Brighton Beach Among A Handful Of Brooklyn Nabes That Voted For Sanders

Tuesday’s presidential primaries went pretty much as expected. Party frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump — who polls predicted to win by wide margins — walked away from New York increasing their delegate lead.

However, the primary’s aftermath reveals interesting details about the political hue of the city’s neighborhoods. Election results collected by WNYC reveal southern Brooklyn showed a lot of love to insurgent Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders — who campaigned heavily in the borough.

While many of those neighborhoods were located in the west — Dyker Heights was among the 10 neighborhoods with the greatest share of the Vermont senator’s supporters — Brighton Beach stands out as a Sanders stronghold surrounded by communities that favored Clinton.

Interestingly, Brighton Beach also showed up on WNYC’s list of neighborhoods where supporters strongly supported Donald Trump, which might signal Brighton residents lean towards candidates who challenge establishment politics. With 84.1 percent of registered Republicans voting Trump, Brighton had the sixth highest share of his supporters of any New York City neighborhood.

Trump’s wide margin of victory in Brighton Beach is somewhat surprising considering it was one of the few New York communities visited by his opponent Ted Cruz, who stopped by to make Matzo and speak at a local Synagogue.

Cruz, who earned zero delegates in the New York primary, did manage to get 40 percent of the vote in Midwood, according to WNYC. The neighborhood had the fifth highest share of Cruz supporters in the city.

To dive even deeper into the primary, check out the New York Times’ detailed analysis breaking down the election results block by block. The Times’ map shows a pretty lopsided battle in the Republican primary, where Trump won handily in almost every precinct. However, on the Democratic side, the fight for delegates raged on almost every block.

The battle for Brooklyn has also come under scrutiny after it was revealed that 125,000 of the borough’s voters had been purged from the system ahead of election day. The error came to light after WNYC reported 60,000 Brooklyn Democrats mysteriously disappeared from voter rolls. The Board of Elections later announced the number was much higher.

The purge was unique to Brooklyn. WNYC reports:

No other borough in New York City nor county in the rest of the state saw such a significant decline in active registered Democrats. In fact, only 7 of the state’s 62 counties saw a drop in the number of Democrats. Everywhere else saw the numbers increase.

Several elected officials, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, responded to the irregulars by calling for voting reforms and supporting an audit by Comptroller Scott Stringer’s office of the Board of Elections.

“There is nothing more sacred in our nation than the right to vote, yet election after election, reports come in of people who were inexplicably purged from the polls, told to vote at the wrong location or unable to get in to their polling site,” Stringer said in a statement.