Mr. X, Take Heart
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

No sooner had our famed op-ed contributor known as “Mr. X” filed his report of what it was like to be a rare supporter of President Bush on the Upper West Side of Manhattan than the letters started pouring in. You are not alone, they said. Many more New Yorkers than like to admit it, they said, had grown skeptical of liberal orthodoxy and were siding with the president. The failure to see this may have been persistent in some quarters even after the election. “A Blue City (Disconsolate, Even) Bewildered by a Red America,” ran the headline from West 43rd Street. Its story quoted New Yorkers who said they didn’t know anyone who had voted for President Bush and described the city as “out of step with the rest of the country.”
But it turns out that all those who wrote in to reassure Mr. X. that he was not alone knew what they were talking about. That’s the message we take away from a close reading of the results of the presidential election here in New York City, where it has been not enough noticed that the results show remarkable gains for President Bush. The number of voters pulling the lever for Mr. Bush soared to 543,000 in New York City in 2004. That’s an astonishing increase of more than 35% over the roughly 400,000 votes the Texan won in 2000. And Mr. Kerry, meanwhile, got about 9,000 fewer votes in New York City in 2004 than Vice President Gore got in 2000.
Brooklyn made a particularly dramatic swing. Mr. Bush’s vote there increased a staggering 63% in 2004 to about 156,000 from about 96,000 in 2000. Mr. Kerry won about 12,000 fewer votes in Brooklyn than Mr. Gore did in 2000. Mr. Bush made similar gains in Queens, where his vote increased 27%, or about 33,000 votes. Mr. Kerry got about 16,000 fewer votes in Queens in 2004 than Mr. Gore did in 2000. Even in Manhattan, that supposed bastion of anti-Bushism, where Mr. X felt so alone at the dinner parties, Mr. Bush improved over his 2000 numbers, winning the votes of about 95,000. He was up about 16% over his 2000 performance in Manhattan, while Mr. Kerry did only 6% better than Mr. Gore did in 2000.
The Republicans achieved these gains with a weak Senate candidate on the ticket and with a virtually nonexistent field organization in New York City. They did it with hardly any television advertising buys in the city. It makes one wonder what could be achieved if the Grand Old Party actually put some more effort into the city. What would have happened had Mayor Giuliani thrown himself into a get-out-the-vote effort in New York as avidly as he did elsewhere in the country?
In any event, there are no doubt all sorts of reasons Mr. Bush did better in New York this year than four years ago. Millions in the city appreciate his response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. His decision to have the Republican National Convention here was a signal of support for New York City. As the Manhattan Institute’s E.J. McMahon has pointed out in our opinion columns, the Bush tax cuts benefited New York City’s economy tremendously. Our guess is that the Brooklyn gains, and some of those elsewhere in the city, can be attributed, at least in part, to Orthodox Jews who voted for the ticket that included Senator Lieberman, the Democrat, as the vice presidential nominee in 2000, but who appreciated Mr. Bush’s support for Israel and for faith based charities and voted Republican this time around.
Certainly Bush voters in New York City are a minority. Republicans certainly have their work cut out for them in New York. But the absolute size of the vote isn’t what draws our attention. It’s the direction of change. Voters for the Republican candidate are a growing minority, at least at the presidential level, while voters for the Democratic candidate are a shrinking majority. The 543,000 Bush voters in New York City are at least 200,000 more than the number of newspapers the liberal daily sells in the city on an average weekday. So for all the bile that has been spewed at President Bush over the past four years by Al Franken, Michael Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, Paul Krugman, George Soros, and the rest of the Bushhaters operating from this city, when it actually came time to count the votes here in New York City this time around the voters were more likely to choose Mr. Bush than they were four years ago. The way forward for those in this city who believe in Mr. Bush’s ideals of freedom abroad and lower taxes at home is for the 543,000 Bush voters in the city to get to know each other and begin building for the next election.