Crime and schools are causing a political realignment in the city, led by communities of recent immigrants. RossBarkan reports on the city's new Republican voters
Illustration: Intelligencer: He was becoming, in deep-blue New York, a Republican. “Democrats were just laughing at me, laughing at communities,” Kagan said on Monday. “Every time, I am saying, ‘What about public safety?’ … Public safety is not a joke. It’s the most important priority today in New York City.”
Kagan, a longtime Democratic activist who was elected just last year, became the sixth Republican on the 51-member council — the most Republicans in at least two decades. The move, in many ways, was driven more by the quirks of redistricting than by any ideological reckoning. After aeliminated his southern Brooklyn district, breaking it up to create a new Asian-majority seat in the area, Kagan had few choices left.
In significant swaths of Brooklyn and Queens, Republican voting is growing organically, driven less by reactionary white people looking longingly to the suburbs — a coalition that helped elect Rudy Giuliani twice in the 1990s — and more by communities of recent immigrants and Orthodox Jews. Some of these voters are conservatives who no longer wish to support Democrats at any level of government after spending years ticket-splitting.
What unites immigrants from East Asia and Russia as well as Yiddish-speaking Hasidic Jews and the comparatively less strict Orthodox Jews? Fear of rising crime. Zeldin campaigned aggressively on funding police and turning back criminal-justice reforms passed in Albany. While the links between the partial end of cash bail and New York’s crime spike, Democrats have paid an electoral price for lacking a compelling counternarrative.
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