Stephen Yang
This slice of Gotham is seeing red.
Just one district in Manhattan chose Donald Trump over Kamala Harris in last week’s election — becoming the first in the borough to vote for a Republican presidential candidate in at least a decade.
The sole pro-Trump district in Manhattan is composed of just one apartment complex, Knickerbocker Village, a majority Chinese-American affordable housing development in the Two Bridges section of the Lower East Side, which voted roughly 51% Trump to Harris’ 48%.
“We all voted for Trump, I even donated to his campaign,” Knickerbocker Village resident Shirley Tang told The Post Wednesday.
Public safety, the economy and the open use of drugs in the neighborhood were some of the largest issues that finally pushed the voting district at Knickerbocker Village – which overwhelmingly leaned blue in 2016 and 2020 – to the red side of the political spectrum, several residents said.
“There’s too many homeless, too much drugs. My neighbor died last year from a drug overdose – the hallways are full of drug addicts and we can’t say anything,” Tang, 50, said.
“Our properties have no safety, our lives have no safety,” Tang added. “People are crazy and no one will put them in a hospital … Nothing has been common sense, and with Trump winning we’re finally going back to common sense.”
Another resident, Susan Dye, 60, also noted “the way the city has changed under Democrats” as a reason why more than half of Knickerbocker Village voted Trump.
“It used to be a safe city, and it’s not a safe city anymore, and it’s like this all over the country,” Dye said. “There is no law anymore. Donald Trump is tough. He will bring the law back.”
In in the NYPD’s 5th precinct, which includes Knickerbocker Village and swaths of Chinatown, Little Italy and the Bowery, major crimes are up 8.6% compared to the same time last year, per NYPD data.
Subway crime was up 43.2%, petit larceny up 41.9%, robbery up 39.6% and rape up a whopping 260%. At the same time, burglaries were down 12.6% and shootings are down by 57.1%, according to the police stats.
Residents in Knickerbocker Village also cited economic concerns in their reasoning for voting red – including a controversial pilot program by Mayor Eric Adams’ administration that gave migrants pre-paid debit cards to buy groceries, and which is slated to end after the city dropped $3.4 million.
“You know how much I pay in taxes for the homeless, for illegal immigrants? We have homeless [people] all over the Bowery, all over the area, and we take care of them,” said Knickerbocker Village resident Peter Chang.
“People from South America, they get a hotel, they get a debit card to spend money, they get medical,” added Chang, 72. “I don’t care who you vote for – I vote for myself.”
“Last time Trump was here he made the economy good, he made us safe, he made the borders secure,” chimed resident Tony Chung, also 72. “Kamala Harris was no good … She can’t answer anything, except to say, ‘President Trump’s no good.’”
Knickerbocker Village is the first Manhattan voting district to vote for a Republican presidential candidate since at least 2012, according to a Post analysis of election records.
Election districts in other boroughs – such as parts of Crown Heights, Bensonhurst, Fort Hamilton, Flushing, Little Neck, Richmond Hill and the west Bronx – also opted for Trump in the 2024 election, despite historically trending left.
Stephen Yang
The New York shift towards Trump, who performed nearly 12 percentage points better statewide during Tuesday’s election than he did in 2020, should be a warning for the left, according to Democratic strategist Jake Dilemani.
“Things like ‘defund the police’ or some of the over-woke-ization of social issues were alienating to voters, some of them who had historically voted Democratic,” he previously told The Post.
“I think this election now, where we continue to see a loss of support for Democratic candidates among black men and Hispanic men, East Asian voters, I think that is hopefully the final wake up call for Democrats,” Dilemani added.
“The surge didn’t happen in places like the Upper West Side or Park Slope. It happened in … working class communities of color,” noted Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine in a Nov. 9 X post.
“If we don’t listen to what these voters are telling us on public safety, the economy, housing, quality of life etc,” he said, “then these votes are not coming back.”
Knickerbocker Village is repped by Democrats down the ballot, including Rep. Dan Goldman in the US House of Representatives, and by state Assemblymember Grace Lee. state Sen. Brian Kavanagh and City Council member Christopher Marte
Residents’ concerns about homelessness came nearly two years after the mayor’s announcement of a pilot program to get mentally ill people off of the streets and into treatment programs – which has seen thousands of homeless New Yorkers checked into shelters to date.
Adams announced another program last month, which will pair transit police officers with clinicians to assist people sleeping in the subway.
Though City Hall has yet to provide hard data on migrant crime in the Big Apple, the citywide crime rate has remained relatively flat since migrants from the border began arriving in 2022.
Asked whether he was worried about Democrats losing support in the city and state, Adams previously said that “It doesn’t surprise me.”
“This far left agenda that I’ve been talking about for a long time, where we’re not focusing on working class people … concerned about the future for their families,” he said during his weekly off-topic press conference Tuesday.
“When you’re talking about things that are not impacting them, how do I get the MetroCard? How do I make sure that I can put food on the table? These are real issues. And so when you’re not talking about those real issues, then it doesn’t surprise me that people are saying, listen, you’re not speaking on my behalf anymore.”