New York isn’t a swing state, but Democrats are doing their best to make it one

Among the few verities in politics is that New York State will never vote for a Republican presidential candidate — especially if his last name is Trump.

Or at least, that’s what we thought until six weeks ago, when President Biden was still running for reelection and his lead in public polling over Trump in New York, a state with twice as many Democrats as Republicans, narrowed to 8 points. “I truly believe we’re a battleground state now,” said Democratic Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine.

Like Democrats in all other states, New York Democrats breathed a sigh of relief when Vice President Kamala Harris replaced Biden as the nominee. Polling shows Harris with a 14-point lead in the state — healthier if still well below Biden’s 23-point margin in 2020.

But Democrats have a deep hole to dig themselves out of in New York. The top two Democrats in the state, Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, are infuriating voters through incompetence and corruption.

Hochul torpedoed a years-in-the making congestion pricing plan in Manhattan after supporting that plan as essential to improving mass transit and air quality. She was unaware that her deputy chief of staff for years was a Chinese government agent. Her hand-picked lieutenant governor resigned over bribery allegations.

After running a lackluster, widely-criticized campaign, Hochul won the 2022 governor’s race over her Republican opponent only by 6 points, compared to the 24 percent margin that her predecessor Andrew Cuomo had won in 2018. Since January, Hochul’s approval ratings have dropped 11 points. Barely 40 percent of New Yorkers view her favorably.

Adams is in even worse shape. Law enforcement agencies are conducting multiple criminal investigations involving the mayor, in which the FBI seized his phone and those of five of his top officials, including the schools chancellor and the police commissioner. (Adams denies any wrongdoing.) A recent poll showed that only 16 percent (that’s not a typo) of likely voters in New York City would vote for Adams in next year’s mayoral election.

The state and city’s voting trends should terrify Democrats. In the 2016 election, Trump vastly improved on GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s 2012 performance in New York. In 2020, despite a chaotic, sometimes grotesque, presidency, Trump improved his vote in deep-blue New York City by nearly 5 points. Then came the 2022 stunner, when Republican congressional candidates flipped several seats in New York, costing Democrats their House majority in an otherwise strong off-year election.

Those trends will only worsen for Democrats, unless they start solving problems that directly affect people’s lives. This is especially so in New York City, whose votes Democrats depend on to win statewide elections, because upstate voters largely go Republican.

The city’s resources have been severely strained by the arrival of immigrants over the last two years. The homeless shelters are overflowing with them. Nearly half of the residents in this traditionally pro-immigration city now say that immigrants are a “burden” and not a benefit.

Three-quarters of city residents tell pollsters that crime is a “very serious” problem. Complaints about uncollected trash rose during the Adams administration, and correspondingly so did the sightings of rats, numbering an estimated 3 million, a 50 percent increase from a decade ago.

After Oct. 7, Jewish students no longer feel safe at Columbia University.

As recently as 1988, California was a solidly Republican presidential state, and then suddenly it wasn’t. Unless New York Democrats wake up, the same thing could happen to them.

Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia.”