Staten Island Votes for President

Sean Ghazala -

As the dust settles on the 2024 Presidential Election and the NYC Board of Elections tallies the final results, Plea for the Fifth looks back on how the 2024 unofficial election night results compare with the 2020 results.

Staten Island's four New York State Assembly Districts are sub-divided into over 250 Election Districts. Plea for the Fifth compared votes across Election & Assembly Districts, but it is an approximation because of district boundary changes since the most recent census. The Center for Community and Ethnic Media at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism has its own interactive NYC Election Atlas tool, if you are interested in a more granular analysis.

Staten Island's Assembly Districts as of 2020 Census (NYS GIS Clearinghouse, 2022)

Note: To simplify the data, votes cast for President along the Republican Party & Conservative Party were combined, as well as for the Democratic Party & Working Families Party.

Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a New York State Campaign Finance law in 2020 that put higher ballot access thresholds for third parties into the state budget. As the Gotham Gazette wrote at the time,

One of the more controversial aspects of the law is the amendment of political party ballot access provisions. Previously, in order to gain an automatic ballot line, a political party had to have its nominee for governor receive 50,000 votes each four-year cycle. The new law significantly increased that requirement to 2% of votes or 130,000, whichever is greater, every two years, in gubernatorial and presidential elections.
Additionally, statewide candidates seeking to get on the ballot must gather 45,000 petition signatures from registered voters, up from 15,000 previously.

The impact of the Law by the 2024 elections was the loss of ballot lines of the Green Party, Libertarian Party, and Independence Party.

The borough cast an additional 1,288 votes for the Republican Party from 2020 to 2024, a 1% increase. Votes in the borough for the Democratic Party decreased by 25,278 or 28%, and 2,296 more Staten Islanders wrote-in their candidate for President an increase of 377% from 2020 to 2024. Total ballots cast for President dropped 25,197 or 12%.