Trend or anomaly?

As a measure of who won local races, the recent election cycle delivered the bluest Monroe County yet.

Democrats won their largest advantage ever in the county Legislature and town board and supervisor seats—once solidly Republican bastions that flipped for the first time in Monroe County Board of Elections recorded history—all while having low turnout rates.

Those victories in unexpected places include at least one seat, possibly two, in the county legislature and a combination of town supervisor, town ward, and town council positions in Greece, Perinton, Penfield and Pittsford.

“This was an amazing night for Democrats across Monroe County,” Monroe County Democratic Committee chairman Stephen DeVay posted on Facebook days after Election Day. “From Irondequoit to Perinton, Penfield to Pittsford, Greece to Brighton, Rush to Webster, voters chose leaders who listen, deliver results, and bring people together. We flipped towns, defended key seats, and expanded Democratic leadership from city hall to the suburbs.”

Democratic county legislator Rachel Barnhart, who presents herself as a left-leaning progressive and butts heads with moderates in her own party, agreed with that conclusion.

“If there’s one big takeaway from Democrats’ outstanding performance on Election Night, it’s that Monroe County is not a purple county. It hasn’t been for a while,” she wrote on her Substack a day after the election.

The Beacon has written about Monroe County’s blue wave in prior election cycles. The 2025 results continue this overarching trend with some of the largest-ever gains by Democrats.

However, some local political watchers urge caution in ascribing too much credit to a blue wave in this cycle. Victories for Democrats were won due to emotional votes influenced by national politics, nontypical conditions and candidates in key races, and suburban areas already teetering on the edge of flipping parties, they argue.

“Voters definitely vote their feelings about the parties and often want to vote against the party in power, this year in a more dramatic fashion than ever,” says former MCDC Chairman Dave Garretson. “There was a blue wave, but I think it’s an anomaly. I doubt it denotes a long-term trend.”

“I find that national politics certainly played a part in the defeats of the Republicans. It didn’t help that the election took place during a government shutdown,” Steve Brew, former county legislator and Republican caucus leader. “Incumbents took it on the chin, possibly because of that.”

Growth in enrollment

Historically, Democrats have dominated politics in the city of Rochester. Demcratic primary races serve as de facto crowning ceremonies except in rare cases, such as the 2013 mayoral election, in which Democrat Lovely Warren faced a legitimate challenge from Thomas Richards, who ran on third-party lines.

The area of growth for Democrats has always been in Monroe County’s towns. On average, the suburbs contain around 78 percent of all registered voters in the county and, until recently, had registered Democrats in the minority.

In 2004, 39 percent of all suburban voters were Republican, an insurmountable 10 percentage points higher than their rival party. Only Brighton had an enrollment advantage for Democrats at that time. That town currently has a 53 to 17 percent split between Democratic and Republican enrollment, making it the most robust Democratic stronghold outside the city.

This picture began to change as the years went on, however. Irondequoit and Henrietta were the earliest towns to shift, recording more registered Democrats than Republicans in 2007 and 2008. More than 43 percent of Irondequoit’s voters are enrolled Democrats, and 22.5 percent are Republicans. Democrats make up 39.6 percent of Henrietta’s voters, compared to 24.8 percent who are Republican.

While less pronounced in their growth, Gates and East Rochester also flipped from having greater Republican enrollment to Democrat in 2008 and 2009. Gates currently has 36.6 percent of voters registered as Democrats and 28 percent as Republicans; East Rochester has 37 and 25.5 percent, respectively.

“Enrollment doesn’t equal victory on Election Day,” points out Garretson, who adds that Republicans are typically more consistent at turning out to vote.

“Unless (Democrats have) a 20 to 25 percent enrollment edge, they are almost certain to lose in a head-to-head race,” he continues. “When is Gates going to flip, for example? Gates has had a decent majority of Democrats for a while; no one on the Democratic slate has made a dent in Gates.”

(The County Legislature seat covering Gates is currently held by Virginia McIntyre, a Republican. Gates town supervisor and town board positions are entirely composed of Republicans.)

The next notable suburban growth for the Democrats occurred a decade later, with Pittsford, Penfield and Perinton changing in 2017, 2019 and 2020, respectively. In fact, by 2018, Democrats had achieved a slight enrollment advantage of 1.06 percent across all towns.

“So 2008 and 2017, gee, what happened in those years?” Garretson asks with a touch of sarcasm. “That was the year of Obama, and the other was the year of Trump. People’s opinions about (those two figures) drove enrollment up.”

If this enrollment advantage continues to improve for Democrats, it would buck both national and statewide trends. Nationally, an analysis by the New York Times found that Democrats lost ground to Republicans in all 30 states that track voter registration by political party between the 2020 and 2024 elections.

According to a report by the New York Public Interest Research Group released this month, enrollment in both the Democratic and Republican parties has either stagnated or slightly dipped in favor of voters unaffiliated with any party.

This is mirrored in Monroe County’s towns. In 2008, registered voters unaffiliated with a party comprised 24.9 percent of voters in the suburbs. Today, that percentage has grown by 8 points to 32.7 percent.

“People are saying, ‘You know what, neither one really does it for me. They both suck,’ and there’s a great level of dissatisfaction about the parties,” says Garretson.

Timothy Kneeland, a professor in Nazareth University’s history, politics, and law department, agrees and believes the unaffiliated portion of the voting population will grow, eroding both Democrat and Republican enrollment. He thinks it is unlikely that Monroe County’s towns will buck the broader trend of enrollment decline.

“Trump’s 2016 election seems to have accelerated Democratic growth,” Kneeland adds. “But Democratic gains flattened after the election of Biden; Republican decline continued but also leveled somewhat under Biden.”

The victories explained

Even if voter enrollment is not as large an advantage as it is sometimes made out to be, Democrats did win a number of notable elections in 2025.

Brew’s former seat in Monroe County’s 12th District was one of those races, with Democrat Nazish Jeffery winning a rural region in the county’s southwest with 43.5 percent of the vote, according to unofficial counts. The seat technically favors Democrats with 31 more enrolled voters than Republicans.

However, both Brew and Garretson believe Jeffery’s victory had less to do with a party shift and more to do with in-party fighting between Leslie Schildt, the endorsed Republican candidate, and Deborah Campanella, who ran as the Conservative Party candidate.

Campanella and Schildt received 32.8 and 23.7 percent of the vote, respectively, likely splitting right-wing voters who failed to rally behind a single candidate.

“The long and short of it was, there was a division in the Republican Party, and neither side was going to give in. So both sides ended up fighting to the end to their demise,” Brew says.

“It was a lucky break for the Democrats,” says Garretson. “I’ve never met (Jeffery), I’m sure she’s wonderful and capable. But I have a feeling that alone was not enough for her to win. I think it was the split vote that did it for her.”

Brew says he is “very confident” the seat will return to the Republicans when the seat is up for reelection and the Democratic victory is a “temporary setback.”

The other county race for District 3 in 2025 was extremely close, with unofficial results giving Democrat Marvin Stepherson 11 votes over his opponent, Republican Scott Hand. This likely will trigger a recount of the race as per New York State law.

District 3 covers most of the town of Chili, where Democrats have a very slight enrollment advantage, with 33.1 percent of total voters compared to Republicans’ 31.7 percent.

Garretson notes that Stepherson has run for the seat four times, an element he says may be working in his favor.

“Since he’s run a few times, maybe his name has warmed up to the voters. A lot of times voters vote for a familiar name,” he says. “Most aren’t going into the polls with strong feelings about every candidate on the ballot—which is why we see them not vote all the way down the ballot because it’s like, ‘I don’t know who all these guys are.’”

In Greece, Jeffrey McCann handily won the town supervisor position with 58 percent of the vote. He ran on the Democrat and Conservative party lines, although Kneeland notes that his campaign de-emphasized partisan differences.

“McCann ran an excellent campaign in which his ads focused on local issues. He did not address controversial national issues, and was not identifiable as a Democrat in the ads,” says Kneeland.

Unofficial results show that, although McCann received a boost of 1,709 votes from people voting along the Conservative Party line, his 9,214 votes along the Democratic Party line were enough to beat Murphy. It is the first time the position has been held by a Democrat in Monroe County Board of Elections records.

McCann has had a long career in politics, first working as a Democrat under state representatives. He then switched to the Republican Party and worked for both Greece Town Supervisor John Auberger and County Executive Maggie Brooks. Most recently, he returned to the Democratic Party and has worked under the current county executive, Adam Bello.

Garretson believes this unique combination of experience and bipartisan bonafides made McCann the perfect candidate to win in Greece, a district with near parity in its registered voter enrollment. (Democrats have 1.2 percent more of the vote share than Republicans.)

Brew, a lifelong Republican, says he respects McCann and had a good relationship working with him in county government.

“Certainly things were not helped by all the infighting (on the Republican side),” Brew adds, referencing a struggle between Murphy and the former supervisor Bill Reilich.

“The outgoing Republican administration has been beset by a series of scandals which may have dampened GOP enthusiasm,” Kneeland observes. “Bill Murphy, who was underfunded, did not run as nearly a successful campaign. If you were not paying attention, you might not have even known he was on the ballot.”

Also for the first time in Monroe County Board of Election records, Democrats won one of Greece’s four town ward seats. Amorette Miller beat Michael Bloomer, a Republican who has held the office since 2021.

Garretson credits Miller’s win with running “an excellent campaign,” running in the ward with the best chance of victory for a Democrat, receiving effective support from her ties to labor organizations, and aligning herself with McCann. She is the first woman of color to be on the town council.

The towns on Monroe County’s east and southeast sides, which Garretson calls “the P towns,” are teetering on the edge of becoming Democrat dominated, he says.

“In the P towns, it’s been inevitable that this will happen. It was just a matter of when,” he says.

That inevitability was not readily apparent until recently, however. Each town’s government was dominated by Republicans for at least two decades.

Cracks first started to show in Perinton when Democrats won a single town board seat in 2019, then went on to take both that were up for election in 2023 and 2025. Also this year, Republican town supervisor Ciaran Hanna lost his bid for a fourth consecutive term to Jennifer Townsend, the first time on record a Democrat has achieved the feat.

“Ciaran Hanna is as straight a shooter as I’ve ever known and distinctly focused on the residents of Perinton,” says Brew, who credits the supervisor for a sidewalk construction program still in use by the county government.

“I’ve always said that good governance should trump political parties. If you’re running your town well, and your town residents understand that, then you should be safe, because we’ve survived in Democratic towns in many cases,” he continues. “The east side has been a battle for a number of years, and this last year was the tipping point.”

Penfield’s Democrats finally won town board positions in 2023 after losing every other election since 2001 in which they ran candidates. They built on that success in 2025, defeating Republican town board incumbents and flipping the town supervisor position after coming very close in the previous election.

Pittsford has been a mixed bag. Two Democratic candidates won a town board election for the first time in 2017. However, that success has not been sustained, with split results or Republican sweeps of town council in the time since. In addition, the role of Pittsford town supervisor has been held by Republican Bill Smith since 2013. (Before him, Republican William Carpenter had served in the position since 2001.)

Although he won re-election in the 2025 race, Smith received his closest result yet, with Democrat Cathy Koshykar coming within 400 votes. There might be reason for positivity among Democrats in the town board race as well.

“The numbers make me think that voters not in a constituted party, so-called Blank voters, favored Bill Smith’s leadership, perhaps because of name recognition,” Kneeland explains. “Yet, the same voters wanted a check on Supervisor Smith because they voted Democrats Michael Arcuri and Cha Ron Sattler-Leblanc onto the town council.”

The road ahead

In the long term, Republicans need to change their approach to recruiting voters, political observers say.

“There’s been a long-term trend away from enrollment in the Republican party basically because of demographics, not policy,” says Garretson. “That’s because it’s the party of old white men, and I say that as an old white man myself. What are we doing? We’re dying! So the Republican Party was sort of doomed to shrink already.”

“A lot of that has to do with the older generation dying off or moving out of town,” Brew adds. “They’re typically the bread and butter of the Republican Party. So it’s a tough situation.”

In Monroe County, about 58 percent of Republicans are 55 or older, compared with 46 percent of Democrats. Registered voters ages 18 to 34 make up 16 percent of all Republicans and 22 percent of all Democrats.

Brew reiterates his belief that his party’s focus should be good governance and active participation in constituents’ lives instead of picking partisan fights or becoming embroiled in national issues.

He also says that churn in leadership at the Monroe County Republican Committee has crippled its effectiveness in raising funds and attracting quality candidates. However, Brew is confident in MCRC’s newest chairman, Peter Elder.

“He’s very versed in Republican politics and the messaging that’s required to build the brand back up again to make it more known, more recognizable and more attractive to county residents,” he says.

Kneeland predicts that Democrats will be able to press these advantages and see even greater success after a change in election scheduling.

“The Monroe County Democratic Committee has refined its operations and was very helpful in securing local wins. As local elections are set to move to even-year dates and occur when congressional, gubernatorial and presidential contests are held, Democrats should be able to keep this advantage and continue to hold these seats,” he says, predicting that those typically higher turnout elections will favor Democrats.

For his part, Garretson takes a long view when it comes to questions of enrollment or party dominance.

“Long term, who knows? Because the pendulum always swings,” he says. “Does it swing every five or 10 years? Or is it every 30 or 40 years? It doesn’t matter because it will always swing.” 

He hopes leaders and voters can see past those swings and step up during a dire time in American history.

“We’re flailing around as voters, not really in love with anybody, with a lot of people thinking, ‘What’s the point of voting at all? They all suck, they’re all corrupt, nobody’s out for me,’” Garretson says. “Somehow, some way, I hope we get to a point where more people in elected office succeed in being in sync with people who elect them.”

“The way we’re divided 50/50 here and everywhere in America, how can you connect with everybody when half are for you and half are against you?” he continues. “But somehow we have to get to that place where we can have more of a consensus and (be) more willing to find common ground. I don’t know when or if that’s possible, but I hope it’s coming.”

Jacob Schermerhorn is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and data journalist.

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