Most Americans voted for someone else in 2024, but as New York City’s public advocate said, “We’re going to have to stand together to get through this.”
New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams speaks at the People’s March in Washington Square Park in New York City on January 18, 2025.(Gabriele Holtermann / Sipa USA via AP Images)
Last Saturday’s anti-Trump People’s March in New York City concluded with a rally in Washington Square Park in the heart of Greenwich Village. The city government’s second-highest-ranking official, Jumaane Williams, began his remarks by recognizing that people were hurting and scared. “We’re facing tough times,” said Williams, a leading figure on the progressive left of New York politics for more than a decade. His demeanor somber but unbowed, he added, “There are hard days ahead.”
Williams is New York’s public advocate, an uncommon office in US politics that holds considerable, though often overlooked, potential influence. Notably, the public advocate stands second in the line of succession to the mayor; if the incumbent for any reason can no longer fulfill their duties, the public advocate automatically takes their place. So if current mayor Eric Adams goes down in the federal corruption trial scheduled for April—a distinct possibility—the most populous city in the United States could be led during the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency by Williams, a 48-year-old African American father of two daughters and self-described democratic socialist.
“I want everyone here to reach out and take the hand of the person next to you,” Williams told the crowd. “We’re going to have to stand together to get through this.” All of the protesters in this reporter’s line of sight took one another’s hands, if perhaps a bit self-consciously. “Now,” Williams continued, “I want everybody to tell the person whose hand you’re holding, ‘I will stand with you.’” Again with some self-consciousness but also now with a few grins, people near me murmured to each another, “I will stand with you.”
“We have to protect everyone” under threat from the Trump regime, Williams added, referencing immigrants, LGBTQ+, Black and brown New Yorkers, working people and youth. “We can make it through if we don’t let go of anyone’s hands.”
One of the signs bobbing above the crowd as it marched to Washington Square under chilly, gray skies offered an essential reminder: “49.8 Percent Is Not A Landslide.” Of course, Trump and his allies have been boasting since election night that he won a resounding landslide victory that gives him a popular mandate to implement his radical agenda. Most mainstream news coverage has uncritically repeated that claim.
But the claim is false. The official vote tally as monitored by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report shows that Trump won only 49.80 percent of the popular vote. The other 50.2 percent went mainly to Kamala Harris, who won 48.33 percent, with the remaining 1.87 percent spread among third-party candidates.
In other words, more Americans voted against Trump in 2024 than voted for him. Even in the Electoral College, where his margin was substantial, if a mere 114,884 voters in three states—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—had shifted from Trump to Harris, then Harris, not Trump, would have been the 47th president of the United States.
It’s no mystery why Trump wants to be seen as super popular: If people believe that lie, it makes his work easier. Citizens will be less likely to resist, members of Congress even more inclined to submit, and news organizations may think twice before questioning his actions. But math does not lie: The people who did not want Trump to be president are the majority, if only slightly. To disregard that fact undercuts that majority’s considerable power to oppose Trump and his Nazi-saluting allies.
The proportion of the anti-Trump majority who turned out for the People’s March in New York, however, was tiny: 1,500 people at most. Turnout was also very low at the main People’s March in Washington, DC., where 25,000 were reportedly in attendance. Those figures are dwarfed by the 1 million–plus protesters who filled the streets of Washington prior to Trump’s first inauguration, in 2017.
“We need to recognize that people are in pain and going through trauma,” Williams told me when asked about the low turnout. It’s wrongheaded, he added, to criticize folks for not showing up at these protests. “We want to pull people in, not push them away. We need to admit to them that the Democratic Party didn’t do what it should have done to prevent Trump from returning to power. And we need to keep giving people pathways to take action.”
Uptown in Harlem, one such pathway beckoned the following day when the historic Apollo Theater hosted its nineteenth annual celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in collaboration with public radio station WNYC. A peerless cathedral of African American song, the Apollo has featured Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Stevie Wonder, Alicia Keys, and hundreds of other Black musical giants over the past 90 years. Less known is that the Apollo is also a community center that promotes cultural awareness and political action. Steps from its entrance on 125th Street a commemorative sign marks the spot where a joyous crowd welcomed Nelson Mandela during his triumphant tour of the US in 1990 after the South African anti-apartheid leader was released after 27 years in prison.
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A recording of Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up” poured from the Apollo’s loudspeakers as a packed house patiently awaited this year’s program, “A Burning House.” The program title came from a conversation King had with his close friend the singer and activist Harry Belafonte, a week before King was assassinated in 1968. Noting that the war in Vietnam was intensifying while racism remained entrenched despite the civil rights movement’s victories—desegregating restrooms and other public facilities, gaining voting rights—King feared he was integrating Black people into “a burning house.” Belafonte asked what should be done. King replied, “We must become firefighters.”
At the People’s March, Williams channeled the sentiments of both King and Mandela: “Lots of us have read about tough periods in history and wondered what we would have done if we were there. Well, in two days [when Trump takes office], we’re there. I think of the generations before me who sacrificed so I could be here. I think of the generations to come who will look back at our generation. We have to shine as bright as we can for them.”
Next, a representative of Brooklyn Young Democrats leaned into the point that most Americans don’t agree with Trump—for example, nearly six in 10 oppose pardoning the January 6 insurrectionists, a Reuters/IPSOS poll found—and thus could be swayed by strategic outreach. “We believe that people across political affiliations, from leftists to liberals to centrists and libertarians and even Republicans, don’t want billionaires running our government,” said Carlos Calzadilla-Palacio. “We need to meet people where there are. And working at the local level, individuals can have a real impact.”
“Showing up at a march like today might not be your thing,” said the Rev. Amanda Hambrick Ashcraft of Middle Collegiate Church, a multiracial church in New York with the intentionally double-meaning motto, “Just Love.” “That’s fine,” she said, “there are other things that need doing: attending meetings, making phone calls, contacting public officials. But find your thing to do. Because we need everyone.”
Mark HertsgaardTwitterMark Hertsgaard is the environment correspondent of The Nation and the executive director of the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now. His new book is Big Red’s Mercy: The Shooting of Deborah Cotton and A Story of Race in America.