What George Santos Revealed About The State of The Democratic Party In New York

 

 

As I have increasingly written about politics, both past and present, over the last year I have ignored one of the most ridiculous stories in the House of Representatives: the saga of George Santos, who seems to be hellbent on setting a modern record for the most blatant lies about themselves that any Congressman has ever told about every aspect of their lives. Hell, we’re not even sure anymore that George Santos is his real name.

The reason I haven’t commented is out of personal shame. Those of you who have read my columns might be aware that I am a New York resident. The truth is worse than that: Santos is my congressman. To be clear, I didn’t vote for him but his New York office is actually within walking distances of where I used to live. So I have tried to ignore the national humiliation that has been deservedly heaped on my representative: all of the late night jokes from Seth Meyers on down; Bowen Yang playing him on SNL, even the fact that his response as a Jeopardy clue in prime time was the subject of a punch line by Ken Jennings.  It’s a lot to bear.

The thing that is lost in all of the controversies that we learn about Santos on a daily basis is a question that has never been asked in the last year: how did Santos get elected? Considering that within days of his election, all of the stores started coming out and had never stopped, the question follows: how did nobody find out before election day? You didn’t need Karl Rove doing opposition research; some staffer doing a Google search should have found this out within hours of his winning the primary.

What’s more and you may not know this, this campaign wasn’t even Santos’ first rodeo. In 2020, he had run in the third  district against the Democratic incumbent Thomas Suozzi. Suozzi humiliated Santos, winning by thirteen points. He refused to accept his defeat and started running for reelection almost immediately. Republicans apparently had doubts even then doubts about him but assumed he had been vetted.  And from the moment Robert Zimmerman began running against him, the information was out there. Zimmerman even knew some of it. Local papers published information at the time.  So how did Santos end up winning?

The general consensus was that it is simply Santos being the full version of the MAGA Republican. Bill Maher actually took it further and argued that Santos’ victory had to do with the embrace of ‘identity politics’, which is one of the many things Maher gets wrong. But what happened is far clearer: the Democratic campaign bungled on this race at both a district and most importantly state level. And part of that is because of the fact that Santos opponent Zimmerman was part of a six way primary and that Zimmerman had won it, even though the only time he had run for public office was nearly forty years earlier. Thomas Suozzi, who’d flattened Santos the first time out, was running for governor against Kathy Hochul and like in so many other districts across the state, the cupboard for the DNC was practically bare.

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won the Democratic primary in 2018, it was signaled as a movement of the progressives and a desire to upset the establishment. It leaves out two very critical facts. In the primary challenge that she had against incumbent Joseph Crowley; less than thirty thousand people voted in the Democratic primary: Ocasio-Cortez needed less than 17,000 votes to ‘upset’  the incumbent. Furthermore Crowley’s district was by far one of the bluest in the entire country: in his previous election he had won reelection with just under 83 percent of the vote and nearly 150,000. Ocasio Cortez, by contrast, only received 78 percent of the vote and in fact has never received anywhere near the margins Crowley did in his previous three elections. 

What both Ocasio-Cortez and Santos’ wins speak to is a bigger problem that the Democratic Party in New York has been suffering from for awhile but only became glaringly obvious in the aftermath of the 2022 midterms.  As we are all aware, the red wave that so many pundits were certain was coming never came to fruition: the Democrats made gains across the board and we did not know that the House was going to be in Republican control until nearly a week after Election Day. It’s clear now what stopped it from the Democrats holding and perhaps gaining seats in the House as well.  In four New York  districts that Biden carried in 2020, five Republicans managed to flip them and win election. These include Marc Molinaro, Mike Lawler and Anthony D’Esposito and Brandon Willaims all of whom like Santos, are freshman Congress.  Had Democrats done their job the House would be Democratic and all of the chaos involving GOP leadership would not be a subject of debate.  To be clear the fault of the House today is entirely at the hands of the New York Democrats.

This no doubt came as a shock to millions of Americans who have never seen an era where New York has not been reliably blue in the Presidential election. I’m relatively sure that the DNC, when trying to figure out how to save the House, basically gave inadequate funds to New York figuring it would be shield against the red wave they were trying to stop. So why did it happen?

As someone who is very aware of New York politics at a state level, I have certain insight into this. It is a long complicated story to tell so I’ll just try to hit on the historical highpoints before getting to the present day.

First New York has only recently become the Democrat stalwart. During the 20^th century, it was a faithfully Republican state, so much so that not even its popular Governor Al Smith could carry it for the Democrats when he ran for President in 1928 – despite the fact that FDR won the governor’s race by a narrow margin. It went for the Democrats in all four of FDR’s wins but went for Thomas Dewey in 1948 and back to Eisenhower in both of his landslides. It was Democrat in every Presidential election in the 1960s; Nixon swept it in 1972, Reagan took in both his landslides. It was not until Michael Dukakis managed to carried it in what otherwise was a landslide victory for George H.W. Bush that it became a reliably blue state.

Furthermore, if you know about New York politics you also know that this shifting of parties played out a gubernatorial and that members of both parties were remarkably progressive ones: I speak not only for FDR, but Smith and Herbert Lehman on the Democratic side, and not only Dewey, but Charles Evans Hughes and Nelson Rockefeller on the Republican side.  The Eastern Establishment of the GOP operated out of New York and liberalism was at its height on both sides: from John Lindsay and Jacob Javits on the GOP; pioneers such as Geraldine Ferraro, Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm in the Democratic Party and establishment figures like Daniel Patrick Moynihan who both parties were comfortable working with. Indeed, the highpoint of Democratic liberalism may have been the New York City Mayoral Democratic Primary of 1977, when Abzug, incumbent Abraham Beame, Mario Cuomo and Ed Koch faced each other.

However in that primary were the roots of the problems in the Democratic Party in the state of New York. Koch and Cuomo began a feud that lasted both of their political careers and neither did much to help each other. Both men were both gifted politicians as much as they were egomaniacs and after Cuomo became governor in 1982, it boiled over frequently. Nor did Cuomo offer much help to David Dinkins when he upset Koch in the 1989 primary and became Mayor that year.

I can’t speak to Mario Cuomo and his relationship with the Democratic party because I wasn’t paying attention to at the time and still have looked back. What I do know is that as long as I have lived in New York State, no matter who is governor the statehouse has almost been split down the middle with the New York GOP usually having a slight advantage. This became much clearer in the aftermath of Rudy Giuliani’s becoming Mayor in 1993 and George Pataki becoming governor the following year. The gridlock in Albany was easier to handle because the same party controlled both the executive and legislator.

Perhaps for obvious reasons the Democratic Party began to decline at a statewide level for the next day. Michael Bloomberg became Mayor running as a Republican in 2001 and only became an Independent in 2009. (He didn’t switch his membership until well after the 2012 election and I’m relatively sure he only did that to run for the Democratic nomination.) Pataki held the Governorship for three consecutive terms.

Pataki declined to run for reelection in 2006. Eliot Spitzer, then the Attorney General for the state of New York, declared that he run for governor in December of 2004. Spitzer quickly brought state Democrats to his side and won election in the largest margin of victory in a New York gubernatorial race.

Less noticed was Andrew Cuomo winning the state Attorney General’s office.  Andrew had served as HUD secretary under Bill Clinton during his second term. He had made an effort to run for the Democratic nomination in 2002. But in the midst of the campaign in the aftermath of the September 11^th attacks, he  said that ‘Pataki…was not a leader. Cream rises to the top, and Rudy Giuliani rose to the top.” His own father admitted it was a blunder and he withdrew from the race.

From the start he clashed with Spitzer and it was clear he had higher ambitions. When Hilary Clinton became Obama’s choice for Secretary of State, then Governor David Paterson considered both him and Kristin Gillibrand for the vacant seat. Gillibrand got it.  By that point Spitzer had resigned in disgrace and Obama helped pushed Paterson out to step aside for Andrew Cuomo.

I want to say upfront I never liked Andrew Cuomo. Just as with Hilary Clinton when she ran for Senate in my state and later President, I thought Cuomo was an opportunist trading on his father’s legacy. Nothing I ever saw of Andrew Cuomo in the more than a decade he was governor ever convinced me that he was little more than a bully and a thug.  He did not have his father’s gift for oratory, he was never subtle about anything and he constantly clashed with every Mayor that has held elected office since he became governor. But by far his biggest sin as governor was doing nothing to help the New York Legislature flip from Republican to Democratic even as he won huge electoral victories.  I spent all my time watching him convinced that Andrew Cuomo was not truly there to help the State of New York, the city of New York or the Democratic party. He was there to help his own ambitions, and it’s become clear that he spent a fair amount of time killing off potential threats to his governorship or leadership in the statehouse among Democratic challengers. In 2014 he was actively involved in the formation of the Independent Democratic Conference three years earlier which gave control of the State Senate to Republicans. He seems to have supported in until it was dissolved in 2018, and the only reason may have been do that he appeared more moderate for an eventual Presidential bid.

The only reason that Cuomo won such overwhelming victories was, to be frank, the incredible weakness of Republican challengers. In 2010, Carl Palladino, a heavy Tea Party favorite was defeated by him in a landslide. Four years later, he won by a smaller margin that he did in 2014. I think Andrew, unlike his father, had his eyes on the White House and had been biding his time. I think his liberalism is not one out of belief but designed to appeal  It helped matters the National Democratic Party was gutted in 2010 and he was one of the few Democratic governors to win election at all and held against it in 2014. I suspected he was going to  run in 2016 but I wasn’t shocked. And I think he was only progressive as far as it affected his national profile: he wanted to have a good liberal record when he ran for President. I’m pretty sure he was planning a run in 2024; he was planning to run for his fourth term as governor in 2022.

Many praised him during the Covid Pandemic when he locked the city down and received praise from epidemiologists. In retrospect, I look at this and am reminded by the praise in terms of an Aaron Sorkin phrase: “Americans want leadership and in the absence of leadership, they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone.” Cuomo was more than willing to do that, and because of that the public ignored that he had failed to grasp the gravity of the pandemic before its risks were known. It did not shock me to learn that Cuomo refused to listen to state health officials and that so many resigned. The confirmation came when we learned that during July and August Cuomo was working on a book in which he proclaimed victory over the pandemic that came out just a month before the 2020 election. The fact that he argued New York had ‘confronted and defeated’ the virus, even though the state had the highest per capita hospitalization rate in the country showed that everything he had done was purely to promote his brand.  He no doubt thought Trump was going to win reelection and was setting himself up as the face of the Democratic Party in 2024.

Of course by the end of 2020, all of the horror stories about Andrew Cuomo as a sexual predator had come out. In less than three months, eight women had come forward. Despite all of allegations and the continuing investigation Cuomo refused to resign until the possibility of criminal charges came. Yet even now there is no sign that he intends to step back from public life: there are rumors that he intends to run for Gillibrand’s Senate Seat in 2024 in the Democratic challenger and he spent much of the lead up to gubernatorial race of 2022 challenging his successor Kathy Hochul and running superPACs.

Ironically the biggest threat to his political future may have come after he left office. In the aftermath of the 2022 midterms, there has been a lookout at the national level at how Cuomo ran the New York Democratic Party when he was in office. As bad as his behavior was in office, it is not necessarily a disqualifier from an attempt to run for office in New York – both Spitzer and Anthony Weiner made attempts to run for New York offices even after sexual scandals had forced them to resign. But when you have decided to gut the entire party in a major state at the expense of trying to build up your own personal brand, and when that, in turn, costs the Democratic Party the House of Representatives in a critical midterms, you’ve earned bad blood at a level that the Party is never going to forgive or forget.  I suspect if he goes that far, his opponents might go as far to run ads that say: “If it weren’t for Andrew Cuomo, George Santos wouldn’t be in the House today”, which unlike most negative ads is actually almost entirely true.

One year out from the 2024 elections, it’s already become clear that control of the House will come through New York. The Republican congressmen are aware of this and have made an effort to expel Santos from Congress this past week, perhaps to get the monkey off their backs. It went nowhere, just as the Democratic attempt did earlier this year: with this slim a majority in the House, the GOP can not afford to lose a single member, even if that man is as much a liability as George Santos.  The Democrats have already started to target many of the other New York Republicans who narrowly won last year; the question is whether the party in New York is strong enough to come up with viable candidates in the course of a year.

As election day passes nationwide, most politicos are already focused on the year to come and will be looking forward without looking back. They will be focused on getting George Santos out of power rather than dealing with the circumstances that got him there. Those circumstances involve the DNC looking at a state that they have considered safe for so long they ignored its problems at a state level, chose to make one of his major figures a man prepared to gut his own state’s party to help his brand, and is now a pariah among New York. George Santos’ election is a cautionary tale for the DNC. I hope they take the right lessons from in the year to come but I’ve learned better to expect that from either party.