Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown appeared on the verge of defeating India Walton, a socialist who won the Democratic primary earlier this year.
Walton trailed in write-in ballots, but those ballots will need to be hand-counted to confirm.
Brown declared victory in the race, and the state Republican Party celebrated what they called a defeat of socialism.
“The people have spoken, from every community of Buffalo cutting across all demographics. The people chose four more years,” Brown says in a victory declaration.
— Chris Horvatits (@ChrisHorvatits4) November 3, 2021
Congratulations Mayor @byronwbrown. Socialism has been defeated in Buffalo!
— Nick Langworthy (@NickLangworthy) November 3, 2021
In June, Walton defeated Brown in the Democratic primary, and her path to the mayor’s office looked clear in a city that has not elected a Republican mayor since the 1960s. But Brown, who is a former chairman of the state’s Democratic Party, launched a write-in campaign asking voters to “Write Down Byron Brown.”
The race is an example of divisions playing out across the Democratic Party between centrists and progressives, as seen in recent weeks in Congress, where Democratic lawmakers have yet to come to an agreement on a social spending package making up key portions of President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda.
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A WIVB/Emerson College poll released last week found Brown, even as a write-in candidate, led Walton by more than 17 percentage points.
Emerson College Polling analyst Isabel Holloway told WIVB last week that Brown “has a pretty significant lead in the race.”
“Considering that Walton won the Democratic primary, one would expect her to be winning among registered Democrats in the general election,” Holloway said. “However, we found that that is not true. In fact, Byron Brown is leading among registered Democrats. This suggests that Democrats tuned in after the primary election and maybe did not turn out for Byron Brown in the primary but are choosing to do so in the general.”
Unless one of the candidates appears to win in a landslide, the final results of the race might not be known for several weeks: Write-in votes cannot be examined until at least 10 days after the election, when all of the military and absentee votes are in.
Jeremy Zellner, the Democratic commissioner for the Board of Elections, told WIVB, “Unless this is a real blowout of one kind or another, we want to be careful about really declaring victory because we won’t know who those write-ins are until we count them.”
Zellner added that counting those ballots will be “done in a bipartisan fashion.”
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“The ballots are kept locked up by two keys, one Republican and one Democrat, every day,” Zellner said. “We really have a lot of fail-safes that the public should be confident in what we’re doing here.”
