New York may have gone to Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday, but New Yorkers have never agreed more with President-elect Donald Trump than they do right now. Statewide, Harris received 56 percent of the vote to Trump’s 44 percent (with 97 percent of votes counted). Not only is that the highest Republican share since 1988, but Trump’s performance far outshone his past results against his previous opponents, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. In New York City, one of the deepest-blue places in the U.S., Trump secured over 30 percent of the vote. His relative strength in minority neighborhoods mirrors many of the gains among Hispanic, Asian, and black voters that he enjoyed nationwide.
What moved voters to tilt New York’s needle closer in Trump’s direction? The city’s ongoing migrant crisis, sky-high unaffordability, and elevated crime cumulatively created a sense that the status quo was untenable. All three represented a failure of Democratic governance, nationally and locally. In April, the Manhattan Institute released a survey of likely New York City voters. When asked for whom they would vote in the presidential race, 52 percent said President Joe Biden (then the Democratic nominee), and 25 percent said Trump. A supermajority of 68 percent said that New York City was on the wrong track, nearly mirroring the proportion who said the same of the country in Tuesday’s exit polls. Sixty-two percent of Hispanic voters opposed the city’s right to shelter. When asked to list their most important issue, Democrats, Independents, and Republicans shared the same top three (though not in the same priority): crime, migrants, and housing costs.
Start with the migrant crisis. Since the spring of 2022, some 210,000 migrants from around the world have arrived in New York City. Some were bused by Texas governor Greg Abbott, but many more came by their own volition after claiming asylum with federal border agents. While few were fleeing actual or feared persecution on grounds covered by the Immigration and Naturalization Act, their claim entitled them to an immigration hearing. Given the 4.3-million-case backlog, as of 2023, these migrants would be able to stay in the U.S. for years.
Tens of thousands awaiting their hearings entered New York City’s shelter system; as of October, the migrant shelter population numbered roughly 60,000. Gotham’s four-decade-old right to shelter, which provides an immediate, publicly funded bed to anyone who requests it, forced the city to ramp up shelter capacity quickly. As migrants kept coming, the tab kept growing, reaching an annual cost of between $4 billion and $5 billion—about the budgets of the city’s parks, sanitation, and fire departments combined. Mayor Eric Adams responded by signing more contracts with shelter providers on an emergency no-bid basis, decrying Washington’s failure to send money but failing himself even at attempting to reverse the right-to-shelter that attracted migrants to the city. The Biden administration was slow to hire more immigration judges, sent the city virtually no funding, and didn’t even grant Adams a crisis-related meeting with the president. It dumped the problem on New Yorkers’ laps.
On top of this flagrant failure of governance, New York City’s leaders have failed to bring crime down to pre-pandemic levels. Serious violent crime and property crime were, respectively, 29.1 and 33.4 percent higher in 2023 than in 2019, when the state passed a suite of criminal-justice reforms, such as discovery and bail reform. Felony assaults, in particular, have skyrocketed 36 percent, as have homicides in the subway system by five times the historical average since 2000. New Yorkers don’t feel safe, but Democratic leaders have repeatedly insisted that their perception was skewed: theirs is the safest city in the country, far safer than in the 1990s, and migrant crime is vanishingly rare—even though it was happening before their eyes.
Democrats can’t say that they weren’t warned that voters weren’t buying it. In 2022, Lee Zeldin, a pro-Trump congressman from Suffolk County, ran the strongest Republican gubernatorial campaign in decades against Kathy Hochul. He lost relatively narrowly to the accidental incumbent, who focused on abortion rights. Zeldin’s campaign centered on fighting crime and improving quality of life, such as by repealing the 2019 criminal-justice reforms, boosting police spending, and firing progressive district attorneys. That a Trump-adjacent gubernatorial candidate could win more than 30 percent of the city’s vote should have set off alarms in Albany and City Hall, prompting them to replace the right-to-shelter law and to curb the excesses of 2019’s criminal-justice reforms.
Instead, New Yorkers got more of the same: more migrants, more emergency contracts, more subway murders, more abortion alarmism, and—crucially—more inflation, particularly of housing costs. The city’s housing-vacancy rate dipped to 1.41 percent, the lowest level since 1968, indicating extremely few homes available to rent. Rather than closing ranks to defend against another Zeldin-like challenge in 2024 with pragmatic compromises on issues New Yorkers cared about most, state legislative progressives refused to budge on criminal-justice overhauls or pro-housing supply measures without stringent rent controls attached. Despite Democratic supermajorities in the state legislature, Hochul failed to deliver on any of her ambitious 2023 proposals to boost housing supply.
As their elected leaders squabbled, New Yorkers paid record-high rents, now with a median of over $4,400 in Manhattan and $3,400 in Queens. Bearing one of the highest state and local tax burdens in the country, residents are paying more and getting less. Many have fled New York, particularly black families.
Put together, these issues fueled a growing and broadly shared sense that city, state, and national leaders—all Democrats—put the needs of foreign migrants, far-left activists, and political insiders above everyday New Yorkers and their families. A larger-than-expected vote for Donald Trump suggests a repudiation of today’s state of affairs. Time will tell whether New York’s leaders finally get the message.
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