The sand is eroding beneath Democrats’ feet in New York

After being criticized by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York Democrats went to bed on election night content, having flipped three House seats and done their part in the battle to retake the House. They proved they weren’t a political liability.

However, with the victory of President-elect Donald Trump, there was melancholy in Manhattan the rest of the week. He has said he will work to deport millions of immigrants, kill federal funding for major transportation projects like the Gateway rail tunnel and could pass superseding laws that would limit reproductive rights.

New York Democrats missed the mark on abortion for the second straight election, bungling the messaging around their ultimately successful campaign to pass Proposal 1 and enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution by turning it into an issue that had swing district Democrats running from supporting it. It also was clear from the results that voters were more concerned about the economy and crime than abortion. Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss can be viewed as a rejection of the Democratic Party’s platform (or lack thereof) and a sign the party is losing touch, both with the electorate and itself. And it’s unclear whether the party will take the results as a signal to veer more right or more left in the coming years.

Perhaps more concerning for Democrats is how strongly Trump performed in New York. It was the best presidential performance for a Republican in the state since 1988. He won both counties on Long Island. Manhattan and Brooklyn shifted roughly 10 points right. And Queens and the Bronx shifted more than 20 points right. 

With their victories in the House, party leaders in Albany and New York City may not think the sky is falling, but the sand is eroding beneath their feet.

“The 2016-2024 swing to the right in working- and middle-class Latino and Asian neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx will be nightmare fuel for the next generation of NYC Democrats,” political writer Michael Lange posted online.

And should these trends continue, the reckoning for Democrats is coming – in one of the most deep-blue states in the nation.

Eroding coalition

Exit polling and a closer look at voting trends throughout New York City laid bare Trump’s appeal to voters of color. It wasn’t completely out of the blue – the Queens native made a point of stopping in New York City during his campaign, holding rallies in the Bronx and more recently, at Madison Square Garden.

A mixture of inefficient outreach to Black and Latino communities coupled with a perception that Democrats do little but pay lip service every four years to communities of color spelled trouble for Harris. The effect was noticeable in New York. Some experts theorized that there was a miscalculation among Democrats about the strength of abortion as a campaign issue, especially in communities of color, and some of the most comfortable congressional results were owed to campaigns couching reproductive rights in an overall message about protecting freedoms.

The out-of-touch perspective within sects of the Democratic Party can be difficult to shift. Democratic strategist Lupe Todd-Medina, who previously worked on Hochul’s campaign, said she’s not sure what it would take for liberal politicos in the New York City metro area to understand the lives of average New Yorkers.

“I’ve been in this game going on 25 years, and I’m still trying to figure it out,” Todd-Medina said.

She added that in the Latino community specifically, Democrats’ message has simply stopped reaching them, and for some reason, Trump’s has. “It’s not like Donald Trump won the Latino vote, but he improved on it, and we flatlined,” she said. “He improved, so we have to look at that and say, ‘He might be a poor messenger, but his commentary is hitting somewhere, somewhere where we are not.’”

To Democratic consultant Ryan Adams, that place Democrats are not hitting with Latinos is an issue of fairness. “I saw people this morning being like, ‘How could these people vote against? How could Latino men vote for Trump when he wants to deport all these immigrants?’” he told City & State. “They don’t see themselves that way. In fact, they see themselves more like, ‘I worked so hard to get here, and you’re telling me that these Democrats want to just give handouts to all the people who aren’t working nearly as hard as me – why is my hard work not worth as much?’”

Public safety concerns have also not been addressed at the top of the party, according to some candidates and operatives. On criminal justice reforms, it hasn’t been made clear to communities of color how they’ll be kept safe.

Chinese voters in New York City have steadily been shifting right, and state Sen. Iwen Chu’s district was no different. The Brooklyn lawmaker lost her seat to Republican Steve Chan in part because of a hyperlocal fights over migrant arrivals and a homeless shelter. Political consultant Trip Yang said her voters were looking for something more visceral in a lawmaker, with Chan fitting the bill.

“Voters don’t necessarily want to have a two-hour roundtable discussion where they go over metrics and arguments,” Yang said. “Voters want to see their representative just standing up for them and just shouting at the top of their lungs, standing with them and opposing it.”

Read the room

The Republican narrative that Democrats care more about social justice than kitchen table issues has been landing effectively, and Democratic Party members aren’t sure why. On a state level, they said they have policies that have addressed affordability, public safety and access to health care. However, due to a fundamental misunderstanding of economics, many voters in New York and elsewhere saw Democrats as the ones to blame for the crunch on their wallets. As wages remain flat and many struggle to make rent and buy groceries, fingers naturally get pointed at the party in power.

Adams said lots of people, including his mom, have complained about the price of eggs going up. “The failure here is that the Democratic Party had four years to hold people accountable for price gouging, and they didn’t,” he said.

Assembly Member Ron Kim, who won Assembly District 40 in Queens despite Trump carrying the district, said it was puzzling that in a year where the Democratic-controlled state Legislature passed several tax credits meant to save families money, candidates like himself were fighting on enemy turf. And messaging from the state party seemed to focus exclusively on abortion toward the final days of the election.

“I’m particularly shocked that the affordability piece, they didn’t really focus on that as much, because we did so much while we were in power to focus on that very topic, but we didn’t communicate that effectively at all,” Kim said. “And all data show that every person in the middle class or working class, they care about cutting costs and having affordable outcomes. That’s very frustrating because that’s something that’s pretty uniting in many different communities.”

In the closing days of the election, Republican messaging played up the culture war, attacking Democrats’ support for the trans community in an ad by saying: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” The tagline punctuated months of conservative campaigning against the Equal Rights Amendment and for congressional candidates on the idea that Democrats care more about the LGBTQ+ community than families and working people. Political consultant Jake Dilemani said that the misinformation campaign and resulting negativity landed so well because during the early Trump years, the far left took root within the Democratic Party and drove policy discussions despite not representing the wider beliefs of the electorate – with flashpoints like the “defund the police” movement leaving a lasting stigma on the party. The 2024 version of that dynamic may have been progressive calls for a ceasefire in Gaza. Not only did it leave the Democratic Party fractured for most of the cycle, it also opened the door to Republican claims of extremism and voting gains for Trump among Jewish voters.

“You had basically an entire party, and some of the most prominent voices within it, captured by this kind of language of these activists and it came back to bite the party in the ass,” Dilemani said. “I do think that the stability of the economy and immigration, etc., are top of mind issues and that clearly voters out there that were affected by that are now reflecting on who they want for president.”

Confusing path forward

Democrats have no idea where to go from here. Party insiders weren’t on alert for a significant conservative shift in the New York City metropolitan area and don’t have an immediate fix for Tuesday’s results. Top Democrats were in Puerto Rico for Somos, a somber affair, and began searching for a way forward.

Putting a stop to the bleeding could look like embracing a populist approach. It could also see New York Democrats lean on the coordinated campaign to shore up weaknesses, since as Hochul promised, the state party apparatus won’t simply disappear until the next election.

But the consensus among Democrats appears to be that communicating a concise vision, one that explains their plan to lower crime and increase affordability, is the best way to bring voters back into the fold and to keep their current electorate from departing. Political consultant Joe Bonilla said that some listening is also in order as Democrats’ overall message can be unclear beyond individual candidates.

“This the best time for Democrats to talk to their constituents,” Bonilla said, “now, while their vote is fresh, about what did we not speak to you enough about, and therefore, you’re getting that data, whether through community meetings, through walking the streets, all of that, and formulating that message from there.”

He added that part of the appeal of Trump and conservatism was that while their message might be viewed as abhorrent to some, it’s simple to digest and easy to spread.

State Sen. James Sanders Jr. of Queens also found that at some point, Democrats stopped crafting a message for voters who haven’t attended college. The phenomenon is evident in some of the labor endorsements Republicans received this cycle.

“The Democrats have to figure out what to do about people who don’t have a college degree,” Sanders said. “Those are the ones in America who are falling behind. … We have been extremely slow in recognizing that fact and trying to come up with policies that will aid them. And theirs was a policy of resentment.”

Progressives in New York have built their movement on fighting for the working class, across all demographics. Some of them think that the reason cracks are showing in the Democrats’ base is because the party’s argument, specifically that they’ll fight harder than Republicans for the “common man,” simply isn’t there.

“(Trump) says, ‘The system is broken. I’m going to fix it.’ People think the system is broken. And he’s also saying, ‘I’m for you.’ And he wants to say, ‘Democrats are for these other people who are not,’” political consultant Bill Neidhardt said. “He’s going to use race, gender, sexual identity to make those divisions. What we need to do is actually effectively communicate, ‘We are for you, working person.’ And if we can do that effectively, that neuters their ability to use race or gender or sexual identity to divide.”

In trouble

Even with three flipped House seats and a revamped, successful state Democratic Party, Democrats are shaken up after the election. The writing on the wall for leaders, voters, operatives and candidates was that, as a political movement, they are beginning to lose America. No one will confuse Astoria for Tulsa anytime soon, but Democrats’ political message died with a whimper on election night and all roads lead back to New York.

“I think the brand is pretty broken,” Neidhardt said. “I do think it’s salvageable, but I also think we have to kind of look at this as not something that happened on Nov. 5, but was years, frankly, decades, in the making.”

The party hasn’t given up, but the reckoning that seemed to be building since 2016 came to fruition and as U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders said as results piled up, “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.” The problem for the party is no one knows what that will look like.

– with reporting by Holly Pretsky and Sophie Krichevsky