In the hours following Donald Trump’s election triumph, Google data indicated that web searches for “move to Canada” had surged twentyfold, including heightened interest among users in deep-blue New York and southern New England. Months earlier, anticipating her Manhattan constituents’ reaction to a possible Trump win, State Senator Liz Krueger envisioned a different kind of mass exodus.
“I thought I would suggest to Canada that, instead of us all trying to illegally cross the border at night . . . New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, would combine and be a great new province as the southeast province of Canada,” Krueger said in a September interview with the City & State weekly. She added that she had “got back some unofficial responses” from unidentified Canadians “and heard this is probably sellable in Ottawa.”
While Krueger’s musings about secession and annexation drew ridicule from Republicans and silence from her fellow Democrats, it’s worth noting that the senator is not a flashy junior ideologue in the AOC mold but a serious player in Albany. Just reelected to her 12th two-year term, the one-time founding director of the New York City Food Bank is chair of the State Senate Finance Committee and plays a leading role in shaping legislative Democrats’ budget proposals and strategy. On institutional issues, Krueger has been a leading advocate (albeit unsuccessful) of sensible reforms to improve New York’s often shambolic and poorly informed budget-making process. But process aside, on a wide range of public policy issues she is as reliably far left as her lopsidedly progressive constituents on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where election districts typically gave 75 percent or more of their presidential votes to Kamala Harris.
Since Election Day, Krueger repeated her Canadian annexation talk in a Politico interview, if only to dramatize what she regards as the awfulness of Trump’s return to the White House. In lieu of outright secession, noting New York’s heavy dependence on federal Medicaid funding, the senator also reportedly suggested that the state respond to any threats of Trump budget cuts by withholding some share of the more than $362 billion a year in federal taxes it generates. As Krueger surely knows, this idea is sheer fantasy. Federal tax payments don’t flow through a central Albany spigot but are paid directly by millions of individual residents and businesses. Notwithstanding the Hunter Biden precedent, anyone deliberately refusing to pay the IRS can expect to face criminal charges of tax evasion. Manhattanites with severe cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome would be better advised to check real-estate listings in Toronto.
More relevant than such fanciful talk was Krueger’s November 17 op-ed in the New York Daily News, laying out her version of why Trump won and what needs to be done about it. “It is now clear that, among the many issues that drove swing voters to Trump, the most potent are the affordability crisis facing a majority of Americans and a lack of faith in government to help,” she wrote.
Krueger echoed a prevailing theme among other Democrats in New York and other liberal enclaves across the country: the main driver of Trump’s appeal wasn’t unhappiness with the migrant crisis and Democrats’ wide-open “sanctuary city” policies, or the crime and disorder precipitated by progressive criminal-justice “reforms,” much less Democrats’ embrace of identity politics. Rather, the correct diagnosis was an updated version of Bill Clinton’s 1992 tactical theme: “it’s the economy, stupid.”
In Krueger’s account, President Biden’s economic policies were successful, but too many working-class Americans didn’t share in the benefits, and so New York Democrats now need to “provide real solutions on affordability,” requiring “nothing less than a comprehensive plan at the scale and ambition of the New Deal, which was first tested out by FDR when he was governor of New York.” This agenda, she said, would translate into “more housing, affordable childcare, better and expanded public transit across the state, lower utility and medical bills, and higher wages.” To pay for more, Krueger said, “We need to consider raising taxes on the very rich and large corporations (no, they won’t leave the state) and explore innovative new ways to raise revenue.”
Krueger’s confidence that these taxpayers won’t leave New York runs counter to evidence, including long-term out-migration trends and a steady decline in the Empire State’s share of the nation’s highest-earning taxpayers over the past decade. The average income of Florida-bound New Yorkers, in particular, has nearly tripled over the past decade, topping $200,000 in the first year following the Covid-19 outbreak.
Krueger’s position also clashes with the postelection advice of the Democratic state chairman, Jay Jacobs. In a radio interview the day after Krueger’s Daily News commentary appeared, Jacobs said he didn’t favor a “tax the rich” agenda. “I talk to people I know who have lots of money, [and] they are leaving are leaving New York.” Without mentioning Krueger or other legislators, Jacobs dismissed as “garbage” the claim that taxes won’t drive away high-income residents.
But when it comes to both taxes and spending, most legislative Democrats are still more likely to sound like Krueger than like Jacobs. State Senator Michael Gianaris of Queens, the party’s deputy majority leader, is on the same page as his Finance Committee chair, albeit more bluntly political in his language. He, too, attributed Trump’s showing primarily to economic issues and prescribed higher spending on social programs as the cure. “These are all things we need to tackle, and if you’re going to do things as a state to help people . . . you need to find the money to do that somewhere,” he said in a recent interview on public radio’s The Capitol Pressroom. While New York income and capital-gains taxes already rank among the highest in the country, Gianaris wouldn’t rule out raising them. “In all the polling I’ve done for a better part of a decade, one of the most popular things you can suggest is taxing the wealthy to provide the services that people need,” he said.
The ultimate arbiter of any tax-and-spend push from Albany’s legislative majorities will be their fellow Democrat in the governor’s office. Kathy Hochul initially reacted to Trump’s election by pledging to “protect New York’s fundamental freedoms from any potential threats,” but she has spent most of her time since mid-November mired in controversy over her planned revival of congestion pricing for drivers in the Manhattan central business district. In her first three state budget cycles since succeeding Andrew Cuomo in 2021, Hochul has resisted calls for higher taxes, calling them unnecessary without flatly rejecting the idea. Legislative pressure in this direction will only increase next year.
Thanks to a post-pandemic surge in revenues generated largely by Wall Street, Hochul piled up record budgetary reserves, even while approving the highest rates of inflation-adjusted state spending growth since the Great Recession. But with her budget gaps projected to mushroom within the next few years, she’ll need to resist inevitable demands from the state legislature to spend even more. Looking ahead to 2026, she’s likely to face challenges from her left (where her potential opponents include her own lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado) and the New York Democratic version of center-right (personified by U.S. representative Ritchie Torres of the Bronx, who has become an outspoken critic of his party’s stances on migration and crime).
To be sure, Election Day was hardly a disaster for New York’s ruling party. Democrats won three of the state’s five most closely watched congressional contests. While Democratic turnout crashed and brought Harris’s vote total short of Hilary Clinton’s 2016 level, the statewide voter base still numbers roughly two-and-a-half enrolled Democrats for every Republican, a ratio that’s even more skewed in New York City. In the 2025–2026 term, Democrats will continue to command overwhelming numbers in the state legislature, where they lost just one Senate seat (leaving them one short of a supermajority), while adding a seat to their existing Assembly supermajority.
Nonetheless, Trump’s election triumph and his greatly improved showing in New York City—including notably better performance among Hispanic and Asian-American voters in some outer borough neighborhoods—clearly have left New York Democrats more on edge than they’ve been in years.
With a fractious 2025 New York City mayoral primary campaign already in its early stages (featuring no fewer than eight candidates, including embattled incumbent Eric Adams, and with former governor Cuomo lurking in the background), the next two years seem likely to feature near-continuous Democratic infighting, along with by-now ritual denunciations of Trump.
For New Yorkers who get fed up with all the noise, there will always be Ontario—or Florida.
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