The Day After Election Day in New York
Revisiting "On Watching Today's Election Returns in New York"
Yesterday, I posted the column reproduced below. I have added my day after observations in italics.
TL;dr - I got a lot right, and some things wrong. Good day for the good gals (I really wish there was a better term in parallel with “good guys”). Governor Kathy Hochul became the first woman elected in her own right as NY Governor. AG Letitia (“Tish”) James won re-election as NY AG.
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).
Governor Hochul won NYC by 668k votes,1 roughly half of Governor Cuomo’s 2018 margin. There was a path for Lee Zeldin to win this race, if he had performed as promised in the rest of the state.
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.
I do not yet have precinct-level information for New York City, so I do not know how our GOTV fared.
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.
This is where Zeldin fell far short. Despite GOP predictions that Zeldin would roll up huge margins in the NYC suburbs, he only gained 133k votes in these five counties. He actually lost Westchester handily. Overall, he came out of the Downstate region trailing by over 500,000 votes.
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).
To my surprise and delight, Gov. Hochul won each of these four counties.
Albany - 19k vote Hochul advantage
Erie - 19k vote Hochul advantage
Monroe - 20k vote Hochul advantage
Onandoga - 12k vote Hochul advantage
So, she added roughly 70k votes to her lead. Zeldin had gain about 570k votes in the 49 smaller counties to overtake Hochul. That was “a bridge too far”.
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.
Gov. Hochul won statewide by roughly 290k votes, meaning that Zeldin made up about 280k votes in the 49 smaller counties. I feel pretty good about guessing that his ceiling was gaining about 330k in those counties.
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).
This requires precinct-level analysis, which I cannot do yet.
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.
The biggest NY surprise of the night for me was that Zeldin did not run meaningfully ahead of the GOP statewide ticket. NY AG Letitia James beat Michael Henry (who ran nearly no campaign). Hochul and James (the Democrats) had virtually identical vote totals statewide (about 2.95 million). Zeldin outpaced Henry by 130k votes, but those appear to be Zeldin voters who simply did not vote for AG - because they had never heard of Henry and did not like James.
In order to win, Zeldin needed a lot of Democratic ticket splitting, getting votes of James voters. That simply did not happen. In retrospect, I was wrong to think that it might happen, because Zeldin NOTHING to “triangulate” from the other GOP candidates and Hochul. Instead, he ran a “Republicans good, Democrats bad” campaign that was doomed to failure, unless there was a statewide Republican sweep.
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.
I know that there are political betting markets, but I would never wager on them. I also would warn you never to use any of my political writing as a basis for you to bet on them.
Final Thought - To the extent that FPOTUS had hopes that the 2022 election would lead to a NY governor who might pardon him in the event he is threatened with criminal prosecution under New York State law, those hopes are gone.
Because New York makes nothing easy, in the link, “Kings County” = Brooklyn, “New York County” = Manhattan and "Richmond County” = Staten Island. Also, the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.
Someone who made a political prediction following up afterward and acknowledging where they came up short??? God bless you.