Maloney and AOC on the Election
Like badgers in a sack, not pulling together
I was astonished by the acrimony revealed in Nick Fandos’ interview with Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, who this week lost his reelection bid for the newly apportioned 17th congressional district, and seems to be directing the blame for that and other losses in New York state toward Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Maloney is the head of the Democrat’s campaign committee, and will presumably be stepping down from that role when he leaves office in 2023.
Fandos: There is a debate in New York right now about the New York Democratic Party, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and some on the left are arguing its leadership is part of the problem here. Is that a conversation you are a part of?
Maloney: The last time I ran into A.O.C., we were beating her endorsed candidate two to one in a primary, and I didn’t see her one minute of these midterms helping our House majority. So, I’m not sure what kind of advice she has, but I’m sure she’ll be generous with it.
But let’s be clear, she had almost nothing to do with what turned out to be an historic defense of our majority. Didn’t pay a dollar of dues. Didn’t do anything for our frontline candidates except give them money when they didn’t want it from her.
There are other voices who should be heard, especially when suburban voters have clearly rejected the ideas that she’s most associated with, from defunding the police on down. She’s an important voice in our politics. But when it comes to passing our agenda through the Congress, or standing our ground on the political battlefield, she was nowhere to be found.
Let me get this straight. As head of the campaign committee, it was his job to ‘defend the majority’, right? AOC is a leader of the progressive side of the party, and Maloney clearly sees her as an impediment to his job. Is that justified?
Here in New York, how much do you think redistricting mattered in the end?
If the top of the ticket is getting smoked in the New York City suburbs, you’re going to lose seats because those districts always have a degree of competitiveness. Albany passed different maps and the commission passed different maps, so it’s hard to talk in generalities.
But if you look at the districts in the Hudson Valley and on Long Island, it’s fair to say that we would have always struggled in an environment where the governor’s losing by double digits in those areas. Different lines wouldn’t have made much difference.
Pat Ryan is running in a district that was easier than mine. I’m running in a district that was easier than my old one. It’s just when you have voters in the booth who are voting against the top of the ticket by double digits, it’s very hard, particularly for a first-time candidate like some of ours, to overcome that.
Look, that’s not the only reason. And again, I don’t think it’s Gov. Hochul’s fault. But we clearly had a problem in the New York City suburbs that just didn’t exist elsewhere in the country, and I’m sure there’s enough blame to go around.
So he is imputing blame to Governor Hochul, who handily won her own election, but he doesn’t take the blame himself, when he and a number of other candidates caved in on the rhetoric about crime that the GOP was pushing, despite the low levels of crime in New York suburbs.
Fandos also interviewed AOC, who attributes the blame on the ‘calcified apparatus’ of NY state Democratic politics:
Fandos: So why did Democrats perform so poorly in New York on Tuesday?
AOC: There were a lot of factors that went into New York’s underperformance relative to the rest of the country.
A lot of this has roots with Andrew Cuomo. A lot of what he did to the state and Democratic Party as governor led to this moment. But it’s not really about placing blame on him, but examining what the New York State Democratic Party looks like. It is not a small “D” democratic structure. As a consequence, we do not have the rich democratic culture and organizing that should be happening year-round, from the way that we select town councils and mayorships across the state of New York. The absence of that results in a lot of what we saw.
Fandos: What do you mean by that? How much is organizing and how much is messaging?
AOC: It’s no secret that an enormous amount of party leadership in New York State is based on big money and old-school, calcified machine-style politics that creates a very anemic voting base that is disengaged and disenfranchised.
There is also a narrative problem when you look at what New York did. This overreliance and insistence on leaning into Republican narratives on crime and safety hurt Democrats in the state of New York.
Instead of ignoring or even pivoting and commanding the narrative on crime and public safety, a lot of Democrats leaned into Lee Zeldin’s approach.
Fandos: Gov. Kathy Hochul did try to do that to an extent, right? She repeatedly tried to bring the discussion back to the proliferation of guns and gun safety.
AOC: She absolutely put in that effort, but it’s a team sport. When you have certain congressional candidates running ads on defund the police, when we have the mayor speaking from certain frames on crime and safety, I think it further drives these narratives.
Not once has the New York State Democratic chair ever called me. All he has done is antagonize myself and any progressive candidates. We need to get together as a team. This idea of pure moderate politics that seeks to defeat both a progressive grass roots and a Republican Party at the same time very often isolates itself and makes itself smaller.
Jay Jacob, the New York State Democratic chair, never called AOC. It is his job (and Maloney) to try to hammer out common ground between moderate (corporate) and progressive (socialist) Democrats running for office. And she thinks Mayor Adams’ position on crime and other issues helped the GOP, not Dems.
Fandos: A lot of Hochul’s messaging was about why not to vote for Zeldin. Did she do a good enough job laying out a proactive vision for the state?
AOC: We as a party benefit from being very assertive about our vision and explaining not just what the stakes are and not just the consequences of what would happen given Republican victory, but also to lay down a vision and be unafraid about what we will do with power.
We can be a state like California that puts things like public banking on the ballot. We have bills in the State Legislature right now like the Build Public Renewables Act that is profoundly motivating.
I don’t think it’s just turnout. Leaning into Republican messaging hurts persuasion, too.
AOC suggests that Hochul and others were being reactive to GOP messaging as opposed to making the case for Democratic priorities.
Fandos: Where did this election leave you?
AOC: New York politics especially in New York City is going through a very strong generational upheaval. Overall the performance is disappointing and this old-school machine politics could well have cost the House majority.
I don’t feel caught off guard. I don’t feel like my reality has been upended. Others may feel more surprised with this. I feel very cleareyed about what the path should be ahead. We should rebuild the New York State Democratic Party and if that is a structure that refuses to be reformed, we rebuild and replace.
Obviously it’s not a good outcome. But I think it is the difference between being sick and having a diagnosis and not having a diagnosis.
AOC is laying the NY state losses at the feet of the Democrats’ party machinery. It’s logically fallacious to say because she won and Maloney lost, her analysis is right. On the other hand, Maloney and Jacob were in charge of the Democrats’ push in the state, and that is where the Dems did worst, nationwide. Clearly, something is wrong.
Maybe both AOC and Maloney are right. Maybe the infighting between progressives and moderates about messaging was in fact a key element of what went wrong. But that split exists across the country, and only in New York is the party losing so many seats. So, that suggests there is something wrong locally.
Maybe all of it — Cuomo’s ghost, Hochul’s not-fully-evolved leadership, the rusty machinery of the party, and moderates and progressives fighting like badgers in a sack — all of it contributed to a bad end in this election. We can’t exorcise Cuomo, and we can only wait for Huchul to fill the role she’s been elected to. The progressives and moderates are unlikely to make peace, though, without a Democratic state party committee working to find common cause: to agree to fight the Republicans instead of each other.