A bastion of GOP moderates until Trump
Successful wing of party in NYC now a thing of the past
Over the course of two decades, the New York City Republican Party got two mayors elected in deep blue New York City. It was a neat trick made possible by the party’s ability to toe a centrist line — conservative on the budget, liberal on social issues.
But that line has shifted in the era of President Donald Trump, and so has the idea of a New York City Republican.
The Metropolitan Republican Club in Manhattan, whose members have included Theodore Roosevelt and Nelson A. Rockefeller, has in the last two years hosted talks by
Steve Bannon; the Breitbart News editor, Joel Pollak; and the Proud
Boys founder, Gavin Mcinnes.
Republicans are now outnumbered by Democrats in Manhattan by nearly 8 to 1, and some prominent New Yorkers like Joseph Lhota, the
2013 Republican candidate for mayor, have left the party.
“It had to do with Donald Trump as head of the party,” Lhota said. “I just couldn’t deal with it.”
Few things embody the change more than the Manhattan Republican Party and the divergent paths of the city’s two former Republican mayors from Manhattan: Michael Bloomberg, who is now a Democrat, and Rudy Giuliani.
In a vitriolic speech in New York in September, Giuliani said that Mayor
Bill de Blasio’s biracial son should fear “another Black” more than a police officer and that Black Lives Matter protesters are “cop killers” who might also want to kill white people.
“When you see a police officer killed, which you are watching, somebody is carrying out what Black Lives Matter asked them to do,” Giuliani said. “Or if you see a white person killed, it could be that, too.”
Giuliani made his remarks at a forum hosted by the Manhattan Republican Party, which is now run by the family of John Catsimatidis, a billionaire Republican grocery magnate who has run for mayor. He has given the majority of the party’s recent political donations; his daughter, Andrea, 30, is the party chair.
John Catsimatidis has evolved from a self-described undecided voter at the 2016 Republican convention to a full-throated Trump supporter in 2020.
“If you vote on personality, Trump loses. If you vote on performance, Trump wins,” Catsimatidis said.
Andrea Catsimatidis also wholly embraces Trumpism, including the president’s rhetoric about New York City, and saw Giuliani’s recent speech as a way to highlight the city’s perils in the time of COVID: the frustrated small business owners, the cuts to sanitation services, the rise in shootings.
The event “was our way of becoming more conspicuous,” she said.
The party’s politics have veered so far in the direction of Trump that they have become virtually unrecognizable to moderate Republicans of years past.
In interview after interview, formerly active Manhattan Republicans said their disaffection with the president prompted them to leave the party or withdraw from local activities. Several are now openly campaigning for former Vice President Joe Biden.
“It’s been very sad to see what’s happened,” said John Ravitz, who chaired the Manhattan Republican Party in 2001 and 2002.
The party has a handful of elected officials in New York City, with most from Staten Island, including James S. Oddo, the borough president, and Nicole Malliotakis, a state assemblywoman who is trying to unseat Rep. Max Rose in a congressional district that includes Staten Island and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
She distanced herself from the president during her 2017 run for mayor but now embraces him, boasting of Trump’s “complete and total endorsement” in her race against Rose.
There are no Republicans from Manhattan in Congress, the City Council or the state Legislature.
The Republicans are thought to have just one potentially viable candidate this election in Manhattan: Lou Puliafito, a doorman who is running for Assembly in a district where the incumbent was thrown off the Democratic and Working Families Party ballot lines for filing her paperwork incorrectly.
Among the party’s 11 long-shot candidates is Mike Zumbluskas, an Independence Party member whom the Manhattan Republicans cross-endorsed for state Senate.
He supports Trump’s embrace of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for coronavirus — which the president tested positive for early this month — despite a lack of scientific evidence that it is effective; argues New York’s lockdown has been too onerous; and says the president’s management of the pandemic has garnered undue criticism.
“If you look what he was doing behind the scenes, he was taking it seriously,” Zumbluskas said. “He was making calls.”
Not that Zumbluskas’ views necessarily matter, from an electoral perspective.
“The candidates are almost beside the point in a place like Manhattan, because they’re not viable up and down the ballot,” said Neal Kwatra, a New York City Democratic strategist. Rather, Kwatra said, the party has the potential to become a “fundraising vehicle” or vanity project for party building, donor cultivation and political organizing for the Catsimatidis family writ large.
As of February, there were 109,269 voters registered in the Republican Party in Manhattan, compared with 832,312 registered Democrats. That’s a nearly 8-to-1 ratio, versus the 6-to-1 ratio at the time Giuliani was elected.
“With a few exceptions, they’re not putting up credible people,” said Stu Loeser, a longtime adviser to Bloomberg. “Just being the party of, ‘ We support the cops no matter what,’ and, ‘The other party supposedly opposes the cops no matter what’ — that’s not really a governing philosophy. That’s a tactic.”