Turnout History Comparisons

We are in the middle of certification of the 2025 General Election, but we have finished our voter history.  I thought I would do a mini blog with some surprising findings.  Here are some surprising and not so surprising stats based on our turnout statistics.  For this blog, I am going to compare the last four local years: 2023, 2021, 2019, & 2017. You can find the spreadsheet that has data going back to 2009 here:  https://static.ongov.net/elections/documents/HistoricalTurnoutComparison.xlsx

Overall Turnout

313,824 Active Registered voters

93,421 Voters

29.77% Turnout

Comparing this with past local year turnouts there is nothing surprising about this.  2023 was 29.64% turnout, 2021 (31.08%), 2019 (36.73%), 2017 (37.20%).  The farther you go back in turnout the higher the turnout is.  The biggest reason for this is we are registering higher numbers of the population now.  With online and DMV registration as well as 10-day windows it is easier than ever to register, which is why we have a higher registration number when population has not risen dramatically.

City of Syracuse Turnout

73,752 Active registered Voters

20,193 Voters

27.38% Turnout

Despite an active Syracuse Mayoral race, we did not see a large increase in turnout from the last mayoral races.  In fact, both 2021 (28.62%) & 2017 (37.42%) had higher turnouts than this year.  The City of Syracuse did see higher turnout than the last non-mayoral year 2023 (22.93%) & but lower than 2019 (29.35%).

Suburban turnout

240,072 Active registered Voters

73,228 Voters

30.50% Turnout

As is normal, the City of Syracuse trailed the suburban turnout rates in 2025.  The Suburban turnout though was lower than each of the last four local years: 2023 (31.69%), 2021 (31.83%), 2019 (39.06%), & 2017 (37.13%).  It should be noted that the only years I have on record that the city turnout was higher than the Suburbs were 209 and 2017 and both times by a fraction of a percentage point.

Turnout by Party

Democrats 41,413 voters (out of 116,353) 35.59%

Republicans 27,359 voters (out of 83,970) 32.58%

Conservatives 1,655 voters (out of 5,208) 31.78%

Working Families 319 voters (out of 1,606) 19.86%

Unaffiliated 22,675 voters (out of 106687) 21.25%

Unfortunately, I only have party turnout data for a general election going back to 2019.  The Board of Elections did not keep those records in our annual report until then and we are not able to reliably go back in time and recreate this data.  However, even with this small sample size we can see the biggest story of this election.  Democrats were enthused and turned out in a higher rate than the Republicans.  In fact, this is the only time this has happened in the data set going back to 2019, whether an even (federal) year or odd (local) year.  In fact, even the Conservatives fell behind in rate of turnout to the Democrats.  Also, the note in this data set the Unaffiliated (all non-enrolled and other enrolled voters) always comes in fourth in turnout rate and Working Families party always comes in 5^th.

So, one of the stories of this election seems to be that the normal turnout happened, however the Democrats were more enthused than in other normal years, and the GOP less enthused than other local years.  That does not alone tell the tale of the tremendous results for Democrats of the November election.  We don’t know how individual voters voted but given the wide margin of many of the results it is safe to say Democrats must have won over the unaffiliated voters by a decent margin in almost every race as well.