Yassine Elmoujahid’s mouth gapes; his hand, gripping a pair of scissors, is frozen over a client’s head. I just asked Elmoujahid, a Moroccan American man who runs a barbershop on a predominantly Muslim block of Astoria, Queens, if he voted for Donald Trump. He seems surprised, almost offended, as though the answer should be obvious.
He almost shouts: “Hell yeah!”
Barbers, like therapists or priests, get the unvarnished truth – “Everyone confesses when they come to this chair,” Elmoujahid says – and he estimates that many of his customers, as well as “more than 90%” of his family, voted for Trump. He’s hardly a rabid Maga fan, and far from the traditional image of a navy-blazered Republican, but he’s cautiously optimistic about Trump’s second term.
Elmoujahid needs unburdening himself. “We had no president for four years,” he says incredulously. “Biden was a ghost. Can’t even remember three words straight.” Kamala Harris “was basically the real president, and she seems fake. This is third-world shit, bro. We come to the greatest country in the world, and see this?” After ranting for several minutes, he exhales. “I feel good right now, to let it all out.”
A few days before Trump assumes office for a historic non-consecutive second term, I decide to take the temperature in Trump’s home borough, Queens, which includes some of the most diverse neighborhoods in the entire United States – including some where Trump and the Republican party have made striking gains among voters.
November’s election saw Trump increase support across almost every American geographic and demographic category. At the same time, turnout for Harris dropped. Some voters who historically voted Democratic defected to Trump; many more did not vote at all.
In New York City, often caricatured as a liberal bastion, this trend was particularly pronounced in working-class neighborhoods with large minority populations – especially in the 14th congressional district, which covers parts of Queens and the south Bronx. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the district’s representative and one of the US’s most famous democratic socialists, was handily re-elected and Harris won nearly 65% of the district’s votes. Yet Trump’s share increased by an estimated 11 points from 2020, according to city records and the Daily Kos.
As Ocasio-Cortez herself has noted, some voters split their ballots by voting for her and for Trump, whose rightwing nationalism would seem to be diametrically opposed to the Democrat’s proudly progressive politics. In an Instagram segment, she recalled a voter telling her: “I feel like you [and Trump] are both outsiders … and less establishment.” (Ocasio-Cortez’s office did not respond to queries.)
There’s also the Israel-Gaza war. “We just want peace,” Elmoujahid says. Despite Trump’s longstanding alliance with the Israeli hard right, he made significant gains with Arab and Muslim voters angry with Joe Biden’s support for the war in Gaza.
Zohran Mamdani, a state legislator who represents much of this area, is acutely aware of residents’ skepticism of the Democratic establishment. In a series of recent man-on-the-street interviews in Queens and the Bronx, Mamdani – a democratic socialist, like Ocasio-Cortez, who is running a leftwing populist campaign for New York City mayor – politely interrogated passersby about how they voted. Most said their main concern was the cost of living.
“I heard one after the other tell me they were Democrats and they voted for Trump,” he tells me. “Or they were Democrats and they didn’t vote at all.”
It resembles an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. About 35 people sit on folding chairs in a draughty auditorium, clutching coffee. A few wear jackets and ties, others hoodies and camo hats. There is talk of rock-bottoms, awakenings, redemptions; God is occasionally invoked. In a neighborhood known as an incubator of the revitalized Democratic Socialists of America, Astoria’s Ronald Reagan Republican Club is working to bring the counterrevolution home.
Robert Hornak, a club leader, opens the meeting with good news about a famous son of Queens. “We are one week away from the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States …”
“Hallelujah!” someone says. Another sighs: “Praise the lord.”
The club is a “safe haven”, Hornak continues, where like-minded people won’t be judged for their values and identity. He adds that there is a reporter present from the Guardian.
“Doesn’t that paper lean pretty left?” someone asks. A number of faces turn to look at the Guardian. The Guardian smiles wanly.
“We need to be speaking to people on the left,” Hornak says, making an argument for bringing their message to people who might disagree, and to New Yorkers of every class, ethnicity, political background and neighborhood.
As they see it, the biggest obstacle Republicans face in the city is what Marxists would call false consciousness: it is the conviction of Hornak and the meeting’s guest speakers, John Burnett and Tom Kenniff, that New York City is filled with voters who don’t know that they’re Republican.
“People are being burnt alive in the subway,” Burnett, the first vice-chair of the state Republican party, says. “All we have to do is talk about what’s going on.” As he sees it, the party has “a great product but people can’t find it on the shelf”.
If the tide is turning, it’s a bit difficult to see it here: the crowd leans older and white; many people are longtime Republicans. A woman tells me that she’s a second-generation Republican, “of course”. There are a couple of young Latino men in suits who listen, with locked-in intensity, to the speakers.
The second to speak is Kenniff, the attorney who successfully defended Daniel Penny. He says that Penny, who killed a homeless man on the subway in 2023 in what he described as self-defense but others saw as vigilantism, was acquitted by a Manhattan jury he claims was dominated by Democrats.
Kenniff says that when he ran a long-shot campaign for Manhattan DA in 2021, he got friendly receptions in minority neighborhoods in Harlem and Washington Heights. “The few times I got a really angry reaction it was a lunatic, guilt-ridden white liberal.”
The 14th congressional district is hardly Escape from New York, but residents here, like people across the city, have watched prices rise, cleanliness decline and infrastructure erode. Crime overall is now down, but a sharp rise during the Covid years – and an ongoing spate of subway violence – have left many New Yorkers here and elsewhere feeling unsafe, leaving an opening for Republicans.
In 2022, amid what the New York Times has estimated was the largest immigration influx in US history, the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, began bussing thousands of people who had just crossed the border to New York and other liberal “sanctuary cities” as a stunt to pressure Democratic politicians into tougher immigration policies.
The result in New York has been a political blame game, with the governor, mayor and other politicians offering competing explanations for who is responsible for the influx, how best to help the new arrivals, and how to deal with the costs of supporting them, with New Yorkers already upset about high rents, a housing shortage and overstretched homeless shelters.
Many immigrants ended up in Corona, a working-class neighborhood in the 14th district whose residents have been unhappy at what they perceive as an increase in prostitution, petty crime and other quality-of-life issues.
John Healy, a Jackson Heights resident who organizes for local Republicans, noted a change in the city’s mood during a Flag Day march in June last year. As he recalls it, when his small Republican delegation passed a Mexican restaurant, the restaurant’s staff began chanting: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”
From 2020 to 2024, Latino Americans moved 25 percentage points to Trump, according to an NBC News analysis. Asian Americans moved five points. Neither category can be understood as a monolith but data shows that Republicans are making inroads across nationalities and ethnic groups.
During the 2023 New York gubernatorial election, voters in majority-Asian voting precincts in New York City moved 23 points to the right compared to 2018; this was true among neighborhoods of a range of ethnic groups including Chinese, Korean, Indian, Bangladeshi and Indo-Caribbean voters. Similarly, although Latinos of different backgrounds still vote mainly Democratic, Republican strategists believe a realignment is occurring that will cause other Latino groups to vote more like conservative Cubans, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans in Miami long have.
The shift is significant, says Trip Yang, a Democratic strategist, because Latinos and Asians “are the two fastest-growing demographics in the whole country, as well as in New York”. (I know Yang from college.) Both groups, like New Yorkers of many stripes, have cited inflation and the economy, crime, education and immigration as voting concerns, with Asian voters particularly worried about public safety.
Latinos and Asian Americans, combined, are about half New York City’s population – and Chinese Americans, specifically, have the highest rate of unaffiliated party registration of any racial minority in New York. “They’re the perfect swing vote,” Yang says. “Neither party can take them for granted. This is huge.”
Of course, registered Democrats still overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans in New York City. Democrats also flipped four congressional seats in New York in 2024.
And not everyone in the 14th district is buying what Trump is selling. Gabriele Perici, an artist displaying his work at a gallery in Astoria, declines to be specific about his politics, but says: “I think the election was a reaction against bad government. Do I expect a real change? Not really.”
Another resident who does not want to be quoted by name is even blunter. I ask if he’s optimistic about any aspect of Trump’s presidency.
“No,” he says flatly. “We in the city know who he is.”
