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      Biaggi Seeks to Block Sean Patrick Maloney’s Chosen Path to Re-election

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      Mr. Maloney, who leads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, upset some Democrats by opting to run in a district currently represented by a Black congressman.Representative Sean Patrick Maloney’s decision last week to leave behind his current congressional district to campaign for a colleague’s safer seat infuriated fellow Democrats, who saw the actions as unacceptable for the man tasked with protecting their House majority.On Monday, a progressive New York lawmaker, Alessandra Biaggi, said she would try to stand in his way, channeling the ire of the party’s left wing at the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in a primary challenge.“I am sure that he will say, ‘This is hurting the party, she doesn’t care about being a Democrat,’” Ms. Biaggi, a state senator from Westchester County, said in an interview. She emphatically declared herself a “proud Democrat. What hurt the party was having the head of the campaign arm not stay in his district, not maximize the number of seats New York can have to hold the majority.”Ms. Biaggi plans to formally announce her candidacy for the Aug. 23 primary on Tuesday.She had already been running for Congress in the nearby Third District, campaigning against a “lack of urgency in Washington” and for policies like single-payer health care. But when a state court finalized new lines on Friday that removed the Westchester portions of the district, Ms. Biaggi decided to switch course.Ms. Biaggi called Mr. Maloney “a selfish corporate Democrat.” She drew a straight line between her campaign and his recently announced decision to abandon much of his current territory in the Hudson Valley to run in a safer, reconfigured 17th Congressional District currently represented by a Black progressive.Democrats across the political spectrum decried the move last week, when it looked like it might force Representative Mondaire Jones into a primary fight with either Mr. Maloney or Representative Jamaal Bowman, a fellow Black progressive in a neighboring seat. Instead, Mr. Jones chose to avoid the conflict altogether, announcing a campaign for an open seat miles away in New York City.But Democrats in the party’s progressive wing, some of whom had considered calling for Mr. Maloney’s resignation, are not ready to let him off the hook, and are lining up behind Ms. Biaggi.“Biaggi has been a voice for justice since she entered the State Senate,” Mr. Bowman said in an interview. “She’s also been a voice for accountability and pushing our party to do better.”He called Mr. Maloney’s decision to leave the 18th District he has long represented — which could swing to Republicans in the fall — “completely unacceptable for a leader of our party whose job it is to make sure that we maintain the majority.” He said he would support Ms. Biaggi but stopped short of issuing an official endorsement. “Leadership requires sacrifice and leadership requires selflessness,” said Mr. Bowman, who defeated another high-ranking Democrat in a 2020 primary.Another member of the New York City House delegation, who asked not to be named to speak frankly, echoed that assessment and suggested Ms. Biaggi could attract significant support.It would not be the first time Ms. Biaggi, 36, has taken on an established Democratic leader.She was first elected to the State Senate in 2018, when she was the face of a wave of younger lawmakers who toppled six conservative Democratic incumbents who had led the chamber in a power-sharing agreement with Republicans. In her victory over Jeffrey D. Klein, a former leader of the breakaway group known as the Independent Democratic Conference, Ms. Biaggi was outspent nearly 10 to one.But the odds could be even higher this time around.Mr. Maloney, 55, will enter the race with far more money, name recognition and institutional party support. The fifth-term congressman had more than $2 million in the bank at the end of March, and, given his ties as a party leader, could easily marshal far more in outside support if needed. (Ms. Biaggi said she had about $200,000 in her campaign account.)Representative Sean Patrick Maloney outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington in 2021.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesThough Democrats have complained about Mr. Maloney running in a district that contains about 70 percent of Mr. Jones’s current constituents, the party chairman does live within the new lines. Ms. Biaggi does not live in the newly shaped district, nor does her current Westchester State Senate District overlap with the new seat.And while Mr. Maloney has attracted ire from fellow New York Democrats, he maintains the support of Speaker Nancy Pelosi.Mia Ehrenberg, a campaign spokeswoman for Mr. Maloney, touted his record and said that the congressman would work hard to win voters’ support.“Representative Maloney has served the Hudson Valley for nearly a decade, spending every day fighting for working families, good jobs, and to protect the environment,” she said.A Fordham-educated lawyer and granddaughter of a Bronx congressman, Ms. Biaggi served as an aide to former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign before winning elective office.In the State Senate, she helped push through an overhaul toughening New York’s sexual harassment laws, became known as an outspoken critic of Mr. Cuomo and was a reliable member of the chamber’s growing left wing, pushing for single-payer health care among other policies.Some of those positions could prove a liability in the race for Congress in a more conservative district, which includes large exurban and rural areas. Ms. Biaggi, for example, has been an outspoken critic of police departments and called for their budgets to be cut, often using the term “defund the police.”Ms. Biaggi said on Monday that she no longer used the term, but would still push for changes in the way American cities are policed, and provide other services to the people who live in them. “Whether or not I use the term is irrelevant because my principles are the same,” she said.Whoever emerges from the Democratic primary in August will likely face a difficult general election in November. The district voted for President Biden in 2020 by an 8-point margin, but Republicans believe the party has a good chance of flipping it this fall.Michael Lawler, a former Republican operative who currently represents Rockland County in the State Assembly, declared his candidacy on Monday and is expected to be the front-runner.“Make no mistake, the record inflation, record crime, and unending series of crises that have defined the Biden presidency are Sean Maloney’s record,” said Mr. Lawler, 35.With the new maps in place, other candidates continued to trickle into high-profile House races on Monday.In Manhattan, Suraj Patel, a lawyer and perennial candidate, announced that he would continue running in the Democratic primary for the 12th District, challenging Representatives Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler even after they were drawn into a single district by the courts.Mr. Patel came close to defeating Ms. Maloney in a 2020 primary, and was running against her this year before the maps were reconfigured. Separately, after weeks of inaction, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that Representative Antonio Delgado would be sworn in as her lieutenant governor on Wednesday. That date would allow the governor to schedule a special election to temporarily fill Mr. Delgado’s Hudson Valley House seat on the same day in August as the congressional primaries. More

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      Fearing ‘Extinction-Level Event,’ N.Y. Democrats Turn Against Each Other

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      Newly drawn congressional maps have led some House members to quickly lay claim to certain districts, even if it means challenging fellow incumbents.Two weeks ago, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney warned fellow Democrats in a private meeting that a ruling by New York’s highest court to invalidate a Democratic-leaning congressional map could prompt “an extinction-level event” for the party, according to people familiar with the remarks.Democratic incumbents, he feared, could either be shoehorned into more difficult districts or forced into primaries against one another.So on Monday, when the courts finally unveiled a proposed new slate of districts unwinding Democrats’ gerrymander, Mr. Maloney, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, knew precisely what to do.Just 25 minutes after the maps’ release, Mr. Maloney announced on Twitter that he would leave behind the bulk of his traditional Hudson Valley seat and run instead for a newly drawn 17th Congressional District rooted in Westchester County. Mr. Maloney lives within the new lines, which happen to offer a safer path for a Democrat than the district he currently represents.What might have seemed like an easy political decision for Mr. Maloney, however, has quickly turned into a political firestorm, replete with racial overtones, off-the-record recriminations and rare breaches of congressional decorum between staff of neighboring colleagues.Some Democrats saw the maneuver as an attempt to box out Representative Mondaire Jones, a first-term congressman who represents the vast majority of the district’s population, and force him to enter a primary against Jamaal Bowman, a fellow Black progressive, in the neighboring 16th District. Mr. Jones made no secret of his own feelings, though he has yet to say which Democrat he will challenge.“Sean Patrick Maloney did not even give me a heads-up before he went on Twitter to make that announcement,” Mr. Jones tersely told Politico on Monday. “And I think that tells you everything you need to know about Sean Patrick Maloney.”What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.Deepening Divides: As political mapmakers create lopsided new district lines, the already polarized parties are being pulled even farther apart.In a rare break from Congress’s genteel protocols, Mr. Jones’s chief of staff even shared a screenshot of an exchange with Mr. Maloney’s top aide, and accused the chairman of prioritizing his personal interests “rather than working to unravel this gerrymander” by the courts.The once-a-decade congressional redistricting process is almost always an exercise in raw political power, particularly in a state like New York, which this year must shed a seat overall to account for population losses.But if New York’s redistricting cycle began this year with an attempt by Democrats to marginalize Republicans, it now appears destined to end in intense infighting among Democrats as the Aug. 23 primary approaches — thanks to a ruling last month by the state’s highest court declaring the Democrat-led Legislature’s maps unconstitutional.“Can I just go on vacation through August and wake up in September?” said Maria Slippen, the chairwoman of the Cortlandt Democratic Committee in Westchester County, lamenting a potential Democrat on Democrat fight in her district between Mr. Maloney and Mr. Jones. “When we are put in a situation where we have to fight with each other, the Republicans win,” she added.Representative Mondaire Jones said Mr. Maloney failed to give him a heads-up on his election plan.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesThe replacement map, drawn for the court by Jonathan R. Cervas, erased outright gains that Democrats had counted on based on the Legislature’s map and made other Democratic swing seats more competitive. It also forced at least five pairs of incumbents together in the same districts from Brooklyn to Buffalo, leaving candidates to decide whether to retire, move or go head-to-head with another sitting House member.A few miles down the Hudson from Mr. Maloney, two powerful Democratic committee chairs who have served alongside each other for 30 years — Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn Maloney — were also gearing up for a potentially explosive primary fight that would pit the east and west sides of Manhattan against one another in the new 12th Congressional District.Representatives Hakeem Jeffries and Yvette Clarke, two Black Democrats drawn into a single district in Central Brooklyn, expressed fury at Mr. Cervas, but indicated they were likely to still run for separate seats.The maps, which could still be tweaked before a judge makes them final on Friday, may simply leave other candidates without a natural seat to run in and create unexpected openings for candidates who had previously decided not to run in 2022.Alessandra Biaggi, a rising Democratic star in the State Senate, had hoped to run in a new seat — stretching from her home in Westchester County to Nassau County on Long Island — created under the State Legislature’s plan. But Mr. Cervas’s map removed Westchester from the district entirely.Rana Abdelhamid, a community organizer backed by Justice Democrats, had spent more than a year campaigning against Ms. Maloney in New York City, only to see her Queens neighborhood removed from the district.Suraj Patel, another Carolyn Maloney challenger, has yet to declare his intentions but lives close to the line separating the new 12th District from the 10th, the remnants of Mr. Nadler’s old seat. He could decide to run in the 10th, where State Senator Brad Hoylman, former Mayor Bill de Blasio and Carlina Rivera, a member of the City Council, are also seriously considering runs.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Ahead of 2022, House Democrats Aim to Fix Their Polling Problem

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      This time, party leaders hope, they won’t be stunned by Republican voters coming out of the woodwork.Democrats control both houses of Congress — but just barely.Cast your mind back to October 2020, and you might remember expecting things to turn out a bit different. Polls suggested that Democratic House candidates were on track to nearly match their historic margins in the 2018 midterms. But that didn’t happen.For the second presidential cycle in a row, Democrats were stunned by the number of voters who came out in support of Donald J. Trump and his Republican allies down the ballot.This week, the House Democrats’ campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, presented the results of an inquiry into the 2020 election, aimed at understanding what had gone askew for the party — and why, after the corrections that pollsters made in the wake of 2016, surveys were still missing the mark.The report came to two interrelated conclusions, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the campaign committee chairman, said in a phone interview today. One is that Trump voters are disproportionately likely to refuse to take a poll, a conclusion echoed in other post-mortem reports that have recently been released by private Democratic pollsters. The other is that Mr. Trump’s presence on the ballot appears to have driven up turnout among the Republican base.“In 2020, what we realized is that the polling error really equaled Trump turnout,” Mr. Maloney said. “So in polling, you’ve got this mistake in the assumption about what the electorate will look like.”Because support for Mr. Trump lines up with a relative unwillingness to be polled, survey researchers may think they’ve reached the right share of, say, rural-dwelling, white men without college degrees. But in fact what they’ve reached is often a Democratic-skewing segment of that demographic.In 2018, when polls were relatively accurate, this didn’t factor in as much, presumably because the most anti-institutional and anti-polling voters were also those who were likely to turn out only if Mr. Trump himself was on the ballot.In 2020, Mr. Trump’s popularity with a typically low-turnout base meant that an upsurge in turnout actually helped Republicans more than Democrats — a rare occurrence. “Because low-propensity voters turned out for Trump in much higher numbers than our low-propensity voters turned out for us, it ripples through the data and has a big effect,” Mr. Maloney said.He has been through this process before: In 2017, after Mr. Trump’s upset win over Hillary Clinton, the congressman, then in his third term, led an inquiry into what had gone wrong for the Democrats. That work helped put him in position for his current role as the head of the party’s House campaign arm.This time around, he put together a team including campaign consultants, academics and other Democratic members of Congress, and they assembled what he called “a first-of-its-kind national polling database,” drawing from over 600 polls of House races, as well as voter-file and other local-level data.Last year, because Democrats underestimated the extent to which Mr. Trump’s presence on the ballot would drive up Republican turnout, their strategists mistakenly thought that a number of seats that had flipped blue in the 2018 midterms would remain safe in 2020. Six Democrats who had won for the first time in 2018 lost their 2020 races by less than two percentage points.Mr. Maloney said he was only half-swayed by arguments that ascribed a lot of impact to Republican attacks on the “defund the police” movement and “democratic socialism.” He said that the messenger had been far more important than the message.“What you realize is that it is true that the lies and distortions about socialism and ‘defund’ carried a punch — no argument from me,” Mr. Maloney said.“But I think the power of those lies has been exaggerated when you understand that Trump,” he added, was responsible for turning out “a bunch of people who were going into the voting booth.”In next year’s midterms, he said that Republicans would be running a risk if they were counting on Trump-level engagement from base voters, given that his name wouldn’t be on the ballot.“It leads you to ask: Will this post-Trump toxicity of QAnon and conspiracy theories and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene and the attack on the Capitol — will that message work without Trump’s turnout?” Mr. Maloney said. “The research suggests that they have taken too much comfort in the power of messages that were effective, yes, but that were enormously helped by Trump’s power to turn out voters.”Still, he cautioned against taking comfort in the results of the report, which at the end of the day serves as a reminder of just how out-of-reach an entire swath of the population remains — for mainstream pollsters and Democratic candidates alike.On the tactics front, the report concluded that in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, Democratic spending had been heavily tilted away from grass-roots campaigning and toward TV ads, which mostly ran late in the campaign and ended up doing little to tip things in the party’s favor.Going forward, Mr. Maloney said, he plans to keep the 600-poll database in use. The D.C.C.C. has already been using it in special elections this year to analyze messages for effectiveness.“We think there’s a lot to learn, we’re going to learn as we go, and you’re always building the ship as you’re sailing it,” he said. “In this case it’s important that we apply what we’ve learned to as many contexts as we can.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Democrats Pick Campaign Chief for Uphill Bid to Protect House Majority

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