Data plays a key role in just about every political campaign. Historically, polls have gathered data to help answer questions like what issues matter the most to voters and who is the most likely candidate to win an election. While no poll produces perfect results, data from good polls can be valuable temperature checks for both candidates and voters. Beyond polling, political campaigns use many other sources of data, such as campaign finance statistics, to track the number and average amount of contributions. I explore both polling and campaign finance data for the 2021 New York City mayoral election to gain a deeper insight into which candidates are polling high before the Democratic primary and understand who is donating to the candidates.
The Polls
Polling is not a perfect science, so the data gathered for local elections tend to vary a lot more than the polls gathered for presidential elections. But, there is one key aspect of this year’s election that has made analyzing the polling data much more complicated: ranked-choice voting. New York City’s ranked-choice voting, in brief, allows voters to choose up to five candidates to support on the ballot. If no candidate gains more than a 50% majority, the candidate with the least votes is eliminated, and those who voted for them will then have their votes redistributed to their next-choice candidate. This process continues until only two candidates remain, and the candidate with a simple majority of votes wins.
So how does this affect polling? First, it no longer means that the candidate with the most votes will necessarily win the election. Instead, the winner will either be the candidate with more than half the votes in the first round or the candidate with the most votes after only two remain, and votes are reallocated. So, second, third, fourth, and fifth-choice options will be especially important in the Democratic primary, where there are 15 candidates in the running.
Second, there will be a lot more uncertainty when evaluating the polling results. This is the first time the city is using ranked-choice voting, so there is no historical data showing how New Yorkers will vote. How many people will continue only ranking their top pick? How many will fill out all five spots on their ballot? Which candidates are polling well as the second choice for voters? The third choice? These are just a few questions that pollsters are looking to answer. Initial evidence from a Fontas Advisors and Core Decision Analytics poll shows that 30% of respondents said they only plan on picking a first-choice candidate in the Democratic primary. This will further complicate the ballot count, especially considering that no candidate is currently anywhere close to having more than a 50% majority in the polls.
Keeping the new factors of this year’s election in mind, we can still evaluate the polling data to see some of the general trends in the changing popularity of the Democratic candidates. I plotted the data from six recent polls out of Ipsos, Benenson Strategy Group, Emerson College, and Public Opinion Strategies. These polls only evaluated up to the third-choice candidate at most, so there was no fourth and fifth-choice data to plot. From the Ipsos polls, I only evaluated the first and second-choice responses solicited by their questions 10 and 11. It should be noted that I only evaluated five recent polls for this article, and there were other polls not included in my analysis.
From the trends, we can see that Eric Adams and Andrew Yang have consistently been the two most popular first-choice candidates across these six polls. Scott Stringer was also polling in double digits as the first-choice candidate until a dip in mid-May. Around the same time, he was accused of sexual misconduct and is now facing a second accusation. Recent polls show that Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley have quickly risen to become top candidates competing with Adams and Yang. This comes just after The New York Times’s Editorial Board endorsed Garcia and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Wiley. While these trends are insightful, some of the most important from these plots have nothing to do with who is leading at all. Instead, my key takeaways from these plots are that no candidate has anywhere near a 50% majority of the votes, at least 10% of voters remain undecided, and Eric Adams is polling low in third-choice polling percentages in recent polls.
Breaking down my three takeaways, the first point that no candidate has anywhere near a 50% majority of the votes means that the second, third, fourth, and fifth-choice ballot votes will likely be critical to whoever wins the Democratic primary. The second point regarding at least 10% of undecided voters adds additional uncertainty to how these poll results will differ from the actual post-election results. This 10% comes from the lowest “Don’t Know/No One” response for the first-choice candidate. Given how close many top candidates are polling, especially in the second and third-choice questions, having even 10% of undecided voters could flip the outcomes in any direction. And to my third point, Eric Adams polling low in third-choice polling percentages in the recent polls spells potentially bad news for him after all votes get tallied up. Wiley is polling highest in second-choice polling percentages with Adams, Yang, and Garcia right behind her and Garcia has taken a far lead in third-choice polling percentages from the latest Emerson poll. These are just some observations from this data, but anything could change from now to the primary.
The Money
Campaign finance has always been a hot topic in the political realm. But, from other analyses, we know that it is not always the case that the candidate with the most money does the best in elections. In this section, I explore the money in the 2021 New York City mayoral race slightly differently. First, I analyze data for the number of individual contributors who have donated to the candidates before breaking down the contributors by location — from individual city boroughs and from outside of New York City.
How Many Individual Contributors Does Each Candidate Have?
The first two plots evaluate the overall total number of people who have donated to each candidate. The left plot shows only donors living in New York City, and the right plot shows all donors from the United States. We can see that since Eric Adams and Scott Stringer started their campaigns in early 2018, they have both collected donations from more than 6,000 New Yorkers. However, they do not lead in having the greatest number of individual contributors. For that ranking, Andrew Yang, Dianne Morales, and Maya Wiley are in the top three spots with donations from over 7,500 New Yorkers. We can see that these rankings stay consistent in the data of all donors from the United States. So, no candidate is receiving a disproportionate amount of individual donations from outside of the city compared to within the city. But New York City is very diverse, so I continue by breaking down the data into individual boroughs.
Which Borough Do Candidates Receive The Most Contributions From?
After splitting the data into boroughs, we can see more details from where donations are coming from for each candidate. It is useful to note that Brooklyn and Queens have the highest populations in the city, and Staten Island has the lowest population. Among the candidates with the most donors, we can see that many of Yang and Wiley’s donors are coming from outside of the city. Morales and Adams have most of their individual donors coming from Brooklyn. And Stringer has most of his donors coming from Manhattan. This data is interesting because it allows us to see which specific boroughs each candidate is receiving support from.
And a lot of the data makes sense. For example, it should not be surprising that Stringer receives most of his donations from Manhattan since he was the former Manhattan borough president. Also, it is not surprising that Yang receives most of his donations from outside of the city since he gained name recognition across the country after his bid at the presidency in 2020. In the next table, I split up the borough data to find which candidate received the most donations from each borough.
Which Candidates Receive the Most Donations From Each Borough?
From this table, we can see additional results not represented in the previous table. To start, while Yang only had 9% of his total individual donors coming from Queens in the first table, this table shows that he is tied with Adams in the percentage of contributions from donors in Queens. However, other observations parallel the earlier findings, such as Stringer receiving the highest percentage of donors from Manhattan out of all other candidates and Morales receiving the highest percentage of donors from Brooklyn out of all other candidates. However, comparing all of these tables with the previous polling data, we can begin to understand where the initial statement that having more money does not necessarily mean doing better in the election comes into play.
While Morales and Wiley are both in the top three in terms of having the greatest number of individual donors, they are both polling lower as first-choice candidates than Stringer, Adams, and Garcia, who all have fewer unique individual donors. And while Wiley polls much higher as a second and third-choice candidate, Morales continues to struggle in those polls. So, just because these two candidates have many individual donors from New York City, it does not necessarily mean that they have the most support among all New Yorkers.
Final Thoughts
The 2021 New York City mayoral election is going to be a fierce competition. With 15 candidates in the Democratic primary and a new ranked-choice system of voting, there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the outcome of the election. The goal of this article is to explore the recent polling data and explain how the new ranked-choice voting might cause these polls to be even less accurate. This article also analyzes the money behind the campaigns and specifically dives into the specific boroughs of the city and where each candidate receives donations from. If you are from New York City, remember to vote in the primaries on Tuesday and in the general on Nov. 2. You can learn more about how to vote by going to the official Board of Elections in the City of New York website.
The polling data used for this article was aggregated from several polling organizations and is available on GitHub. The campaign finance data used for this article is from the New York City Campaign Finance Board and includes data up to June 8, 2021. The code used for this analysis is publicly available on GitHub.
Image by Mika Baumeister is licensed under the Unsplash License.
Yao Yu is a Sophomore studying Government and Data Science. He is the Publisher and a Data Journalist at the Harvard Political Review.
