When people who follow elections and politics are asked about an insular religious group in upstate Orange county, New York that votes as a bloc delivered for the candidate chosen by their spiritual leader, people would probably unanimously say Kiryas Joel. The Hasidic community is the red dot on the map below in the sea of blue and is worth about 5,000 votes for whoever the leaders endorse, which can swing primaries and close elections.
However, while Kiryas Joel is situated in Monroe, Orange county also has another group tucked away in the west in Deerpark Town is another group that is a lot smaller but exhibits similar behavior. The Fulan Gong organization and its Dragon Springs compound set up shop in 2000 and officially moved people in at the end of 2012 and it has since settled in. As it gets into more and more conflicts with the local city council over expansion and how it runs its area, this writeup will explore how it votes and how you can see the start of it flexing political muscle and how these groups make decisions before they are large enough to extract concessions.
About a hundred adults live on this 400+ square acre compound, which has a few schools that mostly serve as an arts academy teaching traditional Chinese dance. That’s because they are a feeder school for the Shen Yun performance, which you may recognize if you live in a city because they plaster posters everywhere, and starting in 2021, added the tagline “China Before Communism.”
The Fulan Gong is a global religious movement that practices Fulan Dafa which is primarily focused on meditation and letting go of material attachment, though unlike Buddhism it stretches living in the secular world. It started in China in the 1990s as a loosely organized network but the state turned hard against it and began to persecute its followers, causing the leadership to disband or flee and to go underground so its number are unknown. Its founder, Li Hongzi, became a permanent resident in the US in 1998 living right next to Dragon Springs and bills himself as a prophet and teacher. Even if you don’t know Shen Yun, you might still have come across his news organization, The Epoch Times, which markets itself a lot on Facebook and social media but runs a physical newspaper as well. The Epoch Times, seeing Trump’s anti-China rhetoric, consistently has praised and promoted his candidacies. Later on in 2019, ex-Trump advisor and China hawk Steve Bannon worked with Hongzi to create an anti-China movie that aired on the right wing network One America News Network.
Looking at maps overlapping between the town itself and its voting precincts, as well as the ethnic breakdown from the census, we can estimate that Dragon Springs is mostly in Ward 6 and a little in Ward 1. For the purposes of the next few charts, I lumped the two together but you should pay special attention to Ward 6 as it was a lot more remote before and now Dragon Springs voters make up a majority there, while it’s a smaller slice of Ward 1 that also includes the nearby town. The first chart below shows the raw share of the vote that the Republican presidential candidate received in each ward of Deerpark for the last four cycles, as well as the shift from 2012 to 2016.
These two wards used to be the most Democratic but have now seen the hardest shifts to Trump since it opened and the whole town votes about the same uniformly.
But it’s not just that the whole area moved Republican. As the most recent chart shows, the gap between the Dragon Springs wards and the rest of the town has closed from a ten point gap before to less than 4 points now. While Biden stayed about the same as Clinton’s 2016 performance in the rest of Deerpark, Trump gained nearly 4% in Wards 1 and 6.
And it wasn’t just that Republicans gained more on the margins. The influx of people in Ward 6 voted in a bloc for Trump. Between 2012 and 2020, the total votes cast in Deerpark changed by 22%, Ward 6’s turnout went up by a whopping 46%. And the chart below shows that while turnout change and margin change aren’t really correlated, Ward 6 is a massive outlier in both vote growth and gains that Trump made over Romney’s share. Ward 1 also was a smaller positive outlier in both votes cast and turnout to a smaller degree. It’s clear that these new voters are both turning out and voting GOP.
Falun gong is now eyeing an expansion that has brought it into conflict with the surrounding areas and legal tensions with the Deerpark City Council have exploded. There was litigation almost immediately after people moved in with a 2013 federal lawsuit that the city council was not approving permits because of religious discrimination which was settled. There was then a 2015 suit by some residents that said the town supervisor was improperly challenging their right to vote, but then it was withdrawn. But in 2019, Dragon Springs submitted approval for a new facility including a large music hall that would be able to expand to 500 permanent residents and thousands of visitors a day.
Recently, some residents of Deerpark filed a federal lawsuit saying that Dragon Springs was allegedly dumping waste in the nearby stream and river and brought a case under the Clean Water Act. In response, Dragon Springs filed a lawsuit against Deerpark of once again slow walking permit approval and allegedly conducting excessive inspections including one on the Chinese New Year which they believe was religiously motivated.
With tensions building, I wanted to see how that played out in local elections where they don’t yet have enough to actually swing an election and how Dragon Springs was responding. Deerpark holds their elections in the year after the presidential cycle so we won’t see votes again until 2025 but I have the results below for the town council and town supervisor for every year going back to 2009. Each time, the candidates were running unopposed and were Republican, so I instead plotted blank ballots to show disapproval and to account for any partisan difference, plotted it against the Republican presidential share from the election below. The red dot in each plot is Ward 6, where Dragon Springs is located.
The partisanship of the district and how many people left the ballot blank. That changed in the cycles after where more Democratic districts left more ballots blank and it’s the most clear in the 2013 city council elections, right after the first lawsuit. But 2021 had a huge outlier for more blank ballots in both races, and in the City Council race, 90% of Ward 6 residents left their ballots blank in that race!
Back in 2015, before Trump. they did try this when Liam O’Neill ran against current Deerpark Supervisor Gary Spears for Supervisor. O’Neill had been a member on the Town Board before moving to New Jersey and he moved back and ran for office. He still practiced Falun Dafa but claimed to not be associated with the compound anymore. O’Neill ran on a ticket with Gail Rachlin, who was also a practitioner and was going for the City Council. All the Dragon Springs affiliated candidates ran as Democrats, which meant they were heavily disfavored.
The Falun Dafa members lost pretty overwhelmingly, but the table below shows that when comparing how Republican Spears did in each ward compared to Trump’s performance a year later, there was a substantial overperformance for Democrats in the Dragon Springs area.
Falun Gong has said that it doesn’t recommend candidates or voting or not voting to the Dragon Springs residents, unlike the recommendations handed out from the leaders in Hasidic communities, and that could be the case, as people will vote for candidates aligned with them that have the same effect. But clearly the residents vote (or do not vote) as a group and are fairly aligned on who they choose. As Falun Gong eyes expansion and presumably more influence, they have started to throw their voting bloc around not just for Trump at the federal level with higher turnout, but also more willing to give in absent ballots as a message to the local council. Deerpark elections. In 2021, the race for Deerpark supervisor had 1192 total ballots cast so if the expansion for 500 more residents goes through in this small town, it could tip the balance towards Dragon Springs. It is not unrealistic to expect that they could field their own candidates that could win a general, and especially a primary, and it explains why some are wary about Dragon Springs expanding. With the lawsuits increasing and the large expansion at stake, Deerpark Town may really only be big enough for one side.
Sources:https://medium.com/@rudnicknoah/is-a-pro-trump-anti-china-cult-about-to-take-over-a-small-new-york-town-33ac52ce581c
