Subterms
Representative George Santos of New York was indicted this week by federal prosecutors on 13 felony counts largely tied to financial fraud. Almost immediately after his election in November, The New York Times began scrutinizing his background. Mr. Santos has misled, exaggerated to or lied to voters about much of his life, including his education; […] More
Adam Sullivan holds deep influence over Gov. Kathy Hochul, her administration and campaign team, even as skepticism mounts over his judgment and distance from New York.With the Democratic nomination all but assured last spring, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York and her campaign team began to plot a pre-emptive television ad to protect against Republican attacks already bubbling up around rising crime.Ad makers cut a 30-second spot, highlighting Ms. Hochul’s plan to secure city streets and subway trains. She told her campaign manager she was eager to see it on air, and she previewed it for donors at a private Park Avenue screening.But the ad never ran. After rounds of debate, one voice rose above the others. “Let’s focus on abortion,” Adam C. Sullivan wrote in a note to senior strategists reviewed by The New York Times. Crime could wait.A year later, the decision has come to be seen by many in Ms. Hochul’s orbit as a damaging miscalculation that helped her Republican challenger come dangerously close to upsetting her, and contributed to Democrats losing the House majority. It is also a testament to the unseen influence of Mr. Sullivan, an obscure operative who has leveraged a close bond with Ms. Hochul to become perhaps the most powerful political force in New York who almost no one knows.Mr. Sullivan, 42, has no formal job title or social media presence. He operates a small consulting firm from his home in a Colorado mining town, delivering strategy directives on issues like public safety far from the streets of New York City, where crime has unsettled some residents. And his generous compensation — estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars — is mostly hidden from campaign records.Yet 18 months into Ms. Hochul’s tenure, Mr. Sullivan’s fingerprints can be found all over New York, according to more than two dozen people who have worked with him closely.Adam Sullivan, far left, largely remains in the background as the hidden force behind many of Governor Hochul’s stances and political strategy.He helped Ms. Hochul build her administration, advising her on early key hires; shaped two multibillion-dollar state budgets; and ran a 2022 election campaign that was criticized by Democrats for its lack of energy. Most recently, he helped the governor navigate the failed effort to muscle Justice Hector D. LaSalle onto the state’s highest court.Now, as the de facto head of Ms. Hochul’s political operation, Mr. Sullivan has been deputized to revive New York’s embattled state Democratic Party. And the outcome could have significant implications for Democrats’ chances to retake the House.Even by the Zoom era’s standards, the breadth of Mr. Sullivan’s influence from afar is unusual, puzzling much of New York’s clubby political establishment and exasperating many on Ms. Hochul’s own team.Most governors have a trusted, all-around enforcer who carefully guards their political standing. Ms. Hochul met hers in 2011, when Mr. Sullivan helped her win a special House election no one else thought she could. But rarely do people in his position phone in from 1,700 miles away or command so few relationships with key stakeholders.“Managing New York politics from Colorado is like managing the war in Ukraine from New York,” Charlie King, a veteran Democratic strategist, said. “You can be a very good tactician, but things on the ground move incredibly fast and you may just not be close enough to the action.”Many of those who work directly for Ms. Hochul’s political team and administration have taken an even harsher view. The Times spoke to more than 15 people at all levels who said Mr. Sullivan is known as a divisive presence. They related anecdotes of him disparaging subordinates, especially younger women; marginalizing those who disagreed with him; telling younger workers that the governor did not know their names; and frequently shifting blame when things have gone wrong.The aides and advisers insisted on anonymity for fear of retaliation. But they said Mr. Sullivan had contributed to Ms. Hochul’s diminished political standing while escaping public scrutiny.In a written statement, Mr. Sullivan did not directly dispute those characterizations, but noted the intensity of the campaign. “I have always tried to treat everyone with respect and regret that there are people who feel I did not meet that bar,” he said.Julie Wood, a spokeswoman for the governor, did not address the workplace concerns in her own statement about Mr. Sullivan, saying that Ms. Hochul “values his ideas and guidance.”“Ultimately what drives her decision-making is what’s best for New Yorkers,” Ms. Wood said.Ms. Hochul has used Mr. Sullivan to advise her on the most recent state budget, which lapsed on April 1, and in current talks over the stalled 2024 budget.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesThere are also questions about how and by whom Mr. Sullivan, who is not a state employee, is being paid.Since 2021, the governor’s campaign has paid roughly $50,000 directly to a limited liability company that Mr. Sullivan controls, “ACS Campaign Consulting.” But he earned far more through a secretive arrangement that rewarded him with a cut of the campaign’s ad spending, according to four people with direct knowledge of the matter. Assuming the arrangement was in line with industry standards, he would have netted at least $500,000 — a figure he did not dispute.The Times could only identify one other current client of Mr. Sullivan’s, the Reform Alliance, a nonprofit founded by the rappers Meek Mill and Jay-Z and others to change probation and parole laws. Mr. Sullivan would not identify other clients, but he said that none had business before New York State. He added that he had “never been paid to lobby or influence the governor.”The governor has leaned on other outsiders for help: The state paid nearly $2 million to Deloitte and Boston Consulting to help her with State of the State messages. Others with Ms. Hochul’s ear include Karen Persichilli Keogh, her top government aide; Jefrey Pollock, her longtime pollster; and Daniel French, who was until recently Syracuse University’s general counsel.While those advisers are mostly known in political circles, even basic biographical information about Mr. Sullivan is difficult to find. Ms. Hochul has mentioned him prominently only once, from the stage after her victory in November. And he seems to be his consulting firm’s lone employee, working mostly out of his home in Leadville, Colo., where he is an avid skier, except for occasional trips to New York.Of two dozen lawmakers, union leaders and campaign strategists contacted by The Times, only a few could correctly identify him.“I’ve never met him, I’ve just heard bad things about him — sorry,” Liz Krueger, an influential Democratic state senator from Manhattan, said.Mr. Sullivan’s proponents describe him as a talented tactician who steered Ms. Hochul through the aftershocks of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s resignation and helped her win a full term in office, even if it was bumpy.“Maybe he’s not the New York backslapper who knows everybody, but Adam has an unquestionable record of success,” Jess Fassler, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s longtime chief of staff, said.Ms. Hochul first hired Mr. Sullivan in 2011 as her campaign manager when she scored an upset victory in a special election for a House seat.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesMr. Sullivan began his career as a political operative in 2000, and ran his first New York race in 2008, the same year he helped Ms. Gillibrand win re-election to the House.He was fresh off a stint with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in early 2011 when Ms. Hochul, then the Erie County clerk, decided to run in a special House election in western New York. She hired Mr. Sullivan as campaign manager because of his experience running special elections and his conviction, shared by few, that she could win. Despite long odds, she did.It was a boon for Mr. Sullivan. He managed a Senate race in New Mexico in 2012 and was Senator Mary Landrieu’s campaign manager in her failed re-election bid in Louisiana in 2014, until he was abruptly fired just weeks before Election Day.Ms. Landrieu said in an interview she had replaced Mr. Sullivan because she was losing and wanted a more familiar team. Afterward, Mr. Sullivan’s political work dried up, and Ms. Hochul appears to have been his only major political client since 2015.Things began to shift in summer 2021, as it became clear that sexual harassment claims would force Mr. Cuomo from office. With only a small circle around her, Ms. Hochul leaned on Mr. Sullivan, whose wedding she attended in 2018, to help build an administration, including choosing Brian A. Benjamin as lieutenant governor. (Mr. Benjamin later resigned amid federal corruption charges.)Mr. Sullivan played an even more active role in the campaign, involving himself in media strategy, Ms. Hochul’s day-to-day schedule and larger decisions like how to allocate millions of dollars on ad campaigns, including the one he intervened in last May.In that case, the campaign produced and tested the ad, “Safe,” to highlight public safety changes approved in the state budget. Ms. Hochul and other advisers pushed to air it across New York. In the communications viewed by The Times, Ms. Hochul’s campaign manager, Brian Lenzmeier, wrote that she “believes strongly that we need to get a crime ad into the mix and not be solely focused on abortion.” (Mr. Lenzmeier declined to comment.)But Mr. Sullivan often insisted that crime was a losing issue for Ms. Hochul. He believed the campaign’s resources would be better spent motivating Democrats to turn out on the issue of abortion rights, so he pushed to limit public safety messaging in areas like Long Island or to issues like gun laws. In the end, the campaign did not meaningfully challenge Republicans on crime statewide until October, after they had already whipped up a frenzy.Ms. Hochul survived by just six percentage points in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, and some party leaders believe her approach on crime helped Republicans win congressional seats. Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, told The Times’s Maureen Dowd that Ms. Hochul needed to deal with crime “early on, not 10 days before the election.”Mr. Sullivan’s allies said he stood by the campaign’s commitment to prioritizing attacks on Ms. Hochul’s Republican opponent on abortion. Mr. Sullivan declined to comment on campaign strategy.Since then, he has also resisted any quick course correction at the state Democratic Party. He and Ms. Hochul have stood by its chairman, Jay Jacobs, who has become a punching bag for Democrats, especially on the left.Mr. Sullivan’s allies say he and Ms. Hochul want to strengthen the party, but they could only describe vague plans. In the meantime, national Democrats do not appear to be waiting, announcing their own $45 million New York political machine.“Adam is the first person to pick up the phone and call me and be supportive,” Mr. Jacobs said in an interview. “I don’t think he has any agenda other than the governor being successful.”Susan C. Beachy More
Mr. Santos, a Republican House member from New York, has admitted to lying about parts of his biography and is facing several ethics and criminal inquiries.Representative George Santos won his seat in Congress in part by deceiving voters with lies and exaggerations about his biography. Now, with his falsehoods exposed, Mr. Santos plans to test his luck with voters again.Mr. Santos, a Republican from New York, formally announced that he was running for re-election on Monday. In a statement, he did not address the controversy that has surrounded him for months.Instead, he depicted himself as a political outsider who would eschew traditional Republican Party politics.“We need a fighter who knows the district and can serve the people fearlessly, and independent of local or national party influence,” Mr. Santos said. “Good isn’t good enough, and I’m not shy about doing what it takes to get the job done.”The announcement follows months of speculation over Mr. Santos’s political future, with fellow Republican lawmakers calling for his resignation, and federal and state prosecutors and his colleagues in Congress investigating his falsehoods on the campaign trail and his finances.Last month, Mr. Santos filed paperwork indicating his intent to run for re-election, but Monday’s announcement, which was first reported in The New York Post, was his first public declaration of his 2024 campaign.Though he has admitted to fabricating some parts of his résumé and biography, Mr. Santos has stood by other apparent falsehoods and insisted that the inquiries into him would find no criminal wrongdoing. Still, for months, he remained publicly ambivalent about whether he would run again.Shortly before sharing his intention to run for re-election on social media, Mr. Santos declined to confirm the announcement, telling a New York Times reporter, “I’m not confirming anything for you.”Mr. Santos enters the race with significant challenges. Polling has shown that he is unpopular in his district, with 78 percent of constituents believing that he ought to resign, according to a January Siena poll.He will also face a cash crunch: As of the end of last month, his campaign had just over $25,000 on hand, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.While other first-term Republicans in New York battleground districts raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in the first three months of the year, Mr. Santos raised only $5,333.26. During that same period he refunded nearly $8,400, bringing his fund-raising total into the negative.That is less than Mr. Santos raised during his first run for office in 2020, when he was virtually unknown and reported receiving about $7,000 in the same three-month period.Around the same time Mr. Santos made his intentions public, Republicans filed paperwork to create a new joint fund-raising committee that will allow Speaker Kevin McCarthy and others to pour money into defending the party’s seats in New York. Mr. Santos was the only vulnerable Republican left out of the effort.Even before he was mired in scandal, Mr. Santos was already expected to face a competitive race.Democrats, eager to reverse losses in New York that cost them their hold on Congress, were eyeing Mr. Santos’s suburban district, which covers northern Nassau County on Long Island and a small section of northeast Queens.But Mr. Santos’s seat became even more of a priority for Democrats after The New York Times and other news outlets published revelations that he had omitted key details from his financial disclosures and misled voters about his education, his professional background, his heritage and his ties to tragedies like the Pulse nightclub shooting and the Sept. 11 attacks.Subsequent reporting uncovered a number of irregularities in his campaign filings, including an unusual pattern of payments for $199.99, an unregistered fund that purported to be raising huge amounts for Mr. Santos and thousands of dollars in unexplained expenses.The F.B.I., federal prosecutors in Brooklyn and the Nassau County district attorney’s office are now all investigating Mr. Santos’s campaign finances and how Mr. Santos operated his business, the Devolder Organization, about which he has disclosed little information.The House Ethics Committee, which is split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, is conducting an inquiry into whether Mr. Santos failed to properly fill out his financial disclosure forms, violated federal conflict of interest laws or engaged in other unlawful activity during his 2022 campaign.Mr. McCarthy, who holds a slim majority in the House, has pinned Mr. Santos’s fate in Congress on that investigation. Yet the speaker, who supported Mr. Santos’s campaign in 2022, has also expressed reservations about a re-election bid, telling reporters in Washington earlier this year that he would “probably have a little difficulty” supporting one.Mr. Santos temporarily removed himself from two congressional committees at the direction of House leadership, and many rank-and-file Republicans have said they would not work with him on legislation.“From a political point of view, I don’t think there’s any future for him,” Edward F. Cox, the state Republican Party chairman in New York, said in an interview. He added that his organization would “clearly not” be helping Mr. Santos’s campaign.Gerard Kassar, the chairman of the New York Conservative Party, a small but influential partner to the Republican Party, said in a statement that the Conservatives would not back Mr. Santos under any circumstances. “The party has called for his resignation and finds his pattern of deceit morally repugnant,” he said.Closer to home, just days after Mr. Santos was sworn in, a score of Republican officials in Nassau County called on him to resign, said they would not endorse him in 2024 and would work to circumvent his office whenever possible.Mr. Santos already faces a primary challenger, Kellen Curry, whose campaign biography says he served in the Air Force for eight years before working for J.P. Morgan.The seat is also being looked at by a raft of Democrats, including Mr. Santos’s 2022 opponent, Robert Zimmerman, and Josh Lafazan, a centrist Nassau County legislator who has entered the race.Party leaders are also encouraging a comeback attempt by Thomas R. Suozzi, the district’s former representative who retired last year. Mr. Suozzi is now working for a consulting firm, but he has spoken about the possibility in recent weeks with Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top House Democrat, and Jay Jacobs, the state party chairman, according to two people with direct knowledge.Nicholas Fandos More
It was perhaps inevitable that, with Donald Trump’s historic arraignment taking place in the run-up to Easter Sunday, one of his most zealous disciples, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, would aim to drag Jesus into this mess.The former president “is joining some of the most incredible people in history being arrested,” the MAGA chaos agent blathered to a conservative news outlet just hours before Mr. Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts related to a hush-money deal with a porn star. “Jesus! Jesus was arrested and murdered by the Roman government!” proclaimed Ms. Greene.As a lapsed Southern Baptist, I’ll leave it to the more devout to debate whether this comparison qualifies as outright blasphemy or is merely idiotic. Regardless, it was a perfect distillation of Mr. Trump’s longstanding political refrain and current legal defense: He is the faultless victim of political persecution — a righteous martyr beset on all sides by America-hating, baby-eating Democrats and Deep Staters. In the Gospel According to the Donald, any bad thing he is ever accused of is just more proof that the forces of evil are out to get the MAGA messiah.It’s a great story if you can sustain it. Unless you’re a Republican presidential hopeful not named Donald Trump, in which case being required to shovel this grade of malarkey to please the base is increasingly awkward — at least for anyone hoping to retain a shred of credibility beyond the hard-core MAGAverse.This uncomfortable reality is actually something for every member of the G.O.P. to think about. Again. Because, if Mr. Trump’s prime-time, post-arraignment remarks on Tuesday were any indication, this is going to be a central theme of his third presidential run — one that promises to relegate everyone else in the party, including those considering a 2024 run themselves, to being minor players in this latest, tawdriest season of “The Trump Show.”Tuesday night was Mr. Trump’s first chance to address the criminal charges against him — his first real opportunity to counterpunch — since the New York indictment came down. Safely back in the gilded cocoon of Mar-a-Lago, surrounded by American flags and supporters sporting red hats and campaign signs, he delivered a half-hour battle cry that was painfully on brand: a greatest hits of his witch-hunt grievances interwoven with his dark take on how the country is “going to hell” without him. As he tells it, “all-out nuclear World War III” is just around the corner. “It can happen! We’re not very far away from it!” He also suggested that the investigation into his squirreling away sensitive documents at Mar-a-Lago could somehow lead to his being executed.Precisely the kind of responsible rhetoric one likes to hear from a political leader.It was not one of Mr. Trump’s more compelling speeches. The Mar-a-Lago crowd, while friendly, wasn’t the kind of roaring mass of fans from which Mr. Trump draws energy, and the former president sounded heavily scripted. Even so, the address was impressively offensive in its attacks on the justice system in general and the individuals leading the investigations of Mr. Trump in particular — as well as their families. (Seriously, what was with all the wife bashing?) He sniped about the “racist in reverse” officials out to get him. He went on a bizarre riff about how President Biden had hidden a bunch of documents in Chinatown. And his repeated attacks on the “lunatic” Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the federal investigations of Mr. Trump, suggest that whole business is really chafing the former president’s backside.Get ready for more of this magic. As Mr. Trump’s legal troubles heat up, with possibly more indictments to come, these investigations are going to eat at him and distract him. A hefty chunk of his campaign is likely to be an extended whine about his ongoing martyrdom, constantly putting other Republicans in the awkward position of having to defend him. And they won’t really have any choice as he whips his devoted followers into a frenzy over his persecution — and, of course, by extension, theirs.That is certainly what we have seen happening. Republicans have been lining up to trash the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg. It was in no way surprising to see Representative Lauren Boebert comparing the indictment of Mr. Trump to the actions of Mussolini and, yes, Hitler. But one might have expected slightly more from Gov. Ron DeSantis, widely regarded as the biggest threat to Mr. Trump’s 2024 ambitions, than his pathetic vow to refuse to assist any effort to extradite Mr. Trump to New York. Weak, Ron. Very weak.A long-shot candidate or two, like Asa Hutchinson, a former governor of Arkansas, may try to distinguish themselves by not smooching Mr. Trump’s backside so sloppily. But this is a risky path that few contenders seem inclined to tread. Having bowed to Mr. Trump so low and for so long, the party has left itself few, if any, good options for dealing with him now.Anyone looking to lead the G.O.P. beyond its Trump era was already at a disadvantage before the charges. Be it Nikki Haley or Mike Pence or Mr. DeSantis, the political world is busy assessing potential 2024 contenders in Trump terms, obsessing over where they fall on the MAGA spectrum and how delicately they are or are not handling the former president.Team Trump, meanwhile, is happy to play the martyr card for all it’s worth. They have been boasting about using the former president’s legal troubles to fund-raise and sign up volunteers.Any day now, look for the campaign to start hawking bracelets asking: WWDTD? (What would Donald Trump do?) Ms. Greene will surely snap up several. What classier, more tasteful Easter present for the MAGA faithful in one’s life?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More
There is a presumption among a certain kind of analyst — rooted, I presume, in a deeply buried belief in the vengeance of Almighty God — that because Republicans morally deserve Donald Trump they will be stuck with him no matter what. That having refused so many opportunities to take a righteous stand against him, they will be condemned to halt at the edge of a post-Trump promised land, gazing pathetically across the Jordan even as they cast in their lots with the False Orange Messiah once again.That assumption informs some of the reactions to the Trump indictment and the immediate rally effect that it produced among Republicans, with the former president’s (presumptive) leading challenger, Ron DeSantis, not only condemning prosecutorial overreach but promising some kind of Floridian sanctuary should Trump choose to become a fugitive from New York justice.A certain part of the media narrative was already turning against DeSantis, or at least downgrading his chances, in part because he hasn’t yet swung back hard at any of Trump’s wild attacks. Now with the indictment bringing the Florida governor and most of the G.O.P. leadership to Trump’s defense, that narrative is likely to harden — that this is just another case study in how leading Republicans can’t ever actually turn on Trump, and they will be condemned to nominate him once again 2024.In reality, the electoral politics of the indictment are just as murky as they were when it was just a hypothetical. One can certainly imagine a world where a partisan-seeming prosecution bonds wavering conservatives to Trump and makes his path to the nomination easier. But one can equally imagine a world where the sheer mess involved in his tangle with the legal system ends up being a reason for even some Trump fans to move on to another choice. (A poll this week from Echelon Insights showing a swing toward DeSantis in the event of an indictment offers extremely tentative support for that possibility.)Either way, the response from DeSantis and others right now, their provisional defense of Trump against a Democratic prosecutor, is not what will determine how this plays out politically.I have argued this before, but there’s no reason not to state the case again: The theory that in order to beat Trump, other Republicans need to deserve to beat him, and that in order to deserve to beat him they need to attack his character with appropriate moral dudgeon, is a satisfying idea but not at all a realistic one. It isn’t credible that Republican voters who have voted for Trump multiple times over, in full knowledge of his immense defects, will finally decide to buy into the moral case just because DeSantis or any other rival hammers it in some new and exciting way.Instead the plausible line of attack against Trump in a Republican primary has always been on competence and execution, with his moral turpitude cast as a practical obstacle to getting things done. And as others have pointed out, including New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, nothing about defending Trump against a Democratic prosecutor makes that case any more difficult to make.You can imagine DeSantis on the debate stage: Yes, I condemn the partisan witch hunt that led to this indictment. But the pattern with my opponent is that he makes it too easy for the liberals. If you’re paying hush money to a porn star, you’re giving the other side what it wants.It was the same way all through his presidency — all the drama, all the chaos, just played into the Democrats’ hands. Into the deep state’s hands. He would attack lockdowns on social media while Dr. Fauci, his own guy, was actually making them happen. He tried to get our troops out of the Middle East, but he let the woke generals at the Pentagon disregard his orders. He didn’t finish the Wall because he was always distracted — there was a new batch of leaks from inside his White House every week. He’s got valid complaints about the 2020 election, about how the other side changed election laws on the fly during the pandemic — but he was president, he just watched them do it, he was too busy tweeting.I admire what he tried to do, he did get some big things accomplished. But the other side fights to win, they fight dirty, and you deserve a president who doesn’t go into the fight with a bunch of self-inflicted wounds.Is this argument enough? Maybe not. It certainly doesn’t have the primal appeal that Trump specializes in, where all those self-inflicted wounds are transformed into proof that he’s the man in the arena, he’s the fighter you need, because why else would he be dripping blood?But it’s the argument that DeSantis has to work with. And nothing about its logic will be altered when Trump is fingerprinted and charged.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More
The move by Mr. Santos allows him to continue fund-raising as a prospective candidate and to spend campaign funds.Representative George Santos, the embattled Republican from New York facing criminal inquiries and ethics investigations, filed paperwork on Tuesday indicating his intent to run for re-election.The statement of candidacy filed with the Federal Election Commission does not guarantee that Mr. Santos, a first-term lawmaker representing parts of Long Island and Queens, will run for office next year.But it allows Mr. Santos to continue to raise money and spend it on various campaign-related expenses, including paying back the roughly $700,000 he lent to his campaign and paying any potential legal fees connected to the inquiries that he is currently facing.The filing also offers a clear signal that Mr. Santos is leaving the door open to defending his seat in Congress, even as he has been besieged by calls to resign from his constituents, a handful of local Republican officials in his district and fellow House members, including representatives from his own party.Mr. Santos did not respond to a message seeking comment.Mr. Santos’s political future has been severely questioned after revelations in The New York Times that he lied to voters about graduating from college, working for prestigious Wall Street firms and boasting an extensive real estate portfolio. Subsequent reporting by The Times and other outlets has also raised questions about his campaign’s fund-raising and spending practices.Federal prosecutors have been examining Mr. Santos’s campaign finances and personal business dealings, and local prosecutors in New York have been exploring Mr. Santos’s behavior during his campaign. Last month, the House Ethics Committee said it would investigate whether Mr. Santos broke laws tied to his campaign filings or his personal business.While Mr. Santos has admitted to fabricating parts of his résumé and biography, he has denied any criminal wrongdoing. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has maintained that Mr. Santos was duly elected, and that the House would only take action if its Ethics Committee found cause.Yet many rank-and-file Republicans have raised concerns about Mr. Santos’s ability to properly serve constituents. Republicans in Nassau County on Long Island have said they would circumvent his office whenever possible, and 10 House Republicans have called on Mr. Santos to resign. Other Republican representatives have said they were hesitant to collaborate with Mr. Santos on legislation or party business.Mr. Santos has said he would not leave office unless all those voters who supported his campaign last year called on him to do so. A poll in January by Newsday and Siena College found that 78 percent of voters in Mr. Santos’s district wanted him to step down, including 71 percent of Republicans surveyed.Still, Mr. Santos appeared to bow to pressure in January, when he said he would temporarily recuse himself from sitting on two congressional committees. Mr. McCarthy said that he and Mr. Santos reached the decision jointly.But Mr. Santos has repeatedly declined to answer questions about whether he planned to run for re-election.In January, he repeatedly told reporters asking about his future plans that it was “too early” to answer. Last month, he told the Fox station in New York that he had not yet decided whether he would run in 2024.Mr. McCarthy — who endorsed Mr. Santos and helped his campaign in 2022 — told reporters in Washington that he would “probably have a little difficulty” supporting Mr. Santos in a re-election bid.Local Republicans have also voiced their opposition to re-electing Mr. Santos: The Nassau County Republican Committee, a powerful local party organization, has resolutely said it would not support him in 2024.The committee’s chairman, Joseph G. Cairo Jr., reiterated on Tuesday that Mr. Santos would not receive its endorsement.“If he decides to run, we will oppose and beat him,” Mr. Cairo said in a statement.The Federal Election Commission requires candidates to register if they raise or spend more than $5,000 toward an election, a threshold that Mr. Santos passed at the end of last year, according to campaign finance reports.Incumbent politicians are generally quick to register regardless of whether they have decided to run again, so they can continue to accept donations that can be used to pay old campaign debts.Those debts can include personal loans that candidates make to fund their campaigns, experts said. A Supreme Court decision last year cleared the way for candidates to be repaid well after their elections.Brett G. Kappel, an election lawyer, said that the commission’s guidance was also “pretty liberal” regarding the use of campaign money for legal expenses. Candidates can use funds for legal fees tied to “any investigation related to your status as an officeholder or candidate.” The inquiries into Mr. Santos’s campaign finances would likely qualify, he said.So far, only one other candidate has registered with the commission to fill Mr. Santos’s seat: Josh Lafazan, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully in last year’s primary. More
Democrats’ House super PAC plans to spend $45 million trying to flip as many as six seats Republicans won in 2022. It could set off a major spending contest.New York almost single-handedly cost Democrats their House majority in last fall’s midterm elections. Now, a leading Democratic group is preparing to pour record sums into the state, in hopes it can deliver the party back to power next year.House Majority PAC, the main super PAC aligned with congressional Democrats, will unveil a first-of-its-kind, $45 million fund this week dedicated to winning back four seats Republicans flipped in New York, and targeting two other competitive districts. Republicans currently control the chamber by only a five-seat margin.The planned Democratic infusion would dwarf outside spending in the state in recent election cycles, and reflects just how central traditionally blue New York has become to the national House battlefield for both parties. Of the 18 districts nationwide that President Biden won in 2020 that are now represented by Republicans, New York is home to six.“The path to the majority runs through New York,” Mike Smith, the group’s president, said in an interview outlining its plans. “It’s not just us seeing it. It is the Republican Party seeing it. It’s every donor around the country seeing it.”The announcement comes amid bitter Democratic infighting over how to regroup from last year’s whiplash elections. While the party outperformed expectations nationally, New York was a glaring outlier. On Election Day, Republicans here harnessed fears about rising crime and one-party Democratic rule to run a nearly clean sweep through competitive districts and secure their majority.Mr. Smith said his group was still raising the funds, but planned to move unusually early in the election cycle to try to reshape how voters view those six newly elected Republicans, who represent districts in Long Island, the Hudson Valley and Syracuse. Many of them succeeded in portraying themselves as common sense moderates in suburban territory, but they will enter a presidential election year, when Democrats historically turn out in higher numbers, as among the most endangered Republicans in the country.Among Democrats’ best cudgels may be one of those freshmen, Representative George Santos, the Republican who flipped a suburban Long Island seat only to watch his résumé unravel into a series of elaborate lies and potential frauds.Lawmakers called for the expulsion of Representative George Santos, who flipped a suburban Long Island seat, earlier this month.Kenny Holston/The New York Times“These freshman Republicans have no real track record to run on other than what’s happening in the national space,” Mr. Smith said. “And that’s George Santos, Kevin McCarthy, Marjorie Taylor Greene and the most extreme elements.”That effort is almost certain to set off a major spending war with Republicans, whose main super PAC has consistently out-raised and outspent House Majority PAC nationally. In New York, the Democratic group spent around $13 million last year, while Republicans’ Congressional Leadership Fund pumped in at least $21 million.Unlike traditional candidates or party committees, dark money groups can raise and spend unlimited sums of money.The Congressional Leadership Fund has yet to detail its strategy for 2024. But on Tuesday, several vulnerable House Republicans — Mr. Santos not among them — established a new joint fund-raising committee named “New York Majority Makers,” designed to help bundle smaller contributions to protect their seats.And in a sign of their significance to party leaders, Speaker Kevin McCarthy was scheduled to make an early fund-raising stop New York in March. The event will help at least one at-risk incumbent build an early fund-raising advantage while Democrats are still recruiting challengers.Cash is only one factor that could tip the balance of power. To be successful, Democrats will also have to revamp their own image in certain parts of New York where voters rejected them last fall.Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the party’s new House leader, has called for a careful review of what went wrong. But for now, the party’s progressive and moderate wings have vastly different prescriptions on how to address concerns about public safety and rising living costs that are especially acute here. The party’s left flank has spent months agitating to remove the more moderate chairman of the state party, Jay Jacobs, who they believe has overseen a moribund organization.In the interview, Mr. Smith said that Democrats had let Republican candidates dominate the conversation around crime last year, which “definitely hurt us.”“There is no getting around the top of the ticket concerns,” he said, referring to the state’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, who waited until the campaign’s final weeks to aggressively counter Republicans’ attacks on the issue and won by a narrower than expected margin. “That is a big part of how we got to where we are today.”Still, at least on paper, many of the districts could easily change hands in a presidential election year, when Democrats historically turn out in higher numbers.In the suburbs of Westchester and Rockland counties, Representative Michael Lawler defeated his Democratic opponent by less than a percentage point last fall by running as a moderate focused on issues like crime and inflation. Now, he has to win another term in a district that Mr. Biden won by 10 points in 2020 and where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans three to two.Representative Anthony D’Esposito, another relative centrist, faces similarly daunting numbers on the South Shore of Long Island, where a wave of Republican enthusiasm — and depressed turnout by Black voters — helped him narrowly win a district Mr. Biden won by 14 points.Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a Republican who narrowly won a House race on the South Shore of Long Island, may face a tougher race in 2024.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesRepresentatives Brandon Williams and Marc Molinaro will be defending Democratic-leaning districts around Syracuse and in the Hudson Valley. Representative Nick LaLota likely faces an easier race on the East End of Long Island, which narrowly voted for Mr. Biden but has been friendly ground to Republican congressional candidates for a decade now.And then there is Mr. Santos, who has not indicated clearly whether he will seek a second term in a district that Mr. Biden won by eight points. Nearly every other New York Republican freshman has called on him to resign, and local party leaders have vowed to back a primary challenger. More
Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.The stunning failure of the Democratic Party on election night was nowhere more apparent than at Il Bacco, an Italian restaurant on the boulevard where Queens bleeds into Nassau County. That was where a soon-to-be-infamous 34-year-old political neophyte walked out to a cheering throng of Republicans and declared victory in one of America’s most important House contests. “Only in this country can the kid who came from the basement in Jackson Heights … ,” George Santos began, before he was momentarily overwhelmed. “To everybody watching, I want you to know that the American dream is worth fighting for. It’s worth defending, and that’s why I jumped into this race.”In another era — two or four years ago, perhaps — the Santos saga, with its absurd cascade of lies, would have been an amusing sideshow for many Democratic politicians, who would have been able to mock the chaos and move on, comfortably sure that Santos, who fabricated much of his personal and financial biography, would only further hobble a neutered Republican minority. But the new congressman, now under investigation by local and federal authorities, was instead a crucial cog in Kevin McCarthy’s House majority, having flipped the redrawn Third Congressional District in New York, an area that had been represented by Democrats for decades, by eight points.These days, New York is known as the deep-blue state where Democrats lost four seats on the way to losing the House of Representatives and effectively halting President Biden’s domestic agenda for the next two years. Kathy Hochul, who served as Andrew Cuomo’s lieutenant governor before accusations of sexual harassment and assault forced him from office in 2021, won the narrowest race for governor in 28 years, beating Lee Zeldin, a Trump-supporting congressman from Long Island, by less than six points. While forecasts for a national red wave didn’t materialize — Democratic candidates for governor and the Senate were largely triumphant in tossup races across the country, and Chuck Schumer of Brooklyn remained the Senate majority leader — Democrats stumbled in territory on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley that Biden won handily just two years earlier.These disappointments have cast into sharp relief both the divisions within the party and the peculiar void of the state’s Democratic organization itself. Few New Yorkers cared, until late 2022, that the statewide Democratic apparatus operated, for the most part, as a hollowed-out appendage of the governor, a second campaign account that did little, if any, work in terms of messaging and turnout. New Hampshire, a state with roughly half the population of Queens, has a Democratic Party with 16 full-time paid staff members. New York’s has four, according to the state chairman, Jay Jacobs. One helps maintain social media accounts that update only sparingly. Most state committee members have no idea where the party keeps its headquarters, or if it even has one. (It does, at 50 Broadway in Manhattan.)National parties function as enormous umbrella organizations, determining the presidential primary calendar and the process for allocating delegates at the national conventions. The drudgery of running elections is left to the local and state parties, as well as individual campaigns and independent political action committees.Kathy Hochul won the narrowest race for New York governor in 28 years.Olga Fedorova/SOPA Images/Sipa USA, via Associated PressElsewhere in the country, state Democratic parties are much more robust than they are in New York. In Wisconsin, under the leadership of 42-year-old Ben Wikler, the party offered crucial organizing muscle in Gov. Tony Evers’s re-election win, staving off a Republican statewide sweep. The Nevada Democratic Party, despite infighting among moderates and progressives, aided Senator Catherine Cortez Masto’s re-election, investing strongly in rural voter engagement. And in California, the party chair position is publicly contested among multiple candidates, with delegates voting as Democrats traverse the state and make their case in the media.As for New York, observers across the ideological spectrum agree that the state is entering an unprecedented era, with warring political factions and a glaring power vacuum. Hochul recently became the first governor in New York history to have the State Legislature, controlled by Democrats, vote down her nominee to the state’s highest court. Progressives spearheaded opposition to the judge, Hector LaSalle, arguing that he was too conservative.In challenging Hochul from the right, Zeldin was savagely effective — “Vote like your life depends on it,” he exhorted, echoing Richard Nixon, in the final days of the campaign — in seizing on suburban anxieties around rising crime that Republicans in other states weren’t able to successfully exploit. While Manhattan and the combined might of upper-income white and middle-class Black voters thwarted Zeldin in the five boroughs, he made notable inroads with working-class Asian Americans, potentially heralding a political realignment for the city’s fastest growing demographic. Hochul’s campaign was assailed for its relative listlessness and failure to counter Republican attacks on crime. “That is an issue that had to be dealt with early on, not 10 days before the election,” Nancy Pelosi chided the governor. (Hochul’s staff did not make her available for an interview.)Within the confines of New York, Democrats remain historically dominant, retaining veto-proof majorities in both the State Senate and State Assembly. All the statewide elected officials are Democrats, as is the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams. But this is a recent shift: Republicans controlled the State Senate almost continuously from the mid-1960s until 2019. George Pataki, a moderate Republican, led the state for 12 years, and Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg ran New York City from 1994 through 2013.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.Mississippi Court Plan: Republican lawmakers want to create a separate court system served by a state-run police force for mainly Black parts of the capital, Jackson, reviving old racial divisions.Michigan G.O.P.: Michigan Republicans picked Kristina Karamo to lead the party in the battleground state, fully embracing an election-denying Trump acolyte after her failed bid for secretary of state.Dianne Feinstein: The Democratic senator of California will not run for re-election in 2024, clearing the way for what is expected to be a costly and competitive race to succeed the iconic political figure.Lori Lightfoot: As the mayor of Chicago seeks a second term at City Hall, her administration is overseeing the largest experiment in guaranteed basic income in the nation.Heading into 2022, Democrats were confident that after decades of Republican rule in the State Legislature, they could entirely control the state’s redistricting process, engineering favorable House maps for the fall. After a quasi-independent commission deadlocked — critics argued that it was designed to fail when Cuomo helped create it a decade ago — Democratic state legislators redrew lines that strongly favored their party. Republicans sued in court, claiming that the Democrats’ maps violated an anti-gerrymandering clause in the State Constitution. To the shock of many political insiders, the Republicans won their court battle, and an outside special master was appointed by an upstate Republican judge to quickly draw new lines. House primaries were shoved from June to August.With the special master prioritizing competitiveness, not incumbency advantage, Democrats found themselves thrown together in some of the same districts. Representative Jerry Nadler was pitted in a nasty primary against his longtime colleague Carolyn Maloney in Manhattan. (Nadler would prevail.) North of the city, Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and a pugilistic centrist, decided to run in a new district spanning Rockland and Westchester that included far more turf than had been represented by Mondaire Jones, a neighboring progressive.“Sean Patrick Maloney did not even give me a heads up before he went on Twitter to make that announcement,” Jones fumed at the time. “And I think that tells you everything you need to know about Sean Patrick Maloney.” Ritchie Torres, a Bronx congressman, accused Maloney of “thinly veiled racism” against Jones, who is Black. Maloney held his ground, and Jones was forced to move to a new district in New York City, where he would lose in an August primary. Maloney fended off a primary challenge from Alessandra Biaggi, a state senator who ran far to his left. Then, despite a titanic war chest, he fell to Mike Lawler, a Republican state legislator, by less than a point. Jones tweeted one word: “Yikes.”And now the Democratic civil war rages. Jacobs, who is also the chairman of the Nassau County Democratic Party and is on his second tour leading the statewide organization, has come in for a drubbing. A week after the election, more than 1,000 Democrats signed a letter calling for Jacobs’s ouster. They included state legislators, City Council members, county leaders and members of New York’s 400-odd Democratic State Committee. Most of them belonged to the state’s progressive wing, which has grown only further emboldened since the fall. On Jan. 3, a number of them gathered outside City Hall to reiterate their demands: Jacobs must go.Protesters outside City Hall in New York in January, including Jumaane Williams, argued that Jay Jacobs, the state Democratic Party chairman, was responsible for losing four congressional seats.Kena Betancur/VIEWpress, via Getty Images“The party has to change, and it can’t change until we change the leadership,” George Albro, a co-chair of the New York Progressive Action Network, a left-wing organization formed from the remnants of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, said in an interview. “From top to bottom, the Democratic Party in New York is a disaster.”Until Cuomo’s downfall, Jacobs was known as a close ally of the imperious governor. His first tenure as party chairman came under Cuomo’s predecessor, David Paterson, but his second began in 2019, a year after Cuomo won a commanding re-election. That election cycle was notable because Cuomo overcame a primary challenge from the actress Cynthia Nixon, who targeted him from the ascendant left. Though Nixon lost, six insurgent progressives defeated members of the Independent Democratic Conference, a breakaway group of centrist Democrats who had spent the last half decade in an unusual — and incredibly infuriating to progressives — power-sharing arrangement with State Senate Republicans. The I.D.C. had existed with Cuomo’s blessing, joining with Republicans to foil liberal priorities in the State Legislature, like tuition assistance for undocumented immigrants, tougher tenant protections and criminal-justice reforms. For Cuomo, a triangulating centrist determined to avoid having to sign or veto progressive bills while harboring dreams of the national stage, the arrangement worked just fine. (In 2018, I took a break from writing to run for State Senate myself, losing in a Brooklyn Democratic primary.)Since the state party, historically, has been a creature of the governor or the most powerful Democrat in the state, Jacobs is safe as long as Hochul tolerates him. And Hochul, some Democrats say, owes Jacobs for the work he did behind closed doors to ensure that the new governor had a comfortable primary win after Cuomo resigned and immediately began to plot a comeback. Jacobs’s fear was that a divided field could pave the way for a Cuomo revival, and he worked to rapidly hustle up institutional and financial support for Hochul that helped to deter another challenger, Attorney General Letitia James, from running against her.In 2021, after a democratic socialist, India Walton, defeated the longtime mayor of Buffalo and a former chairman of the state party, Byron Brown, in a contentious primary, Jacobs refused to endorse Walton. “Let’s take a scenario, very different, where David Duke — You remember him? The grand wizard of the KKK? He moves to New York, he becomes a Democrat and he runs for mayor in the city of Rochester, which has a low primary turnout, and he wins the Democratic line. I have to endorse David Duke? I don’t think so,” Jacobs said in a television interview, before clarifying that Walton “isn’t in the same category, but it just leads you to that question, Is it a must? It’s not a must. It’s something you choose to do.”Outraged progressives called for Jacobs’s resignation. He refused to go, and Hochul, who is from the Buffalo area and remains close to Brown, did not force Jacobs out. Brown, with tacit approval from the governor and Jacobs, then won the mayoralty with a write-in campaign that November, drawing support from Republicans to crush Walton.A year later, Jacobs explored ways of undercutting the established vehicle for left-wing organizing in the state, the Working Families Party, a hybrid of party activists and labor unions that had endorsed Jumaane Williams over Hochul in the primary. He cut a check to a more moderate Democrat trying to primary Jamaal Bowman, a Westchester County congressman and a member of the Squad, the prominent group of far-left members of Congress, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. After Republicans swept Democrats out of power in the New York suburbs last fall, Jacobs quickly blamed the left. “New York did underperform, but so did California,” Jacobs told the politics publication City & State in November. “What do those two states have in common? Well, governmentally, we’re among the two most progressive states in the country.”Jacobs is under fire from the party’s more progressive wing, which is calling for his ouster, but so far has had Gov. Hochul’s support.Seth Wenig/Associated PressA 67-year-old political lifer, Jacobs has an unrelated day job overseeing a string of popular and lucrative summer camps in upstate New York, in Pennsylvania and on Long Island, where he lives. Democratic business is often run out of a TLC Family of Camps office in Glen Cove, a small town on Nassau County’s Gold Coast. Politicos and journalists who want to reach Jacobs know to email his Camp TLC address; Jacobs cc’d his chief of staff at that summer-camp address to help arrange a telephone interview that lasted an hour, despite Jacobs’s initial hesitancy about going on the record.“People believe that the state party runs all the campaigns, determines the messaging, does the opposition research for every candidate and, you know, when a candidate anywhere loses, it’s the fault of the state party, and all of that is just not an accurate view of the function of the state party and what we actually do,” Jacobs said.Jacobs described the party as a “housekeeping organization” and a “coordinating entity” that works among labor unions, campaigns and other interest groups. He cited the maintenance of a voter file that campaigns use to target the electorate as among its most important work, as well as establishing campaign offices at election time. Fund-raising, too, is a big part of the work, and it’s there where Jacobs has been especially useful. A multimillionaire and prolific donor, Jacobs has given more than $1 million to various Democratic candidates and causes over the last two decades. It can be argued that it’s this wealth, in part, that has allowed him to continuously lead the Nassau County party since 2001. Few staunch Democrats are both better wired and more willing to cut checks than Jacobs.“How I run my businesses and my charitable donations and the rest would indicate, as well as my personal beliefs, would indicate that I’m really, personally, quite progressive, more so than most people would think,” Jacobs said. Rather, he argued, his message is direct: “Slow down. You’re going too fast. What you’re doing is going to lose us votes in the suburbs and rural areas.”In an unusual move for a party leader, Jacobs last year backed the rivals of several incumbent Democrats. His motivation, he told me, was “the behavior of some of these folks that are speaking on behalf of what I’d refer to as the far left. They practice the politics of personal destruction. They won’t argue the merits of what I say, but they’ll condemn me — and others, by the way, not just me — in really vitriolic terms, personal and the rest. Some of the reasons why I personally gave to some of the primaries — it was just a handful of people — it’s because of what they said about me. Personally.”Last August, Jacobs donated $2,900 — the maximum allowable amount — to a county legislator trying to unseat Bowman. The congressman won by 38 points anyway.“I don’t know Jay Jacobs,” Bowman told me. “I’ve never talked to him on the phone. I’ve never met him in my life. Even though I was a newcomer in 2020, I was still duly elected, and I’m a member of the party now. One would’ve thought that the leader of the party would have reached out to have a cup of coffee or have a conversation.”Should Jacobs resign? “The short answer is yes,” Bowman answered. “But the more, I think, comprehensive nuanced answer or question is, What the hell are we even doing? You know, the whole thing about the corporate agenda, which I think Jay Jacobs and maybe even Governor Hochul and maybe others are missing is, when you talk about younger voters, millennials or Gen Z, they are not aligned with corporate interests over labor and working-class people.”But Jacobs has plenty of defenders, including county leaders across the state, who believe he’s an upgrade over his somnolent or domineering predecessors and has a realistic view of what it takes to win beyond the liberal confines of New York City. “It’s hard for me to understand this rancor from certain individuals, by the way, who never seem to be satisfied,” says Jeremy Zellner, the chairman of the Erie County Democratic Party. “Only in New York could Jay win every single statewide election and hold the supermajorities in both the Assembly and Senate and be chastised.”Gregory Meeks, the Queens congressman and chairman of the county organization there, echoes Jacobs’s critique: The progressive and socialist left has cost Democrats in general elections by forcing them to defend positions he believes are alienating. “Extremes cannot be the dominant part of a party, because it isolates everyone else,” Meeks says. “What’s not good for all of us is talking about defunding the police.”Because Hochul inherited Jacobs, his critics have hoped she would ditch him for someone who might take a more active role in the sort of tasks that party chairs in other states care far more about: recruiting candidates, shaping the party’s message, funding voter-outreach campaigns that begin many months ahead of a general election and even hiring a full-time communications director and research staff. Among some Hochul allies, there has been quiet frustration directed at one of her top advisers, Adam Sullivan, who speaks frequently with Jacobs on Hochul’s behalf. Sullivan holds great sway in Hochul’s world because he managed her successful campaign for Congress more than a decade ago. Despite his low profile and the fact that his consulting firm, ACS Campaign Consulting, is based in Colorado, where he lives, Sullivan was one of a select few aides Hochul thanked in her victory speech. Sullivan himself disputes that there’s any behind-the-scenes friction. “The governor is completely committed to building a strong, robust party,” Sullivan says. “Everyone in her orbit is on the same page.” What isn’t clear is whether that page, and the vision for the future of the state party, includes Jacobs.Even Jacobs’s detractors acknowledge that dumping him and hunting for a replacement is only the beginning of a political project that will take many years. (Floated successors include Adriano Espaillat, a congressman who has built a strong operation among Dominican Americans in Upper Manhattan; Grace Meng, a Queens congresswoman and Democratic National Committee vice chairwoman who is the first Asian American elected to the House from New York; and Jessica Ramos, a progressive Queens state senator.)All the ongoing chaos hasn’t escaped the notice of national Democrats. “When I go to D.N.C. meetings,” says a high-ranking New York Democratic official, who requested anonymity to avoid antagonizing colleagues, “there is a sense that New York doesn’t have a state party at all.”Through the first half of the 20th century, Tammany Hall, with origins as an Irish Catholic society in the late 1700s, was the embodiment of the local Democratic Party, using patronage to secure power and dominating state and city politics alike. Nothing equivalent rose to take its place. “I don’t think anybody in their right mind would compare the state party right now to the machine that existed 50, 60, 70 years ago,” says Paterson, the former governor who later served as state party chairman during Cuomo’s tenure.New York never had a Harry Reid figure, a singularly powerful Democrat who took an obsessive interest in party building. The two Cuomos, Mario and his son Andrew, governed the state for a combined nearly 23 years, and each treated the party organization as little more than a tool for self-promotion. A liberal icon to the rest of America for his soaring speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, Mario Cuomo was assailed at home for barely lifting a finger to aid Democrats desperately trying to retake the State Senate. In 1990, The Times reported that Cuomo was hoarding more than $5 million for his own campaign while spending none for the State Senate Democrats, who were outspent 4 to 1 by Republicans. In 1994, the state party spent almost $2 million to aid Cuomo’s failed re-election effort while offering less than $30,000 apiece for the candidates for attorney general and state comptroller. By the end of the year, the party was moribund and completely broke, running up a million-dollar debt.The only Democratic governor in modern times to care about the future of the state party and down-ballot candidates was Eliot Spitzer, who won a landslide victory in 2006 and would resign, a little more than a year later, in a prostitution scandal. Spitzer was a proud liberal who wanted to break the Republican hold on the State Senate. The party, too, was trying to modernize in anticipation of Senator Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign for president. For a brief period, under the leadership of Denny Farrell, an influential state assemblyman from Manhattan, talented operatives were hired, and Spitzer’s aides tried to implement a strategy for boosting legislative candidates.“The party itself had really dissipated,” recalls Spitzer, now a real estate developer. His team helped recruit and fund an upstate Democratic candidate who won a pivotal special election for a State Senate seat in early 2008. “It was partly fund-raising, partly finding the right candidates, partly putting the right energy into it.”Andrew Cuomo at a news conference in 2021, a few months before he announced his resignation. The two Cuomos, Andrew and his father Mario, governed the state for a combined nearly 23 years.Mary Altaffer/Getty ImagesThe rise of Andrew Cuomo, who had a near-dictatorial hold on political affairs for nearly the entirety of the 2010s, put an end to nascent party-building plans. Cuomo treated Democratic politics as an extension of Cuomo politics, hoovering up resources and kneecapping Democrats he viewed as a threat. He was content to let Republicans keep the State Senate and rarely campaigned for House candidates. Donald Trump’s election, coupled with Sanders’s 2016 bid, would radicalize a new generation of Democrats. Soon, a democratic socialist candidate was winning a State Senate seat, and Working Families Party-supported insurgents were driving out the conservative Democrats who had chosen to align themselves with the Republican Party.By 2018, Ocasio-Cortez had felled one of the most powerful party bosses in New York, a sign that the left could win its battles against the establishment. “We need Democrats who are not running from their own shadow,” says Sochie Nnaemeka, the New York director of the Working Families Party.The widening fissures are both ideological and geographical. Manhattan and Brooklyn Democrats saved Hochul in November, but so did Westchester County, which once upon a time was a Republican stronghold. Democrats there gave Hochul a 20-point margin over Zeldin after Biden flew in to campaign for her. Westchester has continued to mirror national trends, as affluent suburbs grow Democratic, but Republicans have remained remarkably resilient on Long Island. Home to lavish estates, as well as growing Orthodox Jewish communities and a rising Asian American electorate newly alienated by Democrats, along with a working- and middle-class vote forever skeptical of big-city liberalism, the eastern suburb backed Zeldin by double digits. In recent years, the Hudson Valley has grown bluer, with city residents scooping up comparatively cheaper real estate during the pandemic, yet Zeldin carried Rockland, Dutchess, Putnam and Orange Counties, where Trump-era enthusiasm for Democrats gave way to backlash over rising crime south of the former Tappan Zee Bridge (renamed for Mario Cuomo by his son).Jacobs can credibly argue that the progressivism or outright socialism that wins in Brooklyn or Queens can’t be easily sold in Nassau County. But Bowman and his cohort can ask why he neglects the younger voters moving left — or, for that matter, why he fails to build out an organization that can be credibly called a political party, the kind that is more than one man and a few aides conducting political business from a summer-camp office. In a 10-page report issued in January, Jacobs pinned Democratic losses on historically high Republican turnout, a contention backed by data. But shouldn’t a state party’s task be, in part, to turn out its own voters? Had enough Democrats been motivated to vote, George Santos would never have been sworn in as a congressman.“What we saw is a party that did not know what role they should play,” Nnaemeka says, “and therefore played no role.”Ross Barkan writes frequently on New York and national politics. He is the author of two novels and a nonfiction account of Covid’s impact on New York City. This is his first article for the magazine. More
