When progressives held a post-election march in Manhattan last weekend, one New Yorker knew she had to be there.
With her Trump flag.
Mikaela Widlanski, who lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, does not display the flag in her famously liberal neighborhood. But this was a special occasion.
“If they’re upset,” she said, waving her flag at the demonstrators, “it’s not my fault.”
More than a week after Election Day, New Yorkers are still grappling with a changed reality, not just in Washington, but at home as well. The city, which had resoundingly rejected Donald J. Trump in his first two election bids, inched closer to him this year.
Kamala Harris still carried the city by a huge margin, more than doubling Mr. Trump’s vote count, but it was not the blowout some New Yorkers have come to expect.
She received nearly 600,000 fewer votes in the city than Joseph R. Biden Jr., had in 2020, while Mr. Trump gained almost 100,000. Where once New Yorkers could see Mr. Trump as somebody else’s doing, now the city was implicated.
Mr. Trump improved his results throughout the city, but some of the biggest gains were in neighborhoods with large low-income or immigrant populations. This was especially hard for some progressives, who campaigned for immigrant rights and a strong social safety net.
Those who once could act as if they lived in a progressive bubble had to think differently about the people around them. For many, this reckoning will have to wait until the shock wears off.
“I feel gutted,” said Annie Thoms, who teaches English at Stuyvesant High School in Lower Manhattan, speaking broadly about the election. “I feel that my country and large parts of our city have betrayed ourselves and our children and our neighbors.”
Ms. Thoms’s students are predominantly immigrants or the children of immigrants, and she was not surprised that some immigrant communities shifted toward Mr. Trump or away from Ms. Harris. Her students often spoke about their parents’ fears or complained that neither party served their communities.
She saw the election as a “catastrophic failure of empathy.” But she added: “It is personally very difficult for me to understand why anybody would make that choice, because the level of cruelty and damage that he represents to so many people is so great.”
Eight years ago, when Mr. Trump won a surprise victory while losing the popular vote, New Yorkers took the lead in the resistance, a bond that seemed to hold disparate elements of the city together. People raged or wept openly on city streets. This year, the mood in the city felt more subdued than apocalyptic.
“I’m much less shocked than I was eight years ago, and I’m a lot more tired,” said Jonathan Morrill, 53, a lawyer in West Midwood, Brooklyn, who canvassed outside Philadelphia for Ms. Harris in the campaign’s final days. After years of political fighting, exacerbated in the last year around the war in Israel and Gaza, people around him felt battle fatigue, he said.
“I’m not burned out,” he said. “But I’m definitely tired.”
That fatigue was evident at the Protect Our Futures march on Saturday, where hecklers in MAGA hats matched the energy of the marchers. Where past demonstrations against Mr. Trump filled swaths of the city, this covered only three blocks along Central Park West.
“Where is everybody?” asked Carmen Laube, 67, who works in financial services and lives on the Upper West Side. “This is ridiculous.”
Ms. Laube saw the low turnout as reflecting the election, where voting in the city was down 14 percent from 2020.
“It’s the same thing, people didn’t go out to vote — people don’t think this is important,” she said. “It looks like a regular Saturday.”
The day after the election, Nandita Shenoy, a playwright and actor, was walking near her home on the Upper East Side when she saw a cluster of people she took to be Trump supporters in red, white and blue regalia taking photos of themselves — something she had never seen in her neighborhood.
“I felt uncomfortable and gave them a wider berth,” she said.
The election has made her feel less safe in the city. “Democrats have been called scum and vermin,” she said. “That is specifically what makes me feel nervous.”
Her encounter on the street was one more reminder to her not to assume that her neighbors shared her progressive values. “And I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” she said.
That same day, Carin Bail wore an American flag headband to her job as an elementary schoolteacher in Jamaica, Queens, where the student body is predominantly foreign-born. Ms. Bail, 47, a longtime registered independent, is one of the first-time Trump voters. (In 2020 she did not vote for president.) Her two deciding issues were Israel, where she felt the Biden administration did not provide enough support, and crime.
“I’m not a Trump supporter,” she said. “I’m just not a Harris and Walz supporter.”
After the election, she said, she offered condolences to the school principal, who supported Ms. Harris.
“And I gave him a hug,” she said. “And my assistant principal actually was crying and came to me, and I gave her a hug, too.”
By the middle of this week, much of the hand-wringing had turned to Mr. Trump’s cabinet appointees, a gallery of liberals’ boogeymen. When Republicans secured control of the House of Representatives, it dashed Democrats’ last slender hope.
Many immigrants who voted for Mr. Trump declined to be interviewed for this article, fearing backlash; some said immigrants were being scapegoated for his win.
Alexander Ben Shmuel Zhik, 31, a criminal defense lawyer and general counsel in the New York Young Republican Club who came to the United States from Odesa, Ukraine, when he was 9, said he felt that it was now safer to talk publicly about his support for Mr. Trump.
The election “emboldened” him to be much more vocal about his politics, he said. “The stigma around being a Trump supporter is fading away.”
Han Ran Li, 70, who lives in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, was part of the immigrant shift toward Mr. Trump this year. Speaking through a Cantonese interpreter, she said she was put off by Mr. Biden’s involvement in foreign wars. She also blamed the Biden administration for the influx of undocumented migrants, and said they were given more favorable treatment than previous immigrants, which she resented.
For progressives, the loss of voters like Ms. Li will require a reassessment that has not begun yet, said John Mollenkopf, a professor of political science who runs the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center.
“It’s an interesting question of how a party learns from defeat,” he said. “It doesn’t happen right away.”
At the Protect Our Futures march, many demonstrators said they had simply stopped talking to relatives or acquaintances who supported Mr. Trump.
But one, Masha Rojkova, 29, tried to start a conversation. She approached Ms. Widlanski, who was waving her Trump flag at the crowd, and asked her why she supported Mr. Trump.
Ms. Widlanski, 29, a small-business owner, had never voted before, but the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas forces changed her thinking.
She said she believed Mr. Trump would end the wars in Israel and Ukraine.
Ms. Rojkova was used to talking with Trump supporters. Her parents, Russian émigrés, supported Mr. Trump because they felt Mr. Biden did not adequately back Ukraine. How, she asked Ms. Widlanski, would Mr. Trump end the wars?
“I don’t know how,” Ms. Widlanski said. “But he’s going to end them.”
Afterward, Ms. Rojkova, an actor, said she felt bad for the other woman, saying she was “undereducated.”
“Poor girl,” she said, adding that what she felt was “not quite pity, it’s more like empathy. I hope she finds her way.”
This was New York 2024 in miniature — two people seeming to engage but talking past each other.
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