NYC’s Younger Voters and Men of All Groups Most Likely to Be Unaffiliated
New York City’s mayoral charter commission will soon start formulating the changes it will put on the November ballot for public approval. To help inform the Commission and the public, Reinvent Albany is sharing Professor John Mollenkopf’s new estimate of the party affiliation of New York City voters. Professor Mollenkopf, the Director of the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center, based his estimate on data from voter rolls and the American Community Survey, and will update using more sophisticated statistical methods later in 2025.
Younger voters and men are most likely not to be affiliated with a political party
The data shows a clear age gradient for all groups, with the youngest voters much more likely to be unaffiliated than the oldest voters. NYC men are more likely to be unaffiliated than women. Among groups of men, Asians are least likely to be in a political party, followed by white, Hispanic, and Black men. However, there is still a comparatively low level of party affiliation even among young Black men. Young women are more likely than older women to be unaffiliated, though at lower rates than men.
The growing numbers of unaffiliated voters have been spotlighted by the NYC Campaign Finance Board amidst discussion by the Charter Revision Commission to allow voters to choose which primary they vote in (“open primaries”).
Sources
Voter registration file, NYC Board of Elections February 2025 (for age, gender, party) and American Community Survey 2018-2023 (for racial composition of voting age population at the block group level)
Professor Mollenkopf’s Methodology
Using the age cohorts used by the NYC Campaign Finance Board, Mollenkopf categorized all voters’ races based on the plurality racial group among the voting age citizens at the block group level.
Where group shares tied, Mollenkopf allocated the block group plurality racial group using the 2020 Census count of VAP by race at the block level for the blocks on which the voters resided. This is imprecise, since block groups’ CVAP is not 100 percent racially segregated. However, Mollenkopf believes the various errors offset each other and the overall estimate is close to the truth.