From Sunset Park in Brooklyn to Elmhurst and Flushing in Queens, frustrations over Democratic stances on schools and crime helped mobilize votes for Republican Curtis Sliwa for mayor and conservative City Council candidates
After casting his ballot in the early morning on Election Day, Ray Huang made more than a dozen trips to poll sites in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood.
Each time, he brought with him one or two Chinese residents who came to vote for Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa, just as he did.
They weren’t alone: While Sliwa notched 29% of ballots cast citywide and 24% in Brooklyn, in central Sunset Park he got 46% against Democrat Eric Adams, city Board of Election data shows. In this hub of the neighborhood, known as Brooklyn’s Chinatown, 70% of residents categorized themselves as Asian in the 2020 census.
Across the five boroughs, Sliwa scored 44% of the vote in precincts where more than half of residents are Asian — surpassing his 40% of votes in white enclaves, 20% in majority-Hispanic districts and 6% in majority-Black districts.
Republican Curtis Sliwa performed better in majority-Asian and -white election districts than he did in Black and Hispanic districts
Chart shows the percent of votes Sliwa got in districts where one race or ethnicity is a majority group
It was not difficult for Huang, a Sunset Park resident since the 1980s and an emerging community leader, to persuade people he bumped into in the neighborhood to choose the Republican candidate, he said. Many of them had just participated in a demonstration Huang had organized six days before.
BY RONG XIAOQING, CLIFFORD MICHEL, SUHAIL BHAT AND WILL WELCH
