President Donald Trump with Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive and Republican candidate for governor of New York.
Photo: Al Drago/The New York Times/Redux
Across the country, in the reddest of red states and districts, Republicans — clinging to what were once thought to be safe seats with a Blue Wave breaking — have a plan to eke out a victory in November: Avoid Donald Trump.
In Florida — Trump’s adopted state, and one he has won three times — gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds has scrubbed references to the president, including a photo of the two of them, from his website. Representative María Elvira Salazar, who represents a district Trump won by 15 points in 2024, recently cut an ad attacking Trump over his immigration policies. In Kansas, a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1932, Senator Roger Marshall posted on social media that he had gone to the White House directly to air his complaints to Trump about the president threatening to ban the sale of Canadian-made Bombardier jets in the United States. As Trump and JD Vance have held rallies from Iowa to Texas, Republicans are suddenly finding their campaign schedules filled with conflicts that keep them away from any camera capturing them with a president who has record-low approval ratings.
Despite the national landscape, Trump is finding a warmer reception in the unlikeliest of locales: his one-time home state of New York. On Friday, Trump held a rally in Syracuse with Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive running an uphill race against incumbent governor Kathy Hochul. “I’m asking you to do me a favor,” the president said, “just pretend I’m on the ballot.” The association does not seem to be hurting Blakeman. The gubernatorial race isn’t as uphill as it should be. New York is nearly as Democratic a state as it gets, a place where Republicans haven’t won statewide office since 2002 and a Republican presidential candidate hasn’t won since 1984. Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than two to one. But in a national political environment that pollsters say boosts Democrats by eight percentage points, Blakeman is down only 11 points to Hochul; not close enough to win, but close enough to make congenitally fretful Democrats fret a little more.
And it is not just in statewide races. Democrats are scarcely contesting two congressional seats out on the eastern half of Long Island that were in Democratic hands for much of the Obama administration. Republicans have poured more than $11 million into an effort to unseat Tom Suozzi, a longtime fixture in Nassau County. In New York City, polls show Nicole Malliotakis, who represents a district that covers Staten Island and a slice of Brooklyn, cruising to victory in a district that, according to one Democratic official who has seen the polling data, is one of the few in the state where Trump has a net-positive approval rating.
Republicans say that their resilience is due to Democratic mismanagement. They point to high taxes, disorder on the streets, a punitive business climate and a Democratic Party in thrall to Democratic Socialism as the reason for their gains. “Democrats have a good shot at taking the House back, but the path isn’t going to go through New York,” said Chapin Fay, a longtime GOP strategist currently working on a Blakeman SuperPAC. “This is a big complicated state, and it’s fun as a Republican to see it causing Democrats fits.”
Talk to a dozen Democrats and you get two dozen theories about why Republicans aren’t being dragged by Trump as much as in other states. Some say having a New York City Democratic Socialist as the biggest star in the state frightens moderates. Others complain the New York Post feeds suburban readers stories about crime and chaos on city streets. Andrew Grossman, a senior advisor to Battleground New York which helps run a number of House races in New York this cycle, says the fact that the state has been so uncontested for so long at the presidential and statewide levels has allowed muscles to atrophy. “New York typically doesn’t see any action in the primary or the general election in presidential years, and so we don’t have the kind of four-year organizing that occurs in states that are presidential swing states or even senatorial swing states,” he said.
Another theory goes that while voters in the heartland are whipsawed by Trump’s tariffs, the price of diesel, and the ongoing conflict in Iran, New Yorkers are largely shielded from the downdrafts of the Trump economy. Even tentative MAGA voters in Rockland County have watched their stock portfolios grow. They haven’t had to witness the crops on their farm wilt on the vine because of migrant-labor shortages or because of Trump’s trade wars. Instead, Republicans in New York remain animated by DEI, Trump’s so-called war on woke and immigration, all areas where the president has delivered, and don’t have to question that their devotion to the cause is hurting their 401k’s.
The current state of play in New York mirrors what happened in the state during the last midterms. 2022 was a good year for Democrats nationally. The party gained a seat in the Senate and narrowly lost the House. But New York ran counter to those trends, as a sharp rightward turn in the electorate resulted in four lost House seats on the Democratic side while Hochul squeaked by with a modest six-point victory over Lee Zeldin. (To put that number in perspective, going back to 2006 Democrats have won the governor’s races in New York by an average of 27 points.)
The transformation of New York can be witnessed in the career of Mike Lawler, a congressman from the suburbs just north of New York City. Democrats have been angling to defeat Lawler ever since he unseated Sean Patrick Maloney, a powerful Democratic lawmaker in 2022. Lawler was a State Assemblyman and a well-regarded political consultant and had been a delegate for Trump in 2016. But after he won, Lawler became a Trump skeptic. He said that Joe Biden was the rightful victor of the 2020 election and suggested that Trump should not be the nominee in 2024. Lawler became a regular on cable news and on the Sunday shows, slotted in as the sensible Yankee Republican who could deliver the party’s message while criticizing its extreme elements. He castigated Trump when the then-former president said he wanted a “termination” of the Constitution, joined Biden when the president held an event in his district, became a member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, and praised Kevin McCarthy for negotiating a debt-ceiling deal with his Democratic counterparts. It was enough to give Lawler a comfortable six-point victory in 2024 even as Kamala Harris narrowly won his district.
But now, facing another fierce reelection, and despite a national environment leaning toward Democrats, Lawler is finally finding his inner MAGA. At a time when most endangered Republicans found reasons to avoid Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas, Lawler not only appeared but spoke from the stage. In May, he held a rally with Trump in the heart of his district, declaring, “I am proud to be here today for President Donald Trump.” Lawler not only backed Trump’s unpopular “One Big Beautiful Bill,” he is running ads touting his support for it.
It is an audacious gamble. Lawler thinks Republicans in New York are insulated from the Trump economy enough to let their MAGA flag fly without concern that it will mean the end of abortion rights (a number of elected Republicans in the state are pro-choice) or large cuts to the social safety net (which city and state governments in New York have tried to repair in the face of Trump’s cuts). The hope is that MAGA in New York will feel energized enough in an off-year election to counter Democratic desire to give Donald Trump a crushing defeat.
With only three weeks to go, it seems to be working so far, as polls show a margin-of-error race.
Sign Up for the Intelligencer Newsletter
Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.
Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice