Opinion | Why the Democrats Just Lost the House - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...house-democrats-new-york.html
Democratic party mistakes 2022 crime arrogance politics
shared by Javier E on 17 Nov 22
- No Cached
-
Some elections are determined in the mad rush of a campaign’s final days. And others are effectively over before they begin. In New York, the Democratic supermajority in control of the legislature made two fatal mistakes driven by arrogance and incompetence that sealed the fate of its congressional candidates many months ago
-
Those mistakes point up the dangers of one-party rule, especially when it becomes so entrenched and beholden to its most activist wing — and in this case causes some Democrats to vote Republican just to break that stranglehold.
-
The first mistake: After an independent commission created by voters failed to agree on a new map of House districts in New York, Democrats got greedy. Instead of drawing maps that were modestly advantageous, they went whole hog — producing an extremely gerrymandered map that invited a successful legal challenge.
- ...9 more annotations...
-
Second, the legislature apparently decided that voter concerns about crime and disorder were nothing to worry about. After three decades of falling crime, Democrats had gotten complacent and disconnected, and failed to recognize that the bail reforms they passed in 2019, eliminating cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, were deeply unpopular.
-
Fair or not, the Republican message was quite simple: Bail reform passed by Democrats in Albany had created a wave of crime and disorder.
-
Instead, in the face of crime rates rising some 30 percent in New York City, Democrats mostly denied that there was a crime problem on the scale that Republicans portrayed in frequent campaign ads. To the extent that Democrats acknowledged the growing disorder at all, they argued that there was no data showing that bail reforms affected crime — a claim at odds with the desire of many voters for stronger public safety, including locking up potentially dangerous people and giving judges the ability to consider dangerousness in making bail decisions.
-
Sadly there is little evidence that Democratic leaders in Albany heard the alarm bells ringing on Long Island or saw the Adams victory in the city as a path forward.
-
the changes were too little and too late, and voters were unconvinced. New York remains the only state in the nation where in setting bail, judges cannot take into account whether a person arrested for a crime is a danger to the community
-
Remaining insulated from swing voters is a luxury that most members of the legislature enjoy because so many of them represent overwhelmingly Democratic districts in which elections are decided in low-turnout primaries.
-
Unfortunately for Democratic planning, in 2014 voters had passed an amendment to the state’s Constitution that was designed to prevent just this kind of extreme gerrymandering.
-
It set about drawing a congressional map that so blatantly overreached that a court struck it down, threw it out and turned the process over to a special master instead who drew a map that gave Republicans every opportunity to exploit Democratic failures around crime and disorder.
-
As a result, Democrats lost six congressional districts won by Joe Biden in 2020 — more than in any other state in the nation.