Why New York Democrats Got Crushed in the Midterms-Part 1

New York is supposed to be one of the bluest states in the Union.  So how could Republicans flip four seats in Congress?  Why did Governor Kathy Hochul win her race by only five points, in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one? 

These results were particularly stunning because several of the Republican candidates were hard-core Trump acolytes. That included Lee Zeldin, a MAGA Congressman from Long Island whose race against Hochul turned into a nail-biter for Democrats. 

We have to be careful about interpreting election results, but three key factors probably caused the Democrats’ poor showing.  State Democrats’ arrogant attempt to gerrymander the electoral map backfired, and some Democratic Congressional candidates paid the price.  Republicans turned the election into a referendum on crime, while Democrats fumbled badly on that issue.  Gov. Hochul ran a lackluster campaign, so Democrat candidates did not have any coattails to ride on. 

The loss of these four Congressional seats was devastating for the Democratic Party overall.  To put this in perspective, Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives by gaining eight seats, so their wins in New York were critically important.

Governor Kathy Hochul/Getty Images

The Dangers of One-Party Rule

Democrats suffered this fiasco in large part because of a self-inflicted wound.  With supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature, the Democrats abused their power and overreached. They rammed through a highly gerrymandered plan to redraw election districts.  

The Democrats openly defied voters’ expressed wishes on this issue, and they violated norms of good legislative conduct, which generated a lot of bad publicity. The negative PR probably hurt them with independent voters, and in the end, their maneuvers put them at a disadvantage in some key districts. 

As background, voters had approved a ballot initiative calling for New York State to set up an advisory commission to redraw election districts after the 2020 census. Voters clearly wanted to stop gerrymandering.  However, the reform suffered from some major flaws. Among them: the committee could only recommend a map, which the legislature could accept or reject at its discretion. 

A Gerrymander that Boomeranged

That is precisely what happened. The Democratic state legislators ignored the committee’s maps and created their own, highly biased one. Their goal, which they explicitly stated, was to pick up three more seats in Congress.  Instead, their maneuver backfired, badly.     

Outraged Republicans sued to nullify the new maps. As the litigation proceeded, candidates spent months campaigning in the newly designed districts. But in April, with the primaries already in full swing, the state’s Court of Appeals threw out the map.  The court appointed an independent expert, who drew up a completely new electoral map, which reconfigured numerous districts.

Candidates in Congressional races had to scramble and, in several cases, they had to adjust to radically new boundaries. The Democrats probably lost at least two Congressional seats because of their gerrymandering shenanigans. 

Trouble In the Hudson Valley

Two Democratic Congressmen in the Hudson Valley, Sean Patrick Maloney and Mondaire Jones, were popular in their former districts.  Maloney, a centrist, had represented his district for 10 years and become a pillar of the Democratic caucus in the House. Maloney was the powerful chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which finances races across the country.  Jones had served only one term, but as a young, progressive, Black Representative, he was a rising star in the party.  Both men probably would have won re-election under the previous (pre-2022) electoral map. 

But in Maloney’s reconfigured district, which included more Republican voters, he would have faced a difficult race.  In a carpetbagging move, Maloney announced he would run in a different newly drawn district, which included most of Jones’ former territory, as well as some of Maloney’s old turf.  Taking one for the Democratic Party, the less-senior Jones gracefully defused the situation by deciding to run for a seat in Brooklyn.  (He lost.) 

Republicans’ Winning Issue: Crime

Maloney’s gamble did not work, and he lost his race, too.  Many voters in the new district did not know him well.  It did not help that in the primary Alessandra Biaggi, a very progressive Democratic state senator, ran against Maloney, accusing him of being a sell-out to corporate interests. 

Then, in the general campaign, Mike Lawler, the Republican candidate, relentlessly attacked Maloney for being soft on crime, although Maloney had a strong record of supporting the police. Unlike Biaggi, Maloney had never advocated for “defunding the police”. 

Nonetheless, these attacks badly damaged Maloney, particularly because many NYPD officers lived, and voted of course, in his new district.  Biaggi had changed her position on defunding the police before running for Congress.  However, Republicans used her previous comments (and those of other progressive Democrats) to attack all Democrats as hell-bent on cutting police budgets. 

The Red Wave on Long Island

In another wake-up call for the Democrats, the Republicans won all four seats on Long Island.  They picked up two open seats in districts where Democrat incumbents did not run for re-election.  The law and order issue dominated the races in both districts that flipped to the Republicans.    

In northern Nassau County, an affluent, usually liberal area near New York City, Robert Zimmerman attacked his Republican opponent, George Santos, for supporting Donald Trump and being at the Capitol on January 6.  Santos emphasized rising crime rates…and trounced Zimmerman by eight points.   A more moderate Republican candidate won in lower Nassau County, also hammering home the crime theme.  

It was no surprise that Republicans held onto the two other seats, from central and eastern Long Island.  Central Long Island is Zeldin country, and the eastern part has historically been conservative, too.  

We will discuss Gov. Hochul’s disappointing campaign in the second part of this article. 

The Wall Street Democrat