When it comes to politics, New York City is not ‘New York City’ - The Washington Post

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There is a particular perception of New York City politics that is fairly well earned: It is a bastion of liberals, a manifestation of America’s hard-left. This perception is a bit like the perception that all of New York City is tall skyscrapers and bustling avenues — not entirely wrong, just incomplete. There is a New York that is deeply and vocally liberal just as there is a part of the city that matches the depictions seen in movies. But there is a lot of the city that’s single-family homes and quiet streets. It’s less dense, less populated and less evocative in the national conversation, but this other New York City is a physical reminder that New York City is not equivalent to America’s understanding of “New York City.”

The prompt for this distinction is, of course, the city’s primary election on Tuesday. In a normal year, citywide elections are complicated things, demanding outreach to hundreds of thousands of voters who are often hard to contact and requiring that campaigns navigate complicated and conflicting political communities. This year, though, the city has moved to ranked-choice voting, meaning that voters will be able to indicate their preferences for up to five contenders for positions such as mayor. For the candidates, that means that securing a vote isn’t enough; you need to not only have a core base of support but be palatable even to those whose first choice is someone else.

Over the course of the election, New York City Democrats — from whose ranks the next mayor will almost certainly come — have consistently moved relatively moderate candidates to the front of the pack. Eric Adams, a former police officer, has led in most recent polling, having usurped the lead held by former presidential candidate Andrew Yang earlier in the year. More progressive candidates such as Maya Wiley have trailed.

For those whose assumptions about New York are rooted in the idea that the city is midnight-blue, this is probably a bit strange. After all, it’s not simply the case that the more progressive candidates are splitting the vote; even when accounting for vote-ranking, Adams has held a lead. The answer, as suggested at the beginning of this article, is simple: New York isn’t as left-wing as its public perception.

That perception is a function of visibility, just as is the perception of New York being all skyscrapers and taxicabs. Media outlets and Hollywood tend to focus on Manhattan because it’s visually interesting and densely populated. Manhattan therefore has an outsize voice in the media conversation. It has an outsize voice in the political conversation, too, thanks in part to that same density. It’s also thanks to the hyperdensity of wealth in the borough, with the Zip codes that line Central Park often topping the lists of the most generous political donors to both political parties.

The city’s five boroughs correlate to five counties. In 2020, four of those counties cast more votes for Joe Biden than Donald Trump, the exception being Richmond County, better known as Staten Island.

You’ll notice above that New York County — Manhattan — was one of the most heavily pro-Biden in the country. But there were 38 counties that voted more heavily for Biden than did Brooklyn (Kings County) and 73 counties that voted more heavily for Biden than Queens. That hardly makes them pro-Trump, especially given that each preferred Biden by about 50 percentage points, but it is a useful reminder that they aren’t Manhattan.

We can use all of the results from 2020 to show the city’s politics. (For a deeper look at the geographic patterns in the city, I’d recommend this look from FiveThirtyEight.) Below, the results of last year’s Democratic presidential primary and the presidential vote. In each case, the results are broken out by election district, showing the number of votes cast relative to the city median (the size of the circle) and the relative distribution of those votes between either Biden and Trump (in the general) or between Biden and the combined vote for Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), in an effort to measure the relative progressiveness of the area. The darker the color, the bigger the margin for that candidate(s).

(The relatively empty area in the middle of Manhattan is Central Park. The empty area in the southeastern part of Brooklyn is John F. Kennedy International Airport.)

There’s a lot of red on that lower map, perhaps more than you might have expected.

But also consider those primary results. In most places, Biden won — easily. Granted, the vote was held well after Biden had secured the Democratic nomination. There were still some areas, mostly in Brooklyn and Queens, where Sanders and Warren earned more combined votes. But even in a moment when casting a protest vote against Biden would incur literally no cost, New Yorkers voted for Biden by more than a 2-to-1 margin relative to the two senators. Only in Brooklyn did Biden get less than twice as many votes.

You can see the areas where Biden underperformed more clearly if we zoom in.

You can also see, at the bottom of those maps, where the Republican part of the borough begins. Brooklyn is particularly interesting in that regard. As you can see in the first set of maps and below, it ranges from more progressive in the north to heavily Republican in the south, as indicated by the general election results.

That bleeds further south into Staten Island, which is to New Jersey what Crimea is to Ukraine. Staten Island is the most densely Republican borough.

What differentiates the Democratic northern part of Staten Island from the rest of the island? In part, race. That part of the island is more heavily Black while the rest of the island is heavily White.

In fact, race probably drives a large part of the distinctions above. Biden won the Democratic nomination last year because of his strength with Black voters, first demonstrated robustly in the South Carolina primary. The parts of Brooklyn where the Sanders-Warren combination outperformed Biden, for example, are less-heavily Black than the rest of the borough.

A central reason that New York City votes so consistently Democratic is, simply, that many of its residents aren’t White — and those who are, are more likely to be Democrats.

But because non-White Democrats tend to be more moderate than White Democrats, that creates more political space for candidates whose platforms don’t comport with the popular perception of “New York Democrat.”

For the first eight years of this century, remember, New York had a Republican mayor. For most of that time, it was Mike Bloomberg, who eventually became an independent and, later, a Democrat (as he’d been before 2001). Twenty years ago today, the mayor of New York was a guy named Rudolph W. Giuliani, who’s been in the news a bit of late.

Granted, things have shifted since then, with more geographic sorting across the country. Still, that’s not the New York City people generally think of when they’re thinking of New York City politics.

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When it comes to politics, New York City is not ‘New York City’ - The Washington Post
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