In a slice of Queens south of LaGuardia Airport, voters again re-elected a left-leaning congressmember known for touting her working-class bona fides. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez still points to her time waiting tables and preaches economic redistribution, and while voters flee from some of her party’s colleagues, she has yet to face a serious re-election threat.
The conventional wisdom states that a figure like Ocasio-Cortez, who brings an activist energy and belongs to a left-leaning coalition of congressional Democrats, could only win in certain left strongholds. But in parts of her district where she handily won re-election this month, Republicans gained ground as voters swung to another candidate who commands superstar attention: President-elect Donald Trump.
Gothamist went to East Elmhurst and North Corona, where voters overwhelmingly said they voted for Trump, to hear what drove them to the polls this year. They cited issues of public safety, the recent arrival of migrants and concerns about the rising cost of living, noting that they wanted a leader who they believed understood their concerns.
Safety and quality of life
As she stood in front of her small two-story home in North Corona, 65-year-old Ana Marte said she voted for Trump at the urging of her four adult children, who are all in their 40s. Marte said one of her daughters pressed her to vote against Kamala Harris, viewing her as an extension of the current administration.
Ana Marte, 65, said she voted for Trump because her adult children encouraged her to.
Brigid Bergin
“They told me to vote for Trump because we need some change,” said Marte.
Marte has lived in North Corona since about 2005. She’s originally from the Dominican Republic. In her election district, the smallest geographic unit the Board of Elections uses to assign voters, more than 60% of the voting age population is Latino, according to analysis of the voter rolls by John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Overall, Trump performed 8 percentage points better with Latino voters in 2024 compared to 2020, according to AP VoteCast data.
Mollenkopf said the district had slightly higher levels of average home ownership than the city average, and slightly lower levels of college education. More than 35% of the voting age population was born outside the United States.
“This is the current generation of Archie Bunker-like people,” said Mollenkopf, in a nod to the 1970’s era sitcom “All in the Family,” set in a nearby Queens neighborhood and following a working-class family patriarch who struggles with racial and demographic shifts in his neighborhood. “Blue-collar, home-owning, solid citizens who basically register as Democrats but are alienated from the Democratic nominee,” Mollenkopf said.
Harris narrowly beat Trump in this election district: She pulled 54% of the vote to his 46%, compared to a 68%-30% split citywide. The election district also saw a striking decline in overall turnout, with more than 20% fewer people voting in 2024 compared to 2020, according to the NYC Election Atlas created by CUNY’s Center for Urban Research.
The most significant drop was in support for the Democratic presidential candidate, who received 282 fewer votes this year compared with four years ago. By comparison, 109 more voters turned out for the Republican candidate, suggesting that Trump more successfully energized voters than Harris.
Marte said the growing number of migrants arriving in the city made her feel less safe. She said she installed security cameras after people began sleeping in her backyard, and someone pounded on her front door at 2 a.m.
“It’s a lot of problems in the streets,” Marte said.
Marte said she hoped her vote for Trump would bring a sense of order to her neighborhood.
Down ballot, Marte also voted for Ocasio-Cortez. Even though she’s not new to office, Marte saw Ocasio-Cortez as someone who could bring a fresh approach to the work. “We need somebody like, new, maybe they do something,” she said. “We need change.”
Benito Cortez, 79, said he also voted for Ocasio-Cortez, but declined to say why. He also would not say if he voted for Trump, but echoed Marte’s concerns about feeling unsafe around his neighborhood.
“Everything is bad here,” Cortez said as he leaned against a brick fence by his East Elmhurst driveway. “After 7 o’clock, you cannot go out, you know, they mug you,” he said.
Cortez said he had never personally experienced a violent crime, but he knew others who had. He said his hope was that Trump would keep his promises when he took office related to immigration and the economy. “Let’s hope for the best,” he added.
Work and rising costs
As he walked out of a pharmacy on 103rd Street in North Corona, Primitivo Collado wore a baseball cap with a logo for a retired U.S. Navy ship where he said his grandson used to work. Now his grandson is a police officer in Connecticut.
Primitivo Collado stressed how hard he and his family worked upon arriving in the U.S., suggesting that more recent immigrants do not.
Brigid Bergin
“When we came to this country, we came to work,” said Collado, who said he left his home in the Dominican Republic at the age of 16. When he discussed his reasons for voting for Trump, he talked about his own job working at the Four Seasons and the work his children and grandchildren are now doing, an oblique criticism of people who have recently arrived in this country and are not working.
Other voters in the neighborhood who did not want to share their full names shared similar frustrations. Several of them, including a 21-year-old college student who was returning home from a shopping trip with her mother and younger brother, said their votes for Trump were motivated by rising grocery costs. The student lamented that her money doesn’t go far enough.
Harris holdouts
This isn’t to say that Trump swept all of Ocasio-Cortez’s district, despite gaining ground in Elmhurst and Corona. Harris still won the Bronx and Queens congressional district overall.
Karim Abdullah, 47, said he voted for Harris. While parking his car after work as his 5-year-old son slept in the backseat, Abdullah said he had often talked to his friends and neighbors about the election. He said Trump did a better job of stirring up voters’ anxieties, especially as it relation to migrants.
“If I say, ‘Oh, this person is bad,’” said Abdullah, “if I keep telling you that 10 times over and over again. Then you’re going to believe that.”
Abdullah said he struggled to understand how people of color could support Trump.
“When you’re supporting somebody who say, ‘I don’t like your kind of skin’ or his people around him don’t like people of color or Hispanic or have a problem with somebody being Muslim,” said Abdullah, who said he was originally from West Africa. He said he even struggled to relate to frustrations he heard over the arrival of migrants, especially coming from other New Yorkers from immigrant families.
“I’m like, but you were children of immigrants. Why do you have a problem with migrants?” said Abdullah. “And they just don’t have an answer.”
Not the only one listening
Shortly after the election, Ocasio-Cortez asked her 8.5 million Instagram followers why some supporters might vote for a split ticket. She has published dozens of the responses from voters, who voiced concerns about immigration policy, the economy, the war in Gaza and more.
Other elected officials have made similar outreach efforts.
Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani of Queens – who is also running to unseat Adams as mayor – did his own outreach to voters in two areas that swung for Trump: along Fordham Road in the Bronx and along Hillside Avenue in Queens. He turned that outreach into a video he shared on social media.
“The beauty of speaking to voters directly is that you can break through so much of the noise, and you can in fact hear it directly from them as to what motivated them,” Mamdani told Gothamist. He said working-class New Yorkers’ perspectives were missing from much of the coverage of Trump’s success in the city.
“You cannot go to someone that is struggling to afford the price of eggs and tell them this is an incredible economy and we have record low levels of unemployment,” said Mamdani. “Because those statistics have not translated into all that much for so many of these New Yorkers’ lives.”
Speaking to WNYC on Friday, Ocasio-Cortez said politicians should listen to their constituents’ concerns about issues like immigration, but shouldn’t get defensive.
“Yeah, having an undocumented population is a problem. But undocumented people are not a problem. It’s the fact that they’re undocumented,” Ocasio-Cortez said. She characterized deploying the U.S. military against immigrant populations, as Trump has vowed to do, as a violent waste of resources.
“We can solve this problem by giving people work papers and allow us to uphold the longstanding tradition of the United States, which is people coming here, oftentimes with nothing but the shirt on their backs, being able to work their way to support their families,” she added. “It’s really only recently, in recent decades, that we have made it so hard, and so onerous, for people to make an honest living and for small businesses to hire immigrants who want to support their families.”
Update: This story has been updated with comments from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Correction: This story has been updated to clarify the breakdown of votes for presidential candidates in part of the 14th District in 2024 compared to 2020.