It’s no surprise that the few Manhattanites who bothered to participate in this year’s presidential election voted overwhelmingly for President Obama. Of course, there were some exceptions: The first was in the precinct covering Park Avenue near the Waldorf-Astoria. Of the six voters who showed up on Election Day, four cast their ballots for Mitt Romney, giving the Republican candidate his only majority win in New York City. The second was in the precinct that is home to Trump Tower — and the Donald himself — where Obama and Romney tied with 110 votes each and lent some context to Trump’s subsequent Twitter freakout.
While numbers show that President Obama received 100 percent of the vote in 91 of New York’s 5,286 precincts, Romney did get a little bit of love in the outer boroughs (though he failed to win the traditionally conservative Staten Island, where Obama had a narrow 50.2 victory.)
Take a four-square-block slice of Gravesend, Brooklyn, a warren of high-priced residences dotted with Sephardic temples and yeshivas that happens to be the deepest single bloc of Republican support in all five boroughs. On Election Day, 97 percent of the voters there supported Mr. Romney, who beat Mr. Obama 133 votes to 3. Mr. Romney won unanimously in six other precincts [in the Borough Park and Sheepshead Bay neighborhoods in Brooklyn and in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens], but altogether, 10 people voted in those precincts.
These red pockets of resistance surprised even their own members. “I thought I was alone, a voice in the wilderness,” said retired technical writer James Gibbons on Brooklyn’s Avenue S. He added that he wished the Romney support was “was spread out more.”
