The Weekly Wonk: 2025 General Election Turnout

Welcome back to the #WeeklyWonk. This is my weekly look at election related stats and demographic information that is important to Syracuse, Onondaga County, and New York State. I took a brief hiatus from this blog in 2025 but now that 2025 election is officially certified, along with manual recounts and write-ins, we can now take an official look back at the stats that made up the 2025 election. As we close out December, I will do this in three parts: Election Turnout, Election Methods, & The New Blue Onondaga. This week we dive into part 1: 2025 General Election turnout.

For the 2025 General Election Onondaga County had 313,824 registered voters. Of them 93,421 (30%) turnouts while 220,403 (70%) stayed home. Of those that turned out 41,413 (44%) were Democrat, 27,359 (29%) were Republican, 1,655 (2%) were Conservative, 319 (1%) were working families. Another 22,675 (24%) were Unaffiliated. Meaning either non-enrolled or enrolled in an unrecognized party. Also, of those who turned out 70,601 (76%) voted on Election Day, 17,218 (18%) voted Early In-Person, 499 Voted by Mail, and 694 voted by Affidavit (either on Election Day or during Early Voting). We will go more into voting next week. The official voter turnout percentage was 29.77%. On its surface this was a typical local (odd) year turnout like 2023 (29.64%) and 2021 (31.08%).

To get a true sense of what happened in 2025, we must look at party turnout. There are always way more Democrats enrolled than republicans in Onondaga County, in fact the GOP are behind the Unaffiliated voters. However, every year the Democrats fail to turnout in as high a percentage of their enrollment as the GOP and thus undercut their strength in numbers. This year though, for the first time since 2009 (where I have data back to) the Democrats turned out in higher number and Higher percentage. Democrats turned out 35.59% of their electorate (41,413/116,353). Republicans turned out at 32.587% (27,359/83.970). The Unaffiliated turnout percentage is always much lower than the two major parties despite their numbers with just 21.25% turnout (22,675/106.687).

New year I wanted to look at voting age groups. To do so I broke Onondaga County into six distinct age ranges. As we can see this year, as every year, the age of the electorate is distinctively older. The older an age group, the higher in both raw numbers as well as the percentage of their registered numbers. 18-30 had 5,644 voters (11.0%), 31-40 9146 voters (17.8%), 41-50 11,742 (25.4%), 51-60 14,147 (31.6%), 61-70 23,272 (43.6%), 71+ 29,470 (48.7%). This means that 52,742 voters or 56.46% of the electorate that showed up was age 61+.

The next demographic to look at is regional turnout.  Traditionally Onondaga County turnout into two distinct regions, The City of Syracuse and the Suburbs.  The City of Syracuse, like with most urban centers, is usually a drag on voter turnout.  The only year since 2009 that City of Syracuse turned out at a higher rate than the suburbs was in 2017, the last open mayoral contest. That is true this year as well but bnot be ,uch.  Suburban turnout did outpace overall turnout at 30.50%, however the City turnout of 27.38% was only 3.12% behind the suburbs.  This is the best City performance since 2017 and is due to the mayoral election generating turnout.

Even though the City of Syracuse trailed the suburbs in percentage of turnout, by sheer numbers they dominate raw number turnout.  The 20,193 voters in the City of Syracuse is twice more than the #2 (Clay 10,348) and #3 (Manlius 9,513). We can see that Onondaga County has two class of suburban towns after that. Suburban moderate sized towns like Camillus, Cucero, Dewitt, Geddes, Lysander, Onondaga, & Salina which span from 4557 – 6407 voters.  After that we have the smaller agrarian towns Elbridge, Fabius, Lafayette, Marcellus, Otisco, Pompey, Skaneateles, Spafford, Tully, and Van Buren spanning from 403 – 2,596 voters.

Further looking into the regional differences there is a stark difference to last yea’s performance.  The City of Syracuse was so far behind the suburbs last year that there was not a ward inside the City that eqaled or surpassed any of the towns, not so this year The City of Syracuse (27.38%) had better turnout than 6 of the 17 towns such as Clay (24.16%), Cicero (26.32%), Lafayette (26.58%), Lysander (26.50%), Otisco (26.37%), & Van Buren (24.23%).  In fact the 17th Ward of Syracuse (38.21%) was better than all but two towns.  Other standouts beside are Strathmore (11 31.71%), and Eastwood (5 34.59%) areas.  The king of this year’s turnout was the Town of Skaneateles (43.02%) followed closely by Spafford (41.15%).

Finally, to get a true sense of these numbers we want to look at performance when compared to registration. Here we look at the percentage of turnout in the 2025 General Election when compared to a demographic registration in the overall electorate. This chart gives us a great final look at why this election turned out the way it did. We see that Democrats overperformed their registration by 7.25% which is part of why we saw the results we did last month. Unaffiliated voters severely underperformed their registration by 9.73%. Older voters 61-70 (+7.55%) and 71+ (+11.88%) truly outpaced younger voters 31-40 (-6.91%) and 18-30 (-1064%). The City of Syracuse because of its larger population overcame its turnout deficit and made up a slightly higher proportion of the electorate when compared to its registration. It is important to show these figures when politicians are making tough choices, they will remember who shows up more often than who does not. I hope switching to elections aligned with even years will help balance these numbers.

That is, it for this week’s edition of the Weekly Wonk. Next week I will look at part 2 of my series examining the 2025 General Election. We will look at the methods that voters in Onondaga County choose to vote for this year. As always follow along at dustinczarny.com to get all content and election news information as we get ready for the big midterm 2026 elections.

Commissioner in a Car: Let’s Talk Manual Recounts

In this week’s episode I detail what goes into a manual recount, the results of this week’s close contests, and why I think this law is a good thing, but how we can improve it. As always I detail about what is going on at the Onondaga County Board of elections as well.

https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/zoomwithczarny

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Commissioner in a Car: What method did Onondaga County vote by in 2025?

In this week’s Commissioner in a Car I talk about what method Onondaga County voters chose to cast their vote this last November. I also detail what the Onondaga County Board of Elections did last week to certify the election. i also talk about how we have to break certification for the hand counts and to finish write ins this next week. Enjoy.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6McByaIEKJAY0fEhWx5eZe?si=HRmduirGTPulisVXTx1nUg

https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/zoomwithczarny

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What Voter History tells us about Voting Method in 2025 General Election

One last mini blog on the November election. Today we will look at how people voted in 2025, and by that, I mean which method they chose to vote. This breaks down into three main categories: Early, Mail, Election Day.

Total Voters: 93,421

Early Voters: 17,326 (18.55%)

Mail Voters: 4,909 (5.25%)

Election Day: 71,186 (76.20%)

Election Day is obviously still the most popular option, but the Early Voting portion is growing. Each of these categories has two subcategories in them.

Early Voters: 17,326 (In-Person 17,218, Affidavit 108)

Mail Voters: 4,909 (Absentee 3,322, Early Mail Ballot 1,587)

Election Day: 71,186 (In-Person 70,601, Affidavit 585)

For in person Voting such as Early and Election Day you have in-person voters and declaration of facts voters. In-person voters use the machine, while those with registration issues must complete affidavits and vote using an envelope. Affidavit ballots are examined once Election Day has passed. Mail balloting has two distinct categories: Early Mail Ballot and Absentee. The main difference in these types of mail ballots is Early Mail Ballots are yearly requests that do not need an excuse, and Absentees use excuses to vote, mostly permanently, by mail.

As we have done in other posts, let us look at how the parties chose to vote.

 Early Voters: 17,326 (Dem 8602 49.65%, GOP 4474 25.82%, CON 248 1.43%, WFP 30 .17%, UNA 3927 22.93%)

Mail Voters: 4,909 (Dem 2464 50.19%, GOP 1323 26.95%, CON 73 1.49%, 22 0.45%, UNA 1027 20.92%)

Election Day: 71,186 (Dem 30347 42.63%, GOP 21873 30.73%, CON 1345 1.89%, 263 0.37%, UNA 17915 25.17%)

One of the problems with comparing party performance is the makeup of Onondaga County. Over the last ten years Onondaga County has settled with a solid Democratic plurality. In fact, the GOP has now fallen to third place behind the non-enrolled. In the November Election, out of the 313,824 voters 116,353 were Democrat (37.08%), 83,907 Republican (26.58%), 5,298 Conservative (1.66%), 1606 Working Families 0.51%), and 106,687 (34.00%) in the unaffiliated category.

So, to see how a party performs when it comes to voting method you really need to see how a party performs when compared against the enrollment. We expect Democrats to outnumber the GOP and Unaffiliated because they have the raw numbers. For this post, I am going to subtract the turnout in a voting method by party by that party’s enrollment. This will give us a quick look at how parties performed.

Early Voters: Dem +12.57%, GOP -0.94%, CON -0.23%, WFP -0.34%, UNA -11.07%

Mail Voters: Dem +13.11%, GOP +0.19%, CON -0.17%, WFP -0.06%, UNA -13.08%

Election Day: Dem +5.55%, GOP +3.97%, CON +0.23%, WFP +0.14%, UNA -8.83%

We can see similar patterns for both Early In person voting and Mail voters. Democrats over performed their enrollment stats while the GOP remains remarkably stable. In fact, GOP, CON, and WFP are not that far off their enrollment numbers for both Mail and Early voting. Matching Democrat over performance is Unaffiliated underperformance. Both in Mail voting and Early voting the Unaffiliated tended to participate much less, which is normal as partisan voters, especially in odd years, tend to turn out better than unaffiliated.

Election Day is slightly different. Here we see Democrats also turning out at a higher rate than enrollment though by a lesser amount. The GOP also had a decent higher turnout, but not as much as previous over performances. The Unaffiliated did a little better on Election Day, but still well under enrollment rates.

Thus, one of the stories of the Election is the Democrats used alternative voting such as Early and Mail to over perform their enrollment. By banking votes early, they were able to pivot to non typical odd election year voters and expand their electorate. The GOP did not ignore Early and Mail in voting, but they seemed to have relied on past strategies for Election Day surge. Unfortunately for them the GOP electorate was unenthused, and they decided not to show up. This was the surge seen throughout the country this last election as well as Onondaga County. This is why Democrats were able to take advantage of the wave and flip so many GOP held seats.

In December I will restart my Weekly Wonk series which will go back to Wednesdays. I plan to start this on Wednesday December 10, 2025, with my traditional 2-part series looking back at the 2025 General election with charts and data. I then will resume my weekly look at political subdivisions as we get ready for the huge 2026 election, the first year where the Even Year Election law will start to take effect.

Commissioner in a Car: What does voter history tell us about 2025?

In this week’s episode I talk about how we finished canvassing write ins and affidavits at the Onondaga County Board of Elections. I also talk about what voter history tells us about 2025. Finally I talk about what is to come next week and beyond to finally wrap up the 2025 election.

https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/zoomwithczarny

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2025 General Election Turnout

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 5th.

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.

Commissioner in a Car: The #Votebymail has been counted so what’s next?

In this week’s episode I talk about how the Onondaga County Board of Elections finished our vote by Mail and Affidavit counting this week. I touch on why we are still counting 10 days after election Day. I also talk about what’s next including write in canvassing and manual recounts. Enjoy.

https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/zoomwithczarny

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The story of Turnout in the 2025 Election

Another story in this election is about turnout. I will do more about this after certification, but going into the last scan we have some numbers on voter stats, specially voter turnout.

Best estimate of voter turnout 93,628 voters out of 313,859: 29.83%

However that is not the whole story. Right now this is typical local/odd year voter turnout. But when we delve into the party numbers another story is told:

Democrats 41,494 out of 116,357 35.66%
Republicans 27,406 out of 83,970 32.64%
Non-Enrolled 19,953 out of 94,634 21.08%

Lets compare this to 2023

Total Vote 90,744 out of 306,077 29.65%
Democrats 36,635 out of 116,344 31.49%
Republicans 30,920 out of 82,351 37.55%
Non-Enrolled 18,218 out of 87,231 20,88%

Now compare to 2021

Total Vote 94,306 out of 303,618 31.06%
Democrats 37,278 out of 116,710 31.94%
Republicans 33,048 out of 82,843 39.89%
Non-Enrolled 18,358 out of 82,777 22.18%

So looking at this sample size we see that while overall turnout and turnout among non-enrolled in 2025 was statistically about the same, Democratic turnout was 5-6% higher than 2023 & 2021 outpacing the GOP which was 5-7% lower than 2023 & 2021.

I will do a deeper dive post certification, but I think this is the first time I can remember where Democratic turnout significantly was better than GOP turnout. Even in other so called Democratic years we always seem to lag or barely tie GOP turnout. The turnout operation by Democratic candidates and party strategists deserves to be commended.

Commissioner in a Car: Election night recap

While the narrative is all about the anti-trump wave, the reality is candidates are the ones who put us here. This is why Democrats did so well in Onondaga County this last Tuesday. I recap the night ad tell you what’s ahead next week.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7FKEdidu9EH9xKaVVox8eq?si=k0zDXqU-RIiadJ_KqkExZQ

https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/zoomwithczarny

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