On April 5, 2024, in Manhattan, as lawyers for Donald Trump finalized their preparations for the first-ever criminal trial of an American president, the granite island began to tremble. A 4.8-magnitude earthquake struck New York City, the largest since 1884. The physical tremor was minor, but exactly seven months later, another seismic event rocked the city. The same man whom Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg had convicted on 34 felony charges was now—again—president-elect of the United States. The aftershocks of the biggest electoral quake in a century will shape New York’s policy and political landscape for years, including in the 2025 mayoral election and the 2026 gubernatorial race.

Trump won about 44 percent of New York State’s vote, compared with Vice President Kamala Harris’s 56 percent—the best showing for a Republican presidential candidate since George H. W. Bush in 1988. But a closer look reveals a more mixed picture. Thanks to a concerted effort by labor unions and the national and state party, Democrats flipped back three downstate House seats, recapturing those they lost in 2022, except for Representative Mike Lawler’s 17th District. Republicans picked up a state senate seat in Brooklyn, which broke Democrats’ senate supermajority but won’t significantly change Albany’s political dynamics.

New York City presented a clearer rightward shift. Harris lost ground in almost every neighborhood, earning 573,600 fewer votes than Joe Biden did in 2020. Unmotivated and disillusioned Democrats stayed home. Trump won over 30 percent of the citywide tally, beating his 2020 performance by 94,600 votes. Time and again now, city voters have expressed their discontent over elevated violent crime, retail theft, open-air drug use, an aimless response to the migrant crisis, and out-of-control housing costs.

Trump made deep inroads in majority-minority, immigrant-heavy, and working- and middle-class neighborhoods. Fully 63 percent of his vote pickup came from Queens and the Bronx. For example, in Queens, Trump won the heavily Asian American neighborhood of Flushing by about 400 votes; Harris lost some 10,000 votes there, compared with Biden. In the nearby working-class Hispanic neighborhood of Corona, Harris lost 6,500 votes, compared with 2020; Trump gained 2,700 votes. In areas with at least 70 percent Hispanic residents, Trump earned 55 percent more votes than in 2020. In heavily black neighborhoods, Trump gained 46 percent more. In predominantly white areas, Trump lost 2 percent.

Trump’s surprisingly strong showing has given rise to the prospect of a multiethnic, multi-borough voting bloc. The big question is whether Trump’s electoral gains are durable enough to translate to local political success. Is it possible, that is, to crystallize this coalition of disaffected, yet practical-minded, New Yorkers to establish a reliable base for state and local candidates focused on quality of life and public safety?

In the short run, translating Trump’s relative success to next year’s mayoral primaries will prove difficult. These races are limited to party members and likely to attract only about a quarter of eligible voters. Another problem is that the groups making up the November 5 coalition are disconnected from one another. In contrast with the city’s labor unions and progressive organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, which mobilize supporters on shared economic interest or ideology, there’s no outfit or party pulling together these pragmatic voters.

What do the November 5 results mean for Governor Kathy Hochul and Gotham mayor Eric Adams? Theoretically, as relative moderates, both should be able to capitalize on the apparent wave of moderation sweeping city voters. But their weak governance contributed to poor Democratic turnout, as their rock-bottom polling numbers bear out. A September 2024 poll of likely state voters found that only 34 percent view the governor favorably—lower than Trump’s 39 percent approval. Following the first-ever federal indictment of a sitting New York mayor, just 12 percent of city voters support Adams’s reelection; 53 percent say that he should resign.

Since Hochul and Adams took office, they’ve followed the path of least resistance on transit, crime, migrants, and housing—throwing money at problems and mainly avoiding hard decisions. Shortly after the election, Hochul “unpaused” the city’s unpopular congestion-pricing program at a lower fee, fearing that Trump would keep her from implementing it post-inauguration by, for example, directing the Department of Transportation to revoke the program’s environmental approval, refuse to grant final approval, or rescind the Biden administration’s sign-off. Starting January 5, proceeds of the renewed initiative will go to the MTA, but Hochul hasn’t forced the perennially cash-strapped agency to find money by renegotiating labor agreements and improving its balance sheet.

The city’s mid-November daytime stabbing spree, which left three residents dead at the hands of Ramon Rivera, a schizophrenic career criminal out on early release, is only one recent high-profile criminal-justice failure. The audacious homicide of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson—and the aberrant support for his suspected killer—has increased safety fears among the city’s business leaders. Serious crime rose by over 32 percent in the city between 2019 and 2023 and remains sharply elevated. Subway murders are up fivefold compared with the historical average since 2000. In response, Hochul hailed a supposedly big legislative victory to reclassify assaults against retail workers as felonies and spend $40 million on state police dedicated to fighting retail theft. Bail and discovery reform are still on the books, however, and both are major factors in high crime rates: the first by putting suspects known to be dangerous immediately back on the streets, the second by impairing prosecutors with excessive paperwork.

More than 210,000 foreign migrants have entered Gotham since 2022, costing at least $6.4 billion and diverting resources from essential services—the city now has its lowest level of police staffing since the early 1990s. Rather than push for state legislation to revoke the right to shelter that attracts migrants to the city, Adams signed dozens of lucrative emergency no-bid contracts for new shelter operations and migrant services. Hochul kicked in $2.4 billion in state aid this year, but she hasn’t meaningfully contributed to a long-term solution to reduce the city shelter population.

“More than 210,000 foreign migrants have entered Gotham since 2022, costing at least $6.4 billion and diverting resources from essential services.”

Two years ago, Adams set a “moonshot” goal of creating 500,000 new housing units within a decade. To help reach it, he proposed City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, a set of supply-boosting reforms expected to add about 108,000 units over the next 15 years. On December 5, the city council passed a watered-down version of the plan, cutting the number of projected units to about 82,000. To sweeten the deal, the council added $5 billion in affordable (that is, subsidized) housing and infrastructure-related spending. Hochul’s housing plans fell through in 2023, and though she managed in 2024 to revive a much-needed tax abatement for large rental construction in the city, it will take years for this program to deliver units. Meantime, applications for new city housing developments are at multiyear lows.

For hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, these moves were too little, too late. The city and state are suffering the worst outmigration in the nation, with everyone from working singles to college-educated and black families leaving. Since 2020, the Census Bureau estimates that the state lost 884,000 residents; the city alone hemorrhaged about 546,000. At this rate, New York may lose up to three House seats in the 2030 redistricting. There were 63,530 more active registered voters statewide in November 2024 than in November 2020, but with gains and losses spread unevenly among parties and regions. Democrats lost 242,660 voters, 234,394 of those from the city. Republicans gained 77,125, including 12,405 city registrants. Those unaffiliated with any party grew by 345,556, with 74,807 new city voters bucking any party identification. Trump’s numbers show that voters are considering other options.

Congressman Ritchie Torres of the Bronx might be one choice. Torres is signaling that he’s ready to claim the moderate Democratic mantle from Hochul and Adams. In the weeks following the election, he lambasted Hochul. “A Democratic incumbent who is less popular in New York than Donald Trump is in grave danger of losing to a Republican in 2026—an outcome not seen in 30 years,” Torres posted on X. In a letter, he called Hochul and Adams “complicit” in the November stabbing spree, blaming the mayor for letting Rivera fall through the cracks of the state’s mental-health and criminal-justice systems. Though Torres hasn’t ruled out a mayoral bid, his sights are likely set on Albany.

He poses a strong potential threat to Hochul. As the first openly gay Latino congressman, Torres commands a base of ethnic support and would limit the Left’s opportunities to attack him on identity grounds. His reputation as a moderate will make repudiating some of his earlier progressive positions on issues like immigration easier. With the GOP in control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, Torres doesn’t have much to lose in his career by leaving his seat.

In the city, Adams’s September indictment didn’t lead to his downfall. With Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney Damien Williams leaving office before Trump’s inauguration, his successor, Jay Clayton, will decide whether to proceed with the charges against the mayor. Trump has intimated that he would pardon a convicted Adams, extending the beneficence that only an American president can bestow upon a high-profile Democratic supplicant, portrayed as a fellow victim of an overzealous and vindictive Biden Department of Justice.

Before the indictment, Adams was the clear favorite among primary candidates. Receiving illegal campaign donations and comped airline and hotel upgrades isn’t the sort of thing that many New York voters would consider politically lethal. Adams might thus retain an edge over the weak set of progressive challengers like former city comptroller Scott Stringer, current comptroller Brad Lander, and state senators Jessica Ramos and Zellnor Myrie.

It’s possible for Adams to win again, but he’s racing against several headwinds. On December 16, the city Campaign Finance Board announced that Adams’s 2025 campaign would be ineligible for up to $4.3 million in public matching funds. It cited the indictment’s allegations that his mayoral campaigns accepted straw donations from foreign nationals and businessmen who reimbursed employees for contributions. In giving his opponents a leg up, this raises the odds that Adams will hedge against a Democratic primary loss by seeking to run in the general election as a Republican, something he suggested in early December.

The city’s labor unions—who’ve played kingmaker in past mayoral primaries—have treated Adams’s indictment and the 2025 race cautiously. In his favor in gaining labor backing, Adams has struck collective-bargaining deals with essentially every city-worker union, without requiring productivity or accountability givebacks. In October, however, two Teamsters locals threw their support behind Ramos, the chair of the senate’s Labor Committee and an outspoken union supporter. Labor leaders know that they can get at least as good a deal from a progressive like Ramos as they did from Adams.

The mayor’s biggest electoral threat comes from Andrew Cuomo. Despite some heavy baggage, the former governor remains a potent political force. He commands widespread name recognition and has a record of completing large-scale projects like the Tappan Zee, Goethals, and Kosciuszko bridge replacements, inking on-time state budget deals, kickstarting upstate economic development, and providing the state funding for city programs like universal pre-K. And though Cuomo enacted bail and discovery reforms in 2019 and marijuana legalization in 2021, he has since spoken out against progressive criminal-justice policies like defunding the police and written on the need for Democrats to focus on quality of life. His reputation for ruthlessness might resonate with voters hungry for effectiveness.

Former governor Andrew Cuomo remains a potent political force—and he could become New York’s next mayor. (Al Drago/Getty Images)

Adams’s best chance for reelection is to show rapid progress between now and June on winding down the migrant crisis and visibly improving public order. That would require tacitly—within the bounds of the state and city’s sanctuary laws—condoning Trump’s efforts to deport migrants. On December 12, the mayor met with Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, to discuss prioritizing the deportation of criminal migrants. To appear in control, Adams will need to avoid chaotic scenes of forcible removals and family separations that could cause voters to see migrants as victims. Facilitating the deportation of criminals and gang members would be the best place to start.

The November 5 results transformed the American electoral landscape. Even in ordinarily shockproof New York, the ground is exposing cracks for Democratic incumbents as they seek reelection in 2025 and 2026. Those able to navigate New York’s increasingly Trump-friendly geography will have a chance to redraw the city and state’s political map.

Top Photo: Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams have followed the path of least resistance on transit, crime, migrants, and housing—spending freely but mainly avoiding hard decisions. (©Lev Radin/Pacific Press/ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo)

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