Nov 14
2024
How Erie County voted for president
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The Democratic presidential ticket’s margin of victory in Erie County was provided by voters in the City of Buffalo.
Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz won the county by 42,243 votes, according to the current count. She won Buffalo by 46,765, snagging more than three-quarters of the ballots cast by city voters.
The Democrats also won by lesser but still substantial margins in the towns of Amherst, Tonawanda and Aurora, and squeaked out victories in Cheektowaga and Lackawanna.
The rest of the county registered various shades of red, ranging from pinkish communities like Orchard Park, Hamburg and the City of Tonawanda to the wine-dark towns of Alden, Marilla and North Collins.
Overall, the Harris/Walz ticket beat former President Trump and Ohio Sen. J. D. Vance in Erie County with 54 percent of the vote to 44.6 percent. Joe Biden in 2020 beat Trump 56.5 percent to 41.7 percent. Hillary Clinton won Erie County in 2016, too, but by a smaller margin: 50.9 percent to 44.5 percent.
Barack Obama outperformed all of them, winning Erie County by 16 points in 2012 and 18 points in 2008.
Erie County’s electoral map pretty clearly illustrates why Republicans here seldom run candidates for city offices.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomFirst, those candidates stand virtually no chance of winning.
Second, their candidacies would give city Democrats an extra reason to go to the polls in a general election, to the detriment of Republicans running for countywide elected offices like sheriff, district attorney, comptroller, clerk and county executive.
Trump found a few enclaves of support in the city. The largely white, middle-class South District — home to the city’s current acting mayor— provided the Republican ticket 5,172 votes, or 43 percent of the ballots cast there. By contrast, the Masten District — home to the city’s recently departed mayor — gave the Republicans just 721 votes, or a little over 8 percent. Harris got 8,000 votes there.
Trump’s second-highest vote total in the city came from the relatively affluent Delaware District, but he lost to Harris there by a margin of 4-to-1. The district boasted the highest turnout in the city, too, providing the Democratic ticket 11,339 votes.
The South District accounted for over a quarter of the votes Trump won in the city as a whole.
Still, only five of 207 election districts in the city broke for Trump, and only one was in the South District. The Republicans prevailed in South 15, the neighborhood between South Park Avenue and Hopkins Street, bounded by Tifft Street and South Park. Trump’s margin of victory in the district: 23 votes out of 404 cast.
Three of the other Trump election districts were in Lovejoy, comprising Kaisertown and parts of the Valley and Seneca-Babcock neighborhoods. In Fillmore 24 — the Cobblestone District, where few people live or vote — Trump beat Harris, eight votes to her six.
Every other election district in the city voted for the Democrats. There’s a lesson, if one were needed, for Buffalo mayoral candidates considering doing an end-run around next June’s Democratic primary by taking the Republican or Conservative Party lines into the November general election.
Even if those parties are game for the effort, it’s a hard way to go.
There were 6,350 Erie County voters who chose not to vote for either major party ticket, opting instead to write in another candidate’s name. Those write-ins accounted for 1.4 percent of votes cast.
