Harry Siegel: NYC Democrats had no reason to show up to vote

New York City didn’t get much redder on Tuesday but it did get a lot less blue.

Kamala Harris won 573,618 fewer votes than Joe Biden had four years earlier, while Donald Trump won 94,611 more than he had against Biden.

That pencils out to six lost Democratic votes for every one new Republican vote, as my colleague Haidee Chu noted in an analysis of the election results at The City.

Harris won 1,748,140 votes in a city with 3,114,785 active registered Democrats — meaning roughly four out of every nine didn’t show up for her according to the preliminary count.

Trump, on the other hand, won 786,294 votes in a city with 513,996 active registered Republicans.

He broke 30% in the best showing by a Republican, and the worst by a Democrat, since 1988.

That year, George H.W. Bush came just four points away from winning New York State while crushing Democrat Mike Dukakis nationally.

New York was close enough that Dukakis had to spend one of the campaign’s closing days rallying voters in Queens to fend off the humiliating prospect of Democrats losing the Empire State.

But where Democrats held control of the Senate and picked up a couple House seats in 1988, Republicans ran the table this year.

While New Yorkers chafe at having our city compared to anywhere else, the local results fit the national pattern as Trump basically matched his 74 million votes from 2020 while Harris’ 70 million was way down from Biden’s 81 million.

In New Jersey, where Democrats have a big voter registration advantage and full control of the state government, Trump fell just five points short after losing by 16 in 2020.

He didn’t add voters, but far fewer Democrats turned out for their party’s mid-race replacement candidate whose closing message boiled down to “I‘m not him, and he’s not OK.”

Dayenu, but I’m not surprised that wasn’t a winning national appeal and that many Americans well aware of Trump’s flaws nonetheless judged him to be the lesser of two evils or simply stayed home.

To put down the shovel and climb out of this hole, Democrats can start by remembering  they’ll always need to justify themselves in ways Republicans do not.

Cutting taxes sells itself.

Spending more on a bigger government demands justification.

Appealing to winners and people who aspire to win sells itself.

Holding together a coalition of people expecting the state to do more for each other and especially the needier among us demands justification.

On a local level, a government that righteously aspires to do more than run the trains, police the streets and pick up the trash needs to start by delivering on the basics.

Second — and this is why New York’s Democratic politicians are often so insulated from the first point — the party needs to appeal to people past the hard-core primary voters who effectively decide most elections here.

One reason there are so many registered Democrats in the city is that they’re the only voters who count in the primaries that actually decide most races, all the way up to mayor, where there’s any choice at all.

(And one reason so many of those Dems sat out this general election was that most voters in what’s again a one-party town didn’t have any competitive race on their ballot.)

Mayor Adams, a former Republican who’s been talking with Trump since the election, just flipped our system of Potemkin elections that usually benefits progressives to his advantage.

As New Yorkers voted in the presidential race, they approved four of his five proposed changes to the City Charter on the back of their ballots.

Those passed despite an organized campaign from his left-leaning opponents to get voters to reject them all as a power grab by the unpopular mayor (something I also suggested in last week’s column).

There wasn’t much of a campaign by City Hall to get voters on board, and the results show there didn’t need to be.

People paying close attention to the devilish details and politics lost out to the many Democrats turning out to vote for Harris who didn’t see a referendum on the mayor but language about things like giving Sanitation more control of Parks and just checked off “yes,” mostly.

Eventually, though, the same rule applies to politicians in all wings of the Democratic party and everywhere else:

People aren’t stupid.

You have to deliver, or at some point your voters stop showing up and some new ones start weighing in.

Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.