The blame game has continued over the past week among New York Democrats after Republican candidates in the Empire State had a good election night last week, gaining multiple seats in the 2022 midterms.
The Democrats were blaming each other after Republicans made significant gains in New York in the U.S. House of Representatives despite Long Island Congressman Lee Zeldin’s unsuccessful bid to unseat incumbent New York Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul.
As Breitbart News reported last week, Zeldin, running one of the closest gubernatorial races in New York in 20 years, created significant inroads for other GOP candidates across the state — including at least ten House seats, with one being held by Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) Chair Rep. Sean Maloney (D-NY).
The losses have ultimately left some of the Democrats in the state to point fingers from anywhere between redistricting, the Democrat governor being weak, and the overall weakness of the state party.
Maloney reflected on his failed reelection campaign in an interview with the New York Times while simultaneously blaming far-left Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) for not contributing to the Democrats’ overall agenda over the last cycle and joked that the “last time” he ran into her, his candidates “were beating her endorsed candidate two to one in a primary.”
Ocasio-Cortez eventually shot back at Maloney on social media, saying he “courted” her to monetarily support vulnerable members and claiming he helped out in other ways while blaming the soon-to-be former congressman for not seeing her as a prominent member of the party. Additionally, in her own interview with the Times she blamed “big money and old-school, calcified machine-style politics” within her state party’s leadership.
In a tweet, Howard Wolfson, a former advisor to New York City’s former mayor Michael Bloomberg, blamed redistricting and ignoring the increase in crime.
“A good night could have been a great night if NY Dems hadn’t screwed up redistricting and ignored voter concerns about crime and disorder,” Wolfson wrote. “These mistakes cost House Dems winnable seats and forced Dems to waste $ millions that could have gone elsewhere. Time to course correct.”
A good night could have been a great night if NY Dems hadn’t screwed up redistricting and ignored voter concerns about crime and disorder. These mistakes cost House Dems winnable seats and forced Dems to waste $ millions that could have gone elsewhere. Time to course correct.
— howard wolfson (@howiewolf) November 9, 2022
Additionally, Jon Reinish, a former aide to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), said:
New Yorkers … especially in the New York City and Albany media markets for several months before Election Day were blanketed with ads solely focused on crime, on safety. Wasn’t a conversation based on data, it was an emotional conversation based on aiming to stoke fear, and that message was extremely well-funded and extremely consistent.
I think it really rallied Republicans, suburban voters in Putnam County and Nassau and Suffolk County. A lot of those are swing voters…Yes, they tend to usually support Democrats. But I think that they were persuadable by the consistency of this message, and it was hard to recover from that.
Furthermore, the former executive director of the New York State Democrat Party, Basil Smikle, pointed to the “chaos of redistricting” for the Democrats’ election struggles and Hochul’s performance for hurting down-ballot races. She added:
It seemed as though for a period of time, it almost looked like the governor didn’t have coattails, and that’s a problem when the top of your ticket doesn’t have coattails… And I’m not saying she didn’t, but what I’m saying is, the behavior suggests that she didn’t.
These are big names that even if you didn’t think the governor had coattails, all of these other ones have coattails…What’s wrong with having the rest of the ticket able to sort of latch onto each or any one of these candidates?… So that I think that is the piece that people are really latching onto, that there just didn’t seem to be a coordinated effort.
Breitbart News reported last month that the Democratic Governors Association (DGA) had to scramble in the final weeks of the campaign to save Hochul and down-ballot Democrats, dumping money into the race after not planning to spend anything in the deep blue state.
The DGA formed a super PAC in the final weeks of the campaign, as polls showed ominous signs for the Democrats, to pump the airwaves and launch a get-out-the-vote effort to save Hochul and down-ballot races.
Ultimately, Zeldin received at least 2.66 million votes, more than Gov. George Pataki (R) and the highest since Gov. Nelson Rockefeller (R).
Jacob Bliss is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jbliss@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter @JacobMBliss.
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