Harris’ underwhelming victory in New York State

• Share on
• 
• 
• 
• 

Kamala Harris won New York State on Tuesday.

Or, more accurately, she won New York City, whose voters provided her margin of victory. She also won in counties with urban centers — Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Albany — while losing Long Island and most of rural upstate.

Harris this year drew 900,000 fewer votes in New York State than Joe Biden did in 2020. Biden beat Trump that year by 23 percentage points, as did Hillary Clinton in 2016. Harris’s margin of victory was just shy of 12 percent. 

Trump, meanwhile, has gained support with each appearance on the ballot in the deep-blue state. The Republican in 2020 garnered 400,000 more votes than he did against Clinton four years earlier. He added another 200,000 to that performance this year, for a total gain of 600,000 votes since 2016.

In all, Harris and her running mate Tim Walz carried 16 of the state’s 62 counties, generally those containing densely populated urban areas rich with Democratic votes. She won the state by about 900,000 votes, or just shy of 12 percentage points.

Biden won New York in 2020 by 1.9 million votes, a 23 percent margin over Trump. Clinton beat the Republican by 1.8 million votes, likewise a 23 percent margin of victory.

Harris’s 12-point victory was the smallest by a Democrat in New York since 1992. The Democratic ticket’s performance here contributed to Harris losing the nationwide popular vote, which Trump was winning by 4.7 million votes according to the latest count. She’s the first Democrat to lose the popular vote in a presidential election since 2004.

The takeaway: New York State remains a sea of red, bracketed by Democratic strongholds downstate and in Erie and Monroe counties, with a few islands of blue in between. Democrats continue to dominate all branches of state government and its Congressional delegation. But the red parts of the state grew redder this year, and the blue appears to have faded slightly.

As expected, Harris and Walz racked up lots of support in the five counties comprising the New York City area, beating Trump and J.D. Vance by nearly a million votes — accounting for her margin of victory statewide. 

Those counties in aggregate voted more than 2-to-1 for the Democrats. The lone outlier was Staten Island, where the Republican ticket prevailed by 30 percentage points. 

Trump and Vance also carried the two counties of Long Island by a little over 100,000 votes, or six percentage points.

Even in and around New York City, Harris lost ground compared to Biden and Clinton. Biden won Bronx County in 2020 with 83.4 percent of the vote, for example. Clinton did even better in 2016, winning the county with 88.5 percent of the vote. Both candidates drew more than 350,000 supporters to the polls there.

The Harris campaign turned out fewer than 250,000 votes in Bronx County, and won with 73 percent of the vote — a 10-point slide compared to 2020.

Syracuse and Albany voters delivered their counties to Harris, and Tompkins County — where Ithaca, with its colleges and universities, are situated — voted blue, too. 

But Harris lost upstate counties, such as Clinton and Rockland, that Biden won in 2020. And in other upstate counties where Biden prevailed, like Essex and Broome, the Democratic ticket lost ground, splitting the vote with Trump.

Of the eight counties comprising Western New York, Trump won all but Erie County, the most populous. Harris’s 10-point margin of victory in Erie County contributed to a four-point advantage overall across the eight counties. Trump gained support in the other seven, with Allegany and Wyoming the reddest.

Since 2004, only Hillary Clinton won Erie County by a lesser margin than Harris. Biden won Erie County by nearly 15 points in 2020, Barack Obama by nearly 18 percent in 2008.

Trump’s 16-point win in Niagara County matched his 2016 performance against Clinton. It was the highest margin of victory for a Republican in the county since 2004.

In Monroe County, anchored by Rochester, Harris held her own. She won 20,000 fewer voters than Biden got in 2020, but the margin by percentage was the same, 59 percent to Trump’s 41 percent. Harris got 17,000 more votes in Monroe County than Clinton got in 2016.

There’s plenty of analysis and opinion out there about why Harris and Walz underperformed in New York, particularly from Democratic and Republican party and elected officials.

U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres, a Democrat who represents Bronx County, told Politico Harris lost ground there to Trump because of voters’ belief that the economy is bad and inflation continues to increase the cost of living.

“People who live paycheck to paycheck are hit hardest by inflation,” Torres said, noting the Bronx is one of the state’s poorest counties and home to a big Latino population. 

“When you are college educated and higher income, you can be concerned with issues like democracy and culture. But when you are struggling to put food on the table, the cost of living is existential.”

State Sen. Mike Gianaris, the deputy majority leader from Queens — where Harris got a 156,000 fewer votes and won by 10 percentage points less than Biden in 2020 — told Politico the problem this election cycle was Democratic turnout more than Republicans gaining ground in New York.

“Trump didn’t gain votes so much as Democrats who voted for Biden didn’t vote,” Gianaris said.

Indeed, Democrats in down-ballot races reversed some losses the party suffered in the 2022 midterms. That year, when Gov. Kathy Hochul was at the top of the ticket, Democrats endured a net loss of three Congressional seats, which helped the GOP win control of the U.S. House of Representatives. 

Hochul took a lot of heat for those losses and staked her political reputation on this year’s results. Happily for her, the Democrats on Tuesday won at least four and probably five of seven hotly and expensively contested House races. 

Democrats Josh Riley and John Mannion beat Republican incumbents in two upstate districts. Democrat Laura Gillen is likely to prevail against a Republican incumbent on increasingly red Long Island. 

Also on Long Island, Democrat Tom Suozzi held the House seat formerly occupied by disgraced Republican George Santos. Democrat Pat Ryan held his seat representing a district that spans Orange, Dutchess and Ulster counties. 

Republican Nick LaLota of Long Island held his House seat, as did Republican Mike Lawler of the lower Hudson Valley.

Lawler, a relative moderate in his party, is considering a challenge to Hochul for governor in 2026. Lawler told the New York Times after Tuesday’s election he believes GOP gains in New York are real and not specific to Trump or Harris.

“These seats are all going to be competitive in 2026,” he said. “The suburbs are continuing to move rightward.”

Geoff Kelly