2021 NYC Mayor Primary Election

In anticipation of this year’s NYC Mayoral primaries (being held today), I’ve put together a diagram of the previous Democratic primary, from 2021.

A Sankey diagram of the 2021 New York City Democratic Mayoral primary election, which used ranked choice voting. In the first round, the top 3 vote recipients were Eric Adams, Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia. As candidates were eliminated and their votes flowed to other candidates, Garcia moved up to 2nd place in the 7th round. After Wiley was eliminated, Adams finally exceeded 50% of the remaining active votes. Adams' margin of victory over Garcia was 7,197 votes. The number of Inactive Ballots at the end (with none of the remaining candidates ranked) was 140,202, far exceeding the margin of victory.

Some notes:

  • Only a few labels are shown on the diagram, specifically highlighting the changes between rounds.
  • The original votes for each candidate are in gray; any votes added to a candidate keep the color of the last candidate they ‘belonged’ to.
  • On the diagram’s page, you can click the ‘Edit with Sankeymatic‘ button to import the full diagram into the editor, to see exactly how it is made.