New York Democrats Get a Babysitter After 2022
The national party is stepping in to quell the infighting amongst New York Democrats.
The New York Democratic Party Chair is currently fending off a mutiny. Chairman Jay Jacobs is facing calls to resign from over 1,000 New York Democrats after the party’s dismal performance in the 2022 midterm elections. This has forced the hand of House Democrats’ main super PAC: House Majority PAC has decided to build a special “war room” dedicated to New York that will handle the state’s electoral operation including opposition research, messaging, and more. All of this because New York Democrats struggled greatly during an election cycle where their counterparts in other states saw unexpected success. To recap:
New York Democrats lost a whopping four US House seats to Republicans, largely due to unforced errors by the party.
The state’s governors race was the closest since 1994 with Democratic incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul only beating Republican challenger Lee Zeldin by 6 points.
Democrats ultimately lost six seats in the New York State Legislature. (Republicans gained 5 Assembly seats and 1 state Senate seat.)
These struggles are symptoms of an existential divide in the New York Democratic Party between progressive voters in New York City and more moderate voters found Upstate and along Long Island. Chair Jay Jacobs sits squarely on the side of moderates and focused his efforts on the competitive regions outside of NYC. Jacobs failed to produce necessary wins in competitive districts across the state, in part because his approach alienated voters that the party needs to produce wins.
Redistricting Woes
Before even entering the 2022 midterms, New York Democrats completely fumbled on congressional redistricting. After rejecting maps drawn by the state’s new bipartisan redistricting commission, Democrats in the legislature were responsible for creating new districts. The party was overzealous and passed a map that favored the party by such a large degree, it was tossed out for violating the state’s constitution. The state’s high court ruled that a special master would be responsible for drawing the state’s new congressional districts and while the enacted map was much more fair, it pit some Democratic House incumbents against one another.
*cue the infighting*
Sean Patrick Maloney’s Self-Sabotage
Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney was the chair of the national Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) heading into the 2022 midterms and he decided to run in the new NY-17. He made this decision this without telling the incumbent who represented most of the voters of the new district: Rep. Mondaire Jones. This put Jones in the awkward position of either running against one of the most prominent national Democrats or running against fellow Black House freshman Jamaal Bowman in neighboring NY-16. Instead, Jones decided to run in an entirely new, open district: NY-10 and he lost his primary by a large margin. Due to Sean Patrick Maloney’s primary decision, Democrats lost one of the first openly gay Black men to serve in Congress. Local voters took notice…
“People would say, ‘Isn’t he the guy that pushed Mondaire out of this district?’ Folks had a really tough time getting past that. And he didn’t do much work past saying, ‘Well, I live here…’ I was surprised at just how much people brought that up canvassing in the general… Lower voter information folks, average voters, even they were kind of disgusted.”
-Meredith Wisner, chair of the Rockland County Working Families Party chapter
When it came time for Maloney to lean on these voters in the general election, they didn’t show up. This was a district that had previously supported Joe Biden by a wide 10-point margin and Maloney’s antics flipped it to Republicans for the first time since 1981. This marks the first time in forty years that the sitting DCCC chairman lost re-election.
Let’s be very clear: this loss was an unforced error for New York Democrats and is emblematic of larger issues within the national party. A party leader made a unilateral decision to push aside a popular, progressive incumbent candidate so that he could run in his chosen district. This decision was based in hubris: an unequivocal belief by the leader that he knew what was best for the party. This led to a fundamental misunderstanding of how to organize with the district’s progressive voting base, so he lost.
Unfortunately for Democrats, this wasn’t the only major error in the 2022 midterms…
Yes, We Have to Talk About George Santos
Everyone knows the story by now: Rep. George Santos is a newly elected freshman that’s absolutely drowning in controversy. Before Santos was even sworn-in, the New York Times dropped a bombshell article that exposed much of Santos’s resume as lies. Since that first post, a seemingly never-ending avalanche of fabrications and misdeeds have come to light about the new congressman. Now, many of his own voters are campaigning aggressively for his ouster from Congress. But the question that most are still asking is… how did he get elected in the first place?
The answer: Democrats were asleep at the wheel.
Before even getting into his laundry list of lies, Santos simply wasn’t a strong candidate to begin with. His platform was filled with unpopular ideas like standing against abortion (76% of Long Island voters supported abortion rights when polled in 2022.) He openly talked about his attendance at the “Stop the Steal” rally that prefaced the Jan 6 insurrection. And despite pointing to Trump as one of the main reasons for his candidacy, he never received the former president’s endorsement.
While Democrats did conduct opposition research against Santos, they very clearly didn’t take action on any of it until it was too late.
“So not a damn thing he touted about himself was factual? In the county ‘led’ by [New York State Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs], no less. Maybe spend a little less time demonizing progressives and a little more doing oppo research on Republicans running in your county.” -State Sen. Gustavo Rivera (D)
So, What Now?
To start: it’s time for Jay Jacobs to go. Prior to becoming Chair of the New York State Democratic Committee, he served as the Nassau County Democratic Chairman. Yet under his supervision, Democrats lost both of Nassau County’s US House seats in the 2022 midterms. As mentioned in the quote above, Nassau County voters were responsible for electing George Santos. The fact that this controversy happened in Jacobs’ own backyard is in itself a strong case for his removal.
The bigger problem for New York Democrats is that ousting Jacobs doesn’t fix their central issue: New York City and the rest of state are heading in opposite ideological directions. Progressives in NYC are slowly growing their ranks with elections of Ritchie Torres (NY-15) and Jamaal Bowman (NY-21) while voters Upstate and along Long Island are flirting with more moderate candidates. Jacobs’ approach to running campaigns focused on crafting a unified message to blast across all corners of the state, created by watering down progressive priorities to sway moderates. The reality was that this milquetoast messaging suited “for all” resonated with only a few.
I personally don’t think intervention from the national Democratic party’s House Majority PAC will fix these issues. Not only does the party struggle with the same ideological divide on a national level, the solution to these disagreements isn’t more money and mediation. Instead, New York needs leadership that is willing to embrace a “divide and conquer” strategy for campaigns and can create coalitions that cooperate when its time to govern. Pushing out progressives shouldn’t be a prerequisite for supporting moderate and/or establishment candidates, especially as we’ve seen that this approach turns away some of the most enthusiastic voters in the party. Simply put, Democrats can’t be a big-tent party if they only allow one type of candidate to occupy the center ring.