The shooting of two teenagers directly outside his Long Island home has given Mr. Zeldin an opportunity to push his tough-on-crime message within a personal frame.
After two teenage boys were shot outside his home on Long Island last weekend, Representative Lee Zeldin wasted little time to amplify the tough-on-crime message he has relentlessly pressed in his bid for governor of New York.
He quickly assembled a news conference in front of his moonlit house on Sunday night, followed up the next day with a Fox News interview, and used an appearance at the Columbus Day Parade to imbue his political messaging with a new personal, if frightening, outlook.
“It doesn’t hit any closer to home than this,” Mr. Zeldin, a Republican, said while marching at the parade in Manhattan on Monday, describing the incident as “traumatic” for his twin 16-year-old daughters, who were doing their homework in the kitchen when the shooting happened. “This could be anyone across this entire state.”
“Last night the girls wanted to sleep with us,” Mr. Zeldin also said during the parade. “I didn’t think that the next time I’d be standing in front of a crime scene, it would be crime scene tape in front of my own house.”
The shooting unfolded on Sunday afternoon when the police said multiple gunshots were fired from a dark-colored vehicle at three teenage boys walking near Mr. Zeldin’s home in Suffolk County on Long Island. Two 17-year-old boys were forced to take cover by Mr. Zeldin’s porch, suffering injuries that were not life threatening, while a 15-year-old boy fled the shots unharmed.
That the shooting unfolded near the home of a conservative congressman who has anchored his campaign for governor on the state of crime in New York, attracting outsize media attention, appears to have been pure happenstance.
The police had not made any arrests as of Tuesday, but they were investigating whether the incident was connected to gang violence, according to a law enforcement official who asked to remain anonymous to discuss an ongoing investigation.
But with less than four weeks until Election Day, the shooting offered Mr. Zeldin an opportunity to elevate the issue of public safety in the governor’s race, as the congressman seeks a breakout in his efforts to unseat Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who has so far enjoyed a comfortable lead in most public polls.
Mr. Zeldin faces a steep climb to overcome Ms. Hochul’s significant fund-raising edge in a state where Democrats overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans. He has been quick to talk about the impact of the shooting in starkly personal terms, appealing to New Yorkers who have also been affected by gun violence. Mr. Zeldin was at a campaign event in the Bronx with his wife during the shooting.
Mr. Zeldin, a staunch Trump supporter who has represented Suffolk County in Congress since 2015, has said he would make law and order his top priority if elected. He has consistently sought to blame the rise in violence on criminal justice policies enacted by progressive lawmakers as well as on left-leaning prosecutors, such as Alvin Bragg, the district attorney in Manhattan. He has promised to fire Mr. Bragg “on Day 1.”
At the same time, he has opposed Democratic-led efforts to tighten gun control measures, cheering the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down New York’s concealed carry law as “a historic, proper, and necessary victory.”
Ms. Hochul, who is seeking her first full term, has trumpeted her efforts to tighten the state’s bail laws and has emphasized initiatives to crack down on illegal gun trafficking, as well as a law she signed raising the age for the purchase of semiautomatic rifles, after a massacre at a Buffalo supermarket earlier this year.
“We’re not running away from those issues,” Ms. Hochul said on Monday. “We’re leaning hard into them because we have a real record of accomplishment.”
The shooting outside Mr. Zeldin’s home is the second time his safety has been threatened this election cycle.
Three months ago, a man tried to physically attack Mr. Zeldin with a sharp key chain during a campaign event near Rochester. The attacker, a veteran of the Iraq War who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and alcoholism, was quickly subdued and initially released without bail before being arrested on federal assault charges.
Mr. Zeldin, who was not injured, used the confrontation to attack Democrats for the reforms they enacted to the state’s bail laws two years ago, even if the episode did little to shake up the state of the race.
“It’s an extraordinary coincidence of events that gives Zeldin’s crime message added credibility, urgency, and national attention,” said William F. B. O’Reilly, a Republican political consultant who is not working on the Zeldin campaign. “This will almost certainly help him in the final weeks of the campaign.”
Mr. Zeldin could certainly use a boost, having lagged behind Ms. Hochul in nearly every public poll commissioned this cycle. He has also found himself chasing her haul of campaign contributions — a tribute to a voracious fund-raising apparatus that raised $11.1 million from July to October of this year. The cash has allowed her to blanket airwaves and smartphones with campaign ads attacking Mr. Zeldin’s support of Mr. Trump and his opposition to abortion rights.
Mr. Zeldins financial outlook is not exactly bleak, however. He brought in $6.4 million during the same period, thanks in part to fund-raisers with former president Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. He has also seen support from conservative super PACs which have spent nearly $4 million in the past weeks on ads calling Ms. Hochul soft on crime and criticizing her handling of the economy.
On Tuesday, a police car was still stationed outside Mr. Zeldin’s home in Shirley, a working-class hamlet on the South Shore of Long Island, where residents on the typically sleepy street were still rattled by the burst of violence.
Dan Haug was in his home when he heard the shots and ran to the window, spotting one of the boys lying in Mr. Zeldin’s bushes, screaming and bleeding from the gunshot wounds.
“You know, there’s little isolated incidents in this neighborhood with like, fireworks and like dogs getting loose,” said Mr. Haug, who has lived in the neighborhood for seven years. “But nothing like that.”
Mary Smith, the mother of the teenager who escaped unharmed, blamed the shooting on the proliferation of guns among young people, while stressing that she did not believe her son was in a gang, saying: “He’s just a normal kid.”
While expressing sympathy for the Zeldin family ordeal, Ms. Smith lamented that she had heard nothing from the congressman himself, despite his many public comments.
“I’m around the corner from you,” Ms. Smith said in an interview. “They took the story away from the victims and made it about running for government.”
Chelsia Rose Marcius contributed reporting.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
