Mapping Independent Voters in NYC
By: Maggie Moss
Tags: Elections, NYC

As the country winds down from a tumultuous election season, the last thing many of us want to think about is the 2016 presidential election.

However, with the fervor of the 2020 election behind us, now is the time to reflect on the elections of America’s past and to issue measured analyses that can help us understand our electoral world a little bit better.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working with a compendium on NYC voter demographic data in the hopes of understanding a little more about city residents who have abstained from registering with either side of the political party dichotomy. As I’ve written in a prior article, the NYC independent voter population consists of just about 900,000 registered voters, making it the second largest population of eligible voters in the city (after Democrats, of course).

Despite the proportional significance of independent voters, according to the NYC Campaign Finance Board, this block just doesn’t come out to vote in the same numbers as other demographics. Yet, a cursory look at the data revealed a counterintuitive pattern in voter behavior: in the 2008 and 2012 elections, independent voters came out in large numbers, especially in the South and East Bronx (which are not known for their civic engagement, to say the least). As of 2016, it seems that large numbers of independent voters in these and other Bronx neighborhoods have been key players in the presidential election (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Map depicting NTA locales and the number of independent voters as of 2016.

My first analysis led me to wonder about other exceptions to the generalities put forth by the Bureau’s report on city voter behavior, so I took a look at independent voters across all of the NYC boroughs. Since the 2016 election was one of high voter turnout across the nation, I thought it would be an interesting moment in history to look at for this population, which is supposedly prone to forgoing exercising their right to the ballot.

When looking at a map of registered independent voters, normalized to total population, it reveals a relatively even distribution of independent voters within each Neighborhood Tabulation Area (NTA).* Of course, there are certain hotspots that have more non-affiliated voters than others, such as the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, and Forest Hills, Middle Village, Little Neck, and Bayside of Queens. However, it seems that in 2016, the vast majority of NTAs ranged from 800–1400 independent voters per 10,000 voting age residents (Figure 2). What’s interesting — independent voters in 2016 did not seem to be solely concentrated in areas with particular levels of income or with particular racial/ethnic demographics.

Figure 2

Now that I had a vague idea of where independent voters lived in NYC (everywhere, apparently), I wanted to know the spatial distribution of their voting participation in the 2016 election. What I found contrasted distinctly with the relatively even spread of voters across the boroughs and neighborhoods. However, my findings did correlate with those included in the Bureau’s report and corresponded with age-old adages about voter turnout: those who live in wealthier areas are more likely to vote than those who live in areas of less wealth.

Figures 3, 4, & 5 depict the distribution of those who voted and did not vote in the 2016 presidential election, respectively. Figure 3 and 4 maps show a concentration of participating voters in areas with higher household incomes, such as the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Staten Island’s South Shore &, and Bayside, Queens. They also show a concentration of nonparticipating voters in areas of lower income, such as Flushing, Queens and Brooklyn’s Midwood and Flatlands neighborhoods.

Figure 3

Figure 4

The figure 5 map reiterates this pattern with percentage of participation relative to all registered independent voters in an NTA. While this depiction adheres a bit more closely to the even distribution of voters in figure 2, it shows that the typical independent voter turnout in this election is around 41–60% of the registered voters. However, there are distinct concentrations of higher turnout (around 70%) in Manhattan, Downtown Brooklyn, Long Island City and Glen Oaks, Queens, and Riverdale, Bronx — all affluent areas of the city.

Figure 5

This pattern in voter data is extremely common, not only in NYC but also throughout the U.S. Convention tells us that working class Americans may not have the leeway to prioritize getting to the polls during a workday. They may have to arrange additional childcare, take public transportation to their voting station, or move their schedules around entirely. Furthermore, beyond the logistics of voting, we know that economically disenfranchised voters are less likely to feel that their votes matter. This psychology has a huge effect on people’s ultimate decision to exercise their voting rights.

However, there is reason to believe that this trend may have changed between the 2016 and 2020 elections. Mail-in ballots have generally increased voter access, and national campaign rhetoric has emphasized the importance of widespread electoral participation for shaping the future of the country. If these practices continue, and if there is a steady change in U.S. political culture, it is possible that we may see voter turnout for lower income areas of the city increase— if not in 2020, then perhaps in subsequent elections.

Methods

To create these maps, I used data included in the 2019–2020 Voter Analysis Report to the Mayor’s Office issued by the city’s Campaign Finance Board. I isolated all of the independent or non-affiliated voters using R and then ran count functions to tally the number of voters by Neighborhood Tabulation Area (NTA). This gave me a raw count of all of the independent voters in each NTA throughout the city by year. Since the NTA codes correspond with shapefile polygons made available on the NYC Planning website, I was able to join the resulting csv data to the NTA file in QGIS.

In QGIS, I started with the CartoDB Positron basemap and created new layers with a shapefile of New York City’s boroughs and a shapefile of NYC’s NTAs. I then pulled data from the U.S. Census Bureau on the total populations of NYC NTAs and joined a paired down version of this .csv to the NTA shapefile. Between these three sources of data, I was able to create a new column in QGIS that represented the number of independent voters per 10,000 voting-age residents in each NTA [(# of independents / (total population — population under 18))*10,000]. I repeated this process to create columns that showed the number of independents who either voted or didn’t vote in the 2016 presidential election per 10,000 voting-age residents within each NTA.

In QGIS, I used the graduated symbology function to show the number of voters and used natural breaks for the distinctions in the legend. Standardizing the number of voters by NTA total population was essential to visualizing the discrepancy in voter participation across the boroughs. Without this comparison, the maps showed little-to-no differentiation across NTAs in different boroughs, which was not representative of proportionate voter turnout.

Finally, the percentage of voting participation map (figure 5) is simply a graduated representation of those who voted in 2016 over the total number of independent voters and multiplied by 100.

As for next steps, I would like to create some bar graphs comparing voter turnout in each of the higher income and lower income neighborhoods. I think a direct comparison would illustrate my point a bit more clearly to the reader.

*NTAs were created to project populations at a small area level, for PlaNYC, the long-term sustainability plan for New York City. These geographic units have a minimum population of 15,000 people.