NYC becomes battleground as Hochul works to toughen Blue Wall: ‘It’s all turnout’

As the Manhattan skyline twinkled through the windows behind her and a jazz band played “Forgot About Dre,” Gov. Hochul sized up a room in Brooklyn filled with power brokers and offered a swaggering forecast.

Hochul, a former upstate congresswoman whose modest lead in polls of the governor’s race has caused extensive Democratic handwringing, said she was used to getting knocked down.

But come Election Day, she told the crowd at the Brooklyn Democrats Gala in Williamsburg, she was going to “kick ass.” The Republican polling surge, she said one night last week, would be no match for the New York City’s Blue Wall of Democratic voters.

“The MAGA Republican Trump train has now just crashed into a wall, and it stopped right here,” Hochul said. “I can feel it in my bones. The energy, the momentum has shifted our way. They can’t stop us now.”

New York City has long served as a barrier to the GOP in statewide elections. It is home to about 40% of the state’s registered voters, and some of its neighborhoods all but exclusively support Democrats.

But turnout in the city can swing from election to election. And Hochul, a Buffalo Democrat who assumed office 14 months ago through the resignation of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, was not well-known in the city when she took her post.

The sturdiness of Democrats’ downstate Blue Wall could decide the race for New York governor this year: if Hochul drives voters to the polls, particularly in racially diverse outerborough neighborhoods, she is expected to dodge the anxious Election Night her party fears.

For Rep. Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee, to secure a stunning victory on Tuesday, he would need to hold his own in the city, experts said, taking about 35% of the vote or more, and benefiting from depressed turnout.

In a city that has more than six Democrats for every Republican, such a performance amounts to a tall task for a candidate like Zeldin, a Long Island conservative. A Republican has not eclipsed 30% of the vote in a New York City mayoral race since 2005.

Zeldin has blitzed the city in recent weeks, hopscotching from crime scene to crime scene, pledging to toughen the state’s criminal justice system, and drawing a degree of urban momentum.

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One eyebrow-raising mid-October poll published by Quinnipiac University found that Zeldin, an ally of former President Donald Trump, was polling at 37% of the vote in the five boroughs.

“If he hits 35%, I think he’s governor-elect,” said Andrew Giuliani, the runner-up in the GOP primary for governor. “I think people are looking beyond their party affiliation and they’re looking at their safety and they’re looking also at their wallet.”

While other polls have found wider New York City margins than the Quinnipiac survey — which found Hochul’s statewide lead at 4 percentage points — they still suggest that Zeldin is outperforming past Republican candidates in the city.

“It’s a challenging time when Democrats have the White House,” said Carl Heastie, a Bronx Democrat and the speaker of the state Assembly. “There is an enthusiasm issue. But we’re trying to deal with that.”

Hochul, a veteran of small-town upstate politics, also lacks the downstate roots of Cuomo, a son of Queens. Her running mate, Antonio Delgado, hails from the Hudson Valley. (He replaced Hochul’s former lieutenant, Brian Benjamin, of Harlem, after he was charged in a corruption probe.)

The governor’s campaign, which seemed sluggish in adjusting to Zeldin’s success, just recently began to focus the heart of its pitch on the defining political issue for many in New York City: crime.

She has bristled at the notion that her early fall retail campaign schedule was light. “I’m glad the media is paying attention to the race now — we have been out over the summer through the fall,” she told reporters in the Bronx last week.

But before October, she kept much of her public campaigning confined to weekends, and Zeldin was able to tighten the race.

If Zeldin’s city campaign efforts once outshone Hochul’s, the governor has put her campaign into overdrive over the last week, holding 18 campaign events in the city across six days.

After Zeldin claimed Wednesday that Democrats were stunned by the support he has corralled in the city, including with Jewish, Asian and Black voters, Hochul countered that she has “tremendous support in all of those communities.”

“But I take no community for granted,” the governor told reporters. “That’s why I’ve been out there the entire year as governor getting people to understand who I am. New Yorkers didn’t know me a year ago.”

On recent weekends, she has spent much of her time in churches appealing to Black voters. On Thursday morning, she headlined a ballroom clergy breakfast in Midtown Manhattan, where several of the city’s most prominent Democrats urged faith leaders to send their parishioners to the polls.

The Rev. Al Sharpton said he worried that voters were getting lost in considerations like politicians’ “charisma.”

“Y’all are asking the wrong questions,” Sharpton said in a speech at the breakfast. “The question is who stands for our rights to be restored.”

On Thursday night, Hillary Clinton and Vice President Kamala Harris stumped for the governor in Morningside Heights at an event highlighting the historic nature of Hochul’s bid to become New York’s first female elected governor.

And on Saturday, former President Bill Clinton, Mayor Adams and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer led a campaign rally for Hochul in Brooklyn, home to more than 1 million registered Democrats.

“It’s all turnout,” said Charles Rangel, the 92-year-old former Democratic congressman from Harlem. “I couldn’t ask the governor to do more campaigning.”

Hochul is aiming to be the state’s first upstate governor elected in more than 90 years. She is heavily favored to accomplish the feat.

But recent surveys show her statewide lead over Zeldin at around 6 or 7 points, a tight margin for a New York governor’s race. It has left the governor defending swaths of her own turf.

“That’s why you saw Bill Clinton,” said Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee for mayor last year. “These are things they didn’t think they’d have to do.”