{"id":378051,"date":"2026-10-20T16:52:28","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T16:52:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/378051\/"},"modified":"2026-10-20T16:52:28","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T16:52:28","slug":"saritha-surge-could-be-surprise-in-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/378051\/","title":{"rendered":"Saritha Surge Could Be Surprise in New York"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York state, of all places, is emerging as a potential bright spot for Republicans in the midterm elections, with recent<\/a> polls<\/a> showing the Republican candidates for attorney general and for governor within reach of the Democratic opponents.<\/p>\n

The attorney general candidate, Saritha Komatireddy, 42, had a stunningly good performance in a televised debate this month against the two-term incumbent, Letitia James, 68. Not since Sleepy Joe Biden\u2019s national debate meltdown against President Trump has a Democratic incumbent been so devastatingly trounced. James looked like she was in a hostage video. If every New York voter could just watch the debate on YouTube<\/a>, Komatireddy would win the election in a landslide.<\/p>\n

In the debate, Komatireddy called James a “political hack.” In response to a question about the Cornell fraternity case, Komatireddy said of James, “She’s certainly never prosecuted a sexual assault case, and she’s already screwed this one up by prejudging it.”<\/p>\n

Komatireddy\u2019s campaign team has also produced a 30-second ad spot that is so simple it has gone viral: “Just fight crime.<\/a>” “There\u2019s a three word solution to affordability in New York,” Komatireddy says straight to the camera. “Just fight crime. When crooks steal a car, your insurance goes up. When scammers siphon money from Medicaid, health care costs go up. \u2026 Letitia James spent $10 million bucks making herself a celebrity. My motto is my career: Just fight crime.”<\/p>\n

A former Republican congressman from New York, John Faso, told the Washington Free Beacon, “Saritha is one of the best statewide candidates from either party over the past 40 years. She has the experience, temperament, and skill to fix what is wrong in the AG’s office. She will use the powers of the AG’s office to fight crime, rampant theft in programs like Medicaid, and create a civil commitment office to get the seriously mentally ill off our streets and into proper care.”<\/p>\n

In an interview with the Free Beacon, Komatireddy stressed her service in the Biden and Obama administrations. “I\u2019m really running as a nonpartisan law enforcement professional,” she said, “following the facts and following the law.” Unbelievably, James said in the debate that “you don\u2019t have to look at the facts and the law.”<\/p>\n

“She\u2019s had her chance,” Komatireddy said, pointing to James\u2019s eight years in office. “Crime is up. Homelessness is up. Fraud is up,” Komatireddy said.<\/p>\n

“She is political in everything that she does,” Komatireddy said. “It\u2019s time now to turn the page and focus on public safety.”<\/p>\n

Komatireddy has the endorsement of Ray Kelly, who served as New York City Police Commissioner under Mayor David Dinkins and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Kelly was also customs commissioner and a Treasury Department official in the Clinton administration.<\/p>\n

Komatireddy also has the endorsement of Elisha Wiesel, son of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. Elisha Wiesel worked on Bloomberg\u2019s 2020 Democratic presidential campaign.<\/p>\n

Komatireddy was born in Brooklyn. Her parents are immigrants from India. She\u2019s a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. She clerked for Brett Kavanaugh before he joined the Supreme Court, and then spent a career as an antiterrorism and anti-narcotics federal prosecutor. In the Biden administration, she served as chief of staff to the administrator of the 10,000-person Drug Enforcement Administration. She is the parent of two sets of twins. She is not a “country club” Republican.<\/p>\n

“Tish James has assigned twice as many people to prosecute cops than criminals. So we need to move things around,” Komatireddy said in a “spaces” interview<\/a> on X with Bill Ackman. She also promised to shut down state-funded drug injection sites on day one. “It\u2019s a cruel thing to do. I don\u2019t think we should do it. We certainly shouldn\u2019t do it with taxpayer money,” she said.<\/p>\n

“Everyone wants the same thing. They want a safer New York. It\u2019s not partisan,” she said in that interview.<\/p>\n

The governor\u2019s race in New York is a different story, but there, too, the incumbent Democrat, Kathy Hochul, hasn\u2019t exactly covered herself in glory. <\/p>\n

With political junkies focused on control of the House and Senate, it may be hard to get voters and donors focused on statewide races. But the stakes are high. Two recent attorneys general\u2014Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo\u2014became governor of the Empire State. Jacob Javits went from the attorney general\u2019s office into the U.S. Senate.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not only a story about political steppingstones or ambitions. It translates into concrete differences in peoples\u2019 lives. I lived in New York City for 15 years, between 1997 and 2013, and saw the effects of leadership at the state and local level that translated into policies\u2014safer and cleaner, more orderly streets and subways, more business-friendly policies, lower taxes\u2014that helped New York prosper under Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki.<\/p>\n

In 1994, George Elmer Pataki was just an obscure state senator from Peekskill, a grandson of Hungarian immigrants.<\/p>\n

As governor, Pataki\u2014backed by some farsighted businessmen and civic leaders such as Peter Flanigan and some others who have since relocated to Florida\u2014used the leverage of a state legislature wanting a pay raise to win passage of the New York State Charter Schools Act of 1998. Hundreds of thousands of children in Harlem and the Bronx and elsewhere in New York City have benefited from the alternative that those charter schools provided to failing New York City public schools<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So Attorney General Komatireddy\u2014everyone seems to call her Saritha\u2014or Governor Blakeman may be a long shot. But it\u2019s potentially powerful if it happens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York state, of all places, is emerging as a potential bright spot for Republicans in the midterm…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":378052,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[303,398,9,24,55,54,56],"class_list":["post-378051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-crime","tag-letitia-james","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378051\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}