Politics

NY Senate 50th District – Average Democratic Preformancce

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NY Senate 50th District - Average Democratic Preformancce [Expires November 5 2024]

Long-serving Democratic Assemblymember Al Stirpe, with eight terms of experience in the Assembly, has declared his candidacy for the 50th Senate District. The current Senator, John Mannion, who assumed office in December 2020, had previously announced his intention to run for the State's 22nd Congressional District, currently represented by Republican Rep. Brandon Williams.

In the race for one of the Senate's most hotly contested seats, Assemblymember Stirpe becomes the second Democrat to enter. Earlier this year, Tom Drumm, the Democratic Minority Leader of the Oswego County Legislature, also announced his candidacy for the same seat. Nevertheless, Stirpe enjoys the support of State Democratic leaders who approached him in June, continuously expressing their interest in his candidacy. Stirpe cited their belief in his strong performance in those areas and his notable name recognition as reasons for their endorsement.

 

Peter Vallone vs George Pataki (1998)

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Peter Vallone vs George Pataki (1998)

24 years ago, a very red year at least for the Governor's race, with George Pataki receiving 54.3% of the vote to Peter Vallone's 33.2%. This was a three-way race, with Tom Golisano getting 7.7% of the vote, but for sake of mapping I ignored that. Peter Vallone really didn't win much outside of New York City, and the bluest of blue areas in Upstate cities.

With this I learned a lot about how to read fixed width files into R. It's actually not hard if you have the separate header files, and use the read_fwf to set the widths based on the header file. Which is good because a lot of old data is in fixed width format, especially things from the 1960s and 1970s but also later decades too for big datasets. You can get the R code for making the map: https://github.com/AndyArthur/r_maps_and_graphs/blob/main/pataki_v_vallone_1998_map.R