New York continued its streak as a solidly
blue state, with Biden winning 60.87% of the vote to Trump's 37.74%, a Democratic victory margin of 23.13%. Due to a decrease in third-party voting, both candidates increased their party's vote share from
2016, though Biden's margin of victory was slightly wider than
Hillary Clinton's. Statewide elections in New York are heavily influenced by New York City, a Democratic stronghold which tends to provide sizable margins to the Democratic Party though every Democratic nominee since Bill Clinton's first run (1992) still would have won statewide if it were excluded. Biden continued this streak as he would have won upstate New York (excluding New York City's results), albeit by a much smaller 52.4% to 45.9% margin, or 2,923,127 votes to Trump's 2,561,315. New York's inexperience processing a large number of mail ballots, having only legalized no-excuse absentee voting in 2019, led to weekslong delays in counting them. Over two million ballots and over 20% of the votes were cast by mail. New York failed to meet its November 28 deadline to certify the election, with hundreds of thousands of votes still uncounted. State Senator
Michael Gianaris commented, "if we were a
swing state in this presidential election, this would be a national scandal". However, when all the votes were counted, Biden outperformed Clinton's margin over Trump by about 0.6 percentage points. This was due to a major improvement across
Upstate New York and on
Long Island. Meanwhile, four of New York City's five boroughs shifted towards Trump (with the exception of
Staten Island, which shifted left by less than 1%). Donald Trump is the first Republican to receive 3 million or more raw votes in New York since
George H. W. Bush in
1988. Biden flipped four counties that Trump won in 2016:
Broome,
Essex,
Rensselaer, and
Saratoga. Biden also came very close to flipping an additional six counties, as he lost
Cortland County by 419 votes,
Franklin County by 415 votes,
Ontario County by 33 votes,
Orange County by 113 votes,
Suffolk County by 232 votes, and
Warren County by just 57 votes. Trump's narrow victories in these counties meant that they were decided by a combined total of just 1,269 votes out of more than 1 million votes cast across all six counties. According to exit polls by
CNN, Biden won 96% of Democrats, who were 41% of the electorate, 59% of Independents, who made up 32% of voters, and 21% of Republicans, who made up 27% of the vote. Biden dominated core
Democratic constituencies in New York City, winning 76% of the city's vote. Statewide, Biden won 94% of
Black voters and 76% of
Latino voters. Biden also won by 18 points in the
Hudson Valley and urban
Upstate counties. Trump's core support base came from rural Upstate counties. However, Trump made strong inroads with
Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods of New York City and in
Hasidic Jewish communities in
Rockland County. The shift is attributed to Trump's strong
pro-Israel stance as president. New York was one of five states in the nation in which Biden's victory margin was larger than 1 million raw votes, the others being
California,
Maryland,
Massachusetts and
Illinois.
Edison exit polls ==See also==