[ On a night when things mostly went right for the party, the
Empire State’s liberal leaders will be left to rue their costly
errors and campaign struggles. State Dems sought to punish the Left in
New York, instead lost control of Congress.]
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IF THE GOP RETAKES THE HOUSE, BLAME NEW YORK’S BUMBLING, DEMOCRATS
 
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Alex Thomas
November 9, 2022
The New Republic
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_ On a night when things mostly went right for the party, the Empire
State’s liberal leaders will be left to rue their costly errors and
campaign struggles. State Dems sought to punish the Left in New York,
instead lost control of Congress. _

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Representative Sean
Patrick Maloney, in photo last month, lost election to MAGA Republican
Mike Lawler., (Seth Wenig/AP Photo // Politico)

 

For the third election cycle in a row, Democrats around the country
woke up happy on Wednesday morning. The red wave that had been
predicted to wash across the shores of this midterm election failed
to materialize
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and many of Trump’s handpicked candidates fell across the
country—Doug Mastriano and Dr. Mehmet Oz lost in Pennsylvania, Don
Bolduc flopped in New Hampshire, and Herschel Walker failed to avoid a
runoff in Georgia. But while pundits love appearing on Wednesday
morning to announce that the elections were proof of some sort of
referendum, there are always caveats to that blanket statement. And on
the morning after an otherwise sweet election night, some Democrats
woke up with a bitter taste in their mouths.

One jagged little pill came early in the evening on Tuesday.
Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio both carried
wide margins and alerted political watchers to what should have been
standard knowledge—Florida is no longer a swing state
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But an even more worrisome result emerged as the dawn broke: While
Democrats in New York could take some satisfaction in the fact that
Trump-backed gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin shared the poor
fortune of the former president’s other faves in his loss to
Democratic incumbent Kathy Hochul, the Empire State’s Republicans
outperformed expectations up and down the ballot. In a state where
there are twice as many
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Democrats as Republicans, that shouldn’t happen.

The most notable loss for Democrats came in the suburbs north of New
York City, where DCCC Chairman Sean Patrick Maloney lost by a few
thousand votes. Maloney’s opponent, Mike Lawler, campaigned
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crime and inflation—messaging strategies that the national GOP
pushed hard but which resonated particularly outside of New York City.
Maloney’s loss shone a savage light on the Democrats’ struggle to
redraw their district maps to claim the same sort of partisan
advantage that Republicans have taken in recent years.

The powerful Democrat somehow managed to end up as both the biggest
victim and the biggest villain of the redistricting snafu. Rather than
run for the seat he represented for five terms, he instead switched to
another district after New York Democrats’ deep blue congressional
map was thrown out by New York’s highest court. Maloney reportedly
warned
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party at the time that the new Republican-leaning map portended “an
extinction-level event” for Democrats, but he only aided in the
calamity by jumping into a new district, pushing out Mondaire
Jones—a popular Democratic incumbent—and then failing to win.

Maloney’s travails are but a slice of the carnage that Democrats
endured as a result of the redistricting chaos. The final map was
drawn by a Carnegie Mellon postdoctoral fellow named Jonathan Cervas,
who was appointed
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a special master by the state’s Supreme Court. What Cervas produced
was immediately viewed as disastrous for Democrats and set the stage
for an intense round of unexpected party infighting, as top
Democrats—House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler and Oversight Chair
Carolyn Maloney—were pitted against each other in a primary
election. (Nadler prevailed.) Former New York Congressman Steve
Israel told _The New Republic_
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the time, “This was the most calamitous and least predictable
outcome for New York. Nobody thought we’d go from an initial map
where we’d pick up as many as six seats to a map where we lose as
many as two, and maybe more.”

In the end, that map gave New York Republicans a slew of unexpected
down-ballot victories on Tuesday night. It was perhaps the only part
of the country where Republicans plucked surprise victories—most of
last night’s shock results ran in a decidedly leftward direction.

One New York–based Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity to
speak candidly, argued that blame for much of the drubbing could be
laid at the feet of a dysfunctional state Democratic Party: If the
state party had encouraged the strongest candidates to stay in their
respective districts, the outcome could have been different, the
strategist said. On Long Island, Representative Tom Suozzi ran for
governor and Representative Kathleen Rice retired because of their
concerns over winning their redrawn districts, and in the Hudson
Valley, Representative Mondaire Jones was pushed out by Maloney.

Meanwhile, Representative Antonio Delgado was selected as lieutenant
governor by Hochul, leaving his competitive district wide
open. “Frankly, he didn’t add anything to that ticket. [Hochul]
would have had the same exact performance as she did with or without
Antonio Delgado, and I bet you Antonio Delgado would have retained
that congressional seat, even after redistricting,” the strategist
said. “I think the Democrats really suffered from a real vacuum of
party leadership that could have adjudicated some of these musical
chairs.”

For many Democratic operatives, that vacuum of leadership goes all the
way to the governor’s mansion, where Kathy Hochul is on pace to
carry the state by only five points. By comparison, Joe Biden won New
York by 23 points in 2020. Hochul essentially allowed the Democratic
legislature to draw its own overly optimistic (and, it turns out,
unconstitutional) map. And while Hochul was a hit on the fundraising
circuit, she was something of a nonentity on the campaign trail,
offering an empty narrative as Zeldin pushed with his aggressive one
on crime and inflation. By summer’s end, the Republican had built
substantial inroads around the state and was all but setting the
agenda. As the campaign entered the home stretch, Hochul was forced to
play the game by Zeldin’s terms, abandoning her well-worn attacks on
his anti-abortion stances and responding instead to his broadsides
about inflation and crime—two topics that, by then, had become
avoid-at-all-costs issues for most Democrats.

The incumbent’s blitheness was nevertheless persistent. Only a few
days before the election, Hochul put in an appearance on MSNBC where,
after she parroted some well-polished but unconvincing talking points,
she seemed genuinely surprised
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Ruhle told her that New Yorkers “aren’t feeling good.” Hochul
eventually caught on and brought in Joe Biden to make a last-minute
campaign appearance in Yonkers.

Another longtime New York Democratic strategist told _The New
Republic_, “It all really just comes down to the fact that she just
didn’t campaign, didn’t do anything to energize voters until the
final five minutes of this thing. I don’t think enough blame can be
laid at her feet for how she handled this.”

In short, New York Democrats fell victim to a mess of their own making
and may have cost their party a majority in the House of
Representatives as a result. But if there is a positive spin on New
York’s rough election night for Democrats, it’s that this isn’t
an ironclad future—there aren’t real signs that New York is
becoming a true “swing state,” despite the gains by Republicans.
The reasons for the underperformance are clear: Democrats got greedy
and attempted to overplay their hand on the congressional map, the New
York political machine campaigned poorly, and the Republicans battered
them on issues that resonate uniquely in the suburbs. These are all
problems that can be repaired in the next election cycle. But all that
is certainly little comfort on Wednesday morning as the red wave that
missed the rest of the country came crashing down in the Empire State.

_Grace Segers contributed reporting to this story._

_[Alex Thomas is based in Washington, D.C., and has written
for Playboy, Air Mail, and LitHub. @AlexThomas
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* 2022 Elections
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* New York
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* New York State
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* Democratic Party
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* WFP
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* Working Families Party
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* Electoral Politics
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* electoral strategy
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* Congress
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* Biden Administration
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* 2024 Elections
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* Kathy Hochul
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* DSA
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* Democratic Socialists of America
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* Sean Patrick Maloney
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* AOC
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* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
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