Barkan wrote, “In significant swaths of Brooklyn and Queens, Republican voting is growing organically, driven less by reactionary white people looking longingly to the suburbs — a coalition that helped elect Rudy Giuliani twice in the 1990s — and more by communities of recent immigrants and Orthodox Jews. Some of these voters are conservatives who no longer wish to support Democrats at any level of government after spending years ticket-splitting.

“Zeldin ran up large margins in Chinese-speaking Brooklyn neighborhoods and, like other recent Republicans, dominated in Russian-speaking and Orthodox Jewish parts of Brooklyn and Queens. (Kagan, who is Jewish, emigrated from the Soviet Union.) Party affiliation is beginning to matter more than racial or ethnic identity in city voting: A white Republican with scant resources nearly defeated an Asian American Democrat for an Asian-plurality Brooklyn legislative seat last month. And it may have been liberal white voters, not Asian Americans, who saved her.

“What unites immigrants from East Asia and Russia as well as Yiddish-speaking Hasidic Jews and the comparatively less strict Orthodox Jews? Fear of rising crime. Zeldin campaigned aggressively on funding police and turning back criminal-justice reforms passed in Albany.”

I love this next part where Barkan denies what is so obvious that I can see it from Poca, West Virginia.