Kathy Hochul and New York’s never-ending backlash against crime
NEW YORK >> Here we go again.
This is one of the most Democratic states in the union. It has also, for a half century, demonstrated just how durable crime is as a political issue.
One of the earliest demonstrations of the power of police unions was the success of a 1966 referendum abolishing a New York City Civilian Review Board that oversaw the behavior of law enforcement.
In 1993, Republican Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor of New York City largely in reaction to what many New Yorkers saw as chaos in their streets. Mario Cuomo, a three-term Democratic governor, was ousted a year later after a campaign in which the victor, Republican George E. Pataki, zeroed in on the national progressive icon’s principled opposition to the death penalty. (It’s a tribute to the delightfully byzantine nature of New York politics that Giuliani broke party ranks that year to back Cuomo.)
And it was as the tough-oncrime candidate that Eric Adams prevailed in the 2021 New York
City Democratic mayoral primary and election.
So, there is absolutely nothing novel about the efforts of Rep. Lee Zeldin, New York’s Republican nominee for governor this year and a Donald Trump enthusiast, to ride a backlash to fear against Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul. A couple of polls showing Zeldin within striking distance of Hochul, a middle-of-the-road Democrat who once seemed to be cruising to victory, have been treated by her party like a five-alarm fire on Flatbush Avenue. If Zeldin can make it here, Republicans can make it anywhere.
In fact, many pollsters and pols suspect that Zeldin’s threat to Hochul is much overstated. Sean McElwee, executive director of
Data for Progress, a liberal source of reliable survey data, told me “some portion of this narrative is being driven by right-wing pollsters.” It reflects a pattern of Republican success in encouraging red wave talk even in the face of more equivocal facts.
McElwee expects Hochul to win, in part because a Zeldin victory would require a truly monumental swing away from the Democrats — or an almost entirely demobilized Democratic electorate in a state Joe Biden carried in 2020 by roughly 2 million votes and 23 percentage points.
Polls showing a closer race than anticipated might even turn out to be a blessing for Hochul, the former lieutenant governor who took over in the summer of 2021 after Andrew M. Cuomo resigned as governor over sexual harassment allegations. In recent days, alarmed Democratic-leaning groups have stepped up their exertions to boost turnout while the governor and her surrogates fanned out across the state this weekend to energize the party’s electorate as early voting began.
There is a certain irony in the attack on Hochul over crime because she anticipated the problem. Last spring — aware, as the New York Times put it at the time, of “rising concerns over crime in an election year” — she pushed reluctant Democrats in the state Legislature to toughen the state’s bail laws and expand the number of crimes for which defendants can be required to pay bail.
Working closely with Mayor Adams, who supports her, she called an emergency session of the state Legislature in June to pass a new gun law after the Supreme Court struck down the state’s centuryold law sharply limiting the carrying of firearms outside the home. A federal district judge blocked large parts of the new law, but an appeals court left the law in effect earlier this month as the state appeals.
Hochul got high marks early for the quality of her appointments and for pursuing soothing consensus-building after a chaotic period in state government. Her burden: Nearly 16 years of Democratic rule in the state but only a short period in office to make her own mark.
Yet, without the crime issue, Zeldin would not be in contention.
The repetitious cycles of backlash speak to how difficult it is to have a balanced debate over the essentials of law enforcement — not only how to protect the public and support police officers doing a tough job but also how to prevent police abuses and build trust between the forces of order and the communities they serve.
The sweeping GOP attacks require Democrats such as Hochul to empathize with and act on the public’s understandable unease without reinforcing misperceptions that crime rates are anything close to where they were during the crime wave at the end of the last century.
“People would have prayed for these relatively low crime rates in the 1980s and 1990s,” Robert Snyder, a historian and author of “Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York City,” said in an interview. “But now they seem high.”
Which gives Hochul and Adams no choice but to launch urgent new measures against subway crime in New York City, even as she announces grants for upstate communities to fight gun violence. A more measured conversation about crime will have to wait until after Nov. 8.