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At this point <\/span>last November, Zohran Mamdani was a largely unknown state assemblyman, and the Democratic Party\u2019s brand in New York City was at rock bottom.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the 2024 election, President Donald Trump picked up about 100,000 more votes in the city than in 2020; Kamala Harris fell more than half a million votes shy of Joe Biden\u2019s total. And some of the most dramatic shifts in the entire country could be found in immigrant neighborhoods in Mamdani\u2019s home borough of Queens. The party\u2019s outer-borough collapse mirrored the party\u2019s national crack-up; as it spent millions to court college-educated voters in the suburbs, Democrats were losing ground with the sorts of working-class, non-white voters in blue cities who traditionally helped form the backbone of the party. The term you kept hearing over and over was \u201crealignment<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n When we chatted<\/a> with residents and elected officials this spring, in the Queens neighborhoods of Jackson Heights and Corona, we found<\/a> deep-seated frustrations with Democratic governance\u2014and concerns about crime, immigration, sex-workers, poor services, and the cost of living. Many people brought up the pandemic, which had hit the area hard and damaged people\u2019s faith in the social contract.<\/p>\n