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    Can Lee Zeldin Reinvent His Way to the NY Governor’s Mansion?

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    SHIRLEY, N.Y. — As a young U.S. Army lawyer of unmistakable ambition, Lee Zeldin could almost see his future unfurling before him. It was his first stint in Iraq, and he was already imagining the kind of distinguished career in uniform that would have laid the groundwork for one in politics.Then a Red Cross message arrived on the base where Mr. Zeldin was embedded as a captain with the 82nd Airborne Division. His girlfriend had gone into dangerously premature labor with twin girls. Doctors were not optimistic about the babies’ survival. His commanding officer sent him home to mourn.“This I vividly remember the emotion of,” Mr. Zeldin, now a conservative congressman, recalled in a recent interview. “My priorities became all about my daughters.”The girls survived after months in the hospital. But rather than returning to Iraq, Mr. Zeldin took a desk job back at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, got married and then was discharged. At just 27, he found that the life he had imagined had veered off course.It was not the first time, nor the last. As a high school senior here on the South Shore of Long Island, Mr. Zeldin sought a prestigious appointment to West Point, only to fall short. After leaving the Army in 2007, he almost immediately entered a race for Congress, hoping to jump-start his political career. He lost in a blowout.But in every case, Mr. Zeldin has shown aptitude for finding a quick path to reinvention that has helped fuel his political ascent. Now, at age 42, it has put him closer than any Republican since George E. Pataki two decades ago to one of the nation’s most influential political posts, the governorship of New York.A few hundred Zeldin supporters attended a rally on Monday in Westchester County, traditionally an area controlled by Democrats. Brittainy Newman for The New York TimesThough Gov. Kathy Hochul, the Democratic incumbent, remains the front-runner, Mr. Zeldin’s late surge in the polls has shocked even political strategists and sent Democrats scrambling to prop up their candidate. With Ms. Hochul’s huge war chest and a vast Democratic registration advantage, few expected Mr. Zeldin to come close to winning, and perhaps with good reason: He does not easily fit the profile of a New York power player.In a state shaped by wealthy business interests and often governed by larger-than-life personalities and family dynasties, Mr. Zeldin is an outlier. He grew up in law enforcement households of modest means. He can be introverted and awkward with voters. And in a state dominated by the political left, he is probably the most conservative serious contender for the governorship in modern memory — even voting to overturn the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021.Yet a careful review of his public and private life, including two dozen interviews with family, friends, colleagues and critics, shows that Mr. Zeldin’s emergence as a political force stems from decades of meticulous planning, comfort with taking risks, well-timed alliances with more powerful Republicans and, above all, a knack honed from a young age for what allies call adaptation but his critics view as a more cynical political shape-shifting.Those qualities have been on full display in this fall’s campaign, as Mr. Zeldin moved swiftly to tap into two powerful currents of discontent that Democrats appear to have misjudged and that threaten to scramble the state’s usual political order: painful inflation eroding New Yorkers’ sense of financial well-being and fears about rising crime.“He’s grabbed the right issues and hasn’t let go,” said Rob Astorino, who lost to Mr. Zeldin in this year’s Republican primary.Mr. Zeldin, center, has heavily courted the Hasidic vote during his campaign stops in New York City, including a recent visit to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.Andrew Seng for The New York TimesBut his instincts have also been evident as he tries to execute another on-the-fly transformation, playing down hard-line positions that served him well while he climbed the Republican ranks in Albany and Washington but are now politically inconvenient, while offering scant details on some of his latest policy proposals.Who Is Lee Zeldin Up Against?Card 1 of 5Gov. Kathy Hochul’s rise to power. More

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      For Zeldin, a Shooting Hits Close to Home and to His Campaign Theme

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      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 More

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      2 Shot Outside Home of Lee Zeldin, Candidate for New York Governor

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      The conditions of the two people and the circumstances of what happened were unclear but officials said there was no connection between the shooting and the residents of the home.Two people were wounded in a shooting on Sunday outside the home of Representative Lee Zeldin, the Republican candidate for governor of New York, the candidate said on Twitter.The Suffolk County Police Department said that detectives were investigating the shooting, outside a home in Shirley on Long Island at 2:20 p.m. The conditions of the two people were not immediately clear.In a statement, Mr. Zeldin said that the two men who were shot were under his front porch and that he did not know them. The authorities also said there was no connection between the injured and the residents of the home.Mr. Zeldin said that he and his wife, Diana, were not home at the time of the shooting and had just left the Bronx Columbus Day Parade in the Morris Park neighborhood. He said his 16-year-old daughters, Mikayla and Arianna, were in the house doing homework at the kitchen table when they heard gunshots and screaming.“They ran upstairs, locked themselves in the bathroom and immediately called 911,” he said. “They acted very swiftly and smartly every step of the way and Diana and I are extremely proud of them.”Mr. Zeldin, a conservative congressman, has made public safety the centerpiece of his campaign, traveling the state to highlight violent crimes while promising to tighten the state’s bail laws and crack down on crime, if elected.He is considered an underdog against Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, who had a comfortable lead in recent polls. Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than two to one in New York, and the governor’s campaign has sought to highlight Mr. Zeldin’s opposition to abortion rights and his support for former President Donald J. Trump.The shooting is the second time that violence has intersected with Mr. Zeldin’s campaign in recent months. In July, a man from Western New York was charged with assaulting a member of Congress after he physically confronted Mr. Zeldin onstage during a political event.The man, who was identified as an Army veteran, was pointing a sharp keychain toward the congressman. He later said he had been drinking and did not know who Mr. Zeldin was. Mr. Zeldin placed the attack in the context of his anti-crime message.“I’m as resolute as ever to do my part to make New York safe again,” he said at the time.The campaign increased security around Mr. Zeldin after the July incident. He hit the same note on Sunday, saying that his daughters were shaken by the shooting but otherwise unhurt.“Like so many New Yorkers, crime has literally made its way to our front door,” he said.Governor Hochul said on Twitter that she had been briefed on the shooting and was “relieved to hear the Zeldin family is safe and grateful for law enforcement’s quick response.”Grace Ashford More

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      Will Abortion Turn Tide for Democrats in House Fight for NY Suburbs?

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      ROCKVILLE CENTRE, N.Y. — A year ago, Republicans staged an uprising in the Long Island suburbs, winning a slew of races by zeroing in on public safety and suggesting that Democrats had allowed violent crime to fester.Now, with the midterms approaching, Democratic leaders are hoping that their own singular message, focused on abortion, might have a similar effect.“Young ladies, your rights are on the line,” Laura Gillen, a Democrat running for Congress in Nassau County, said to two young women commuting toward the city on a recent weekday morning. “Please vote!”Long Island has emerged as an unlikely battleground in the bitter fight for control of the House of Representatives, with both Democrats and Republicans gearing up to pour large sums of money into the contests here.Nassau and Suffolk Counties, where nearly three million New Yorkers live, have become a powerful testing ground for the main campaign themes of each party, with Democrats hoping that their renewed focus on abortion rights — following the recent Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade — will help them retain control of the House.The New York City suburbs are at a rare political crossroads: Three of the four House seats that encompass most of Long Island are open this year after their incumbents retired or stepped aside to seek higher political office, offering both parties a unique, regionally concentrated opportunity to send new faces to Congress.The two districts that are mostly situated in Nassau County, just east of Queens, are held by Democrats, while the two districts concentrated on the eastern stretch of the island in Suffolk County are held by Republicans. Both parties are vying to gain one, if not, two seats.That prospect has injected a sense of urgency and uncertainty into the races on Long Island, once a Republican stronghold that has turned more Democratic and diverse in recent decades, becoming the type of suburban swing area that could determine control of the House in November.Republicans have almost exclusively focused on blaming Democrats for rising prices as well as on public safety: They have amplified concerns about the state’s contentious bail laws and crime in nearby New York City, where many Long Islanders commute for work.“Many Democrats feel like that they don’t have a party anymore because it’s gone so far to the left,” said Anthony D’Esposito, a former New York City police detective and local councilman running against Ms. Gillen, the former Town of Hempstead supervisor who lost her seat in 2019. He suggested that police officers, firefighters and emergency medical workers who live in Nassau County but work in the five boroughs are alarmed by crime in the city.Anthony D’Esposito, a former New York City police detective, is trying to flip a Democratic seat being vacated by Kathleen Rice.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesMr. D’Esposito and Ms. Gillen are running in a tight race to replace Representative Kathleen Rice, a Democrat who announced in February that she would not run for re-election in the Fourth District in central and southern Nassau, which she has represented since 2015.“The Dobbs decision was a wake-up call that elections have consequences,” Ms. Rice said in an interview. “But for people on Long Island, they don’t want to just hear about that. They want to hear about how we’re going to get inflation under control and public safety,” she said, adding both were politically thorny issues for Democrats in New York.Republicans are looking to replicate their success from 2021, when the party used visceral ads of assaults and break-ins to help capture a slew of races across Long Island. They ousted Laura Curran, the Democratic Nassau County executive, in November, and won control of the Nassau district attorney’s office despite running a first-time candidate against a well-known Democratic state senator.Democratic operatives are quick to caution that 2021 was an off-year election, when Republicans typically are more successful in getting voters to the polls. Indeed, there are more Democrats than Republicans registered to vote in the district, and political analysts have forecast it as more favorable for Democrats.Still, almost a quarter of voters are unaffiliated with either party. Some high-ranking Democrats have privately raised concerns that the contest is being overlooked by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which did not include it in its national “Red to Blue” slate of competitive races, a designation that provides field work and helps attract financial support from national donors.Interviews this month with more than a dozen voters in Nassau County showed that public safety, inflation and immigration remained animating issues among Republicans and swing voters who typically play an outsize role in elections here..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Joe O’Connor, a 75-year-old Vietnam veteran from Freeport on Long Island’s South Shore, is not registered with either party. He voted against Mr. Trump in 2020 but said he was still unsure how he would vote in November, noting that chief among his concerns were education, homelessness and safety in New York City.“New York has come back great, and I’m really happy with that,” said Mr. O’Connor, a former teacher who frequently visits museums and Broadway shows in the city. “But it’s got to be cleaned up, and it’s got to be safe for people.”Democrats, for their part, have homed in on abortion rights and the threat to democracy as central campaign themes, hopeful that the recent legal setbacks that have thrust former President Donald J. Trump back into the news will also boost their chances in a state where Mr. Trump remains deeply unpopular.Delis Ortiz, 20, who said she would vote for her first time in November, said that while her top concern was keeping up with rising grocery prices, she would most likely vote Democratic in part because of the party’s stance on abortion rights.“I believe that every person has a right to their own body,” said Ms. Ortiz, a barista at an upscale coffee shop in Garden City. “Nobody should have that power over anyone else, ever.”Those themes are playing out visibly in the competitive race to replace Representative Thomas R. Suozzi, a centrist Democrat who has represented the Third District, in northern parts of Nassau County and parts of eastern Queens, since 2017 but decided not to run for re-election to pursue an unsuccessful run for governor this year.Robert Zimmerman, a small-business owner and well-known Democratic activist, has repeatedly sought to cast his Republican opponent, George Santos, as too extreme to represent the district, highlighting Mr. Santos’s apparent support of abortion bans and his attendance at the pro-Trump rally in Washington on Jan. 6.Robert Zimmerman, a Democrat, is facing George Santos, a Republican, in a contest to fill an open seat vacated by Representative Thomas Suozzi.Johnny Milano for The New York Times“Long Island can very well determine who has the majority in Congress,” Mr. Zimmerman said over coffee at a diner in Great Neck this month. “And frankly, George Santos represents the greatest threat to our democracy of any candidate running for Congress in New York State. I really can’t underscore that enough.”In a statement, Charley Lovett, Mr. Santos’s campaign manager, accused Mr. Zimmerman of trying to “distract voters from the disasters that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi’s policies have caused with Robert Zimmerman’s full support.”Their matchup also has history-making potential: The race appears to be the first time that two openly gay candidates for Congress have faced off in a general election.The governor’s election could also play a role in some House races on Long Island, which has emerged as a key battleground in the race between Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, and her Republican opponent, Representative Lee Zeldin, who has represented most of Suffolk County in Congress since 2015.Ms. Hochul has held a significant lead in most public polls, and she held a narrow five-point lead in the New York City suburbs in a Siena College poll released on Wednesday. Even so, Republicans are hoping Mr. Zeldin’s support on Long Island could help drive its voters to the polls, buoying the party’s House candidates, though Democrats are betting that their barrage of attack ads portraying Mr. Zeldin as a right-wing extremist will help the party animate Democrats and swing more moderate voters in their favor.Mr. Zeldin’s entry into the governor’s race paved the way for Democrats to try and flip his now-open congressional seat in the First District on the eastern end of the island, one of the few Republican-held seats in the country that is open and considered competitive. But Democrats face an uphill battle: The seat is projected to slightly favor Republicans, who have held the district since Mr. Zeldin wrestled it from Democratic control in 2014.The Democrat in the race, Bridget Fleming, a former assistant district attorney and current county legislator, has nonetheless outpaced her opponent in fund-raising and recently received the endorsement from the union that represents police officers in Suffolk County. She was also added to the Democrats’ Red to Blue program in June.A moderate, she has centered her campaign in the district, a mix of working-class and wealthy residents, on affordability and conserving the environment — a top issue for fishermen and farmers, as well as the tourism industry, on the island’s East End — but also on protecting women’s right to choose.“There’s no question that fundamental freedoms are under assault in our country,” said Ms. Fleming. “The exploitation of the extremes that we’ve seen recently is electrifying people who are standing up to fight for themselves.”In an interview, her opponent, Nicholas LaLota, brushed off Democrats’ almost singular focus on reproductive rights, saying that New York already had some of the strictest protections in the country.“Here in New York, nobody’s abortion rights are under attack or assault,” said Mr. LaLota, a former Navy lieutenant who works in the Suffolk County Legislature. “So those folks who want to campaign on abortion, they should run for state office, not federal office.”He added that voters in the district “who live paycheck to paycheck were more concerned about rising interests rates and prices.”Democrats are facing an even steeper climb to unseat Representative Andrew Garbarino, a well-funded Republican who represents the Second District on the South Shore that is among the most affluent in the country. Opposing Mr. Garbarino is Jackie Gordon, an Army veteran, who lost to Mr. Garbarino in 2020. More