NYC’S Trump voters
President lost handily in city, but improved in immigrant-heavy areas
Surprising areas in New York City where Trump’s support grew — and why.
In the months leading up to the election, as the restaurant where she has worked for 18 years in Corona, Queens, struggled to survive, Juliana Rodriguez wavered over her choice for president.
President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and the way he spoke about Latino immigrants stung Rodriguez and pushed her toward Joe Biden. But, she reasoned, it was the president’s administration that oversaw the delivery of the stimulus check that had arrived last spring, just as she had felt the pandemic might crush her. She chose Trump.
“I don’t like when someone talks about our people,” Rodriguez, 55, who is Dominican, said. “But when I saw everything he did during the first four months of the pandemic, I said to myself, ‘Maybe he changed.’”
In casting her vote, Rodriguez joined a surge of support for Trump in New York City. And while he once again lost his native city by wide margins, he increased his share of votes in nearly all of the city’s 65 assembly districts.
Some of the president’s biggest gains came in pockets of Brooklyn neighborhoods that are home to the city’s Hasidic community, where Trump was expected to run strongly.
But he also improved greatly on his 2016 showing in immigrant-heavy districts in Queens and the Bronx, mirroring gains among Latino voters in Florida, Texas and elsewhere amid surging turnout.
The president’s gains still left him far behind Biden in these sections of the city. But the shift was large, reflecting the reality that New York City’s diverse group of Hispanic American voters is far from monolithic.
In a heavily Dominican section of the West Bronx, where more than three-quarters of the population is Latino, Trump won just 5 percent of the vote in 2016. In 2020, he carried more than 15 percent. In the neighborhood where Rodriguez lives and works, Trump’s support grew from under 15 percent to around 27 percent.
Experts said some voters were drawn to Trump by a mixture of economic policy, religious values and their belief that he is a strong leader. And though Biden still overwhelmingly won the city, collecting 72 percent of the total vote across the five boroughs on his way to winning the election, the president’s improved performance startled some Democrats.
Even now, weeks after the election, it remains unclear whether some Latino voters’ apparent shift toward a Republican candidate represents a lasting reshaping of traditional political allegiances or a phenomenon unique to an unconventional president.
“With Trump, there is a kind of eclectic mix of policies — anti-trade, and easy money, and you have a very good economy — which can play into, ‘This seems to be working for me,’” said Daniel Disalvo, a professor of political science at City College of New York and author of “Engines of Change: Party Factions in American Politics.”
“Trump did have a basket of policies that were potentially appealing to those groups in a way that maybe some people couldn’t see,” he said.
Certified results released this month by the New York City Board of Elections show that in nearly 90 percent of the city’s assembly districts, even where he lost, Trump’s share of the vote increased over four years ago. And while precise demographic voter results are not available, a review of election district results shows that he ran considerably stronger in heavily Dominican and Mexican American areas like Elmhurst and Corona in Queens.
The results bucked conventional perceptions of Latino voters’ loyalty to the Democratic Party. Yet for some, the improved support for the president is hard to reconcile with the Trump administration’s policies and Trump’s own words, which for four years were widely criticized as racist.
“Even if he is racist, they believe that what he is delivering is more important than how he acts,” said José Rámón Sánchez, a professor of political science at Long Island University Brooklyn and chair of the National Institute of Latino Policy.
He pointed to the Democratic Party’s down-ballot losses as an example of the risk to the party going forward, should Democrats fail to cultivate Latino voters.
The shift has caused tension within the community, particularly between younger Latinos and older and firstgeneration immigrants, who tend to be more conservative, according to studies of voting behavior.
Trump’s support also grew in more expected places: the few pockets of the city where he has always been popular with voters.
Results from election districts show that Trump’s margins of victory grew in the Hasidic Jewish enclaves of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and in overwhelmingly white places like Breezy Point.
Trump made gains among the Hasidic community because they believed he was strongly pro-israel and shared their conservative views on social issues, according to political scientists.
But the gains in the five boroughs are perhaps a cold comfort for Trump. Overall in New York City, Biden received 2,321,759 votes, according to the city Board of Elections. Trump received just 691,682.