Current Events > The NY Democratic Party fucked up big time

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.aol.com/news/york-democrats-divided-between-moderates-172545013.html

After a disappointing performance that may cost the party control of the U.S. House, Democrats in New York are divided between progressives from New York City and suburban moderates, with both sides blaming the other for the loss of at least four congressional seats two on Long Island, one in New York Citys northern suburbs and one upstate.

Those losses in an overwhelmingly Democratic state stood out in an election in which the party outperformed expectations in House and Senate races nationally.

Now progressives are calling for an overhaul of the moderate-dominated state party. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a prominent progressive from New York City, fired the opening shot on Twitter Wednesday when she called for the resignation of state party chair Jay Jacobs.

NYS Dem party leadership, which was gutted under [former Gov. Andrew] Cuomo, stuffed with lobbyists, works to boost [the] GOP, and failed to pass a basic state ballot measure to protect NY redistricting, must be accountable, she wrote. I called for Jay Jacobs resignation a year ago and I still hold that position.

Ocasio-Cortez was referring to a 2021 ballot initiative that would have allowed new congressional and legislative districts to be drawn by the Democratic-dominated state Legislature, instead of by a bipartisan commission created in 2014 with Cuomos support. The initiatives defeat led to maps that had been drawn by the Legislature which would have left Republicans with as few as four of New Yorks 26 congressional seats, instead of the 10 they will now have being overturned by four Cuomo appointees to the state Court of Appeals (two of whom are former Republicans).
The subsequent court-drawn maps were much more favorable to Republicans, costing Democrats a slew of House seats: the four they lost, and one currently held by a Republican that they would have picked up, according to a data analysis of election returns by the City, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet.

Jacobs, who was appointed by Cuomo, hails from Nassau County, the suburban Long Island area in which Democrats lost two House seats whose incumbents Reps. Kathleen Rice and Tom Suozzi did not run for reelection. Both districts had voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and yet both elected a Republican candidate. One of those future members of Congress, George Santos, said he attended then-President Donald Trumps Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C., that preceded the U.S. Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

Hochul won her first full term in office by only 6 points on Tuesday, whereas Cuomo won by 14 points in 2014, the last midterm election with a Democrat in the White House. But she told reporters on Thursday that Jacobs did a great job as chair and that he should stay on. (Hochuls office and campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Progressive activists and commentators many of whom noted the absence of get-out-the-vote efforts in heavily Democratic New York City, where voter turnout dropped from 44% of registered voters in 2018 to 36% this year, while the rest of the states turnout held steady at 55% say that amounts to dereliction of duty by the party establishment.

https://twitter.com/RossBarkan/status/1587140369082466305

In southern Brooklyn, for example, two longtime Assembly Democrats lost to Republicans, and local Democrats attributed the result to the party's failure to mobilize its voters. Where the hell was the state party? state Sen. Andrew Gounardes, a Democrat from the area, told the City. We were literally left to die on a vine here. And its deeply frustrating that our party didnt even put up a fight.

A lot of folks who dont even necessarily identify with the left were like, Why havent I received a single piece of mail? What is the state party doing? state Sen. Julia Salazar, who represents Brooklyn, a borough that has the most Democrats of any county in the state, told Yahoo News.

But it wasnt just about redistricting and the ground game, or lack thereof. Despite losing all of New Yorks statewide races, Republicans did better than usual, as the electorate told pollsters that crime and inflation were their top two concerns. Republican candidates such as gubernatorial nominee Rep. Lee Zeldin and the winning GOP congressional candidates have relentlessly hammered Democrats for a spike in crime since 2020. (Crime has risen nationally since the pandemic, and New York remains a relatively safe state, with the 10th-lowest crime rate in the country.)

New York City Mayor Eric Adams argued on MSNBC Thursday morning that Democrats performed badly in the state because of a 2019 law that reduced the use of bail for lower-level criminal charges.

Adams, a former police captain and former Republican, consistently overstates the threat of crime. In May, he said he has never witnessed crime at this level, even though New York City has less than one-fifth as many murders as it did in 1990, when Adams was a police officer.

Mayor Adams spent the last year really fearmongering about crime and in many ways becoming Lee Zeldins best surrogate, especially with suburban voters, Sochie Nnaemeka, the New York director of the Working Families Party, a progressive beacon, told local news outlet NY1. Adams pointed his finger back at the left, saying that those that ignored the concern about crime are at fault.

Ocasio-Cortez and Salazar, both of whom belong to the Democratic Socialists of America, say an ideological shift away from Adamss style of messaging is needed. As they see it, the establishment favors centrists over forthright progressives who would motivate their base. And they say moderates efforts to assuage voters concerns on hot-button issues such as crime may do more harm than good by accepting a Republican frame.

If we want people to turn out to vote, we have to be unapologetic about our party, as Democrats, Salazar said. Democrats who performed better in hotly contested races elsewhere, such as Pennsylvanias Sen.-elect John Fetterman, were more unabashedly progressive, they argue.

I think, in New York, the way that those campaigns were run were different than the way a lot of winning campaigns across the country were run. And I think the role of the state party had very strong national implications, Ocasio-Cortez told the Intercepts Ryan Grim in a Wednesday interview for his newsletter. I think the choice among certain Democrats to validate Republican narratives and amplify Republican narratives on crime and policing, running ads on it validating these narratives actually ended up hurting them.
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One particularly embarrassing loss for the establishment was Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, a moderate who chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. When much of Maloneys district got moved into that of his neighbor Rep. Mondaire Jones, he decided to run in Joness district. This forced Jones a progressive freshman who is one of the first two openly gay Black members of Congress out of a seat. That drew criticism of Maloney from progressives and an unsuccessful carpetbagging primary challenge from progressive state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi, a notable Cuomo antagonist. Maloney, though his new district had gone for Biden by 10 points in 2020, lost to Republican challenger Mike Lawler. (Maloney told MSNBC that he and other congressional candidates were dragged down by Hochuls poor performance.)

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/4/3/AAAt4pAADekb.jpg

tl;dnr, but I'm all for blaming New York for things.

I doubt this has much to do with mailers, and everything to do with the fact that suburban NY has grown into some of the reddest parts of the country.

NeonTentacles posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/4/3/AAAt4pAADekb.jpg

I cant read that

TLDR: Jacobs needs to go.

COVxy posted...

I doubt this has much to do with mailers, and everything to do with the fact that suburban NY has grown into some of the reddest parts of the country.

No, it's because Democrats have to deal with a non-trivial amount of their base being liberals/leftists who will vote based on their ideology rather than party-line. This eats into their votes in the same way it does Republicans -> Libertarians.

But yeah it has nothing to do with mailers.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

No, the NY democratic party did in fact gerrymander the shit out of NY last year, but it was so egregious that it was redrawn by the courts to make a bunch of districts competitive.

In the case of Mondaire Joness seat which Maloney ran in and lost- werent there a couple of progressive candidates in the primary that continue to run and not pull behind one candidate? I think jones was in trouble but he didnt pull out- he continue to run splitting the vote opening for Maloney to win. If there was one unified progressive candidate in that district that could have beaten Maloney and maybe would have pulled out the victory here

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


Fuck yes. If the other time is playing dirty and you are not...you will lose.

SwordMaster13X posted...

I cant read that

I have no clue what it says. It's just a funny tl;dr meme

Pretty much all traditional campaigning is just superstition that costs money, time, and environmental resources. But it makes it look like you're doing something, so people will often opt for it even if they know the above. Hire a bunch of hs kids to go door to door knocking which changes exactly no minds, mail out dozens and dozens of mailers to each registered voter, knowing they will just go straight into the trash.

NY is run by losers. Illinois has an insane gerrymander which gave Democrats way more seats than they should of won. If California and NY played like Illinois you would have Republicans begging for gerrymandering to stop.

https://twitter.com/MC_of_A/status/1592235845813407744

Hmmmm

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


No, it's definitely a boogeyman.

To wit:
https://twitter.com/ghgtobias/status/1590377910074232832
The graph of violent crime doesn't look anything close to that