Some thoughts on watching the returns come in tonight from New York:
1. The polls have shown a close race between Gov. Hochul (who is running for election for the first time, having risen from Lieutenant Governor with the resignation of Andrew Cuomo) and Rep. Lee Zeldin.
2. Gov. Hochul is originally from western New York (the Buffalo suburbs), and won one term as a Congresswoman representing the Buffalo area.
3. Rep. Zeldin has been a Congressman from Suffolk County (on Long Island) for 8 years (coming to office in the 2014 elections).
4. In 2018, Governor Cuomo won re-election by 60% - 36%. That is in line with the partisan split in New York.
5. In particular, Gov. Cuomo racked up a 1.35 million vote advantage in the five boroughs of NYC, winning overwhelmingly in Queens, Brooklyn, The Bronx and Manhattan and barely in Staten Island.
6. If Gov. Hochul wins NYC by 1 million votes, she almost certainly will win. The total vote in 2018 was 5.8 million. In order to make up 1 million votes in the rest of the state, Zeldin would have to win everything that was not NYC by 20 points (60-40).
7. In the past two weeks, those of us supporting Gov. Hochul have thrown enormous effort into turning out the vote in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn -- particularly in NYCHA housing projects. If those voters turn out to vote, they almost certainly will vote for Gov. Hochul. Until recently, many NYC residents have not felt particularly passionately about turning out to vote for Gov. Hochul.
8. Rep. Zeldin's path to victory -- if he has one -- is to hold his losses in NYC to under 500,000 votes (including a big margin in Staten Island), and rack up big margins in Suffolk, Nassau, Westchester, Dutchess and Rockland counties, so that he battles the downstate vote (below the Tappan Zee Bridge (don't tell me it has been renamed)) to a draw.
9. In the rest of the state, Gov. Hochul should do well in Buffalo, Rochester, Albany and Syracuse - but the surrounding suburbs are very Republican. In a world where Gov. Hochul has not built up a lead downstate, it would be unusual for her to do better than a draw in these counties (Erie, Monroe, Albany and Onandoga).
10. The small counties (the other 49 counties) ordinarily do not swing a New York election. I would expect them to be very pro-Zeldin, but probably produce only about 1.1 million votes. If Zeldin won those counties by 65 - 35, that would yield him about a 330k vote margin in the rest of the state.
11. One particularly New York wrinkle this year is the segmented Jewish vote. Most of the major Chasidic (ultra-orthodox) groups have endorsed Rep. Zeldin, while endorsing Democrats for the other statewide offices. The Chasidim are roughly 20% of the New York’s voting age Jewish population (in 2011, it was 239,000 Chasidim out of 1.7 million Jews, but the Chasidim tend to have more children under the age of 18). More secular Jews (like me), who are Conservative (which has nothing to do with American politics), Reform, Reconstructionist or Unaffiliated tend to vote very Democratic. I expect that there will be some precincts where Rep. Zeldin and AG James both rack up huge margins (like 80-20).
12. As early returns come in, look to see the gap between Zeldin and the Republican running for AG (Michael Henry). Mr. Henry has had virtually no campaign. I expect that NY AG James will win re-election by 60-40. Zeldin needs to run at least 10 points ahead of Henry in order to have a chance to pull of an upset. This is true in every county - so you do not have to worry about where the results are coming from.
In the end, this prediction is worth as much as you have paid for it. This is just pattern recognition. The only thing that I know for certain about the future is that it has not happened yet.