The more camouflage Harris-Walz trucker hats I saw around Brooklyn, the greater my sense of foreboding. “Courting disaster,” I texted a colleague, half-joking, as I walked to my Fort Greene polling site on Election Day. Scanning as working class, the hats seemed to be worn exclusively by people who didn’t match that description. They reminded me of the Big Buck Hunter arcade game at a bar near the campus of my elite college, which lent wry “authenticity” to the setting and whose plastic rifles were the only kind most of us had any interest in handling. I wondered if some of the hat wearers were in on the joke or simply liked the aesthetic. But some of these people looked sincere, as though they felt the hats really reflected the campaign’s resonance with regular folks.
In the end, the Harris campaign lacked such appeal. Blue-collar voters of every ethnicity drifted right. Donald Trump, according to exit polls, carried voters from families earning between $30,000 and $50,000, a group Joe Biden had won by 13 points. Among minorities without a college degree, Harris performed 26 points worse than Clinton did in 2016. Trump’s 45 percent share of the Latino vote was the highest ever for a Republican presidential candidate. Cementing her party’s new white-collar identity, it was Harris this time who won voters making six figures or more. Never in the recent history of the Democratic Party has a presidential campaign appealed less to the actual trucker-hat set, auguring a tectonic class realignment of the two parties.
In This Issue
How Even This City Swung Hard Toward Trump.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the most famous progressive politician in the U.S. and the national face of young democratic socialism. On Election Night, though, Trump increased his share of voters in her congressional district by 50 percent compared to four years ago and shrunk his margin of defeat by 24 points — among the greatest fluctuations in the country. AOC’s district, the 14th, spans northwestern Queens, from gentrifying Astoria to multiethnic Jackson Heights to heavily Latino Corona. Moving north, beyond La Guardia airport and Rikers Island, it covers the Bronx’s Hunts Point Market, then moves into Parkchester, the Black, Latino, and increasingly South Asian neighborhood where Ocasio-Cortez was born, up through the eastern shore of the borough, past City Island and Orchard Beach, to the border of Westchester County, where she was raised.
The next morning, I continue north through the 14th District, taking the 6 train to the Parkchester stop in the Bronx. The borough, 85 percent Black and Latino, went 27 percent for Trump, nearly three times the rate it did eight years ago. South of the elevated tracks is Unionport, where in October Trump filmed a Fox & Friends segment at a barbershop called King of Knockouts. North of the tracks is the Parkchester complex, virtually a city unto itself, composed of 171 brick buildings that, like Stuy Town in Manhattan, were built in the 1940s by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Just outside its walls is a Bangladeshi enclave of restaurants, groceries, and small businesses.
Denialism is not confined to the left, of course. Denialism on the right, which ranges from election denial to climate denial, is partly explained by the familiar problem of partisan echo chambers amplified by social media and Trump-onset hyperpolarization. But the conservative and liberal versions of the phenomenon have taken on different qualities, the former tending to indulge dark fantasies like QAnon and the latter more prosaically refusing to accept certain inconvenient realities, such as Joe Biden’s age-related decline.
