Jay Jacobs Has To Go

No matter what the excuses for November's loses, the State Democratic Party is broken… or maybe never really built, at all.

Jay Jacobs

Ross Barkan dissects the current disarray in the New York Democratic party. He relates the losses in last fall’s election, where Patrick Maloney lost to Republican Mike Lawler in the newly configured congressional district 17, and three other seats, yielding control of the US House to the GOP.

At the core of this mess is the tug of war between right-of-center Cuomo Democrats and decidedly more left-wing progressives.

Few New Yorkers cared, until late 2022, that the statewide Democratic apparatus operated, for the most part, as a hollowed-out appendage of the governor, a second campaign account that did little, if any, work in terms of messaging and turnout. New Hampshire, a state with roughly half the population of Queens, has a Democratic Party with 16 full-time paid staff members. New York’s has four, according to the state chairman, Jay Jacobs. One helps maintain social media accounts that update only sparingly. Most state committee members have no idea where the party keeps its headquarters, or if it even has one. (It does, at 50 Broadway in Manhattan.)

The behind-the-scenes jockeying goes on between Cuomo Democrats and the progressives:

And now the Democratic civil war rages. Jacobs, who is also the chairman of the Nassau County Democratic Party and is on his second tour leading the statewide organization, has come in for a drubbing. A week after the election, more than 1,000 Democrats signed a letter calling for Jacobs’s ouster [I signed it]. They included state legislators, City Council members, county leaders and members of New York’s 400-odd Democratic State Committee. Most of them belonged to the state’s progressive wing, which has grown only further emboldened since the fall. On Jan. 3, a number of them gathered outside City Hall to reiterate their demands: Jacobs must go.

And he has not.

“The party has to change, and it can’t change until we change the leadership,” George Albro, a co-chair of the New York Progressive Action Network, a left-wing organization formed from the remnants of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, said in an interview. “From top to bottom, the Democratic Party in New York is a disaster.”

And what are the chances of that change? Consider the controversy surrounding his snubbing India Walton in 2021:

In 2021, after a democratic socialist, India Walton, defeated the longtime mayor of Buffalo and a former chairman of the state party, Byron Brown, in a contentious primary, Jacobs refused to endorse Walton. “Let’s take a scenario, very different, where David Duke — You remember him? The grand wizard of the KKK? He moves to New York, he becomes a Democrat and he runs for mayor in the city of Rochester, which has a low primary turnout, and he wins the Democratic line. I have to endorse David Duke? I don’t think so,” Jacobs said in a television interview, before clarifying that Walton “isn’t in the same category, but it just leads you to that question, Is it a must? It’s not a must. It’s something you choose to do.”

Outraged progressives called for Jacobs’s resignation. He refused to go, and Hochul, who is from the Buffalo area and remains close to Brown, did not force Jacobs out. Brown, with tacit approval from the governor and Jacobs, then won the mayoralty with a write-in campaign that November, drawing support from Republicans to crush Walton.

But Hochul continues to support Jacobs:

Because Hochul inherited Jacobs, his critics have hoped she would ditch him for someone who might take a more active role in the sort of tasks that party chairs in other states care far more about: recruiting candidates, shaping the party’s message, funding voter-outreach campaigns that begin many months ahead of a general election and even hiring a full-time communications director and research staff.

Remember that New York has no planning department, either.

All the ongoing chaos hasn’t escaped the notice of national Democrats. “When I go to D.N.C. meetings,” says a high-ranking New York Democratic official, who requested anonymity to avoid antagonizing colleagues, “there is a sense that New York doesn’t have a state party at all.”

That is a legacy of the Cuomo years, and now the split between progressives and centrists — including the questions about Jacobs’ handling of the State Democratic Party — looms over everything:

The widening fissures are both ideological and geographical. Manhattan and Brooklyn Democrats saved Hochul in November, but so did Westchester County, which once upon a time was a Republican stronghold. Democrats there gave Hochul a 20-point margin over Zeldin after Biden flew in to campaign for her. Westchester has continued to mirror national trends, as affluent suburbs grow Democratic, but Republicans have remained remarkably resilient on Long Island. Home to lavish estates, as well as growing Orthodox Jewish communities and a rising Asian American electorate newly alienated by Democrats, along with a working- and middle-class vote forever skeptical of big-city liberalism, the eastern suburb backed Zeldin by double digits. In recent years, the Hudson Valley has grown bluer, with city residents scooping up comparatively cheaper real estate during the pandemic, yet Zeldin carried Rockland, Dutchess, Putnam and Orange Counties, where Trump-era enthusiasm for Democrats gave way to backlash over rising crime south of the former Tappan Zee Bridge (renamed for Mario Cuomo by his son).

Jacobs can credibly argue that the progressivism or outright socialism that wins in Brooklyn or Queens can’t be easily sold in Nassau County. But Bowman and his cohort can ask why he neglects the younger voters moving left — or, for that matter, why he fails to build out an organization that can be credibly called a political party, the kind that is more than one man and a few aides conducting political business from a summer-camp office [Jacobs’ day job is running a day camp origanization]. In a 10-page report issued in January, Jacobs pinned Democratic losses on historically high Republican turnout, a contention backed by data. But shouldn’t a state party’s task be, in part, to turn out its own voters? Had enough Democrats been motivated to vote, George Santos would never have been sworn in as a congressman.

The longer that Hochul allows the State organization to reject the activities normally associated with state-wide organizing — like research, marketing, choosing and developing candidates — the longer we will be dangling in the wind, and perhaps losing even more congressional districts to the Right.