Democratic officials and strategists in New York tell CNN they are bracing for surprise losses in the gubernatorial election and contests for up to four U.S. House seats, mostly in the suburbs.
With crime dominating the headlines and the airwaves, many Democrats who follow these races closely are pointing to New York Mayor Eric Adams, accusing him of overstating the issue and playing to right-wing narratives in ways that may have helped the party collapse. on Tuesday.
“He was a key endorser in the city to make their attacks look more legitimate and less partisan,” said a Democratic operative who worked on New York campaigns, who asked not to be identified so as not to endanger current clients.
Other Democrats argue that it backfires. While they accuse Republicans of political gimmicks they call cynical, racist and exploiting a situation caused by the pandemic, they insist the candidates would have been better off if they had followed Adams’ example by speaking to the fear and frustration voters feel.
But ahead of Election Day, New York Democrats worry about a double whammy from how they’ve struggled to tackle crime: Voters turned off by Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and suburban House Democrats are voting Republican, while grassroots Democrats in the city, frustrated by talking about how awful things are, don’t turn out at all.
“Crime today has been compared to the ’80s and ’90s, and the reality is that crime is lower now than it was then,” said Crystal Hudson, a New York City councilwoman from Brooklyn. “This has strengthened the right to use crime as a narrative and put Democrats in a bad spot for these midterm elections.”
Rep. Lee Zeldin, Hochul’s GOP opponent, regularly invokes Adams on the campaign trail, to the point where some Democratic operatives joked that Zeldin might just run clips of Adams talking about crime as closing ads.
There are national ripples: Democratic groups like the Democratic Governors Association are moving millions of dollars to support Hochul in a blue state rather than spend it in close races elsewhere, with Vice President Kamala Harris flying Thursday in one of them. The latest campaign stops and President Joe Biden heads to Westchester County, upstate New York, on Sunday to rally with the governor. Republicans, meanwhile, are seizing opportunities to carve out a potential House majority by targeting seats that Democrats counted on as backstops.
Adams was elected mayor last year on a tough, tough-on-crime message, then embraced as such a hero among many Democratic leaders that rumors swirled that he might be eyeing a presidential run himself in 2024. In office, he often spoke about the poor state in which the city is located, including citing statistics it says show connections between rising crime and a progressive change in state law in 2019 that barred judges from setting cash bail for all but the most serious offenses. .
Many top Democrats argue that Adams could have used his credibility to support Hochul — who allies point to as being in a difficult political spot talking about crime in New York as a 64-year-old white woman from Western New York. York – instead of pushing hard for the governor to call a special session of the legislature to repeal more of the new bail laws. Hochul also appeared surprised by the attacks and unsure how to defend her record, with several elected officials and staffers saying she appeared to be balancing between different party factions rather than setting a firm agenda.
That is fueling an increasingly strained relationship in the final weeks of the campaign, although Adams recently appeared with Hochul both at an official government event announcing she would provide state money to pay overtime for police patrolling the subways and a campaign stop in Queens as he sought to prove to voters that he takes crime seriously. Adams has also turned to blaming the media for sensationalizing the crime problem.
Appearing on “CNN This Morning” on Friday, Hotchul said there has never been a governor and mayor in New York with as strong a relationship as the one she has with Adams. While he acknowledged that violent crime is up and the issue was rooted in voters’ honest fears, he said Republicans “were not talking about real solutions.”
He cited her record of having more police officers and cameras on the street and help for the mentally ill, and Zeldin’s opposition to gun control.
“Crime was a problem,” he said. “I understand that. Let’s talk about real answers and not just give everyone all these platitudes.”
Rep. Kathleen Rice, a retired moderate Democrat from just outside New York City and a former Nassau County district attorney, initially said she encouraged Adams. As a former police officer, he understands the problem, he said, but “the general consensus is that he hasn’t shown that he’s focused on the issue enough to make a difference.”
Rice said she has heard from constituents just outside the city who are repulsed by reports that Adams spent late nights at expensive private restaurants that are juxtaposed with stories of subway murders and other gruesome incidents.
“People want to feel safe first before they go to a club,” Rice said.
Rice’s seat is one of two Democratic-held seats on Long Island that are now at risk. Democrats also risk losing two seats north of New York City – one held by Rep. Pat Ryan and the Lower Hudson Valley district of Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
“It’s an issue for voters, but it’s not because they’ve personally experienced crimes in the Hudson Valley or their neighbors talk about crimes committed in the Hudson Valley as much as the narrative pushed by the industrial fear machine at Fox and The New York Post describes New York as a lawless hellscape,” Maloney said in an interview. “This is understandably causing concern among the suburbs.”
Months ago, Maloney warned other House Democrats, in conversations and in a March memo sent by the DCCC and obtained by CNN, to be ready to respond and counter attacks because they are weak on crime. The guidance began by telling the candidates to strongly oppose calls to “defund the police” but also to talk about the more than $8 billion that Democratic lawmakers had secured for law enforcement in bills like the American Rescue Plan .
Maloney pointed to his votes in favor of legislation to fund programs for body cameras and license plate reader technology for local police departments in his district, as well as gun control measures enacted over the summer.
He also stood by a remark he made last July — which caught the attention of several Democratic operatives at the time — when he stood with Adams on the steps of the Democratic National Committee headquarters and called him “a rock on which I can build a church.”
“What I meant is that I like the combination of a respect for good policing and an understanding of the need for public safety with a genuine passion for fairness and justice in our system,” Maloney said in an interview. “It might not do everything right, and it might not be everything I would do. But he recognizes that we are not where we should be. And I support his efforts to clean it up.”
Others are not convinced.
“The concern about crime is real. It’s sharp,” said Rep. Mondaire Jones, a progressive Democrat who lost the primary to represent parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn after Maloney chose to run in a redrawn suburban seat that also included parts of Jones’ district. “But once this election is over, I hope people will have an honest conversation about how Democrats like Eric Adams endorsed a crime hysteria that is uninformed and debunked.”
Debates about crime in New York are tied to the debate over bail reform and heavy internal political power struggles among officials. In phone calls and meetings earlier this year, Adams urged top officials in Albany to change the laws, warning them that crime would likely be a major political liability in the fall, according to people familiar with the talks.
Legislative leaders have already passed two partial reversals, including one sponsored by Hochul earlier this year. But they resisted doing more, despite warnings from suburban members.
Adams has charged that the “crazy broken system” of bail laws now puts criminals back on the street, who then tend to go back to committing crimes. According to data from the New York Police Department, in the first half of the year, 211 people were arrested at least three times for burglary and 899 people were arrested at least three times for shoplifting, increases of 142.5 percent and 88.9 percent, respectively. during the same period in 2017. The mayor’s office also pointed to statistics showing double-digit recidivism jumps for felony, grand larceny and auto theft.
However, crime statistics don’t tell as simple a story as what appears in political ads. Suburban counties report safer streets and communities — a February report by the Westchester County Executive from just north of New York City, for example, showed a 26.5 percent drop in crime.
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