How New York and other cities should react to Trump’s decisive victory
Left-leaning New Yorkers who spent years dreading the possibility of Donald Trump retaking the White House have converted their anxiety into at least temporary depression. As they process his decisive victory, they should snap out of the hangover with a sobering realization: It’s now far too simplistic to think of New York and other urban areas as enlightened bright blue islands in a scary sea of red. Those who live in American cities moved right along with the rest of the country. To put it another way, the call is at least partially coming from inside the house.
The counting isn’t quite finished yet, but almost a third of New York City voters supported Trump. Trump got 38% of the vote in Queens, the immigration capital of the world. He got 28% of Brooklyn’s vote, 17% of Manhattan’s, 27% of the Bronx’s and around 65% of Staten Island’s. All represented big jumps from the last time around, and the time before that. This was despite his chaotic first term, his attempts to overturn the last election, and a campaign marked by increasingly harsh rhetoric about cities.
New York wasn’t the only city to shift right. In Miami, Dallas, Houston and Chicago and plenty of other places, Trump improved on his 2020 results by double digits. Trump’s support among Black voters, who disproportionately live in big cities, doubled. Nationwide, Trump actually won Latino men by eight points, four years after losing them by 23 points.
Those who live in American cities, including New York City, moved right along with the rest of the country.
Democrats might be tempted to blame this defeat on disinformation or low-information voters or some combination of racism and sexism, but that would be a mistake.
So, what just happened, and what can be learned from it?
The first and most important pill New York progressives need to swallow is this: Just because a complaint might be broadly associated with Trump — about crime, about immigration or about anything else — doesn’t mean it should be met with equal and opposite resistance. Some of what Trump said, as furiously and nastily and hyperbolically (or falsely) as he said it, resonated with urban voters for legitimate reasons.
For instance, when he obnoxiously disparaged cities as crime-ridden wastelands, a growing number of the people who live in those very cities saw some truth in his caricature.
Why? While murder and other violent crime are indeed declining significantly from pandemic highs, something else is afoot that helps the Trump crime critique land. A 2023 survey showed New Yorkers feeling increasingly unsafe in their neighborhoods. This may be because the overall number of offenses has kept rising post-pandemic, or because visible signs of disorder feel increasingly common, or because especially scary crimes like felony assault are going up.
If the left responds to these concerns by merely calling Trump a liar (which he is) or merely insisting New York and other cities are safer than 20 or 30 years ago (which they are), they’ll be missing the point. People deserve answers to real problems, not a denial that problems exist.
The same is true on immigration. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s gambit to send buses of migrants to big cities, where enlightened liberals had promised they’d be welcomed with open arms, proved politically brilliant. Though most New Yorkers sympathize with undocumented immigrants rather than vilifying them as a criminal “invasion,” the arrival of thousands of people from the southern border has stressed resources and caused a not-insignificant share of voters to bristle. Immigrant New Yorkers themselves have lots of legitimate concerns about all this. By some accounts, Black voters have been among those most irritated.
Again, we have a real political and policy problem that demands an honest reckoning, not a wave of the hand.
People deserve answers to real problems, not a denial that problems exist.
And on the economy, it stands to reason that — even with fundamentals like job creation, wage growth and consumer spending levels as solid as they’ve been in a long time — the pain of rising prices resonated with a decent number of people who live in cities, who tend to be stressed by the high price of housing and other goods. The left can either lecture people that they don’t know how good they have it, or they can try harder to deliver answers, like a robust housing production agenda.
There was another phenomenon at work Tuesday night. By any honest reckoning, 2017 to 2021 was not an unrelenting nightmare in New York City or in other cities. (It’s also true that to some extent things went okay because the City exercised its power to reject Trump’s worst ideas.) Nevertheless, leading Democratic voices kept talking about a second Trump term as some kind of impending apocalypse. It might indeed be bad, but the rhetoric obviously struck some sizable share of city voters as profoundly out of touch with their experience.
What now?
New York City, where Mayor Eric Adams is now in charge, will have many political and policy choices to make as Trump returns to power. Adams, of course, is under federal indictment, and those around him have been not so subtly hoping that perhaps a President Trump victory might make the criminal charges against him go away. That alone may influence Adams’ posture and therefore the city’s as long as he’s in the big chair in City Hall. In any event, he approaches many problems in a way that does not aggressively conflict with Trump’s positions. As a law-and-order former cop, Adams believes in robust law enforcement to stop smaller crimes, and he believes in increasing civil commitment to try to help seriously mentally ill people.
But Adams is not, of course, the only politician who matters in New York. Others in the city’s political class, including the uber-progressive City Council, may well react by hunkering down or making another left turn. Many of them will conclude that the real problem in this election was that Kamala Harris didn’t speak loudly and clearly enough to the Democratic base, so now is the time to double down on a progressive agenda that opposes anything that Trump is for.
That would be a mistake. Local leaders should instead seek to speak to the center of the New York electorate. That means listening carefully not just to the 30% of New Yorkers who voted for Trump but also to the many voters who pulled the lever for Harris but still have real doubts about the progressive agenda.
Local leaders should seek to speak to the center of the New York electorate.
This is not to say that the left should abandon all principles. It is too early to say whether Trump will really follow through on his terrible plans to carry out the largest deportation operation in American history. If he does so, it would be right and proper for hospitals and schools to continue protecting undocumented immigrants seeking care and education. If federal authorities are really going to rip otherwise law-abiding families apart, leaders of New York should not just capitulate.
But a knee-jerk opposition to deportation in every case doesn’t make sense. Some deportations may indeed be necessary, like in cases when recent migrants to the city have committed repeated violent crimes. There’s nothing wrong, and a lot right, with there being more order at the border. Nor is there anything wrong with expressing concerns when migrants arrive in New York City by the thousands, without a coherent plan or the necessary resources to assimilate them into our metropolis.
On immigration and indeed every issue that matters to cities, reflexive and often performative resistance might feel good, but it won't win over more voters — or solve real problems. Progressives must pick their battles wisely this time around, or they’ll lose even more ground to Trump and Trumpism.