AOC-BACKED POLS POUNDED IN ELEX
Left-leaning Dems she touted lose 7 of 9 Assembly races as voters move to center
Left-wing candidates took a beating in New York’s statewide primary elections Tuesday as Democratic voters gravitated toward the party’s ideological center in a string of key races — but some observers cautioned against viewing the outcome as a referendum on progressive politics due to campaign fund-raising disparities and other factors.
Up and down the ballot in this week’s Democratic primaries, insurgents backed by prominent leftwing lawmakers and groups were drubbed by more moderate-minded candidates.
In the gubernatorial race, Gov. Hochul breezed to victory with a nearly 50-point edge over her progressive challenger, city Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, according to unofficial results from the state Board of Elections. Williams’ running mate, Ana Maria Archila, lost by nearly as wide a margin to Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado, casting doubt on the endorsement power of the left-leaning Working Families Party, which backed both Williams and Archila.
Archila’s defeat also reflected on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York’s most influential Democratic progressive in Congress, who endorsed the lieutenant governor hopeful last week in a test of her political muscle.
The Queens-Bronx congresswoman’s local sway was further diminished by nine endorsements she made of state Assembly candidates challenging incumbents.
Only two of the Ocasio-Cortez-backed Assembly hopefuls, climate activist Sarahana Shrestha and ex-City Council aide Juan Ardila, came out victorious — with Ardila clinching the Democratic nomination for an open seat in Queens’ 37th District and Shrestha eking out a victory against Assemblyman Kevin Cahill in the Hudson Valley’s 103rd District.
The seven other AOC-endorsed Assembly candidates lost their primaries, most of them by sizable margins.
Ocasio-Cortez also did endorse four incumbent Assembly progressives, all of whom were on track to win reelection, according to Board of Elections tallies.
Meantime, Mayor Adams, a centrist who has engaged in a political proxy war of sorts with Ocasio-Cortez and other lefty Democrats in recent weeks, enjoyed a nearly spotless endorsement scorecard in Tuesday’s elections.
In addition to publicly supporting Hochul, Adams endorsed Democratic Assembly members Michael Benedetto of the Bronx, Nikki Lucas of Brooklyn and Inez Dickens of Harlem — all of whom trounced challengers supported by Ocasio-Cortez and the Working Families Party.
Doug Muzzio, a Baruch College political scientist, said that while there is a tendency to give friction between Ocasio-Cortez and Adams an outsized role as compared with the viability of individual candidates, it appears Tuesday’s elections showed the mayor holds the upper hand, at least for the moment.
“The proxy war, it’s partly a fiction, but there’s an element of reality insofar as moderate Democrats against progressive Democrats,” he said. “In that sense, the moderates won.”
But Kenneth Sherrill, professor emeritus of political science at Hunter College, said there are other factors at play complicating that picture.
Sherrill noted that nearly all of Tuesday’s centrist winners were incumbents and argued they likely benefited from the lack of a matching funds program in state-level races.
“The absence of matching funds made it much harder to run against
the people in entrenched power,” he said.
In city elections, candidates receive matching public dollars once they hit a certain fund-raising threshold — a mechanism meant to level the playing field for candidates without connections to deep-pocketed donors.
But statewide races do not have an equivalent program, and that appears to have boosted Hochul in her contest against Williams and Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-L.I., Queens).
Hochul’s campaign had raked in $34 million ahead of Primary Day, much of it from real estate executives and other special interests — an astronomical figure compared with the less than $550,000 raised by Williams, who did not accept corporate donations, and the $7.3 million collected by Suozzi, who positioned himself as the most moderate candidate in the race.
The massive campaign war chest allowed Hochul to blanket the airwaves with ads before voters headed to the polls.
Despite the fund-raising disadvantage, Williams received nearly 20% of the vote total, compared with the 12% collected by Suozzi, who raised far more money than the public advocate.
“That means that [Suozzi’s] line of argument is not likely to result in widespread defection to a move rightward,” said Sherrill.
Though New York is overwhelmingly Democratic, Republican voters also headed to the primary polls Tuesday and picked Rep. Lee Zeldin as their gubernatorial candidate.
Zeldin, an ardent supporter of former President Donald Trump, has attempted to paint Hochul as being part of the far left, a tactic that echoes rhetoric used by national Republicans.
Sherrill said those attacks from the right could have also had an effect on New York Democrats this week as they look ahead to November’s congressional midterms, in which the Republican Party appears positioned to perform well.
“Some of it, I think, is the realization that the Democrats are in peril of losing, and the Republicans are putting us all in peril at this point in terms of democracy,” he said, adding that liberal voters are craving “stability” ahead of November.
Speaking to reporters at an unrelated news conference in Manhattan on Wednesday morning, Adams said the outcome of Tuesday’s Democratic primaries reflects “what I’ve been saying for a long time” on issues of public safety, with voters largely siding with candidates embracing his crimefighting policies.
But the mayor added of Ocasio-Cortez: “She is not in my sights. I do not think about what her philosophy or opinions are. It’s about solving the problems. We both want the same problems solved.”
A spokeswoman for Ocasio-Cortez did not return a request for comment.