Tuesday’s general election was a resurgence for former president Donald Trump and the Republican Party, which clinched critical races all over the country — including in Brooklyn, though the borough remained largely blue.
According to unofficial Board of Elections results, about 70% of Brooklynites who took part in the Nov. 5 general election voted for Vice President Kamala Harris.
It was an easy majority, but continued a slow trend of declining popularity for Democratic presidential candidates in the borough. In 2020, President Joe Biden earned roughly 76% of Brooklyn’s vote. Four years earlier, Hillary Clinton clinched 79%. Voter turnout in Brooklyn was lower than in 2020, but higher than 2016.
Trump sweeps in southern Brooklyn, and local Republicans make gains
Trump won in six Assembly districts in southern Brooklyn as neighborhoods like Sheepshead Bay, Coney Island, Brighton Beach, Borough Park, Gravesend, and Bensonhurst went red.
The area has long leaned more conservative than the rest of Brooklyn, but Republicans have found stronger footing there over the past eight years. The 2022 “Red Wave” unseated three longtime Democratic Assembly Members in the area, in districts 45, 46, and 49.
Those districts showed up for Republicans again on Tuesday, re-electing Alec Brook-Krasny in AD-46 and Lester Chang, who ran unopposed, in AD-49. Just one of the 2022 Republicans, Michael Novakhov, appeared in any danger of losing, but maintained a slim lead over Democratic challenger Joey Cohen-Saban in a race that remained too close to call on Thursday.
Three of the southern Brooklyn Trump-supporting districts elected Democrats to the Assembly, though two straddle party lines. In AD-48, conservative Democrat Simcha Eichenstein ran unopposed, but on two party lines – Democratic and Conservative.
Kalman Yeger, a Democrat who ran unopposed in AD-41, similarly ran on the Democratic, Republican, and Conservative party lines. Yeger earned 17,818 votes on the Democratic line, and a combined 17,583 on the Republican and Conservative lines. Trump won 51% of the vote in that district.
William Colton, the incumbent Democrat in AD-47, handily won re-election over a Republican challenger.
In Senate District 17, Democratic incumbent Iwen Chu — who won out over a Republican candidate by a small margin in 2022 — was toppled by Republican Steve Chan. SD-17 overlaps with several of the Assembly districts won by Trump.
The Red Wave is driven in part by southern Brooklyn’s immigrant populations. Trump gained support from Latino and Asian communities across New York City and the U.S., and Brooklyn was no different.
That support began in Russian communities in Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay, which were among the first nabes to go red in 2020.
Republican candidates have capitalized on that support. Brook-Krasny, who was born in Russia, represented AD-46 as a Democrat for eight years before retiring in 2015. When he returned to the scene in 2022, Brook-Krasny said he had left the Democratic party because it had become too left-leaning. He was elected later that year.
Asian communities in neighborhoods like Bensonhurst have also shifted right. In most of the nabe, Trump earned about half the vote in 2020, according to data assembled by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. This year, he got more than 70%.
In 2022, SD-17 had just been redistricted to become the first Asian-majority state Senate district in Brooklyn. Chu won that election by just over 500 votes. On Tuesday, she lost to Chan by more than 5,000 votes.
Chan, a former Marine and NYPD officer, is an outspoken supporter of the police and based his campaign around public safety.
He has joined local pols — including Council Member Susan Zhuang, a widely popular conservative Democrat — in protesting the construction of a new homeless shelter in Bensonhurst, which has become a major issue in the neighborhood. Supporters told news outlet THE CITY that Chan’s presence at those protests inspired their decision to vote for him.
“Tonight we won, and it was easy and I’ll tell you why,” Chan said on Tuesday. “It was easy for our community of 350,000 to realize that we did not have someone representing us well, and tonight they spoke.”
One Democratic state Senator in southern Brooklyn held onto her seat — Jessica Scarcella-Spanton, in SD-23.
Scarcella-Spanton, whose district covers Manhattan Beach, Brighton Beach, Coney Island, Sea Gate, and a portion of Staten Island defeated Republican Marko Kepi by more than 8,000 votes. But BOE data showed that Scarcella-Spanton performed better on Staten Island than in Brooklyn. In Richmond County, the incumbent beat Kepi by more than 13,000 votes. In Kings, Kepi received nearly 5,000 more votes than Scarcella-Spanton.
Elsewhere, most of Brooklyn stayed blue
Despite Republican inroads, most of Brooklyn north of Sunset Park remained steadfastly blue. Harris won in 16 of 22 Assembly districts in the borough, and state Democrats in those districts were re-elected easily.
Per unofficial election results, Harris received the highest number of votes — more than 57,000 — in AD-52, which covers the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Dumbo, Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, and parts of Park Slope and Gowanus.
In that district, incumbent Democrat Jo Anne Simon easily fended off a challenge from Republican Brett Wynkoop, and received nearly as many votes as Harris did — 56,289 to Wynkoop’s 3,517. In the same neighborhoods, state Sen. Andrew Gounardes won re-election in SD-26 with more than 78% of the vote, while Republican Vito LaBella, who lost to Chu in 2022, earned just 21.26%.
Harris lost some support from Black voters nationwide, but in Brooklyn neighborhoods with majority-Black populations — including Fort Greene, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Prospect Lefferts-Gardens, Crown Heights and parts of Flatbush — she earned more than 90% of the vote in nearly every electoral district.
Those nabes also re-elected Democratic Assembly Members, including Phara Souffrant-Forrest, Stefani Zinerman, and Monique Chandler-Waterman. In recent years, voters in Fort Greene, Bed-Stuy, and Crown Heights have also elected some of the most left-leaning Council Members at City Hall, including Crystal Hudson and Chi Ossé.
In some election districts in northern Brooklyn’s most left-leaning neighborhoods — including Williamsburg and Greenpoint — Harris won, but by a slightly smaller margin than Biden did in 2020, and Trump picked up more votes than he did in 2020. A number of those election districts saw fewer voters overall, a consistent trend across the country — Democrats lost more voters this election than Republicans gained, according to the Guardian — and some saw more voters overall, increasing the number of votes for both Harris and Trump.
Despite those small changes, the Democratic Assembly Member who represents Williamsburg and Greenpoint, Emily Gallagher, was unchallenged in this election, and earned more votes than Harris did in her district, per unofficial BOE results. Maps show one red island in South Williamsburg, which has a large Hasidic population that has historically voted Republican.
