WFP, Con, and Ind Party Strengths

Stephen Harrison received 6.43% of his vote total from the Working Families Party (WFP) ballot line. I started looking into the effect his ballot line has on the nominees vote total in an previous post here and a follow up here. The basic finding was that the Congressional and Senate candidates on this line received more votes on this line than the Presidential nominee did, which is a reverse of what one would expect to find. So there is a definitely a strength for a local race to have additional party ballot lines such as the WFP.

So I did some quick number crunching and wanted to look at the percentage differential from each party ballot line from 2004 to 2006;

Democrat: -41.5%
SI: -39.3%
Brooklyn: -45.2%

WFP (Harrison): -21.4%
SI: -32.5%
Brooklyn: -15.8%

Quite expectedly fewer voters turned out in this midterm election than they did in 2004 during a Presidential election. Also expected the WFP voters had a smaller differential, suggesting in my opinion that the WFP voters are more likely to turn out for elections and that the WFP has a strong local GOTV machine. The WFP votes were 6.43% of Harrison's total in '06 versus 4.82% in '04.

On the other side, here are Fossella's numbers:

Republican: -51.5%
SI: -53.0%
Brooklyn: -45.2%

Conservative (Fossella): -42.8%
SI: -48.6%
Brooklyn: -15.6%

Independence (Fossella): +37.7%
SI: +55.4%
Brooklyn: +0.5%

Notably Fossella's Republican and Conservative voters turned out in much lower percentages than Harrison. This will not happen in 2008The Independence Party numbers seem to be some what of an aberration with amazing increases in Staten Island. This probably is a result of political infighting within the party and the local desire to maintain effectiveness.

With the WFP continued efforts to move up the ballot and get voters acustom to pulling that WFP lever year and year, I have to imagine they will have an even larger GOTV effort in '08. In 2004 and 2006 the vote total on the WFP line ended up being larger than the vote total differential in the overall election, signifying their importance in tight elections.

After writing this, I read a post over at Room Eight by Jerry Skurnik addressing similar findings;

One of the ways the WFP campaigned was by contacting liberal Democrats with the request that they send a message by voting for Spitzer on the WFP rather than the Democratic line. I, myself, received a large number of e-mail messages with this pitch and I assume others did too. While the overall campaign did not succeed, it clearly had an effect.

While none of the other minor Parties broke 5% of the vote for Governor in any of New York City’s Assembly Districts, the WFP did so in 18 Districts. The WFP clobbered the other minor parties in the City, where they received 74,221 votes to the IP’s 36,882 and the Conservative’s 20,897.