What this shift in voter base might really achieve is an increase in the political firepower of immigrant-heavy neighborhoods like Washington Heights, Corona, Sunset Park, and others that are home to large standing populations of permanent residents, regardless of their political leanings. It’s not necessarily that the voter demographics or political viewpoints would fundamentally shift, but balloon in areas of the city that traditionally have had a harder time achieving political representation. Citywide candidates would presumably be forced to take more seriously the particular political preferences of specific immigrant constituencies; for example, the Dominican population’s preoccupation with dual-language education.

Particularly in the context of a nationwide GOP effort to restrict voting access even for U.S. citizens, there’s no scenario where the measure gets within striking distance of becoming law and avoids being subsumed into the broader culture war. One can easily imagine Tucker Carlson dedicating a segment to it, a continuation of his series of rants about how immigrants are hell-bent on shifting the political firmament to benefit their shadowy Democratic paymasters, a position just short enough of open white genocide rhetoric to give him plausible deniability. Yet local boosters wave that off as a predictable and ultimately irrelevant distraction, and even relish in the prospect of cultural combat. “What we do want to focus on is really being the vanguard,” said the NYIC’s Moore, pointing out that other local initiatives like municipal ID cards and a managed-care municipal health care program are being used as templates for other localities.