Janae Pierre: Welcome to NYC NOW, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Janae Pierre. A new report finds half of all calls made on the MTA's blue help box in subway stations were prank calls. The report from the MTA's inspector general examined calls last year over a six-month period. It found 1,200 emergency calls weren't answered at all and one-fourth of calls about things like someone on the tracks or an injured person were not answered within 15 seconds, the nationwide 911 standard.

The office recommends the MTA adds cameras and institute a $50 fine for prank calls. The MTA says the agency is looking at the IG's recommendation. If you're in the city this weekend and you're looking for some less crowded places to hang out, WNYC's Ryan Kailath has some suggestions for you.

Ryan Kailath: If you're like me and love a hotel lobby bar with a fireplace, the ones at The Marlton Hotel in Greenwich Village or Bowery Hotel downtown feel especially like a mountain cabin. The New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx has a themed light show for The Nightmare Before Christmas. It's an hour-long walk through the grounds with projections and sculptures from the Tim Burton Classic. Another personal favorite is to skip Black Friday and go thrifting instead. There are 10 housing work stores around the city, and with parts of town emptied out for the holiday, they're more relaxed than usual.

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Janae Pierre: Governor Kathy Hochul is expanding protections available to domestic violence victims and their families. The governor signed into law new legislation that makes a wider group of people eligible for protection by restraining orders in domestic violence cases. Melanie's Law is named after 29-year-old Melanie Chianese, who was murdered by her mother's ex boyfriend two years ago. At the signing, Hochul thanked Melanie's mother.

Governor Kathy Hochul: If it wasn't for the relentless advocacy of her mother, her story would have been buried a year and a half ago when we lost her, but her mother Cheryl said no, "No, my daughter deserved more. The system failed my little girl."

Janae Pierre: Under the previous law, orders of protection only covered children under age 18. The new law makes eligible all family members as well as friends and roommates.

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Janae Pierre: Up next, a traditionally Democratic district in Queens surprised many by showing significant Republican support in the recent election. What's behind the shift? That story after the break.

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Speaker 4: This is NYC NOW.

Janae Pierre: Few political figures draw as much attention as Republican President elect Donald Trump and Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Both won their most recent elections, Ocasio-Cortez by a wider margin in her district than Trump nationally. Yet Trump gained ground in traditionally Democratic areas, including parts of Ocasio-Cortez's district. My colleague Tiffany Hansen spoke with WNYC's Brigid Bergen, who visited neighborhoods in Queens where voters supported both parties.

Tiffany Hansen: All right, so first of all, tell us where you went and why did you pick that spot.

Brigid Bergen: Just to put this in context, we're talking about the 14th congressional district, and I went specifically to the Queens part of the district. The district itself includes parts of Queens and the Bronx. Election districts are the smallest geographic units the Board of Election uses to assign voters. There are about 400 of them in the entire 14th congressional district, and thanks to some analysis, voter turnout by Steve Ramaluski over at the CUNY mapping center, the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center, we were actually able to identify the 13 election districts that were won by both Ocasio-Cortez and Trump.

Since I wanted to find those split ticket voters, that's where I went. Basically, I was in two areas around East Elmhurst and North Corona.

Tiffany Hansen: All right, so got it. What did people who voted for Ocasio-Cortez and Trump say to you?

Brigid Bergen: A lot of very interesting perspectives. One of the first people who really wanted to talk to me was Anna Marte. She's 65, owns her small two-story home in North Corona. She's a retired hairdresser who used to work on Manhattan's east side, and she has four adult children. Who did you vote for, if you want to talk about it?

Anna Marte: Oh, [unintelligible 00:04:39]

Brigid Bergen: What made you vote for him?

Anna Marte: Because I don't know, my daughter, they say, "Oh, he's pretty good," because-- not very good, but the one that we have now was not that good.

Brigid Bergen: For Marte, she had really big concerns about migrants in her community and public safety. She said there was actually a temporary encampment on her street corner until some building scaffolding had been taken down. It was there for a couple years, actually. She also said, at one point during the summer, people who she didn't know began sleeping in her backyard, and she's installed security cameras. She voted for Trump at the urging of her kids, but she split her vote. Do you remember voting for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Anna Marte: Yes.

Brigid Bergen: Why did you vote for her?

Anna Marte: Because we need somebody new. Maybe they do something-- We need change. [laughs]

Brigid Bergen: You hear that same voter looking for change pick two different candidates to produce it.

Tiffany Hansen: You mentioned the migrant issue there, a concern for that voter specifically. I'm wondering if you heard other issues bubble to the top as you spoke with other voters in the district.

Brigid Bergen: Yes, I spoke to several voters who didn't want to give me their names, and overall, I heard a lot of really resentment from some longer-term immigrants that saw the support given to some of the current migrants as receiving handouts. This was the way 76-year-old Primitivo Collado said it to me when.

Primitivo Collado: We came in this country so we can work. I come [unintelligible 00:06:23] this country, I started work.

Brigid Bergen: Others I talked to just expressed a general feeling of insecurity. Here's Benito Cortez. He's 79.

Benito Cortez: Everything is [unintelligible 00:06:34] here. After seven o'clock, you cannot go out. They mug you. It's terrible.

Brigid Bergen: Now, I asked him, Tiffany, if he personally had been the victim of a violent crime, and he had not been, but he said he knew people who had and generally just felt unsafe.

Tiffany Hansen: Got it. All right, so crime, as we know from the election, right, crime and the migrant issue both top concerns for voters. We heard that here. Some of the voters you spoke with were one-time immigrants themselves. Did they feel bothered at all by comments the former president and president elect has made in the past about immigrants?

Brigid Bergen: Those voters who I spoke to who supported Trump really seemed to have filtered it out. I spoke to one Harris voter in the district who was struggling with that very issue. Kareem Abdullah is 47, originally from West Africa. He described having that exact kind of conversation with friends and neighbors who supported Trump. He said often in a conversation with another person of color, he would push them to explain how they could support Trump given his rhetoric.

Kareem Abdullah: When you ask them, they're like, "No, I don't care, I don't care--" Then, some people have problem with migrant. I'm like, "But you were children of immigrant. Why you have problem with migrants?" They don't have answer.

Brigid Bergen: Now, I will note at the same time that he struggled with those conversations, Abdullah said he's actually not that worried about a second Trump term. He's just looking for ways to get through it.

Tiffany Hansen: People who know Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez know that she's very active on social media. She-- [crosstalk]

Brigid Bergen: Absolutely.

Tiffany Hansen: Right? She did go on to Instagram after the election to talk about what happened basically. She's not the only Democrat that's trying to figure that out.

Brigid Bergen: That's right. There's a lot of analysis out there from Democrats about why they underperformed. A lot of it's top down. There are also some elected officials here in the city that are trying to take some lessons from this most recent election. Assembly member Zohran Mamdani went to two spots in the Bronx and Queens where he actually just held up a sign and asked voters to tell him what was on their minds and put together a video that shared some of the perspectives he learned from these voters.

In an interview with him afterwards, he told me he plans to take that kind of feedback and make sure it informs his platform because he is also a candidate for mayor next year. Instead of telling people what he thinks they should port, he wants to be responding to their actual concerns. Here's a little bit of what he said.

Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani: You cannot go to someone that is struggling to afford the price of eggs and tell them this is an incredible economy and we have low levels of unemployment because those statistics have not translated into all that much for so many of these New Yorkers' lives.

Brigid Bergen: Going forward, we may see these officials talking less and listening more in the election season ahead.

Janae Pierre: That's WNYC's Brigid Bergen in conversation with my colleague Tiffany Hansen. Thanks for listening to NYC NOW from WNYC. Catch us every weekday three times a day. I'm Janae Pierre. We'll be back tomorrow.

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