As Skullrusher just pointed out, Charles, your extrapolation is not necessarily accurate. In fact, MANY of the people killed in the collapse of the towers were support staff and others who do not live in Manhattan, and many of the white collar workers killed actually lived in the suburbs of New York City. In addition, many who are registered voters in Manhattan in 2010 (which appears to be the basis of the polling) may not have lived anywhere near New York City 9 years ago. Many of today’s Manhattan residents were high school or college students elsewhere in the world in September 2001. The supposition that “Manhattan residents [are] the people who live and work near Ground Zero, and who experienced the 9/11 attacks first hand” is not necessarily accurate.

The far more likely explanation for the polling results, as several have suggested, is that Manhattan residents tend to self-identify (and vote) as liberals on a far greater scale than the largely blue-collar residents of the other boroughs in New York City. I suspect that if the polling results could be broken down to reflect how respondends within Manhattan identified their general political leanings (i.e., liberal, moderate, conservative) or if a statistical analysis could be done to account for the different proportions of respondents in each borough who identified as liberal/moderate/conservative, the results would show that liberal Manhattanites’ views and liberal Staten Islanders’ views were similar, as are the views of conservative Manhattanites and conservative Staten Islanders.