The Democratic Panic in New York
On Election Day, Donald Trump’s surprising support in New York City wasn’t an outlier. Democrats woke up the next morning to significant defeats across the state. The shift was especially apparent on Long Island, where Trump became the first GOP presidential candidate to carry Nassau County since 1988. In a center-right congressional district that extends to the Hamptons, the incumbent Republican Nick LaLota easily defeated John Avlon, an appealing moderate Democrat with a pre-crazy Rudy Giuliani pedigree, a CNN perch, and a marriage to Herbert Hoover’s glamorous great-granddaughter, Margaret Hoover, the commentator. It was the same north of the city, in the Lower Hudson Valley, as Republican Mike Lawler beat back a challenge from former Representative Mondaire Jones in a congressional district where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 80,000.
The bad news didn’t stop there in the nation’s fourth most populous state. Vice President Kamala Harris had the poorest showing for a Democratic presidential candidate in New York City since Ronald Reagan was on the ballot. Asian and Latino voters, who have been shifting rightward since 2020, accelerated their flight from the Democrats. Trump got nearly twice as many votes in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods of the Bronx and Queens as he did four years ago, and the bad news continued downballot. Asian voters helped oust State Senator Iwen Chu, a Democratic incumbent in a heavily Chinese section of south Brooklyn where only 17 percent of the registered voters are Republican. That district, recently redrawn as a safe seat for Democrats, will now send Republican Steven Chan to Albany. Yes, most liberals in the bluest districts could survive the storm, whether it’s rising stars like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose district includes hip gentrifiers in Astoria, Queens, or earnest lifers like Representative Gregory Meeks, ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in his 26th year in the chamber, representing the Caribbean neighborhoods of Jamaica. Everyone else is looking over their shoulder.
Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul are cognizant enough to recognize that the Democratic crisis stems from voters’ sense of chaos in New York City, owing to high-profile crime, homelessness, a surge in migrants, and a toxic brew of all three. Both Adams, a former Brooklyn cop, and Hochul, an upstate pol, have taken to launching public safety PR campaigns involving New York City’s subway—albeit to varying degrees of success. In a more populist approach, Adams filmed himself asking riders in the station at Herald Square what the city could do to make them feel safer (wink, wink: they all said more cops underground which Adams wants). At the same time, Hochul posed for now roundly mocked selfies on a subway car touting increased ridership just hours after a shocking murder underground.
The quality-of-life panic Rudy Giuliani rode to the mayoralty over 30 years ago has reappeared and reshaped Gotham and the state’s political landscape. Subway murders have reached their highest level in the 21st century. Earlier this month, when an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala allegedly set fire to and killed a homeless woman, later identified as 57 year-old Debrina Kawam, on the subways, it shocked even jaded New Yorkers as the city began to move past the brazen assassination of a healthcare executive in Midtown. Both videotaped crimes followed a Manhattan jury declining to convict a former Marine, Daniel Penny, for a chokehold that resulted in the death of Jordan Neely, a mentally disturbed man who was menacing passengers on the F-train last year. The charges facing Penny, criminally negligent homicide and manslaughter, struck many New Yorkers as well as the jurors as overwrought. Sure, New York doesn’t have the highest crime rate in the country, and it is not even close. This isn’t the 1980s. Still, the sense of menace is a political crisis for Democrats, just as the good economic news of the past two years was not enough to save Biden from the inflation-induced tailspin in the polls from which the Democratic president never recovered.
Contributing to New York Democrats’ vulnerability are a series of bail and evidence reforms that many voters, with some cause, hold responsible for the pandemic-era crime wave; the botched rollout of marijuana legalization, which saw some 1,500 illegal cannabis shops pop up citywide, including next to schools and daycare centers; and the visible resurgence of street prostitution. Jackson Heights, arguably the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in wonderfully multicultural New York, was on the rise. Now, its main commercial strip, Roosevelt Avenue, is teeming with open drug deals and 24-7 prostitution.
But more than any other issue, the Biden administration’s policy changes in immigration policy upon taking office in 2021 saddled incumbent New York Democrats with a political liability. Since spring 2022, more than 210,000 migrants have arrived, overwhelming city resources and triggering tensions around the city’s “right-to-shelter” policy, which legally mandates housing for all who ask. The Adams administration has scrambled to house migrants in over 200 hotels, office buildings, and emergency tent shelters, as the homeless population shot to record highs, sending hotel rates soaring, disrupting neighborhoods, and straining the city’s budget. The immigration surge under Biden has even, by some metrics, outpaced the wave of arrivals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While illegal immigration has dropped dramatically since Biden signed an executive order in June limiting asylum claims at the border, the political damage in New York had already been done. Nearly 64,000 migrants remained in city shelters this fall, prompting new rules limiting stays, forcing many migrants onto the streets. Mayor Adams declared the situation a “humanitarian crisis,” estimating it would cost $10 billion over the next three years.
Amid the Election Day wreckage, there were glimmers of hope for New York Democrats, suggesting a path out of the abyss. Pat Ryan and Tom Suozzi held onto congressional seats they won in special elections—Ryan’s to replace Hochul’s Lieutenant Governor Anthony Delgado in 2022 and Suozzi’s to replace disgraced former Representative George Santos in 2023. Laura Gillen, a former Hempstead Town Supervisor, flipped a seat representing Southern Nassau County, while Josh Riley, a former general counsel to Senator Al Franken on the Judiciary Committee, won back the district covering the Catskills. In one district upstate—spanning Syracuse and Utica—Democratic State Senator John Mannion defeated Republican incumbent Brandon Williams. Representative Ritchie Torres, the first openly gay Afro-Latino elected to Congress, coasted to reelection in a majority Latino district covering most of the South Bronx that saw a surge in Trump support.
These candidates helped New York Democrats not only avoid a repeat of their 2022 losses which contributed mightily to the GOP takeover of the House that year. Their green shoots amid the rubble might help Democrats retain and regain office in New York and elsewhere. How? New York’s winning Democrats de-emphasized their party affiliation and re-emphasized core economic issues that matter to all Americans. Ryan, a veteran who served two tours in Iraq, won reelection by a resounding 14 points in a swing district spanning New York City’s northern suburbs and exurbs, outperforming Vice President Harris by double digits. He campaigned heavily on the cost of living and reproductive rights while challenging Governor Hochul on congestion pricing and Biden/Harris on the border crisis. Gillen won her seat by bluntly acknowledging the burden New Yorkers have borne during the migrant crisis and pointing out that her opponent “applauded [Texas] Governor Abbott for sending 40,000 migrants to New York.” She also openly opposed Hochul’s congestion pricing plan, which will raise tolls on drivers entering Midtown and Lower Manhattan during peak hours.
Likewise, Suozzi and Riley distanced themselves from party leadership on contentious issues like immigration, crime, and congestion pricing, positioning themselves as pragmatists who are laser-focused on their constituents. Suozzi vowed to work with Republicans to restore state and local deductions, which Trump’s 2017 tax bill capped. Riley made populist attacks on price-gougers and corporations, championed tax relief, and issued an early call for Joe Biden to step aside—a strong indicator of his independence. “If all you did was talk to quote-unquote political experts and pundits, you’d think there’s some mystery to be solved here,” Riley told NBC News. “But if you spent a day talking to people…they’re going to tell you they’re angry that our immigration system is broken. And they’re even angrier that politicians aren’t being straight with them about it.”
Torres, an outspoken critic of “woke politics,” has become the most interesting politician in New York. He has positioned himself as a centrist alternative for governor in 2026, lambasting Hochul as “the new Joe Biden” for being soft on crime and endangering public safety. In a post-election interview with Hanna Rosin of The Atlantic, Torres identified himself as pro-immigration but blamed the Biden administration for letting the border crisis get out of control. “So we can blame the voters. We can claim that the voters are misogynist and white supremacist. We could blame Fox News and the New York Post. But those institutions have always been with us in recent political history,” he said. When pressed on his vision for Democrats, Torres replied, “Economically populist, right? We have to convey the sense that we’re fighting for working people and that we’re holding powerful interests accountable, right?… People do care about border security. People do care about public safety. We have to ensure that we’re on the center of those issues while doubling down on economic populism.”
In an interview with Nia Prater of New York magazine, Representative Ryan described his approach as “patriotic populism” aimed at “greedy and corrupt elites.” The West Point graduate added: “Whether that’s like the oil executives that sat in a room with Donald Trump when he said, ‘If you give me a billion dollars, I’ll essentially give you whatever you want,” or Jeff Bezos, who pays zero in corporate taxes and pays not enough to his workers… Those are the villains. The hero… has to be the American people. Scrappy, hungry innovators are the hero of the story.”
After his victory, Ryan declared on social media: “I’ve made clear over and over again to my constituents that I fight FOR them and AGAINST anyone who would do them harm. Period, full stop.” In other words, these winning Democrats took a classic, middle-line populist approach.
Admittedly, us-versus-them politics can be vacuous or malevolent. But New York’s political past reveals a consistent preference for this blend of pragmatic, populist, bipartisan leadership during times of crisis. In the 1930s and 1940s, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a liberal Republican, worked with Franklin Roosevelt to deliver New Deal programs and became almost as popular as the president and former New York governor. In 1977, after the fiscal meltdown, Ed Koch won broad support in a crowded Democratic mayoral primary with tough-on-crime stances. Still, he won three terms not just with public safety but other issues like expanding affordable and public housing. Rudy Giuliani’s rise in the 1990s capitalized on demands for law and order but also for being gay-friendly while boosting the city’s economic climate. Michael Bloomberg’s moderate, technocratic governance secured him three terms in the post-9/11 era, a period of historically low crime that opened the door to Bill de Blasio’s progressive win in 2013, perhaps the first election since 1961 that didn’t revolve around crime. While de Blasio’s flaws are well known, his stunning creation of universal pre-kindergarten education helped secure a second term. Eric Adams’s 2021 election marked a shift back toward prioritizing public safety amid pandemic-era unrest. This history underscores a fundamental truth: New Yorkers value stability and safety, even if it means supporting candidates who tack right on key issues or distance themselves from the Democratic brand, but they also welcome economic stances that improve the lives of the working class.
It may be hard to discern a clear direction in the big, volatile, upcoming races: New York Mayor in 2025 and Governor in 2026. Adams could run in the Democratic primary from trial or prison, following his indictment on corruption-related charges. He’s lost his matching campaign funds thanks to New York’s strict public financing law. (See “The Intriguing Role Public Financing of Campaigns Played in the Eric Adams Indictments,” by Ciara Torres-Spelliscy in the Washington Monthly.) But if he loses the Denocratic primary, he could run as an independent or Republican. Right now, he seems to be angling for a Trump pardon. Representatives Torres and Lawler are mulling runs for governor. (What’s worse than being in the minority in the House, a prospect which could await either man in the closely divided chamber?) After the political debacle of walking back her congestion pricing plan (infuriating liberals) and then reintroducing it (perplexing everyone), Hochul’s statewide popularity is lower than Trump’s. She could also face an unprecedented challenge from her attractive hand-selected Lieutenant Governor, Andrew Delgado, a former rapper and Rhodes Scholar who carried New York’s 19th congressional district in 2018. Andrew Cuomo might attempt a political comeback, seeking either a fourth term in the governorship held by his father for three terms, which he resigned from in disgrace in 2021, or the NYC mayoralty that eluded his father. The current weather forecast is “anything could happen.”
To win chief executive slots like mayor and governor, Democrats must demonstrate the political agility of the successful legislating centrists in 2024 and offer policies to address the city and state’s myriad problems. New York can’t return to Giuliani’s encouragement of a police riot or Bloomberg’s unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policies. But there are tangible steps leaders can take to make the city safer. Peter Moskos, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor, argues that addressing these issues requires coordinated policies that include expanding voluntary mental health services, investing in housing solutions for the mentally ill, enforcing public order laws on the subway, reinstating pretrial detention in serious cases, and streamlining processes for involuntary commitment. New York voters value leaders who can deliver on public safety and economic and education approaches that raise living standards for the middle class. Anything less, and Democrats risk watching the Empire State turn redder.
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