Democrats flipped two congressional swing seats in New York and were poised to retake a third on Wednesday, reversing embarrassing midterm losses in the state and keeping their party’s slim hopes of a House majority alive.
And yet, on the same night, President-elect Donald J. Trump delivered the strongest performance of any Republican nominee in the state since the 1980s, gaining ground even in its beating urban heart: New York City.
The whiplash results left Democrats and Republicans uncertain whether to celebrate or panic. On one hand, they validated Democrats’ concerted campaign to avenge 2022, when the party’s New York losses helped Republicans seize House control. On the other, they suggested a more durable shift to the right, upending bedrock political assumptions in one of the nation’s most Democratic states.
The two trends collided most clearly on Long Island. Democrats were on track to narrowly win both competitive House seats in bellwether Nassau County, where Vice President Kamala Harris ran 14 points behind President Biden’s 2020 margin to lose the suburban stronghold.
“We all need to take a deep breath and wake up,” said Representative Tom Suozzi, a Democrat, who barely held onto his Queens and Nassau swing seat by outperforming Ms. Harris.
He argued that Democrats succeeded in the down-ballot races because they were able to separate themselves from the party’s recent liberal positions on immigration, crime and the economy and out-organize Republicans.
But while progressives began arguing Wednesday that the party needed to tack further left after Ms. Harris’s national loss, Mr. Suozzi worried aloud that its problem in New York still lay with moderate and independent voters who believe Democrats do not care about their problems.
“The Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left,” he said. “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.” He added, “Democrats aren’t saying that, and they should be.”
The speed and extent of New York’s evolution have caught many in the state off guard. Both Hillary Clinton and President Biden trounced Mr. Trump statewide. New York City, his hometown, was considered the unofficial capital of the Trump resistance during his first rise to power.
That began changing in the wake of the pandemic, driven by Asian Americans, Orthodox Jewish voters, white suburbanites and Latino voters who blame ruling Democrats for an uptick in crime, sharper rises in living costs and more recently, an influx of more than 200,000 migrants that is straining the city’s finances.
In 2022, the Republican candidate for governor, Lee Zeldin, harnessed those forces and came within six points of winning, despite Democrats’ two-to-one voter registration advantage. And on a night when their party underperformed nationally, Republicans routed the state’s suburban House swing seats, nearly building their entire majority in New York.
Democrats have spent the two years since on a highly disciplined effort to right mistakes involved in those losses — and their effort appears to have paid dividends. This time, as Democrats underperformed across the country, they made important gains on the House map in New York.
John Mannion, a Democratic state senator, defeated first-term Representative Brandon Williams to capture a Syracuse-area seat that Democrats redrew during court-ordered redistricting this year to be slightly more favorable to their party.
Josh Riley, a Democrat, won a rematch against Representative Marc Molinaro in a sprawling upstate district that Republicans had believed was safe until the race’s final days.
And on Long Island, Laura Gillen, a Democratic former town supervisor, declared victory over Representative Anthony D’Esposito after his campaign was buffeted by scandal. The race had not yet been called by The Associated Press.
In addition to Mr. Suozzi’s seat, Democrats also successfully defended the district held by Representative Pat Ryan, who ran more than 10 points ahead of Ms. Harris in the Hudson Valley.
The gains left them with an outside shot at winning the House majority, though Democrats feared that they would fall short in another coastal Democratic state, California.
Most of the winning candidates had run on platforms that fore-fronted the need to protect abortion rights and financed their attacks with huge fund-raising hauls. But they also notably shifted to the center from 2022, adopting tougher stances on public safety and securing the southern border.
The only real disappointment for Democrats in New York came in the suburbs of Westchester and Rockland Counties north of the city, where Representative Mike Lawler, another freshman Republican, handily won re-election in a center-left district that Mr. Biden carried. Mr. Lawler succeeded by pummeling his opponent, Mondaire Jones, for past progressive positions, including his support for defunding the police.
Both parties also gave credit to the decision by Gov. Kathy Hochul, Representative Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York to transform the oft-maligned state Democratic Party from an appendage of the governorship into a robust turnout operation. By Election Day, the party claimed its coordinated campaign had knocked on 1.3 million doors across the House swing districts.
Large labor unions and Democratic advocacy groups built their own parallel turnout operation, Battleground New York, that made another 750,000 attempts at voter contacts in four House districts.
Mr. Mannion praised Ms. Hochul in his victory speech. “She put herself last, and sometimes she can be a target, but I’ll tell you, she made sure that we did not let this country down in New York State.”
The governor had added motivation, though, and not just because she was blamed for the 2022 losses. She faces her own re-election fight in 2026 amid warning signs that her state may not be as reliably Democratic as it once seemed.
“There are a set of challenges that we have here that suggest there is an opening for a mainstream Republican governor,” said Howard Wolfson, a leading Democratic strategist, though he added that Mr. Trump in the White House was perhaps “the best thing that could have happened to Kathy Hochul’s re-election chances.”
Mr. Lawler, who is weighing a run against the governor, argued his party had reason to be happy about Tuesday’s outcome in New York, too.
“These seats are all going to be competitive in 2026,” he said. “The suburbs are continuing to move rightward.”
“Something’s got to give,” he added. “One-party rule does not work.”
Ms. Hochul said on Wednesday that she was not blindsided by the outcome, which unfolded alongside Republican gains across the country.
“We cannot ignore certain populations in our state that feel taken for granted,” she said. “I understand that. But I will also point out, no one expected that we would see the gains that we had in the House of Representatives.”
Statewide, New York voters approved an amendment designed to enshrine new protections from discrimination, including abortion care, in the State Constitution despite conservative opposition. Ms. Gillibrand handily won a third full term against Michael Sapraicone, a private security executive and Republican.
Ms. Harris was still winning New York convincingly, 56 percent to Mr. Trump’s 44 percent. But with 92 percent of votes counted, the margin was less than half the 23-point spread that both Ms. Clinton and Mr. Biden won by in 2016 and 2020.
The Republicans’ growing vote share was driven in large part by the Long Island suburbs and the Lower Hudson Valley. But Mr. Trump also made striking gains in otherwise solidly Democratic districts of New York City.
He appeared on track to take more than 30 percent of the vote in the five boroughs, up from 23 percent in 2020 and 18 percent in 2016. Mr. Trump was running roughly 10 points ahead of his past performance in Queens and the Bronx, boroughs home to large Asian American and Latino populations.
It was the best Republican performance since 1988.
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