Kamala Harris may have won New York City. But the ground she lost with voters compared to Joe Biden in 2020 defies both logic and expectations.
“I’m not sure I can exactly explain it,” said Mike Dawidziak, a political strategist. “I mean, she underperformed so badly in key Democratic groups that supported both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden that it’s very hard to explain.”
In 2020, 5,244,886 voters cast their ballot for Biden. So far, with 97% votes counted, Harris has earned 4,337,146 votes — this, sources say, could indicate a turnout problem.
In all five boroughs, support for Harris faltered compared to Biden in 2020, sometimes by double digits, according to preliminary election results from the Associated Press.
Queens is the most culturally and racially diverse area of New York City, home to an outsize portion of the city’s immigrant population. One thing that became apparent on Tuesday, according to Shawn Donahue, a professor of political science at the University at Buffalo, is that Trump is doing better with the borough’s Asian population.
“Grace Meng’s district, which is an Asian plurality district in Queens — what I see here is that Trump was within about 5 or 6 points of winning that district. I mean, Harris’ margin went from 24 or 23 to about five,” he said.
This is because, Donahue said, for Asian voters, crime and Asian hate crimes, in particular, have been a point of concern. And Republicans have traditionally been better at pitching themselves as the solution to crime issues.
According to unofficial election results from the New York State Board of Elections, Harris won the Bronx by a margin of 71-27. In 2020, Biden won by 83-16. Democrats in the area had been worried about Trump increasing support since the summer, when the former president held a rally in the borough. While strategists scratch their heads and wait for more data to draw concrete conclusions, Democrats in New York and nationwide are reckoning what this means.
“I think the numbers in the Bronx are reflective of a shift where people are fed up and disappointed with the Democratic Party,” said Bronx Borough President Vanessa L. Gibson, a Democrat. “They decided to vote for a candidate who could bring something different and really address the issues that they care about.”
The issues, Gibson said, are abortion and immigration. In New York, Democrats successfully advanced Proposition 1, which sought to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution.
Republicans, from Trump all the way down to the state’s House races, were remarkably consistent in turning the election into a referendum on immigration — which they frequently linked to crime. They also consistently placed New York City — which has seen an influx of migrants since 2022 — at the center of that argument.
“They see the migrant crisis happening in New York City the last two years. They see all of our hotels filled up with migrant families and children in our public schools. And so it’s a frustration,” Gibson said. “I think people understand we’re a sanctuary city, and they welcome new arrivals, but not at the expense of their everyday life.”
When Trump sermonized to a full house at Madison Square Garden in October, he blamed Democrats for all of New York’s problems. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, New York City’s only Republican representative, echoed those sentiments in a statement to NOTUS.
“New Yorkers are fed up with one-party rule of the city and state and unhappy with the Biden-Harris policies that led to mass illegal migration of gang members, murderers, rapists, and criminals who are wreaking havoc in New York City at a cost of billions of dollars to taxpayers,” she said. “This frustration has led more New Yorkers to reject the status quo and vote against the continuation of Democrats’ America-last agenda for another four years.”
New York Democrats are also turning the blame on their own party in response to Democrats’ losses.
Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres, who represents part of the Bronx and was a surrogate for Harris, blamed the “far-left” flank of his party for alienating “historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians and Jews from the Democratic Party.”
“The working class is not buying the ivory-towered nonsense that the far left is selling,” he said on X.
Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi, who earlier this year picked up the seat vacated by George Santos and won reelection this week, said on X that many Amreicans are more afraid of “the Left” than they are of Trump.
“Democrats need to focus more on issues like wages and benefits, and less on being politically correct,” he said. “Moderate White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, union, non-union, and other voters fear that the world we live in and the values we live by are under threat, and Democrats have been too intimidated to speak up.”
Harris’ underperformance wasn’t isolated to New York City — the same weak numbers can be found across the country in metropolitan areas like Philadelphia.
Dawidziak suspects that a lot of it comes down to feeling: Republicans were better able to seize the emotions people have associated with issues like immigration and abortion and turn them into votes against Democrats.
“The Democratic Party likes to tell people how they should feel. They’re often right, but if people don’t feel that way, it doesn’t make any difference,” he said. “I mean, you can tell people they should care about immigrants more than they care about their own pocketbook, but if they don’t, it doesn’t make any difference.”
One thing that everyone can agree on is that the Democratic Party has some soul-searching to do.
“I think what we are going to have to do is really think outside the box of how we can not only attract our Democrats and keep them, but we also have to deliver. People want deliverables. They want answers,” Gibson said.
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Violet Jira is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.