Donald Trump’s victory was ultimately determined by voters in swing states, but a shift toward Republicans was seen across the country — even in the deeply Democratic stronghold of New York City.
Although Kamala Harris still won in New York by a wide margin, with 68% of the vote to Trump’s 30%, that was a marked decline from Joe Biden’s performance in the city in 2020. That year, Biden won by a margin of 53 points. in the city when he won the presidency.
“Almost no place has seen a greater increase in support for Trump than the five boroughs [of New York City],” Nate Silver, the noted political pollster, wrote Thursday.
One of those boroughs, Staten Island, has been aligned with Trump since the beginning — the president-elect held the majority-white area in 2016 and 2020 — but the shift elsewhere is more surprising.
Related: How Trump won over Latino and Hispanic voters in historic numbers
The Bronx, which has a large Latino population, saw the biggest swing toward Trump in the state: Joe Biden won 83% of the vote there in 2020, compared to Trump’s 16% — this time Harris won with 73% against the Trump’s 27%. In 2016, Trump won just 21.8% of the vote in his hometown of Queens, but this week 38% of voters there cast their ballots for the former and now future president.
In fact, every county in the New York City metropolitan area turned toward Trump, compared to four years ago, Gothamist reported. It’s a staggering change for a multicultural, heavily Democratic city, given the divisive and racist nature of Trump’s campaign.
But it shouldn’t have come as a big surprise to Democrats, said Lawrence Levy, former chief political columnist for Newsday and executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University.
“Something started happening in 2021,” Levy said. “This did not come out of the blue.”
That year, New York politics began to see some responses to “post-pandemic pain,” Levy said, as some voters from demographic groups including the white, Latino and Asian communities turned away from Democrats in local elections. In the 2022 midterm elections, New York City retained its Democratic members of the House of Representatives, but some voters in the suburbs north and east of the city elected Republicans.
This was also a referendum on Democratic leadership in New York City
Mona Kleinberg from Queens College
“The question is: what does this all mean?” Levy said.
“I think we’re at an inflection point where, once the echo of pandemic pain finally fades, we’ll either go back to where we were — which is New York City is reliably blue and the surrounding suburbs will go back to purple. to light blue places.
“Or it’s the bigger pendulum that, ‘Okay, the Democrats did their best for 30 years, and now the pendulum is going to swing the other way.’
Although New York City has reliably voted for Democratic presidents, two of the last four mayors were elected as Republicans — although they were not the blood-and-thunder candidates that have come to dominate the modern Republican Party.
Mona Kleinberg, a professor of political science at the City University of New York, Queens College, said it is still unclear whether the swing to Trump was the result of people who voted for Biden casting their ballots for Trump, or whether voters didn’t vote for all of them — just as Harris received fewer votes than Biden across the country.
In terms of why Harris underperformed compared to Biden, Kleinberg said New Yorkers were not immune to two of the key issues motivating people across the country: the economy and inflation.
“In New York, the economy was huge, because New York is an unaffordable city. Rents have gone up so much post-Covid, and then you have a candidate who is promising to essentially bring inflation down even further, who is promising to bring rents down,” she said.
“New Yorkers are not prosperous everywhere, and that’s why they care about these issues. So I think Donald Trump had a better message on that in terms of inflation, or the economy more broadly.”
Despite New York being one of the most diverse cities in the U.S., immigration also played a role, Kleinberg said. The city has received about 200,000 new migrants in the past two years as states including Texas have tried to create chaos by busing tens of thousands of undocumented migrants to New York.
Eric Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York – whose popularity has plummeted after he was accused of taking bribes and contributions to foreign campaigns and has apparently tried to fall in line with Trump in recent days – handled the migrant situation poorly , Kleinberg said. could have turned voters further away from the party.
A plan that provided migrant families with prepaid debit cards became a particular focus of conservative critics, and may have contributed to Democrats’ perception that they are out of touch.
“If every time you go shopping you have the feeling that you are broke afterwards, and then you know that there are asylum seekers in your city who receive a debit card with a certain benefit, that creates resentment. And if you don’t have a message explaining this to people, they’re just angry,” Kleinberg said.
“So I think you know this wasn’t just a referendum on Biden’s legacy, or on the Biden-Harris administration, but this was also a referendum on Democratic leadership in New York City.”
National and local issues both played a role in the change at the time – although something more fundamental may also have been at play.
“Clearly Trump was expressing an anti-immigrant message and of course Kamala Harris was the actual embodiment of an immigrant – she is the daughter of a Southeast Asian mother and a Jamaican father,” Kleinberg said.
“And again, the fact that she is a woman, and a woman of color. There are many unconscious biases that introduce into people’s perception of her abilities. And I think that’s in this whole cocktail of reasons why people migrated to the right.”
