‘The Squad’ Faces a ‘Freedom Force’ Trump lost badly in New York and California, but Republican candidates picked up House seats in both states. Here’s how two of them did it.By Tunku Varadarajan
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-squad-faces-a-freedom-force-11607108025?mod=opinion_lead_pos5
A quarter-century apart in age, Nicole Malliotakis and Michelle Steel are classmates. They’re both freshmen, Republicans who’ve won election to the House of Representatives for the first time. Each ousted an incumbent Democrat in a resolutely blue state—New York and California, respectively—where Joe Biden romped home in November. And each woman has a scathing view of the politics of the other’s state as well as of her own. They’re ready to scorn Govs. Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom. As for Mayor Bill de Blasio, Ms. Malliotakis, a state assemblywoman from New York City, practically combusts at the mention of his name.
“I think our leaderships are competing with each other to be the most radical. They keep getting bad ideas from each other,” says Ms. Malliotakis, 40, who will represent New York’s 11th Congressional District, comprised of the borough of Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn.
“The leadership is trying to make these states into Third World countries,” Ms. Steel, 65, responds. She is a member of the Orange County Board of Supervisors, a local legislative body, and representative-elect from California’s 48th District, a beachy slice of the county. In Washington for a freshman orientation, including a lottery for office space, the two talk to me by Zoom from their hotel rooms near the Capitol.
Both are robust proponents of low taxes and limited government. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” Ms. Malliotakis says: “The government should provide an environment for that—and then get out of the way.” Ms. Steel—who was born in South Korea and came to the U.S. at 19—confesses to drawing her earliest political beliefs from her mother’s experience as a clothing-store owner in Los Angeles. “I saw that my mom was harassed—really harassed—by a tax agency, the State Board of Equalization,” she says. “And you know what? I decided that the Republican Party’s ideology is much better for small-business owners. They need less regulation and smaller taxes.” Her first foray into elective politics was a successful run for the Board of Equalization in 2007.
Not long into our conversation, however, a difference emerges. Asked what role President Trump played in her race, Ms. Steel says that he was “not really a factor.” Hers was a very local race: “For an 18-month period, it was just Rouda vs. Steel.” (Rep. Harley Rouda won election in 2018, unseating 15-term Republican Dana Rohrabacher.) The voters in her district, she says, “were more concerned about their businesses”—hit hard by the pandemic—and with state and local taxes.
Only when she knocked on the doors of Vietnamese-American families would people mention Mr. Trump. “They always ask, ‘So, are you going to vote for Trump?’ They’re very pro-Trump.” Ms. Steel describes them as a “small, close-knit community who came here for freedom.” Her district is nearly 70% white, and she “didn’t hear much about Trump vs. Biden from the mainstream. They wanted to know, ‘When will our businesses open?’ ‘What about public safety?’ ‘What about crime?’ ” Orange County is traditionally Republican but trending Democratic; Hillary Clinton was the first Democratic presidential candidate to receive a plurality there since 1936, and Joe Biden managed a majority.
By contrast, Ms. Malliotakis is eager to emphasize Mr. Trump’s impact. “The president was helpful,” she says. “It’s a district that he won in 2016, and he won again this time.” Ms. Malliotakis and Mr. Trump did a “tele-town hall” together. “People very much appreciate the work that he has done,” she says, “and he is loved on Staten Island.” Although Mr. Trump won only a little over a third of the vote statewide, he got 61% in Staten Island.
Explaining the president’s appeal to her “hardworking, middle-class” voters, she says: “I represent a community made up largely of civil servants, police officers, firefighters, teachers,” all of whom respect the military and “our law enforcement.” The “straight talking” president, a native of the borough of Queens, appeals to them. “He had roots in Staten Island, in the sense that his father owned apartment buildings there, and he, as a young boy, used to go and collect the rents.”
Local issues also played a part in her win, especially the unpopularity of Mayor de Blasio, against whom she ran unsuccessfully as the 2017 Republican nominee. The incumbent, Rep. Max Rose—who like Mr. Rouda unseated a Republican in 2018—ran a 15-second campaign ad in which he stands on a city street and declares: “Bill de Blasio is the worst mayor in the history of New York City.” He pauses for five seconds before adding: “That’s it, guys. Seriously, that’s the whole ad.”
Ms. Malliotakis says she was a more credible bearer of that message: “I’ve been an opponent of this mayor for years, and I ran against him because I wanted to bring attention to the plight that my community was experiencing under his mismanagement.” She describes Mr. Rose’s self-distancing from Mr. de Blasio as “expediency, and not sincere”—a response to a poll “showing that the mayor was very unpopular, so he decided 55 days before the election to run that antimayor commercial.”
Ms. Steel has a similarly withering view of Mr. Rouda, and she laughs as she describes his hypercautious re-election campaign. “I knocked on over 110,000 doors,” she says. “There was not even a single complaint. We knocked with masks on, and people were really happy to see us, glad that someone was talking to them because they’ve been locked down such a long time.” Mr. Rouda “didn’t really come out because of the pandemic. He stayed at home.” He didn’t even go to Washington in July to vote on the relief bill styled the Cares Act; he cast a “yes” vote by proxy. When I ask if that stay-at-home decision hurt Mr. Rouda, Ms. Steel tells me to do the math. “I went to 110,000 homes,” she says. “And I won by 8,000 votes.”
But according to numbers supplied by Ms. Steel’s office, she outperformed Mr. Trump by nearly 3 points in her district, where Mr. Biden led Mr. Trump by 1.48%. She says she was helped by the unpopularity of Proposition 16, the Democratic Legislature’s ballot referendum that would have repealed California’s prohibition on racial preferences in public employment, contracting and college admissions. “They lost badly,” she says, “and I was one of those leading against the proposition.” Repeal was especially unpopular among Asian-Americans, but 57% of Californians voted against it. “The Democrats tried to be so divisive. We have to be inclusive.” Ms. Steel also suggests she was helped by her opponent’s presence at a rally to defund the police in Huntington Beach.
Ms. Malliotakis voices indignation over a similar episode in Staten Island. Unlike Orange County, New York City saw numerous riots in the weeks after George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police. The city’s residents were disconcerted by images of brazen looting in Midtown Manhattan and other parts of the city that had never seen such breakdowns in public order.
“My opponent,” Ms. Malliotakis fumes, “participated in one of the marches in which they were calling for defunding the police.” A few weeks later, she says, “the mayor listened. He cut a billion dollars” from the New York City Police Department, one-sixth of the NYPD budget. Constituents were “extremely upset” that their congressman was at “one of these rallies.” Mr. Rose, in her telling, “tried to backtrack,” but the rally was “pivotal” in her victory.
“One of the obstacles, just politically,” Ms. Malliotakis says, “was the amount of money that was thrown at us in these races.” Both women were outspent 2 to 1. Ms. Steel says that she had $8.7 million to spend against an opponent with a war-chest of $19 million. “Of that, Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party put in $14 million—just against me. The other Republican candidates have to thank me, because she was just attacking me in Southern California!”
Both say the Democratic Party made a special effort to hobble Republican candidates who were women or minorities. “Speaking with some of the other new members of the House,” Ms. Malliotakis says, “I think Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats really, really went after us. They didn’t want the Republicans to have representation.” They wanted, she says, “to monopolize women and minorities.” Ms. Steel recounts that her opponent insinuated—“because I have an accent”—that she was “a communist agent related to China.” Suppressing a giggle, she notes that her parents fled communist North Korea to the south during the Korean War. “I don’t even speak Chinese,” she adds. “I speak Japanese and Korean.”
Ms. Malliotakis’s mother also fled communism—Cuba in 1959, when she was 16. After a brief spell in Spain, she came to the U.S., where she met and married a man who ran a Greek restaurant in Manhattan. This imprint of her mother’s flight is part of the reason she is a “passionate opponent” of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a fellow outer-borough New Yorker and self-described socialist. In opposition to “the Squad”—the nom de guerre of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s far-left cohort—Ms. Malliotakis started her own small group of congressional freshmen, the “Freedom Force.”
‘There’s four of us,” she says, “who on the first day bonded very quickly because we shared very similar circumstances.” She names the others: Carlos Gimenez, Cuban-born, and Maria Salazar, the daughter of Cuban-refugee parents, both from Florida; and Victoria Spartz from Indiana, born in Ukraine, who came to the U.S. at 22. “I guess you could say,” Ms. Malliotakis says, “that we’re the founding members.” But she’s certain that “others within the freshman class who are supportive of freedoms and liberties” will join them.
Ms. Steel adds promptly that she’s “going to work with them.” The Squad, Ms. Steel says, “including AOC, are totally out of line. I want to conserve what we have in this country for future generations. I have a grandson who is 15 months old.”
Ms. Malliotakis concurs. “For me, socialism is personal. We’re going to fight back vehemently when we see policies being proposed that will fundamentally change our nation.” She adds that Mrs. Pelosi faces a choice: “Is she going to work with us in a bipartisan way, to accomplish things? Or will she empower the socialist Squad and kowtow to them?”
Mr. Varadarajan is a Journal contributor and a fellow at the New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.
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