by Janie Haseman & Emilie Munson
Albany Times Union

New York voters showed stronger support for former President Donald J. Trump in 2024 than in his prior two campaigns, part of a nationwide shift to the right that allowed the Republican to recapture the White House.

Although the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, received the most votes in New York, a solidly blue state, support for Trump has been growing in the state since his first presidential run in 2016.

Nationally, Trump is projected to win the Electoral College and the popular vote, the first time a Republican has achieved both since 2004. In counties all across the U.S., he won over more voters this year than he did in previous campaigns.

Harris won New York’s 28 electoral votes, one fewer than Biden got in 2020 due to New York’s shrinking population. But Trump’s gains in New York suggest the electorate has an increasing disillusionment with Democrats even in what has long been considered a safe blue state.

Trump collected at least 177,000 more votes in New York this election than he did in 2020, and at least 610,000 more New York votes than in 2016, according to unofficial results from the state Board of Elections on Wednesday.

Harris won less support than Democratic President Joe Biden got from New Yorkers in 2020. Biden won the state by 23 percentage points, or about two million votes, in 2020. Harris edged out Trump by only 12% of the votes this year thus far, with a margin of about a million fewer votes overall.

It’s seems likely when all votes are counted Harris will have received fewer votes in New York than 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton; as of Wednesday only 99.7% of election districts had reported results.

The weakening of support for Democrats was statewide in New York. In every county where full results were available Wednesday, Harris received fewer votes than Biden except in Yates County in central New York, one of the least populated counties in the state, unofficial Board of Elections results show.

In contrast, Trump received more total votes this year than in 2020 in 62% of New York counties, according to results available on Wednesday. Four counties did not have full results yet on Wednesday. He increased his vote share almost everywhere.

Trump’s gains were striking among New York City voters and appeared to extend to many urban voters across the state.

In 2024, Trump won Clinton, Essex, Nassau and Rockland counties, which Biden carried in 2020. He also appears to have flipped Broome County, but results were still being tabulated there Wednesday. Harris did not flip in any of the counties in New York that Trump won in 2020.

Republicans have been showing signs of gaining ground in New York for several years. In 2022, every county in the state moved further to the right in one of the closest governor’s races in years, a contest won by Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul.

That same year Republicans flipped four New York seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, helping their party take control of that chamber. This year, Democrats recaptured at least two of those seats with victories by U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi and Josh Riley, who narrowly defeated Republican U.S. Rep. Marc Molinaro.

Another Republican, Rep. Mike Lawler, won reelection in another key Hudson Valley race. And a tight race in the 4th District on Long Island had not been called by late Wednesday, although Democrat Laura A. Gillen has declared victory over incumbent Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, a first-term Republican.

Trump’s strong performance in New York was not likely driven by state politics, said Stanley Feldman, a political science professor at Stony Brook University. Rather, he said, it may have been an overwhelming dissatisfaction with the Biden administration that reached voters across the country.

“In elections where presidents have popularity levels like Joe Biden’s in the 40, 41, 42 percent (range), their party almost always loses the election,” Feldman said. “We saw broad-based dissatisfaction driven, I think, primarily by inflation and unhappiness with increases in the cost of living that hit the country pretty universally, and rightly or wrongly, the Biden administration was blamed.”

Trump campaigned on a platform to crack down on illegal immigration into the U.S. and bring down inflation. He said he would let states set abortion policy. Still, he will be the first president who is a convicted felon, after he was found guilty in a case over illegal payments to a porn star in New York state court. Trump is appealing that verdict and has denied wrongdoing.

Harris’s campaign emphasized that she would protect women’s rights to access abortion if elected president. Harris said she would have helped the middle class with economic policies like tax credits. She alleged that Trump was too “unstable” to be in office again and cast him as a threat to democracy. Her platform largely aligned with that of Biden, whom she replaced on the ticket in July, after he struggled in a debate against Trump.

Although Harris experienced a jolt of enthusiasm after she became the nominee, she could not replicate Biden’s 2020 success at the ballot box. And although their administration took steps to address the border crisis and inflation, even members of their own party conceded this week that they acted too late.

Nationally, Harris failed to build on Joe Biden’s margins even in blue counties. In counties (or townships, for Connecticut) where she won, the victory came with an average of about six thousand fewer votes than Biden received in those places in 2020 — adding up to a loss of 2.4 million votes in blue areas alone. Trump, on the other hand, saw vote margins stronger than 2020’s in places he won, gaining on average about 600 votes in these areas for 1.6 million more votes there overall.

In 2020, when Biden was elected president, he received 61% of the vote in New York, compared to 38% for Trump, official results from the state Board of Elections show. Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen collected 1%.

Trump won 41 counties in New York in 2020, but the 21 counties captured by Biden were far more heavily populated and pushed him to victory statewide.

That year, Biden outperformed 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in New York by nearly 700,000 votes, state Board of Elections data shows. Trump also won more New York votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, but nowhere near enough to overtake Biden in a deep blue state like New York.

The last time a Republican presidential candidate won New York was 1984, when President Ronald Reagan was elected to a second term.

In 2016, when Trump was first elected president, Clinton garnered 59% of the New York vote, while 37% of New Yorkers cast ballots for Trump and 3% selected third-party candidates.

Unlike Clinton, Biden won in Broome, Rensselaer and Saratoga counties — counties that Clinton lost to Trump. Harris appears to have lost Broome County, where results were still being reported Wednesday, but beat Trump in Rensselaer and Saratoga counties. All three counties have seen notable increases in Democratic and unaffiliated voter registrations since 2016.