The New York establishment is beating up on AOC. It should be looking in the mirror. New York Democrats have no one to blame but themselves for their setbacks in the U.S. House. Max Burns
It will go down as one of the bitter ironies of the 2022 midterm campaign: One of the few states that actually faced a “red wave” of Republican victories was deep-blue New York.
Democrats could have prevailed had their state party — which was busy deflecting progressive criticism of their conduct — marshaled better infrastructure and financial support for swing-district candidates.
To sour matters further, Democratic losses in the Empire State appear to be pivotal in the narrow majority in the House of Representatives that Republicans are likely to have starting next year. The icing on this rotten cake is that New York Democrats have no one to blame but themselves.
On a night of many disappointments, the party’s most egregious own goal was the one scored for Republicans by no one less than the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman himself, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney. Maloney, whose DCCC role is to elect as many Democrats to the House as possible, not only presided over the loss of four previously Democratic New York districts, but failed to win his own race after putting his ego above the warnings of party officials and activists.
Maloney isn’t the only one to blame for Democrats’ Big Apple bludgeoning, however. The Democratic legislators who control the statehouse fumbled the ball when they were given the task of drawing up new congressional districts to reflect the results of the 2020 census. Their new congressional maps failed to satisfy the courts that they didn’t violate the state constitution’s bar on partisan gerrymandering, leading to the appointment of a nonpartisan election expert as a special master to draw new maps that cut deeply into Democrats’ previously safe districts.
But even facing those tough maps, Democrats could have prevailed had their state party — which was busy deflecting progressive criticism of their conduct — marshaled better infrastructure and financial support for swing-district candidates. The maps were a problem; the party’s malpractice was fatal.
Facing challenging new maps, Maloney and his moderate allies panicked that many of the popular progressives who had already announced their candidacies simply could not win. That pessimism is part of a larger progressive versus moderate mindset the New York Democratic Party struggles with, best emphasized by the constant internal criticism of one of its most popular lawmakers: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
But Ocasio-Cortez is not the sole target of machine Democrats’ ire. During the hotly contested race for mayor of Buffalo, democratic socialist India Walton won her primary, only for moderate party leaders to back her defeated opponent. New York State Democratic Committee Chair Jay Jacobs drew heavy criticism for a ham-fisted analogy in which he compared supporting Walton, who is Black, to backing white supremacist David Duke.
Democrats like Maloney then went about undercutting established progressives. Maloney pushed incumbent Rep. Mondaire Jones to abandon his re-election bid in New York’s 17th District and instead run as a representative of New York City’s new 10th District, where he finished a distant third in the primary.
Maloney’s gamble — that he himself would perform better in a district that included many of Jones’ old voters than in his own territory — succeeded in robbing Congress of not one but two able Democratic lawmakers. That prominent voices, including MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and many Democratic experts, loudly warned Maloney against his deck-shuffling gambit only made last Tuesday’s results more depressing.
In a moment of exceptional self-unawareness that only underscored the broader myopia of establishment New York Democrats, Maloney took the news of his loss Tuesday as an opportunity to swipe at Ocasio-Cortez. In an interview with The New York Times published a few days later, Maloney gloated about beating her endorsed candidates in state primaries — no doubt in part to vent his frustration at such an embarrassing defeat — and argued the progressive congresswoman had “almost nothing to do with” previous efforts to protect Democratic legislative majorities.
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