Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally on Wednesday, October 30, 2024, dressed as a sanitation worker
New York City officials have confirmed what other local jurisdictions are reporting: there’s been a Trump bump in the number of marriages performed around the country.
The city doesn’t track couples’ gender or immigration status, so there is no data on who exactly is getting married, but anecdotal evidence suggests many marriages are taking place out of fear marriage equality for same-sex couples could be imperiled in a second Trump administration.
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The City Clerk’s office in New York, which oversees the Marriage Bureau there, recorded 8,537 marriage license appointments made in November 2024, the same month Trump was elected to a second term. That’s a 33% increase compared to November last year, according to data the agency shared with The City.
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In the two weeks leading up to the election, the city tracked about 1,500 marriage license appointments each week. That number jumped to 2,365 the week following the election, a 55% increase. The number of appointments remained above average for the rest of the month. The wedding fever dipped to 1,914 appointments the week ending on December 3.
“We already fought for it. I don’t want to have to do it again,” Ryan Addario, 36, said of marriage equality as he was leaving the Marriage Bureau in Lower Manhattan with his new husband, Nicholas Caycedo, 39. The pair call the Bronx home.
“I just didn’t want to have any potential obstacles,” he said.
The longtime couple, like others interviewed there on a recent morning, expressed concerns a conservative super-majority could overturn the 2015 Obergefell decision that legalized same sex-marriage. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have been clear about their intention to do so if the opportunity arises.
Trump, while surrounding himself with anti-LGBTQ+ staff and appointees, hasn’t made marriage equality a campaign issue.
His incoming press secretary Karoline Leavitt told NBC News that LGBTQ+ people worried about the future of marriage equality “are sadly mistaken and have fallen for the fear mongering from the media.” She added overturning marriage equality “was never a campaign promise” Trump made.
“I don’t think that the Supreme Court is going to outright overturn marriage equality with a 6–3 conservative majority,” Slate legal analyst and Supreme Court correspondent Mark Joseph Stern said on the outlet’s Outward podcast recently. “But I do think that if, say, Justice Sonia Sotomayor dies under Trump and he replaces her, that there’s a very good chance that the Supreme Court could overturn marriage equality.”
Attorney Diana Adams, executive director of the Chosen Family Law Center, advised unmarried same-sex couples, particularly those with children, to establish a legal connection with longtime partners and children in their relationship as a form of insurance.
“Having a legal connection to your child, having a legal connection to your partner is very, very helpful. And so if you were intending to get married, this is the time to get married,” Adams said.
It’s possible some obsessive newlyweds were just celebrating their fellow New Yorker’s (relative) electoral success in the Big Apple. Trump almost doubled his vote margin in his native Queens when compared with 2020, for instance, while Harris took the city as a whole with 68% of the vote.
As for Staten Island, fuhgeddaboudit. Trump only built on his previous popularity in the fifth borough, netting nearly 70% of the vote in 2024. Data for Staten Island-specific marriages wasn’t available.
The urgency outside the Marriage Bureau was accompanied by the joy attendant the same ceremonies no matter who is in the White House.
“There’s so much uncertainty in the world right now and so much uncertainty with what will occur in the next coming year with this new presidency,” said Bronx resident Caycedo. “The one thing that is certain is our love. And I was like, ‘let’s surrender to that.’”
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