92AD Primary: Looking at the Voters and Asking if Vaccinations Decided the Outcome

A.  Various 92AD Primary Voter Demographics.  

Updated voter rolls provided by the Westchester County Board of Elections offer some general information about the 92AD Democratic voters in the June 2022 primary.  

1.   Democratic primary voters are Old(er) and Mostly Female

                                                   TOTAL            MEDIAN AGE                 %FEMALE  
92AD Registerd Voters              92,222                       51                                    54%
92AD Registerd Democrats       47,214                       51                                    59%
Dem. primary voters 6/2022      10,694                       63                                    61%   

Note: while 10,694 92AD Democrats voted in the June primary, only 10,370 actually voted for assembly candidates (with 9 votes discarded as irregular).  
   
2.   When did June primary voters vote?
Primary Day (6/28) voters          7,982           75%
Absentee Voters                             720             7%
Early Voters                                 1,943          18%          

3.  More about Dem primary voters and age:

 Voter Age

 

Oldest zip code: Hartsdale 10530 - 1,281 voters, median age 69 years old

Youngest zip code:  Dobbs Ferry 10522 - 1,002 voters, median age 59 years old

B.   WAS IT ALL ABOUT VACCINATIONS?

Tom Abinant's  history in Albany of promoting anti-vaccination legislation was the most striking issue in the campaign to distinguish the candidates from each other in contrast to their their generally similar voting records as Democratic office holders. Abinanti tried to refocus voters from his past vaccination agitation by emphasizing his recent votes in Albany in favor of bills to expand eligible vaccination providers and promote access to COVID vaccinations. 

Can we measure the impact of voters' concern about Abinanti's vaccination legislation history?  Can we even conclude vaccination issues were a factor in the outcome, decisive or not? 

We don't have opinion polling but we have available data that reveals some rather suggestive trends, although, admittedly, without probative cause and effect. 

First, the New York State Department of Health provides current vaccination rates organized by zip code, separately measuring the percentage of recipients of "one shot" and residents who have a "completed vaccine series."  Using the updated voter rolls, we can match electoral districts to zip codes. This approach has its problems: for those electoral districts which cross zip code lines, I assigned the electoral district to the zip code where the majority of June 2022 primary voters resided.  In addition, when zip codes were not entirely within 92AD, I assumed that the indicated zip code vaccination rate also applied to 92AD voters.  

By dividing zip codes into those won by Abinanti and those won by Shimsky, the differentiation in vaccination rates among the zip codes in the two lists is immediately apparent.  In the "one shot" column, Shimsky won the highest vaccination % zip codes (I'm splitting 10591 into Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow although we have only the same vaccination rate for each village).  With the exception of small Yonkers 10701, Shimsky won only the very high one-shot vaccination rate zip codes.   Conversely, Abinanti won zip codes with a one-shot vaccination rate below 98% and most of these zips by a comfortable margin (again with the exception of Yonkers 10701).  

Here's another way to illustrate Shimsky's advantage in higher rate one-shot vaccination zip codes by grouping zip codes into one-shot vaccination percentage ranges: 

For "complete series" vaccination rates, the differential between Abinanti and Shimsky zip codes becomes somewhat less glaring because of the strangely low "complete series" rate in Dobbs Ferry 10522 (Dobbs has the biggest gap between one-shot and "complete series" rates among all 92AD zip codes) which allowed Abinanti's Hartsdale 10530 to slip past Dobbs.  Still, Shimsky dominated the highest "complete series" zip codes, winning all three 90%+ zips by wide margins.  We can use the grouping approach from above for another perspective:

But correlation does not mean causation.   While Shimsky prevailed convincingly in higher vaccination rate zip codes, we cannot absolutely conclude without opinion polling whether vaccination rates played a factor in voters' choices. Still, given the prominence of the issue in the campaign, and the data depicted above, it is reasonable to wonder if voter awareness of Abinanti's anti-vaccination past ended his political future.