[ Republicans across the country campaigned on crime. Nowhere did
it resonate more than in New York.]
[[link removed]]

NEW YORK DEMOCRATS DIDN’T DEFEND THEIR BAIL LAW CHANGES. IT BIT
THEM AT THE POLLS.  
[[link removed]]


 

Anna Gronewold
November 27, 2022
Politico
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed].]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Republicans across the country campaigned on crime. Nowhere did it
resonate more than in New York. _

Kathy Hochul speaks to supporters during her election-night party
Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2022, in New York. , Mary Altaffer/AP Photo

 

NEW YORK — New York Democrats knew Republicans would hammer them
over public safety during the midterms. They expected the messaging
around changes to the state’s bail laws — the claims that the
so-called reforms had actually allowed dangerous criminals to roam the
streets.

State lawmakers and Gov. Kathy Hochul even took steps to insulate
themselves, rolling back some of the changes
[[link removed]] and
devising a fact-based response to the attacks.

But it didn’t work. And Democratic Party leaders are trying to
understand why.

Republicans across the country campaigned on crime. Nowhere did it
resonate more than in New York, where the GOP flipped three House
seats
[[link removed]] and
won two open races, propelling the party to the majority.

“This was a nationally coordinated campaign by the Republicans, and
we did not, frankly, rise to the occasion to explain to people what we
did do and how the point was and still is not to criminalize poverty
— it’s to criminalize criminals,” state Senate Majority Leader
Andrea Stewart-Cousins said in an interview.

Democratic strategists and advocates for the bail changes say some of
the messaging failed for a simple reason: No one was explicitly
championing the bail laws and the reasons for them to voters.

That included Hochul, who won by a narrow six points. She campaigned
on public safety, after being repeatedly criticized
[[link removed]] by
her GOP opponent Lee Zeldin, but struggled to highlight the fact that
she held up the state budget in April to get reluctant lawmakers to
toughen the bail laws amid complaints across the state, including from
Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

“New York was arguably the epicenter of a diverse and highly
energized criminal justice reform movement — but you wouldn’t know
it based on the rhetoric from this past election cycle,” said Jason
Kaplan, a senior vice president at public affairs firm SKDK who helped
run Democratic campaigns this year.

Republicans blasted the airwaves — fueled by $12 million from
cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder — with sepia-toned conjectures that the
bail laws, which Democrats have tweaked twice since passing, have been
responsible for rising crime and New Yorkers widespread sense of
unease, despite little evidence to back up their claims.

And they suggested that politicians who have supported the laws were
backing criminals over law-abiding citizens. The laws ended cash bail
for most misdemeanors and non-violent felonies as a way to avoid poor
people, often minorities, from languishing in jail awaiting the
adjudication of their cases.

While state and city data showed the bail laws didn’t increase
recidivism rates, some individual cases were highlighted by
Republicans and Adams to rail against instances where people released
without bail committed new crimes.

[Representative-elect Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) gives an interview during
new member orientation at the U.S. Capitol.]

Republican Mike Lawler beat Democratic Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney in a
critical swing race in the Hudson Valley, in part on a crime-fighting
message. | Francis Chung/E&E News/POLITICO

Part of Republican House candidate Mike Lawler’s attacks against
Hudson Valley Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney that carried him to victory
[[link removed]] was
regularly reupping a years old, six-second clip
[[link removed]] of Maloney, the
chairperson of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, saying
ending cash bail would be a “top priority.”

Maloney recognized the poor messaging after his loss, saying it was
more of a factor than new district lines that led to more competitive
races in the suburbs. While the campaign committee he led was able to
diffuse expectations of a Republican landslide, Maloney wasn’t
successful in his own race and neighboring ones.

“It was our inability to speak to voters in suburban New York City
— again under any iteration of the maps that — that could have
made the difference,” Maloney said Nov. 10 on MSNBC. “I think we
own that as Democrats.”

Democrats attempted to pivot toward other public safety measures like
combating gun violence, trying to explain that statistics don’t show
New York as less safe than other large cities and citing numbers that,
so far, have not indicated the bail laws are directly tied to
individuals arrested for violent crimes
[[link removed]].

“I’m always data driven,” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Bronx
Democrat, said after the elections during Democrats’ annual SOMOS
conference in Puerto Rico. “I keep trying to tell people — before
bail reform, 18 percent of people were rearrested, and after bail
reform, 19 percent.

“I get it,” Heastie added. “The perception people have is they
don’t feel safe, and that’s something we have to deal with. But,
again, I’m just not sure what people want.”

The response to the Republican attacks — despite attempts at
correcting the record — didn’t necessarily hit home with voters
who feel scared, Hochul said Tuesday.

“This is about making sure that people know that we’re doing
everything we can to keep them safe. And perhaps that message was not
delivered, ” she told reporters after an unrelated press conference
in Manhattan. “Obviously, that was not successful in certain
communities who were hearing other voices and seeing other messaging
and seeing other advertising with a contrary message about our
priorities.”

She added: “I suspect more could have been done to make sure that
people know that this was a high priority of ours.”

[Luis Sepúlveda speaks.]

Sen. Luis Sepulveda (D-Bronx) said advocates in support of bail reform
should have been more vocal during the recent elections as Republicans
vilified the laws as a culprit for rising crime. | Hans Pennink/AP
Photo

In 2019, Democrats’ criminal justice reforms were bolstered by
campaigns from advocacy groups highlighting the aims of the laws: to
create safer communities by ensuring thousands of mostly minority New
Yorkers wouldn’t jam up the jail system pretrial because they
couldn’t afford bail.

So where was the pro-bail reform campaign, not just defending, but
championing the laws this year? Largely non-existent.

“I don’t know what the reason is,” said state Sen. Luis
Sepulveda (D-Bronx), who cosponsored the initial 2019 bail reform law
and has fought against its changes. “I just know that one of the
messages that we have to send to our advocates is that when we go out
there and we fight for the right causes, we have to stay together to
deliver messages so that the Republican Party doesn’t muddy the
waters and uses certain areas to demonize us.”

One issue for Democrats was that some of those advocacy groups that
lobbied for ending cash bail have since lost resources. One of the
2019 reforms’ big financial backers was billionaire hedge fund
investor Dan Loeb through a coalition of local and national nonprofits
called New Yorkers United for Justice. Loeb pulled his funding from
the group this year, after the laws were passed and as the reforms
became a matter of Democratic infighting
[[link removed]].

Loeb spent this cycle pouring money into a curious blend of campaigns,
including Republican Mehmet Oz’s U.S. Senate run in Pennsylvania and
Republicans’ Senate Leadership fund, as well as Hochul’s campaign,
Republican Harry Wilson’s run in the New York gubernatorial primary,
and Fair Just and Safe NY PAC, which purports to support candidates
who have advanced pretrial reforms and parole changes.

“Coalitions like New Yorkers United for Justice are so effective
because they can bring diverse groups together to mobilize, energize
and educate voters on why criminal justice reform is so critical,”
said Kaplan, whose firm previously handled communications for the
group. “There is a real opportunity for a new coalition to pick up
the mantle of defending progress like bail reform and pushing and
giving political cover to Democrats so they can go further.”

But it wasn’t just the availability of money and resources.
Supporters of the bail laws arguably have a harder message to sell,
said Marvin Mayfield, director of organizing at Center for Community
Alternatives.

From a public messaging perspective, the narrative that bail reform is
bad is straightforward and emotionally riveting. Explaining the
nuances of it in a 30-second clip is more difficult.

Zeldin’s “Hochul Let My Family Down”
[[link removed]] ad, for example,
highlighted the story of a 93-year-old woman who was “tortured and
killed” at home by a suspect released after previous offenses. But
much of the Republican rhetoric took liberties with hypothetical
outcomes and often in the stories cited by Republicans, the bail
laws had no practical effect
[[link removed]] on
how the charges were handled.

Still, a story for the opposing narrative — why the bail laws are
successful — isn’t so splashy, Mayfield said. And few individuals
who experience a positive effect from the new laws are looking to
highlight a low-level conviction to the masses, he said.

Mayfield himself spent 11 months on Rikers Island because he could not
afford to pay bail, and then took a guilty plea for a crime he says he
did not commit.

“For many, bail reform means they can return to their families and
their jobs and, if their cases are dismissed, they can fully return to
their lives without the trauma of pretrial incarceration or the
coercion to plead guilty,” he said. “At that point, people do not
want their names and faces splashed across the headlines; they simply
want to move on.”

[Kathy Hochul and Eric Adams attend a news conference.]

New York City Mayor Eric Adams will be pushing Gov. Kathy Hochul and
state lawmakers to continue to make changes to the state's bail laws
during the legislative session that starts in January. | Yuki
Iwamura/AP Photo

But the issue is sure to linger in the coming legislative session in
Albany.

Lawmakers and Hochul will enter the six-month session in January with
renewed pressure after the election results to address any other
changes to the bail laws that could be made. Adams briefly stopped his
criticism of the bail law in the weeks leading up to the election. But
he has vowed to press again for new measures, such as using
“dangerousness” as a factor for judges to set bail — something
Democratic legislative leaders view as too subjective.

“We don’t have to do away with the reforms. The criminal justice
system was in the wrong direction,” Adams said Nov. 10 on MSNBC.
“But when you look at those repeated offenders, particularly those
who use guns, and I’m really excited about this legislative
cycle.”

Legislative leaders said they are willing to talk with Adams and
others about bail changes, but they suggested they will need to be
convinced that more tweaks are needed.

“I’m always open to talk to people if there is more information
and more data,” Stewart-Cousins said. “But again, every single
research that has been done has really shown there is no correlation
between the bail reforms we did and crime.”

_Anna Gronewold is a POLITICO New York Playbook writer based in
Albany. She has covered state government in New York, North Carolina
and Nebraska for The Associated Press and previously reported on
business and finance for Morning Consult in Washington, D.C. She is a
graduate of the University of Nebraska’s College of Journalism and
Mass Communications._

_Joseph Spector contributed reporting._

* bail reform
[[link removed]]
* New York Election
[[link removed]]
* crime
[[link removed]]
* political strategy
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed].]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]