Your Economy (No Politics)

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What the Bronx voters who've flipped to Trump are saying

By Monica Showalter

Some 25,000 people attended President Trump's rally in the Bronx this week, a figure no one could have imagined a few years ago, given the deep blue orientation of the borough.

But things can change, and apparently they have.

Newsweek has a fascinating interview with a Bronx local who switched from voting Democrat all his life to throwing his support to President Trump.

Jerry Evans, a registered Democrat in New York City, had never attended a political rally before Thursday.

But speaking with Newsweek at Donald Trump's campaign event in the South Bronx, Evans said that he turned out to show support for the former president because he feels "very strongly about how the border's going." He also accused President Joe Biden of giving the "red carpet treatment" to migrants.

"You know, I said, why is Biden giving them the red carpet treatment?" Evans said. "He's giving them everything—giving them housing, giving them shelter, giving them money, cash—and people who live here can't get that."

He also observed this:

"He opened up the border and then he just said, 'everybody get in,'" Evans told Newsweek. "And then you go to New York and it's like, dumping ground, USA."

"Red carpet treatment"? "Can't get that"? "Dumping ground"?

These are very vivid turns of phrase. They are immediate, they are grittily real, and they refer solely to where the man lives right now. There is no pie-in-the-sky in his thinking, he is solely focused on the reality of his own community, and right now, mass illegal immigration is harming his community, bringing crime and taxpayer costs all of which he has to bear even as he gets no discernable benefit from that same immigration. His taxes go up, he gets nothing while others get everything, Democrats don't care as they 'dump' and Biden is foisting those costs onto him, which he rightly objects to.

There is no arguing with someone like this; he has clearly made his mind up, plugging 'a' to 'b' and ending his long practice of voting Democrat.

Voters like this will be hard to regain for the Democrats. A major sea change in thinking has taken place from all those illegal border crossers being placed on this voter's doorstep. Democrats actually believed it wouldn't be noticed, but New Yorkers are way too plugged in to the realities of urban life to not notice, curiously parallel to the country voters who are plugged in to the realities of country life. Now both have moved on from Democrats at this point.

How many thousands of them in that 25,000 crowd are thinking the same thing?