The math of Byron Brown’s loss in the June 22 Democratic primary is simple.
The mayor’s traditional base of voters on the East Side stayed home, while voters on the other side of Main Street — from the Lower West Side and Allentown to the Elmwood Village — turned out in comparatively high numbers and overwhelmingly chose India Walton.
The result:
Walton beat the four-term incumbent by 7 percent.
Ken Kruly is a political analyst for WGRZ-TV, publisher of
Politics and Other Stuff and author of
Money In Politics for Investigative Post. In an analysis for Investigative Post, Kruly compared Brown’s performance this year to the results of his previous four mayoral campaigns. He found Brown’s share of the vote dropped in six of the nine Common Council districts compared to four years ago.
“He pretty well collapsed everywhere in the city,” Kruly said. “And he’s got a whole lot of homework to do now as he enters this write-in campaign.”
Podcast: Geoff Kelly & Ken Kruly discuss the primary
https://www.investigativepost.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Primary-vote-analysis.mp3
The erosion of Brown’s base was most striking in the Masten District, where the mayor lives and which he represented on the Common Council for five years. The number of votes for the mayor in Masten dropped by more than one-third compared to 2017, Kruly found.
Dr. Henry Louis Taylor Jr., director of the
Center for Urban Studies at the University at Buffalo, described the drop in East Side support for Brown as a “radical no-vote.”
“And by that I mean to say there were people in the Black community who couldn't stomach Brown but didn't believe India could win,” Taylor told Investigative Post. “So they just stayed home. They sat this one out.”
In Brown’s
previous mayoral campaigns, Masten has been reliably stalwart for the mayor, even as turnout steadily declined. In 2009, running against Mickey Kearns, Brown got 5,805 votes in Masten — a flood of support that canceled out Kearns’s strong turnout in South Buffalo.
This primary, Masten gave Brown just 1,668 votes. Brown won the district, but not overwhelmingly, as he has in past campaigns. In 2017, when Brown faced Mark Schroeder, the mayor took Masten with 68 percent of the vote. This year his share was just 55 percent.
Masten District voters stayed home this year, according to Kruly’s analysis: The 20.7 percent turnout there is only slightly higher than the 20.2 percent turnout for the race citywide.
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