Not showing up for Harris

Trump’s electoral victory has been cast in many places as a sign of an indisputable, broad rightward shift across America. The impact of such a shift was so complete that it even penetrated the fortress of Democratic—blue—New York City.

“Trump makes gains in New York following definitive win” according to a New York Magazine headline the day after the race. “America’s cities shifted right,” the right-wing anti-worker Manhattan Institute headlined an email to its list a few days later.

Most recently, New York Magazine published a cover story entitled “The End of Denial,” which indicated the results of the election in New York City showed the Democratic Party’s “myopia” on host of issues for which, apparently, Democrats are in denial about:

[T]hat alienating left-wing positions or rhetoric were confined to college campuses; that the externalities of pandemic shutdowns, such as grade-school learning loss, were overblown; that the rapid adoption of new gender orthodoxies, especially in settings involving children, was not a popular concern; that the “defund the police” movement would be embraced by communities of color; that inflation was overstated; that the pandemic crime wave was exaggerated; that concerns over urban disorder represented a moral panic; that Latinos would welcome loosened border restrictions.

Immediately after the initial election results became available, Politico New York* laid out the situation in a deep-dive on the numbers.

Granted, with 7.9 million of the votes in, Trump lost New York state with 44 percent to Harris’ 56 percent. But that margin marked a 12-point improvement from his losing margin to President Joe Biden four years ago. He even narrowed the gap in New York City, netting 30 percent of the vote, an improvement of 7 points over 2020.

In a summary the reasons are identified as many-fold for why Trump made “gains from cities to suburbs, in blue and red neighborhoods, among whites, Asians and Latinos”: largely echoed the kinds of claims made in the later New York Magazine piece. A cataloging of how these claims run counter to the reality of what the Harris campaign and Democratic leaders directed towards the American people is available in Gabriel Winant’s excellent dissection of the election disaster available at Dissent.

Nationally, Democrats have been bemoaning their situation as it relates to many of the issues above, appearing to be happy to blame everything and everyone but themselves. The New York Times reports Democratic Party leaders have already decided on their next steps: doubling down on the rejection and alienation of the communities they claim as their base. Locally, Republicans—pushed into virtual obscurity in New York City and throughout the political landscape in New York State—have responded with glib glee, as reported by Politico.

“If what we’re seeing is a permanent realignment of portions of the Democratic base joining the Republicans, it makes it more possible that if everything went right for a Republican they have a good shot of winning a statewide race,” said Larry Levy, a suburban politics expert at Hofstra University, in Politico.

It’s not until the reader arrives at the second-to-last paragraph in the story that a critical piece of information is noted:

“Biden won 5.24 million votes in the state in 2020, compared with 4.3 million won by Harris this year. Trump, meanwhile, gained roughly 181,000 more votes than four years ago.”

Were readers of the Politico piece, or any of the many news reports touting the results in New York City as proof of Trump’s widespread and total hold on the American electorate, told this information up-front, it may have created obvious logical dissonance between what was being asserted and what the raw numbers actually indicated.

To be clear, any of the issues identified could potentially have led to reasons behind the actual vote totals. But the numbers themselves make one thing abundantly clear: While more people voted for Trump in this election than in 2020, it was the Democratic candidate for President, Kamala Harris, who lost massive support from voters compared to the 2020 turnout for Biden in New York. The story, then, is less about Trump’s ascendance than it is about the collapse of Democratic support in what is supposed to be one of their most reliable enclaves—a pattern that is likely reflected in the voting results in areas far less Democrat-friendly across the country.

A few political observers in New York have pointed out this reality.

For example, Steven Romalewski, director of the CUNY Mapping Service at the Center for Urban Research, pointed out that New York City “became ‘redder’ mainly because it became ‘less blue.'”

“It was a combination of a movement towards Trump, but also fewer votes for Harris, and that really changed things,” Romalewski said during an interview with NY1’s Pat Kiernan.

As they do every election, Romalewski and his team quickly put together visual map tools that are extremely helpful in getting both a general and deeper understanding of what happened. One need only utilize the visual tool on their website to see the dramatic change from blue to red between the results in 2020 and those of the past week.

But as Romalewski notes, to read that as a Trump swing exclusively, versus a Harris loss, obscures reality.

Digging into some hyper-local numbers shows the latter scenario to largely be the case. For example, in the 40th election district in the 35th Assembly District in Queens—a slightly majority Hispanic area of the borough that sits between LaGuardia Airport and Citifield—the narrative of Trump’s surge, especially among Hispanic voters, appears to find its support. Harris lost to Trump, 48.7 percent to 51.3 percent. It represented a nearly 7-percentage-point swing from Biden’s defeat of Trump in 2020, 55.5 percent to 44.5 percent.

In reality, Trump actually lost votes, from 353 in 2020 to 345 in 2024. It’s just that Harris lost so many more: She saw 113 fewer votes for her than Biden received in 2020—328 compared to 441, a decrease of more than a quarter (25.6 percent).

The reality of Harris’s falloff from 2020 can even be seen in places like deep-blue Park Slope, Brooklyn. Political home to current and former citywide elected officials, Park Slope is quintessential progressive Democrat territory. In the 84th election district within the 52nd Assembly District—the very heart of the neighborhood—we again see Trump lose support, what little he had, going from 62 votes in 2020 to 59 this year. But it’s Harris’s fall-off that’s striking: she garnered 80 less votes than Biden, from 1,213 in 2020 to 1,133 this year. That led to Trump’s proportion of the vote to increase, from 4.86 percent in 2020 to 4.95 percent this year.

Staten Island is well-known, politically, as the Republican holdout in New York City. Notable for its reputation as a white bastion of cops and firefighters, it regularly elects conservative politicians to federal, state, and local office. In the middle of the island, represented by Republican Michael Reilly in the State Assembly, Trump picked up 40 votes this year, 835 compared to 795 in 2020, in the 26th election district within the 62nd Assembly District. He won the vote there with 75.8 percent of the vote, up, again, from his 2020 showing of 67.9 percent. But as elsewhere, the story is not about Trump’s pickups as much as voters retreating from his opponent: Harris received 109 fewer votes than Biden’s 376 in 2020, a drop of nearly 30 percent.

This trend is on display across the city. Based on Romalewski’s analysis of the voting data, in every borough, Trump earned more votes this year than he did in 2020. And in every borough, Harris saw significantly less votes than Biden.

According to the unofficial initial election night tally, nearly 2.6 million people voted. Trump received more than 786,000 votes–an increase of 94,612 votes from his 2020 totals. Harris, by contrast, received more than 1,748,000 votes. This was 573,619 votes less than Biden’s total in 2020. The scope of this change is seen in the drop of 15.3 percent in total voter turnout between the two elections, in an election in which only a bit more than half of eligible city voters even bothered to show up. Nearly 500,000 fewer voters bothered to do so in 2024 versus 2020, which appears to be directly related to the significantly poorer showing for Harris, and belies the wave-of-support narrative for Trump.

Ultimately, the increase in Trump votes out of the nearly 5 million eligible people in New York City represents a shift in the voting population of less than 2 percent—hardly a massive realignment among the electorate. Meanwhile, more than 10 percent of all the voters in New York City evaporated from the polls between 2020 and 2024, for the Democratic candidate for president, in one of the most reliable centers of Democratic votes in America.

This trend isn’t confined to New York City. Low turnout extended to the cities of the so-called “blue wall” states where Trump won this time: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. It would be a strategic problem for the Left if we allow the narrative to be baked in that Trump’s vision has suddenly become much more widely attractive. In developing a response to what is to come, we need to be clear that the election mainly showed a lack of interest in what Harris did, and perhaps more importantly didn’t, offer.

Disillusionment with the Democrats and their inability to offer solutions to the multiple crises of capitalism should not be confused with a widespread embrace of Trump’s authoritarianism. As we acknowledge that the millions of eligible voters who opt not to participate shouldn’t be read as an acquiescence to the political order, we must also be clear-eyed about the reality of this election and what opportunities are presented by the increased rejection of the status quo offered within the two-party system, especially in the face of the very real pain and suffering we can expect out of a Trump presidency.

*The author previously worked for Politico New York.

Featured Image credit: Seth Anderson; modified by Tempest.

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