As I wrote a few weeks back, while New York is not in play when it comes to the presidential election, turnout will really impact the ballot races where control of the House will be determined. During the 2022 midterms, Democrats got so thoroughly wiped out in New York, particularly the NYC suburbs of Long Island, that it cost the party control of the House altogether, throwing it to the chaotic control of weak, successive GOP speakers. Now, there are a number of tight key races that feature relatively slim polling margins between the Democratic and Republican candidates headed into next month.
I won’t really detail each race in particular, because there are already several write-ups of that nature, but the basic details are incumbent GOP Rep. Nick LaLota versus Democrat and commentator John Avlon in the Hamptons-anchored District 1; incumbent Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi versus GOP challenger Mike LiPetri in the Nassau County-based District 2; incumbent GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito versus Democratic challenger Laura Gillen in the Nassau-based District 4; incumbent GOP Rep. Mike Lawler versus former Democratic Rep. Mondaire Jones in District 17, north of NYC with slices of various counties; Democratic incumbent Rep. Pat Ryan versus GOP challenger Alison Esposito farther upstate in the Orange County-anchored District 18; incumbent GOP. Rep. Marc Molinaro versus Democratic challenger Josh Riley in the Hudson Valley-anchored District 19; and to some extent GOP incumbent Rep. Brandon Williams versus Democratic challenger John Mannion in the Syracuse-based District 22.
You’ll notice that most feature Republican incumbents, meaning that if the Democrats are able to defend their seats and flip the others, New York alone could shift the balance of power in Congress. Given that, I figured I’d talk a little about what I perceive with these races cumulatively. The conventional wisdom I’ve heard is that most candidates of both parties are trying to moderate in an effort to avoid backsplash from the intensity of the debate at the national level. Republicans are attempting to avoid the political toxicity that Trump has created around himself and Democrats are hoping to avoid being labeled as progressives outside the sure-shot blue districts of NYC.
This strikes me as broadly accurate, though what I think is often missing from this analysis is that what counts as a relatively moderate position on a multiplicity of issues has shifted dramatically in the last few years, in most cases sharply right but in some cases a bit more left. Among the clearest examples is the question of the validity of elections themselves: casting doubt on whether the 2020 election was fraudulently decided and on whether this year’s election will be fair are both part of the contemporary higher-echelon GOP dogma. This is driven by Trump’s continued contentions that he was cheated last time around and that any future loss will be the result of nefarious forces interfering in the process.
This propaganda has been so widespread, constant, and effective that now over half of voters appear to be concerned about voter fraud in some form (including a third of Democrats, who might be worried about the MAGA side engaging in it). This is all despite the comprehensive, considerable evidence that voter fraud — the act of people who are not eligible to vote voting in elections — is vanishingly rare. This serves a two-fold purpose of pushing the narrative that Trump and his followers are somehow put-upon by the powers that be — as opposed to receiving immense leeway — and distracting from that camp’s very real efforts to actually rig aspects of the election. That includes spurious powers to investigate “fraud” and delay results (see the Georgia State Elections Board for a prime example).
So, we’ve reached the point where Republican candidates simply pointing out that Trump did, in fact, lose the election and that the ongoing one is not in the process of being stolen is considered practically a bipartisan concession. These are not questions that anyone would have even thought to ask in federal elections just a decade ago, but now they’re a somewhat darkly comical marker of a reasonable candidate. As far as I can tell, none of the endangered Republican House candidates in New York have actively made the argument that there was election fraud, though Molinaro praised the disastrous Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity. LaLota at least has pledged to certify the 2024 election results and made it a point to appear reasonable on the issue.
Another area where this has manifested is immigration, to my mind the issue where both parties have lurched the most towards the right. The center of political gravity for Democrats on this issue seems to have landed roughly where it was for Republicans two decades ago — locking down the border, paying lip service to the broad notion of legal immigration while insisting that humanitarian migration be reined in and that large numbers of arrivals are effectively a problem to be handled, perhaps in a humane way but handled nonetheless. For Republicans, meanwhile, the center has drifted to what were once the far fringes.
The Times, for example, labeled Molinaro as having gone “full Trump” for his embrace of conspiracies including the detestable and racist lie that Haitian immigrants have been feasting on pets. Meanwhile, Democrats like Gillen are saying things like “I will work with anyone from any party to secure our southern border, lock up criminals pushing fentanyl and stop the migrant crisis,” a line that would have seemed straight out of a Republican attack ad just a decade ago. The upshot here is that what a moderate candidate looks like today is pretty different from what a moderate candidate looked like a few years ago, on a range of different issues, and this all makes the contours of the races a bit fuzzier, and it also gives us a general sense of how electoral politics as a whole have shifted as of late.
Who wins these tight races depends almost entirely on which side is able to most turn out its voting base, which I think for the Democrats in New York means somehow conveying that it’s actually not necessarily Kamala Harris that voters need to be turning out for. Voters potentially believe, rightly, that the odds of her losing the state are almost nonexistent, and they might as well stay home. Or, rather, the message could be that the vote is for Harris in a roundabout way, emphasizing the reality that the effectiveness of a Harris presidency would be somewhat neutered by an oppositional GOP-controlled House.
That this specific set of GOP candidates have not publicly bought into the MAGA election lies doesn’t mean that these issues won’t have some impact on race dynamics here. I’ve heard the occasional concern from Republican officials and operatives that the emphasis on what is ultimately a false narrative of a rigged system might actually end up hurting the party electorally, which makes sense in a way. Would-be voters that are convinced that their votes are essentially worthless because the game is stacked are not likely to bother (of course that makes them more radical and likelier to sour on the idea of democracy altogether, which is a separate and very sinister problem). In any case, regardless of what happens in New York, it’s looking likely that the longstanding tradition of U.S. candidates accepting election results as a matter of course is over.
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