Photo: Jose A. Alvarado Jr./Bloomberg/Getty Images
Even as New York Democrats work to send Kamala Harris to the White House, Gov. Kathy Hochul is trying feverishly to score a second victory closer to home: winning back suburban congressional districts that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but elected Republicans in the 2022 midterms. Taking back these downstate pro-Biden seats from the GOP represents a chance for Hochul to win a little more respect – and a lot more power – here in New York and on the national stage.
“I’m more behind the scenes. I don’t get credit for things,” Hochul told New York Post columnist Cindy Adams recently. That’s putting it mildly. No less a figure than Nancy Pelosi, the ex-Speaker of the House, has publicly blamed Hochul for running a gubernatorial campaign in 2022 that opened the door for Republicans to flip four congressional districts that had supported Biden in 2020.
At a Politico forum at the Democratic National Convention, columnist Jonathan Martin asked Pelosi whether it was California or New York where losses of congressional seats led to the Republican takeover of the House in 2022. “New York, I think, mostly,” said Pelosi. “Five seats in New York. I think it related to the gubernatorial race.” That reflects a widely-held view that Hochul’s 2022 run, in the immediate aftermath of the COVID pandemic, did not sufficiently address rising crime, creating an opening exploited by suburban GOP candidates who flipped four seats.
Pelosi began heaping blame months earlier, telling the New York Times in early 2023 that Hochul should have been tougher on crime. “That is an issue that had to be dealt with early on, not 10 days before the election,” she said. “The governor didn’t realize soon enough where the trouble was.”
Hochul, of course, disagrees. “That’s a convenient narrative for some people. It’s just not accurate,” she told Spectrum News. “The narrative about crime had taken hold. That’s not something that was our responsibility. We talked about public safety. We worked on those issues.”
The governor’s political team is especially irritated by the ex-Speaker’s comments because they come with a large dose of chutzpah: at least one GOP flip 2022, the surprise victory by future felon George Santos, was a unicorn event, the product of outrageous fraud that evaded detection by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which was under Pelosi’s control at the time. (Following his expulsion from Congress, Democrats won the seat back in a special election earlier this year, with Hochul backing her former adversary Tom Suozzi.)
And the blame-Hochul comments conveniently sidestep the fact that Pelosi’s home state of California saw five pro-Biden districts flip from Democratic to Republican in 2022.
Dems lost three California districts – the 13th, the 22nd and the 27th – that Biden had carried by more than 10 percentage points in 2020. Two other districts, the 40th and 45th, saw more narrow Biden margins, but were also lost by Democrats. At least one of the California Dems, Christy Smith, blames the party for her loss.
“Our campaign got next-to-zero outside resources to fight this battle. In fact, I was fighting the institutional power of my own party from the outset of this race,” Smith said on social media, citing an unwillingness by the party to purchase ads in the high-cost Los Angeles television market. “We didn’t stand a chance,” she said.
Hochul isn’t looking to pick a fight with Pelosi, but she does hope to win back more seats for Democrats than her west coast colleagues this year, in part to deal with growing political challenges here in New York. A recent Siena College survey found that 56% of likely voters give the governor an unfavorable job approval rating, compared with 39% who rate her as doing a good job — the lowest marks she has ever received. Transit advocates have organized protests, petitions and two lawsuits over Hochul’s decision to suspend implementation of a congestion toll in Manhattan days before the measure was set to begin.
Hochul’s plan to turn things around starts with helping Dems to flip seats on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley. Over the last year, Hochul, along with Rep.Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand — two other ambitious New York Dems looking for national recognition — quietly created a legal, financial and logistical framework enabling candidates for state and federal offices to share messaging, manpower and donations. (Such efforts can be tricky because federal and state candidates have different limits on who can make donations, how much they can give and how campaign operations must be disclosed.)
But thanks to Hochul, Jeffries and Gillibrand, New York Democrats are running a coordinated campaign, with 36 field offices and over 80 staffers working in swing congressional districts. As of Labor Day, the party claims to have contacted 800,000 voters by knocking on 220,000 doors and making over 540,000 phone calls. That level of coordinated outreach was unheard of in the past.
Hochul is counting on this network of Democratic officials, operatives and donors to reassemble when she runs for re-election in 2026. As an added benefit for the governor, one of the Republican members of Congress being targeted this year, Michael Lawler, is widely rumored to be considering a run against Hochul.
It’s important to remember that even building a kick-ass political machine won’t necessarily save Hochul. “I don’t think her legacy is necessarily marked by whether or not she wins congressional races. I’m not sure the average person thinks of it that way – It’s very insider stuff,” says Michael Oliva, a veteran campaign consultant based in Suffolk County. “The mistake Democrats keep making is that they prioritize campaign strategy and methodology above issues. They keep thinking ‘If we do outreach and knock on more doors and excite the base, we’ll be victorious,’ instead of saying ‘Hey, what do people care about?’ Is it crime, or putting food on the table or the education of their children?”
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