Modern-day New York City has rarely been as liberal as the rest of the nation thinks it is.
Two of the last four mayors were elected as Republicans. The current mayor is a former Republican whose political instincts lead observers to define him as a conservative Democrat.
And the results of Tuesday’s presidential election in New York City clearly indicate that New York City is shifting to the right.
Kamala Harris won New York City by a 37-point margin, far shy of the nearly 54-point margin of victory that President Biden held over Donald J. Trump in 2020. In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Mr. Trump in New York City by nearly 63 points.
As of now, Mr. Trump has received 786,000 votes in New York City, with 2 percent of the vote still to be counted. In 2020, he got 692,000.
The rightward shift was especially pronounced in Queens, southern Brooklyn and parts of the Bronx.
“I had a feeling Trump was going to do better than he did in 2020, and he exceeded my expectations,” said John Mollenkopf, a professor of political science who runs the City University of New York graduate school’s Center for Urban Research.
Mr. Trump made gains among Chinese and Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn, in heavily Chinese and South Asian neighborhoods in Queens and among heavily Hispanic communities in the Bronx and Queens, according to a Center for Urban Research analysis.
“Democrats really have to come to terms with the growth of the Republican Party in nonwhite, outer borough areas,” said Joseph C. Borelli, the Republican minority leader of the City Council, who represents the South Shore of Staten Island.
The shift to the right in many of these neighborhoods was decades in the making, said Annetta Seecharran, the executive director of Chhaya, a nonprofit community development group that serves a largely South Asian population in Jackson Heights and Richmond Hill in Queens, two neighborhoods that while still solidly Democrat have made noteworthy moves to the right.
While Ms. Harris still won Jackson Heights, Mr. Trump’s margin improved by roughly 17 percentage points compared with his performance in the 2020 election.
Similarly, while Ms. Harris also won Richmond Hill, Mr. Trump’s margin improved there by about 18 percentage points compared with 2020.
Ms. Seecharran, whose family moved to New York from Guyana in the 1980s, said the path to the middle class has become increasingly narrow for her members, many of whom work in construction or in service industries, or drive taxis.
“This is a really hard, difficult reality check of where people are in their lives, and how difficult it is for them to imagine a path forward,” she said, adding that the goal of homeownership, a dream for many of her members, has become remote, because of stagnant wages and rising housing costs.
“I don’t think it’s that people don’t care about immigration, or that they’re selfish,” she said. “People are desperate.”
New York City is not immune from the political forces buffeting the rest of the United States, and its communities have also been at the epicenter of a devastating pandemic and the social and economic disorder that ensued. The influx of more than 200,000 undocumented migrants to New York City, and the city’s legally required efforts to house them, also fueled resentment among some more established immigrant communities, several leaders said.
Those leaders also cited the political awakening engendered by former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s efforts to better integrate New York City’s most selective high schools — an initiative that many local leaders argued would harm Asian students; and the get-out-the-vote efforts of several Republican candidates challenging incumbents in Queens. Mr. de Blasio did not respond to a request for comment.
The results could be a harbinger of things to come, said Gavin Wax, the president of the New York Young Republican Club, a conservative group that has highlighted how the party could lure typically apolitical or disaffected voters.
The diverse voting bloc that was attracted to Mr. Trump’s campaign rhetoric was “ripe for the taking,” Mr. Wax said. He credits much of that growth to young men.
Donovan Richards, the borough president of Queens who won a divisive race for office with strong support from Black residents, argued that the pandemic unleashed a feeling of chaos in parts of the borough that formerly felt insulated from crime and disorder.
“You get on the train now, you’ve got people in crisis,” Mr. Donovan said. “They might not have felt this or seen this at the level that certain pockets of the borough did.”
He also described simmering resentment toward new migrants from longer-standing Queens residents who felt they deserved more city resources.
There were early signs that the election in New York City might be headed this way. Among those New York City residents who registered to vote since 2022, many choose not to affiliate with a political party. That dynamic was particularly noticeable in Asian immigrant areas, according to Mr. Mollenkopf.
“People of color, including the Asian American community, are taking more roles and having more ownership over election results,” said John Liu, a Democratic state senator from Queens.
Mr. Liu added that while New York City remains “ a deep blue city,” the voting results there should be viewed as a political bellwether.
“The mood changed,” he said.
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