In a bold effort to reach blue voters as the November election approaches, Donald Trump’s campaign is planning his first rally in New York state since 2016, in the particularly Democratic area of the South Bronx.
On Friday, the former president’s campaign announced that the rally will be held on Thursday at 6 p.m. in Crotona Park, with a reported capacity of 3,500 people.
This will mark Trump’s first rally in the state since an upstate Buffalo event during his first presidential campaign. In the 2020 election, Biden swamped him, gaining 76% of the city’s vote, and 60.87% of the vote statewide.
This move from his campaign also comes after a record-breaking rally in the strongly blue-voting state of New Jersey last week that had nearly 100,000 attendees.
In the announcement of the Bronx rally, Trump’s campaign made multiple remarks directed at President Biden’s policies over the past few years regarding crime and inflation in the city.
“Both New York City and the state at large have been ravaged by monumental surges in violent crime as a direct result of Biden’s and Democrats’ pro-criminal policies,” the announcement read. “Murders in New York City are up 23.1 percent from 2019 levels, while felony assault is up 35.4 percent. These upticks are incomprehensible and devastating.”
His incursion into the Bronx, where much of the population are Democratic minority voters, may not be welcomed. That demographic constitutes a considerably low portion of his voters.
Rep. Ritchie John Torres, a Democrat who represents New York’s 15th Congressional District, which is zoned where the rally is being held, expressed distaste with Trump’s scheduled visit on behalf of the local community.
“The South Bronx has no greater enemy than Donald Trump, who is on a mission to dismantle the social safety net on which Bronx families depend for their survival,” he said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “Trump is and always has been a fraud. The South Bronx- the most Democratic area in the nation- will not buy the snake oil that he is selling.”
While some business owners of the area may be in support of Trump’s harsher plans relating to crime ways to boost the economy, a significant number of Bronx voters that oppose his conservative policies may prove to be more difficult to win over.
