The Dems trouble in blue New York

 Politico:

Democrats began the year clinging to New York state as a bulwark against GOP gerrymandering and a potentially brutal midterm. Instead, it’s become a giant headache.

A redistricting mishap and President Joe Biden’s lingering toxicity upended Democratic hopes of creating a seawall of deep-blue seats that could offset House losses elsewhere. They started the cycle thinking they could net at least three seats — now, in the worst-case scenario, they could lose as many as five. On top of that, their own party campaign chairman faces both a primary and a potential general election slog.

“We’ve gone from a map that looked like a slam dunk to just being slammed,” said former Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), who once led the House Democratic campaign arm. “This is one of the most competitive environments that I’ve seen in New York at every level.”

The state is hosting a slew of competitive primaries Tuesday in heavily Democratic districts, including a dozen-candidate pileup for an open seat in Manhattan and Brooklyn and an incumbent-versus-incumbent battle between two veteran committee chairs. But primary voters will basically have the final say in those contests. In several purple-tinged seats, they will only finalize matchups in races that Republicans hope to contest in the fall in the Hudson Valley and on Long Island.

It’s an uncomfortable situation many New York Democrats feel was avoidable. The party used its control of state government to thwart a bipartisan commission tasked with drawing the new political lines, instead passing a map that could have yielded Democrats 22 of the state’s 26 districts. (After 2020, the delegation split was 19 Democrats to 8 Republicans. The state is set to lose a district due to reapportionment after the 2020 census.) But in one of the most consequential developments of the redistricting cycle, a Democratic-leaning court struck down the map as an illegal partisan gerrymander and imposed its own.

That court-drawn map, coupled with Biden’s still-low approval ratings and ominous historical trends, have Democrats across the state bracing for impact, particularly in any seat Biden carried by less than double-digits in 2020.
...

Local elections last year on Long Island ended in a rout for Democrats, with the GOP nabbing a slew of offices in Nassau and Suffolk counties after their candidates hammered Democrats on crime rates and the state’s new bail reform laws. Now, Democratic Reps. Tom Suozzi and Kathleen Rice are vacating House seats there, leaving Republicans a chance to build on their gains without having to take on well-funded incumbents.
...

There is much more.

The new bail law has been a disaster which has mainly benefited criminals who are back on the streets the same day they are arrested in most cases.  Politicians who supported that nonsense deserve to be beaten.  What the Democrats seem to be complaining about also is a failure of the party to rig the elections in more districts.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more