Can Democrats Survive the Looming Crisis in New York City’s Outer Boroughs?

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The multiracial working class and the white ethnic middle class are fleeing the Democratic Party, undermining its strength in Albany and imperiling its ability to compete statewide.

by Matthew Thomas

In the midterm elections, Republicans fared much better in New York than they did in most parts of the country, delivering strong performances up and down the ballot. In the governor’s race, Long Island congressman Lee Zeldin came within a few points of unseating Kathy Hochul, the Democratic incumbent who succeeded to the post following the resignation of Andrew Cuomo. Despite being well to the right of most New Yorkers on a variety of high-salience issues – such as abortion, gun control, and the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election – Zeldin had the best showing of any Republican candidate for statewide office in decades.

In the race for Congress, the GOP picked up four seats in New York, allowing them to recapture the House of Representatives. The party now holds eleven House seats in the Empire State, which is the most they’ve held since 2002. The GOP also took out three Democratic incumbents in the State Senate and another three in the State Assembly, and they came close to ousting several more in both chambers. Democrats actually held up alright in the State Senate compared to previous cycles, but they now hold fewer seats in the assembly than at any time since 2012, and they’re on the brink of losing their legislative supermajorities.

How did Republicans do so well in a liberal state like New York, especially with a culture warrior like Zeldin at the top of the ticket? According to the New York Times, the answer is “a suburban revolt over crime and quality of life.” From their Sunday edition, November 27th, 2022:

The paper of record wasn’t the only publication running with this idea; similar claims appeared in many prominent organs of the local and national press. While some of them acknowledged that Republicans made gains in New York City as well, they tended to downplay the impact that those gains had on the midterms. For example, the New York Times noted that the city “remained overwhelmingly blue,” while the Albany Times-Union reported that strong Democratic turnout in Manhattan and Brooklyn helped insulate Hochul from a red wave in the suburbs.

But if you ask me, this interpretation of New York’s midterm results doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. To see why, let’s take a look at the outcomes of the last three governor’s races in three different areas of the state: 1) New York City, 2) the suburbs of New York City, defined as Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, and Rockland counties, and 3) upstate New York, defined as the other fifty-three counties in the state.

The first issue with the suburban revolt narrative is that the suburbs don’t account for most of the decline in the Democratic margin of victory between 2018 and 2022, which is the comparison around which the narrative revolves. True, the suburbs did swing twenty-two points toward the GOP, but the swing in New York City was a whopping twenty-seven points. As a result, Hochul’s performance in the city reduced her statewide margin by eight points relative to 2018, while her performance in the suburbs reduced it by only six. Notably, the Republican stronghold of upstate New York moved just two points to the right and had a negligible impact on the race.

Hochul also suffered from a shift in the geographic distribution of the electorate. In 2018, thirty-five percent of all votes cast in the governor’s race came from New York City, twenty-four percent came from the suburbs, and forty-one percent came from upstate. In 2022, the distribution was thirty percent from New York City, twenty-six percent from the suburbs, and forty-four percent from upstate. The city’s decline as a share of the electorate – a product of flagging turnout in the five boroughs, not a turnout surge anywhere else – knocked another two points off Hochul’s statewide margin relative to the previous midterm cycle.

When you add it all up, the suburbs account for just over a third of the decline in the Democratic margin of victory between 2018 and 2022. The people of New York City, through a combination of defection and abstention, account for most of the rest. In my view, this pretty much dispenses with the claim that the suburbs “fueled New York’s seismic tilt toward the GOP,” as the New York Times has argued. But setting aside the question of its effects, what about the idea that the suburban turn to the right was caused by tabloid hysteria over “rising crime and deteriorating public safety?”

This brings us to another issue with the suburban revolt narrative, which is that it fails to consider other key factors that likely contributed to this outcome. For starters, the national environment was much better for Democrats in 2018 than it was in 2022. True, the party held up pretty well last year in most parts of the country, but Hochul wasn’t riding a historic blue wave in the same way that Cuomo was four years earlier. How much did that wave boost his performance? Notice that while the suburbs swung twenty-two points toward the GOP last year relative to 2018, the swing was only twelve points relative to the more appropriate benchmark of 2014.

Next, consider how much of this so-called revolt took place in Suffolk County. While Zeldin’s wins in Nassau and Rockland counties netted him 67,000 votes in total, Hochul made up for this deficit by netting 68,000 votes out of Westchester County alone. Thus, Zeldin’s entire margin out of the suburbs – indeed, his very claim to having won them – came courtesy of the 94,000 votes that he netted from Suffolk, where he was the incumbent congressman of nearly a decade and a two-term state senator before that. As a lifelong resident of Buffalo and the first upstate governor in over a century, Hochul’s connection to the area was more or less nonexistent.

In summary, the suburbs are responsible for around one-third of the decline in the Democratic margin of victory between 2018 and 2022. Taking into account the rightward drift of the national environment over this period and the home field advantage that Zeldin enjoyed against an unelected, upstate incumbent, I’d estimate that no more than one-half of this one-third can reasonably be attributed to matters of public policy, including “crime and quality of life.” Hochul certainly underperformed in the suburbs, but in my opinion, reports of a revolt have been greatly exaggerated.

Unfortunately for Democrats, Zeldin’s success in New York City isn’t as easy to explain away. Notice that while the city swung twenty-seven points toward the GOP between 2018 and 2022, the swing was still nineteen points relative to 2014. Moreover, while citywide turnout modestly declined between 2018 and 2022, it was still way up relative to 2014. This means that even after selecting an appropriate benchmark for evaluating last year’s results, we’re still left with an impressive swing toward the GOP that can’t be written off as low turnout. Zeldin didn’t have any home field advantage goosing his numbers in the city either.

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