New York City's Generation Gap
Are Young Voters the Sleeping Giant of the Five Boroughs?
The Democratic Party electorate is increasingly stratified by Age, nowhere more so than in New York City.
On June 24th, this Generation Gap will be on the ballot once again, occupying center stage in the highly-anticipated race for Mayor.
Four years ago, progressive Maya Wiley submitted her strongest performances in neighborhoods where voters under-45 comprised a majority of the electorate. Such was also the case for leftists Jumaane Williams, Cynthia Nixon, and Bernie Sanders, becoming a trend following the latter’s insurgent Presidential bid in 2016. Undoubtedly, the electorate’s age in a given neighborhood closely corresponds to the success (or failure) of most progressive candidates. Increasing by the year, this youthful demographic has already reshaped the political character of more than a dozen neighborhoods, with potential for much more in the coming decade.
However, Democratic Primaries in New York City, outside of a handful of gentrifying neighborhoods with a growing number of college-graduates, are still won-and-lost on the whims of voters over-45, largely Generation-X and Baby Boomers (with some Silent Generation sprinkled in). Not only do their political preferences diverge from Millennials and Generation-Z, their media consumption habits vary significantly as well. According to a recent Data for Progress poll, when likely Democratic voters (in New York State) were asked what sources they “have gotten news from about government and politics in the past few weeks,” those over-45 largely favored broadcast news, such as CNN, MSNBC, ABC and CBS, in addition to local television, which spans NY1, News12, Pix11, and everything in-between. In contrast, their younger counterparts vested greater trust in the institution of The New York Times (57% vs. 43%), while preferring the likes of YouTube (40%), podcasts (38%), Instagram (35%), TikTok (34%) and Twitter (33%), to most television and broadcast mediums. Indeed, upon a cursory review of this data, one can easily discern how Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani, omnipresent on the aforementioned mediums, has already distinguished himself as the candidate of younger voters, a cohort which has propelled the democratic socialist to second place in the polls; while former Governor Andrew Cuomo, the well-known scion of a local political dynasty, ubiquitous on television at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, has maintained an iron-clad grip over those age 45+, the clear-majority of the Democratic electorate.
In particular, the Age 65+ cohort enjoys the most outsized influence (a greater share of the Democratic electorate, compared to their percentage of registered Democrats), routinely exceeding forty-percent of all Democratic voters, a trend that transcends both race and class. Whereas Maya Wiley remained the resounding choice of voters under-45, her primary competition, Eric Adams and Kathryn Garcia, rode many of the city’s oldest electorates to first and second place, respectively. Unsurprisingly, Adams’ greatest success came in Black neighborhoods (Southeast Queens, Co-op City, East Flatbush, Canarsie), where senior voters dominate the electorate, while Garcia’s best district came along the Upper East Side’s wealthiest corridor, where more than fifty-percent of the electorate is over-65.
However, this dynamic is changing, albeit gradually. According to the New York City Campaign Finance Board, voter turnout among those 18-29 (10.6% → 17.9%) and 30-39 (15.3% → 21.7%) increased by the greatest percentage of an age group from the 2013 to 2021 Democratic Primary for Mayor. Clearly, a shift is underway, hastened by the Trump era, but to what extent?
Let’s see.
The youngest districts, consistently, are both East and South Asian neighborhoods, as well as Haredi and Orthodox Jewish enclaves in Brooklyn and Queens. This dynamic, in part, is owed to those aforementioned constituencies having some of the lowest voter turnout in Democratic Primary elections, increasing the influence of the relatively few voters who do participate. Whereas the neighborhoods with the lowest percentages of 18-29 Democratic voters, both with respect to voter registration and the electorate itself, are middle-class Black communities in Southeast Queens and Brooklyn.
Interestingly, this data provides insight into the growth and decline of certain racial and ethnic groups. Asian and Orthodox communities continue to see population increases despite a precarious local housing market, while younger African Americans continue to leave the five boroughs en masse, a phenomenon dubbed The Second Great Migration. Unsurprisingly, all districts and neighborhoods see the Age 18-29 electorate underperform their share of registered Democrats. Indeed, one can expect a degree of participation lag with respect to automatic and new registrants, given this youthful cohort is consistently the lowest turnout age demographic across the United States.
Democrats Ages 30–44 outperform their share of party registration in ten of New York City’s sixty-five Assembly Districts. A relatively dismal ratio, but a marked improvement compared to their more junior counterparts, nonetheless.
Ranked in order of out-performance:
AD53 (East Williamsburg, Bushwick) +6.3%
AD50 (Greenpoint, Williamsburg) +5.0%
AD36 (Astoria, Long Island City) +4.9%
AD51 (Red Hook, South Slope, Sunset Park) +4.3%
AD37 (Long Island City, Sunnyside, Ridgewood) +3.7%
AD57 (Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights) +2.8%
AD34 (Astoria-Ditmars, Jackson Heights) +1.8%
AD56 (Bedford-Stuyvesant) +1.5%
AD52 (Park Slope, Carroll Gardens) +0.8%
AD43 (Crown Heights, Prospect Lefferts Garden) +0.7%
Notice a pattern? For the most part, these districts are consistently gentrifying neighborhoods across Western Queens and North Brooklyn, where progressives have seized power in recent years by toppling atrophying political machines. Rather quickly, the political participation of this growing cohort of college-educated Millennials has exceeded that of the neighborhood’s native population — whether they are Latinos in Bushwick and Sunset Park, or White Ethnics in Astoria and Ridgewood — increasing the influence of the 30–44 bloc in Democratic Primary elections, leading to routine progressive victories. Indeed, the top-seven districts listed above were all won by Maya Wiley in 2021.
However, while the emergence of college-educated Millennial voters has reshaped the political landscape across several regions of New York City, said bloc has struggled to overcome the whims of more civically-engaged segments of the Democratic electorate. In particular, these shortcomings are most pronounced in affluent, predominantly-White neighborhoods, such as Park Slope and Yorkville, and working and middle-class Black communities, like Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Here, a handful of local institutions have endured, while a large base of 65+ triple prime voters anchor the electorate, a combination capable of countering the fervent energy of the grassroots left.
Nonetheless, if Millennial voter participation rises to their registration share, several neighborhoods where the progressive left has thus far been denied power, particularly in Upper Manhattan, could become ripe for insurgent candidates against the soft underbelly of local fiefdoms.
Most of New York City’s Millennials honed their political consciousness during the Trump era, inspired by figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, eventually moved to action and involvement by the local umbrella of the Working Families Party, Democratic Socialists of America (NYC Chapter), and Indivisible. They remember Bill de Blasio’s 2013 triumph, but were not a core constituency of his winning coalition. Eric Adams has always been a sad punchline of sorts, Andrew Cuomo exudes the dysfunctional status quo. Over the last several months, Zohran Mamdani has caught their attention. Certainly, across the aforementioned base neighborhoods where “Zo-Mentum” has already caught fire, there is a higher voter turnout ceiling that is within reach.
The heart of New York City’s Democratic electorate — featuring the most registered Democrats of any Age group — is the 45–64 category, primarily hailing from Generation X. Between one-third and two-fifths of the electorate, this age demographic is the proverbial swing vote of New York City’s generational divide.
Universally, those 45-64 are most well-represented in Black neighborhoods across each borough; Wakefield, Harlem, East New York, and Springfield Gardens (to name a few). While outperforming their voter registration percentage almost everywhere, such advantage is nowhere close to the overwhelming margins enjoyed by those over-65, who still dominate the electorate in places like Eastern Queens, Staten Island, and the Upper East Side.
Generation-X in New York City, including many Black Democrats born-and-raised in the five boroughs, came of age politically amidst five-consecutive Republican Mayoral administrations (Guliani twice, Bloomberg thrice). Bill de Blasio, the progressive Park Slope Councilman with a bi-racial family, was their high political watermark, regaining City Hall from the GOP. Unsurprisingly, the top Gen-X neighborhoods in the four bluest boroughs all resoundingly backed Eric Adams four years ago.
Woah.
While not entirely shocking that the 65+ electorate, largely Baby Boomers (and some octogenarians from the Silent Generation) vote at a higher rate than previous generations, their considerable share of the electorate across the five boroughs, frequently more than ten-percentage points above their registration share, remains remarkable.
Three Boroughs: Manhattan, Staten Island, and The Bronx – stand out as particularly old.
In both the Bronx and Staten Island, Democrats over-65 outperform their registration by at least ten-percent in every single Assembly District. While among Manhattan’s wealthiest, most civically-engaged neighborhoods — Upper East Side (+14%), Upper West Side (+11.7%), Greenwich Village (+13.6%) — the age gap is the highest of anywhere in the borough.
Whereas Brooklyn, and Queens (to a lesser extent), remain more politically polarized by Age.
Kings County’s Generation Gap remains the Tale of Two Boroughs: as those aged 65+ are less than 25% of the electorate in seven Assembly Districts, mostly spanning the G train line from Greenpoint to Kensington; but greater than 40% of voters in six Assembly Districts, largely across the residential neighborhoods adjacent to the Belt Parkway, like East New York and Sheepshead Bay, where many senior New Yorkers, depending on skin color and class, fondly remember the Mayors of yore.
David Dinkins, the city’s first Black Mayor, remains revered to this day across Harlem, Southeast Queens, and Central Brooklyn; a soft-spoken gentleman elected to quell racial unrest, expelled from office too soon due to a whitelash familiar to many Black New Yorkers. Whereas others, particularly affluent Manhattanites and Outer Borough white ethnics, reserve their nostalgia for Ed Koch and Michael Bloomberg. Four years ago, while many of the former elevated Eric Adams as one of their own, the latter turned to Kathryn Garcia, a post-partisan technocratic manager.
Now, this contingent may form the bedrock of Andrew Cuomo’s coalition, another familiar name (and face) capable of transcending generations of identities and ideologies across Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.
Voter Turnout Percentage by Age & Neighborhood
The Bronx
In New York’s lowest-income County, voter participation mirrors socioeconomics. Turnout peaks in upper-middle class enclaves like Riverdale and Spuyten Duyvil, the Bronx’s largest majority-White neighborhoods, but craters in the South Bronx (Mott Haven, Hunts Point), where only one-third of Age 65+ Democrats vote in Primary Elections, one of the lowest marks across the five boroughs. Beyond the leafy confines adjacent to the Hudson River and Van Cortlandt Park, the Bronx’s most consistent working-class electorate resides several miles east, in the African-American and Afro-Caribbean neighborhoods that define the borough's top right corner, like Wakefield, Williamsbridge, Edenwald and Co-op City.
The state of young voter turnout in the Bronx is dire, with seven of the borough’s eleven Assembly Districts seeing less than fourteen percent participation among Registered Democrats. For context, only two other neighborhoods, Brownsville and East New York, see as little participation among those Age 18-29. In particular, the predominantly Dominican neighborhoods of the West Bronx — University Heights, Fordham, East Tremont, Bedford Park — all of which significantly shifted to the right in the 2024 Presidential Election, exhibit the lowest 18-29 participation in New York City (less than twelve percent).
Staten Island
Traditionally a political afterthought, owed to the borough’s historic red hue, Staten Island’s lack of turnout in the Democratic Primary is nonetheless surprising for a county that remains, by and large, comfortably middle-class. In Richmond County, the largely working-class North Shore — owed to Black (Mariners Harbor, Clifton) and Latino (Port Richmond, Stapleton) communities, coupled with a small, but growing contingent of young professionals in Tompkinsville — routinely produces the largest share of the Democratic vote.
Most surprisingly, Staten Island’s Southern Shore, the second-most civically-engaged district come November’s General Election, has relatively poor voter participation among senior Democrats. Why? Many remain ancestrally tied to the Party of Kennedy, Clinton, and Obama (who won SI twice) — but no longer care for its modern identity. Not for nothing, during the 2016 Democratic Primary for President, Bernie Sanders edged out Hillary Clinton on both the Island’s Eastern and Southern shores, neighborhoods with both the highest rates of homeownership and union density in New York City.
Manhattan
Civic engagement across Manhattan remains, by far, the most robust of any borough — a reflection of wealth, education, and the requisite time to wholeheartedly participate in local affairs. For instance, across the rest of New York City, there are only two Assembly Districts (Park Slope, Windsor Terrace) where voter turnout among those Age 65+ eclipses fifty-percent; whereas in Manhattan, there are seven.
Even those unfamiliar with the borough’s array of neighborhoods can likely tell the racial (and class) composition of Manhattan’s distinct communities by a cursory review of the above table: with working-class, predominantly Latino neighborhoods like East Harlem and Inwood lagging behind the rest of the borough; all while Harlem, Chinatown, and Washington Heights submit solid voter turnout ratios, that are still noticeably lower than their borough’s median.
While the trademark ~Age 30-44 Progressive Vote~ is well-represented throughout the urban core, its impact is somewhat blunted on the neighborhood-level by the electoral prowess of Manhattan’s civically-engaged seniors. For example, even though Maya Wiley won twenty-percent of the vote more in Bushwick (AD53) than Morningside Heights (AD69), she still earned more raw votes from the latter than the former. Hence, when political professionals reference the Upper West Side as the voter turnout epicenter of June’s Democratic Primary, this is why.
Queens
The diversity of Age across Queens County helps make the World’s Borough the bellwether of New York City politics. Since 1989, no Mayoral campaign has emerged victorious without Queens. And, despite one of the most pronounced shifts towards Donald Trump of any county in the United States, there are more than two-hundred thousand Democratic votes, well-distributed across the borough’s unique enclaves, up-for-grabs this June. While Queens County has fewer college-educated professionals moving in (compared to Brooklyn), largely confining the youth movement to the borough’s westernmost enclaves — Astoria, Long Island City, Sunnyside — many of the new immigrant groups that give the World’s Borough its well-renowned character are among the youngest (and fastest growing) demographics in New York City. With increasing levels of citizenship, the current generation of immigrants are poised to be the young voters capable of remaking Queens politics over the next decade.
For now, the older electorate east of Flushing-Meadows Park, miles of homeowner-heavy neighborhoods — predominantly Black south of Jamaica Avenue, increasingly diverse northbound (Chinese, Korean, Indian, Bangladeshi, Orthodox, Italian, Irish) — retains an electoral advantage over the young renters of the west. Forest Hills and Kew Gardens, middle-class historically-Jewish neighborhoods at the borough’s center (literally and metaphorically), have the most consistent voter turnout across each age group. On June 24th, early returns from this district will forecast the outcome of the Mayoral race.
Brooklyn
Brooklyn’s Chinese neighborhoods — Sunset Park, Bensonhurst, Bath Beach — increasingly alienated from the Democratic Party at the national level, have the lowest turnout rate among Democratic voters of anywhere in the five boroughs. Indeed, such blue malaise is felt across the red region of Southern Brooklyn, as Democratic participation remains equally lackluster in the adjacent neighborhoods of Gravesend, Sheepshead Bay, and Manhattan Beach — a stretch of middle-class bedroom communities with large immigrant populations from the former Soviet Union (Syrian and Russian Jews, Ukranians, Uzbekis) — once represented by the likes of Chuck Schumer and Anthony Weiner, now consistently R+50 at the top-of-the-ticket. With relatively few Democratic voters (in terms of both registration and turnout), Southern Brooklyn will remain overlooked in the upcoming Primary election, but is poised to remain relevant in November — particularly if there is a semi-competitive General Election.
The same cannot be said for Latino neighborhoods like Cypress Hills and Sunset Park, which have more than double the number of registered Democratic voters than the lower-turnout, red sea of Southern Brooklyn. However, due to low rates of senior (65+) participation across Brooklyn’s Hispanic neighborhoods (less than thirty-three percent, lower than the Bronx), said communities hold relatively little influence in the Democratic Primary — increasingly vesting the political whims of Kings County into a handful of neighborhoods, polarized by age, on opposite ends of the Borough.
The professional-class blocks of Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, and Fort Greene not only have the most registered Democrats in New York City, but routinely boast the highest voter turnout in Primary elections. However, while the turnout percentage of Democrats Age 45+ routinely exceeds fifty-percent (one of the higher marks in the city), these communities retain their title as the civic-engagement pinnacle of the five boroughs because of unrivaled participation among Millennials, which shapes the progressive character of Brownstone Brooklyn. And, while Greenpoint and Williamsburg cannot match the electoral influence of their well-heeled neighbors farther along the G train line, the sheer volume of under-45’s foregrounds the influence of leftist politics.
Several miles southeast lie the neighborhoods once considered Eric Adams’ political base; these days, increasingly warm to frontrunner Andrew Cuomo. Older Black communities in Brooklyn — middle-class Canarsie and Flatlands, working-class East Flatbush, and low-income Brownsville and East New York — consistently gave close to ninety-percent of their votes to Eric Adams. Here, voters under-45 rarely factor into the equation, allowing the electorate to be dominated by seniors; the polar opposite of the college-educated dynamic that has reshaped politics on the other end of Kings County.
In the proverbial middle, Central Brooklyn: Bedford-Stuyvesant, Flatbush, & Crown Heights — the two meet. Four years ago, Eric Adams won Brooklyn’s gentrifying neighborhoods because of resounding turnout (50%) and overwhelming support (75%+) among Black seniors, despite Maya Wiley’s advantages with Millennial renters (White and Black), and Gen-X women.
As the Democratic electorate in New York City is currently constructed, a progressive candidate for citywide office cannot win absent significant inroads among Gen-X and Baby Boomers. Andrew Cuomo’s prohibitive early polling lead, owed to sheer dominance with those above-45, speaks to this challenging reality. And, while greater access to television advertisements in the coming weeks should curtail the frontrunner’s numbers (to an extent), the underlying fundamentals of Cuomo’s coalition — anchored in working-class Black and Latino neighborhoods where the Democratic electorate is far older than the citywide average — is unlikely to drastically change.
But first, could the anti-Cuomo progressive faction motivate more young people — across race, borough, neighborhood, and socio-economic class — to the polls this June. Indeed, were one to quantify Untapped Potential, the largest gaps between registration and electorate, the top-twenty five neighborhoods would exclusively be those under-45, disproportionately Millennials in the Bronx and Generation-Z in Manhattan.
Thus far, Millennial-aged participation spikes have been mostly fueled by the college-educated transplant class. Certainly, this demographic trend has been cohered into a consistent voting bloc by organizations like NYC-DSA and the Working Families Party through year-round political outreach. Nevertheless, The Million Dollar Question remains: “what would it take to reach young voters beyond the dozen or so neighborhoods already intimately familiar with the progressive left?”
Theoretically, the right candidate, like Zohran Mamdani, at a high-salience moment for electoral politics in the Democratic Party, could activate younger voters across the five boroughs, and, in the process, reshape the local electorate. And, were the charismatic Mamdani to helps the progressive left make even modest participatory gains among Gen-Z and Millennials, his efforts would not only help his campaign, but potentially aid other aligned candidates through ranked-choice-voting, providing a degree of cushion against the former Governor’s predicted advantage with Gen-X and Baby Boomers. Indeed, further expanding the electorate dilutes the well-known frontrunner’s greatest advantage.
To defeat Andrew Cuomo, nothing less will be required.
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Only a coordinated anti Cuomo media blitz, or, if The NY Times engages will defeat Cuomo, a hugh reduction in Fed dollars, followed by Hugh reductions in the state and city budgets could motivate the electorate… the election is Cuomo’s to lose
My personal opinion is that betting on young voters to win an election seems like a losing strategy.
Chi Osse has been doing media like Zohran's for 2 years - can we really say it's had any impact on young turnout?