New York Democratic blues

And while it may be small consolation to the departing congressman, themes Zeldin ran on helped push a swath of GOP congressional candidates over the line in newly created House districts. House Republican wins in New York are a big part of the reason a narrow 222-213 GOP majority will exist when the 118th Congress convenes. Zeldin can also claim at least some bragging rights for the fact that in the 2022 gubernatorial race, all 62 New York counties shifted toward the right from the 2020 presidential election, per the Times Union in Albany.

ANTHONY D’ESPOSITO LEADS HOUSE GOP SWEEP ON LONG ISLAND

As a gubernatorial candidate, Zeldin frequently talked up the scourge of rising crime across New York and nationally. He railed against a streak of shootings and other violent crimes, including a series of unprovoked attacks on New York City subways. Zeldin also was among the first to warn about a Democratic-written state law that ended cash bail, arguing it leads to the quick release of dangerous criminal suspects.

Zeldin often lamented stories of stabbings. It’s an issue that became starkly personal when, on July 21, a man bearing brass knuckles with sharp spikes on them attempted to stab the congressman at a campaign event in the Rochester-area town of Perinton. Zeldin was unharmed, but the episode played into his critique of Hochul’s administration as ignoring a crime plague sweeping the state.

“Cash bail and crime more generally became a massive issue,” said Garrett Ventry, a Republican consultant who advises House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY). “Even Democratic-leaning voters don’t like crime,” Ventry, originally from the Buffalo area, told the Washington Examiner.

Voters bore out that view in one of New York’s premier 2022 battlegrounds, Long Island, where Republicans swept all four House seats. This included the three new seats created from redistricting this year and the reelection of first-term Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-NY).

“Plenty of people in this area used to go into New York City all the time. Now they don’t bother since they’re worried about being robbed, mugged, attacked — or even just yelled at by the homeless,” Barbara Saeyang, 43, a nurse, said at a Starbucks on Hofstra Boulevard, in the Suffolk County, Long Island, community of Uniondale.

Saeyang said that after backing candidates from both parties over the years, on Nov. 8, she voted for Republican Anthony D’Esposito, a member of the Hempstead Town Council since 2016 and a former New York City Police Department detective. “He was the only one talking about crime concerns here,” Saeyang told the Washington Examiner over Thanksgiving weekend, with holiday shopping looming.

A few miles away in Uniondale, hotel bartender Phil LaBriola, 32, also cited crime as a motivation for his 2022 vote. He said he went for the GOP’s George Santos, soon to represent the northern Nassau County 3rd Congressional District.

But LaBriola’s critique of Democrats also tied his community’s fears of rising crime to an overall disdain for its party members being “woke,” as exemplified, he said, by progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose House district covers northern Queens and the eastern Bronx.

His beef with the party is as much attitudinal as over specific policy disagreements. “You’ve got to walk on eggshells with anything you say these days,” LaBriola said. “You can lose your job for calling somebody the wrong pronoun.”

The real ‘red wave’

The strong vote for Republican candidates in New York ran counter to recent New York political trends. Democrats hold every statewide office and large legislative majorities. And in 2020, President Joe Biden crushed former President Donald Trump 61% to 38% statewide despite the Queens-born incumbent’s native son status and his longtime Trump Tower residency in Manhattan before decamping to his Mar-a-Lago estate in South Florida.

The 2022 New York “red wave” proved an exception to otherwise desultory midterm elections for Republicans. Democrats added a seat to their Senate majority, giving them 51 seats to 49 for Republicans (Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote has tipped the majority to Senate Democrats for the last two years). Democrats also picked up governorships and flipped a series of state legislative chambers, among big midterm wins.

The only comparable bright spot for Republicans was in California, the blue behemoth. In the Golden State, a pair of newly created House seats went to Republican candidates: Reps.-elect John Duarte and Kevin Kiley. Meanwhile, a swath of House Republicans in California won reelection even though the newly configured districts in 2020 would have backed Biden over Trump: Reps. Mike Garcia, Young Kim, Michelle Steel, and David Valadao.

In Florida, GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis beat his Democratic opponent almost 60% to 40%, and the party won several new House seats. But Florida was already becoming a Republican state. Trump won there easily in 2020 despite losing the White House to Biden. So the 2022 midterm elections were more of a culmination of a long-building political trend in the Sunshine State.

The New York GOP wins, in contrast, crashed hard from the eastern tip of Long Island clear west to the Buffalo suburbs. Democrats won 15 House seats to 11 for Republicans. That’s a sharp move toward the right for New York’s House delegation, which currently has 19 Democrats to eight Republicans (New York lost a House seat after the 2020 census due to relatively slow population growth over the prior decade).

In addition to Esposito and Santos, who will represent the portions of Long Island closest to New York City, other Republicans set to be sworn into office when the House convenes on Jan. 3 are Nick LaLota (eastern Long Island and north shore of Suffolk County), Nick Langworthy (Buffalo suburbs and southwestern upstate New York), Michael Lawler (Lower Hudson Valley), Marc Molinaro (southeastern upstate New York), and Brandon Williams (the Syracuse and Utica areas).

The House Republican romp in New York didn’t end there. In the 11th District, encompassing Staten Island and southwestern Brooklyn, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) easily rebuffed a comeback bid by former Rep. Max Rose. New York also will have a seat at the GOP leadership table. Stefanik will continue as House Republican Conference chairwoman, which in the majority represents the No. 4 party leadership slot. Stefanik was first elected to the House in 2014 in a sprawling district stretching from the North Country, along the U.S.-Canada border, to the Albany area.

The 2022 election cycle also saw House Democrats in New York eat their own. When a state court-imposed redistricting plan went into effect, the House Democratic campaign chief, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, pushed freshman Rep. Mondaire Jones to abandon his reelection in the Lower Hudson Valley’s 17th District. Maloney openly said the new seat would be his clearest path to reelection, even though much of the territory would be new.

The move rankled many House Democrats, particularly members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. These furthest-left clutch of House Democrats saw Maloney’s move as putting his own political interests above those of the party, which already faced stiff political headwinds, with Biden’s disapproval ratings rising among the worst inflation in 40 years and stubbornly high gas prices.

Jones abandoned his reelection bid in his Westchester County political base and tried his luck in New York City. Jones joined a crowded primary field in the lower Manhattan and northwestern Brooklyn 10th District, one of the nation’s bluest enclaves, where winning the Democratic primary is tantamount to victory in the November general election. Jones, though, finished a distant third in the Democratic primary, behind now-Rep.-elect Dan Goldman.

Maloney’s campaign efforts were also a failure. Facing off against Lawler, a Republican assemblyman, Maloney faced the dual task of captaining the defense of Democrats’ already slim House majority while holding his own seat. Maloney’s multitasking didn’t work: Lawler beat Maloney, the first time a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman lost in a general election since 1980, and the Republicans wrested back the House majority, though by a much smaller margin than most pundits predicted.

Redistricting also ended the long political career of Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who since 1993 has represented districts covering the Upper East Side and stretching into Queens. But the court-imposed redistricting map effectively put her into a Democratic cage match with her crosstown House colleague and onetime friend, Rep. Jerrold Nadler. A stalwart liberal, Nadler has represented the Upper West Side and points south into Brooklyn since 2013.

The August primary proved the biggest New York rivalry since the 2000 New York Yankees beat the New York Mets in that year’s World Series as few issue differences separated Nadler and Maloney. Instead, personal foibles and nasty anonymous quotes dominated the race. Nadler in August easily won the Democratic primary for the redrawn 12th District, taking in both the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side.

A competitive 2024

Republicans are eager to see that the party’s 2022 successes can be solidified and expanded to make New York truly a competitive, two-party state. Such a development could offer a political road map for other large, blue-dominated states where Democrats hold the governorship and legislative majorities.

Zeldin’s near miss against a well-funded Democratic governor offers a simple and timeless but often-ignored lesson, said John Faso, a former Republican congressman from a Hudson Valley House district south of Albany.

“Lee Zeldin was highly focused on issues people care about,” Faso told the Washington Examiner. “Crime was and is a real issue. It had been the subject of numerous news stories and public reports. That and the economy always pop to the issue lists in polling.”

Faso helped orchestrate a pair of pro-Zeldin super PACs that spent more than $12 million, paid for largely by cosmetics heir and philanthropist Ron Lauder. According to Faso, Hochul and Democratic allies “tried to attack him over abortion and Donald Trump. But those were not of most concern to the voters.”

Ventry, the Republican consultant, said Democratic overreach in New York proved a potent GOP campaign tool, both for Zeldin in his governor bid and the party’s slew of successful House candidates. The redistricting process exemplified that theme.

Democrats, holding all levers of power, tried to push through a House map in which they could have plausibly won 22 seats to just four for Republicans. But that strongly blue map got struck down by a state court in Steuben County, along New York’s state line with Pennsylvania. The map that eventually became law, drawn by an independent “special master,” proved much more competitive for Republicans. Like the crime issue, Ventry said, power brokers in the state and national capitals “underestimated how one-party Democratic rule, not only in D.C. but Albany, is hurting New Yorkers.”

As for the crime issue that Zeldin emphasized so heavily on the gubernatorial campaign trail, New York Democratic operatives acknowledge Republicans got the upper hand. Democrats are going to have to find a better way to discuss crime-fighting in 2024 and beyond, said Basil Smikle, a former executive director of the New York State Democratic Party, because Democrats this year effectively decided that voter concerns about crime and disorder were nothing to worry about.

“Zeldin rode the national wave of messaging around crime, along with the economy, and tapped a lot of voters who would not have come out otherwise,” Smikle told the Washington Examiner. “Democrats have not been able to message this appropriately,” Smikle said. Democrats’ conundrum, he said, is that “within the party, any appearances of leaning into crime too much might have upset progressives. The problem is when you walk that line, you’re not pleasing anybody.”

After three decades of falling crime, Democrats specifically grew complacent and failed to recognize that a 2019 state law eliminating cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies was deeply unpopular, Smikle said. Even with Democrats winning all statewide offices this year, crime made many of the races too close for comfort, Smikle added. He noted that in addition to Hochul’s tight win over Zeldin, Attorney General Letitia James only beat her Republican rival 54%-46%. And Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer beat an underfunded and little-known opponent 56%-43% — hardly a landslide for the top Democrat in Congress.

What New York Democrats “should be concerned about is how close it came,” Smikle said.

Democrats, no doubt, will be looking to recoup lost political ground in 2024. And they’ll have at least some reason for optimism. The Democratic presidential nominee, whether Biden or somebody else, is likely to win New York, if not necessarily by the same blowout margin as in 2020.

And several of the new House seats won by Republicans backed Biden over Trump two years ago, including the districts of D’Esposito, Lawler, LaLota, Molinaro, Santos, and Williams. With House Democrats needing to net only five House seats in the 435-chamber to reclaim the majority, most or all these freshman Republican seats will be targeted.

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Home-state pride might also be at play in Democratic efforts to flip back these seats. Schumer is from Brooklyn. So is the new House Democratic leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries.

With Democrats holding a substantial lead over Republicans in voter registration, it’s quite a stretch to call the state a 2024 battleground in any meaningful way, Faso said. But down-ballot races will be another story, he noted, with the incoming House Republicans having decent shots to hold on to their seats. Crime and related 2022 campaign issues “will continue to have salience unless Democrats change policies, which I don’t think they will.”

David Mark is managing editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.