>>Click Here to Skip Ahead to the Factsheet: Activating the Tenant Vote

The June 2024 issue of High Road Policy explores the gap in voter turnout by housing tenure in NYS. The piece draws on detailed voter records from Catalist, a commercial data vendor that augments official state voter files with modeled attributes to represent each voter’s likely race-ethnicity and housing tenure, among other characteristics. Using these data, Vol. 4(1) finds that likely renters turned out to vote in the 2022 statewide NYS General Election at rates that were, on average, 31 percentage points lower than their likely homeowner counterparts. This finding is similar to the size of the tenure turnout gap that can be estimated from national public data sources. Importantly, though, the analysis finds that renter turnout was significantly higher in races that featured vocal supporters of a policy known as “Good Cause” eviction. Relative to a 31-percentage point difference, the turnout gap between likely renters and likely owners in such races dropped to, on average, 18 percentage points. The implication is that tenants might be more inclined to participate in statewide elections when they see a clear opportunity to advance pro-tenant policies and interests. The issue ends with a thought experiment that shows what the 2022 General Election would have looked like if tenants turned out at the same rate as their homeowner counterparts. In this scenario, likely renters would have cast a majority of ballots in a majority of districts in both houses of the legislature, as well as in statewide contests. In other words, a unified tenant voting bloc that turns out at the same rate as homeowners would potentially have the power to form a pro-tenant-majority government in NYS.

Two interactive mapping applications accompany this release: (1) a Senate District-level tool for exploring actual voter turnout by tenure, race, and party and simulating what these turnout rates would look like if renters voted at the same rates as homeowners; and (2) an Assembly District-level tool for performing the same analyses. Use the icons below to access these tools:

NYS Senate Districts

NYS Assembly Districts

Factsheet: Activating the Tenant Vote

Don’t have time to explore the data or read the full report? Read our brief factsheet instead (click here to download the document as a PDF):