New York Democrats are desperate to avoid repeat of their 2022 midterm collapse

By CNN Newsource

Published September 18, 2024 2:00 AM

By Gregory Krieg and Gloria Pazmino, CNN

(CNN) — A hollowed-out state party apparatus. An off-kilter campaign by the governor. A botched redistricting plan that squeezed out incumbent House members.

New York Democrats offered a wide array of excuses for their disastrous 2022 midterms, when Republicans flipped four seats outside New York City on their way to winning a narrow US House majority.

Now, less than two months out from the 2024 general election, the state party, its campaign season allies, chastened candidates and Gov. Kathy Hochul are betting on what most describe as a revitalized political project – a series of them, in fact – to help the state deliver Democratic majority-makers, particularly from suburban districts, to the House next year.

Former President Donald Trump’s Wednesday rally on Long Island, in Republican Rep. Anthony D’Esposito’s district, underscores the high stakes of the New York contests. D’Esposito is one of five New York GOP freshmen facing an onslaught from Democrats determined to claw back suburban voters. In 2022, he defeated Democrat Laura Gillen, flipping a district where Joe Biden would have routed Trump in 2020 under the current lines. Gillen is back for a rematch this year.

Reps. Marc Molinaro and Mike Lawler in the Hudson Valley, Nick LaLota on Long Island and Brandon Williams in Central New York are the other Republicans facing tough reelection fights in what is still largely blue state that Kamala Harris is expected to win comfortably.

“New York is the reason Democrats lost the House in 2022,” said Pamela Shifman, president of the Democracy Alliance, a liberal group spending big in New York this year. “And it’s going to be the reason we win it back in 2024.”

She is not alone in that analysis. In August, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi singled out New York when asked about the party’s lost majority at a Politico/CNN event at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee.

Pressed to explain, Pelosi said, “I think it related to the gubernatorial race.”

The brief but cutting remark ratcheted up the pressure on Hochul and, by extension, state party chair Jay Jacobs, the duo who have shouldered the brunt of the blame for 2022 in Democratic circles in New York and across the country. The governor has insisted that new investments and increased coordination among party leaders and the liberal grassroots will prevent a repeat in November or beyond.

“We have changed this political party. We have turned it into the strength and the power that it always should have been,” Hochul told New York delegates at the Democratic convention.

Democratic operatives in New York are largely divided on whether Hochul and her allies are doing enough and in the most efficient manner. But the effort is clear: For the first time in recent history, the party and its allies appear more interested in electing their own candidates in the general election than in engaging in internecine primaries.

“I give them credit for being organized up and down the ballot,” said Ana María Archila, co-director of the state’s Working Families Party, which is part of the coordinated effort and no stranger to the intraparty fights of the past.

Archila said the “threat of a Trump presidency and a Trumpist Congress” has been an animating factor in the effort to coordinate across the different groups. While a Trump presidency would be a defeat, she pointed out that securing a majority in the House would pave the way for Brooklyn’s own Hakeem Jeffries to be elected speaker.

Getting coordinated

The new coordinated campaign has brought the state party and Hochul’s operation together with those of Jeffries, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and New York’s junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, who is up for reelection this year.

Former Jeffries campaign manager Lizzy Weiss is the coordinated campaign director for the state party.

The coordinated committee says it has nearly 40 offices spread out over swing districts across the state, dozens of staffers and more than 10,000 volunteers phone-banking and canvassing for Democratic candidates. Hochul has raised more than $22 million ahead of her next campaign in 2026, with $5.5 million going to the state party and $3 million to the coordinated campaign.

Outside groups, many of them frustrated by years of infighting among officials like former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, have also stepped up their spending and fieldwork.

A Jeffries-blessed group called Battleground NY, an amalgamation of labor unions and progressive outfits such as Indivisible and the state Working Families Party, has been on the ground for nearly a year. It did extensive canvassing for Democrat Tom Suozzi during his February special election victory to succeed the since-indicted Republican George Santos in a Long Island seat.

“We didn’t really see a robust coordinated operation in 2022 until the last few weeks,” Battleground NY strategist Gabby Seay told CNN. “We believe that you have to talk to voters early.”

Democratic sources familiar with Jeffries’ involvement said he is determined to avoid the embarrassment of 2022.

“Jeffries is completely focused on New York because he has to be,” one of the sources said. “He’s been fundraising, doing campaign stops, strategizing, meeting with all the relevant entities, having regular phone calls with the delegation to strategize, connecting them with donors – he is doing it all.”

Suozzi’s success earlier this year, Seay said, underscored the importance of closer engagement with voters. While Republicans focused on immigration, crime and the conflict in Gaza, Suozzi and the Democrats – without shying away from those issues – hammered the GOP over provincial concerns such as the state and local tax, or SALT, deduction, which was capped by Trump and the Republicans in their 2017 tax law.

Trump, in a social media post Tuesday, wrote he would work with Democrats to “get SALT back” – a remarkable claim given his role in curtailing it but another indication of the issue’s potency in the New York suburbs.

An expensive job to finish

House Majority PAC, the super PAC linked to Jeffries announced in February the creation of the New York Fund – setting aside a total of $45 million for Empire State races.

The fund got a recent boost from former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who donated $10 million in July. In the weeks leading up to Election Day, the bulk of the spending is going toward paid media, including TV, digital and radio ads and direct mail, boosting Democratic challengers in one of the most expensive media markets in the nation.

A New York-based Democratic strategist, who is not working on any of the congressional campaigns, told CNN that Hochul’s absence from the ticket this year should also bolster the party’s House candidates.

“One big difference is the congressional races are being run by New York people, unlike the governor’s race (in 2022), which had people from out of state running a campaign in New York,” said the strategist, who also expressed some sympathy for Hochul, saying that the governor “understands” the task better now than two years ago, when she headed the ticket for the first time, following Cuomo’s August 2021 resignation.

“She was thrown into it – baptism by fire,” the strategist said. “(There was) no coalition, and the state party was not galvanized.”

The biggest test for Democrats will likely come in the 17th Congressional District, north of New York City in the state’s Hudson Valley.

Lawler, the Republican incumbent who could run for governor in 2026, unseated Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the leader of House Democrats’ campaign arm, two years ago and he faces Democratic former Rep. Mondaire Jones this fall.

Lawler has sought to keep Trump at arm’s length in a district the former president would have lost by 10 points in 2020. The congressman has reaffirmed his support for Trump while forgoing his divisive rhetoric. Last week, Lawler joined more than two dozen House members in a bipartisan “unity commitment” to respect the results of the 2024 presidential election.

“In our country, we hash out our ideas at the ballot box and then come together to govern once all votes are counted,” Lawler said in a statement, directly appealing to the Democrats he will need to win reelection.

In a potential blow to Democrats, Jones will not be on the Working Families Party ballot line this fall after breaking with New York progressives during the primary – a slip-up that could split the anti-GOP vote in November.

Another potential hurdle facing Democrats in battleground districts stems from an effort by state party lawmakers to make hay on the backlash against the US Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Abortion rights are broadly popular across party lines in red and blue states. Heading into this campaign, New York Democrats set out to juice turnout across the state – to their advantage, given the party’s sizable voter registration edge – by adding a measure that would protect reproductive rights to the ballot.

But the New York Equal Rights Amendment has increasingly become a source of frustration for Democrats hoping to win back suburban swing voters. The amendment, which does not actually use the term “abortion,” has been weaponized by some Republicans, who criticize its sweeping language and added protections for “gender identity” and “gender expression.”

“There has been no greater attack on women’s rights and girls’ rights in the State of New York throughout any of our lifetimes than Proposition 1 in November,” former Rep. Lee Zeldin, who narrowly lost to Hochul in the 2022 governor’s race, said this spring, when he appeared alongside former college swimmer Riley Gaines, a high-profile opponent of transgender athletes participating in women’s sports.

Democrats are now grumbling about both the construction of the amendment and the lack of cash for the campaign organized to promote it. The promise last year of $20 million in funding has largely fallen by the wayside. The current figure is closer to $3 million, though there is chatter of a later spending surge from party leaders.

Another Democratic strategist with deep ties in New York told CNN that, for all the handwringing over 2022 and some squabbles over who might deserve credit if the party rebounds this year, the reality is as uncertain as the broader, chaotic political climate.

“There’s more focus than there was the last couple cycles, both from the state party, but also obviously the national committees,” the strategist said. “Now, whether that translates or not, I think, is still an open question.”