The Left Plays Political Russian Roulette

Eventually Luck Will Run Out And New York Will Turn Purple

Congestion Pricing started in New York on Sunday.

Later this week, I plan on doing a podcast episode focusing on implementing Congestion Pricing in New York City. The policy, which tolls all roads into and out of Midtown and Lower Manhattan, went into effect on Sunday, nearly four years after it was initially supposed to begin.

It’s unpopular, and recent polls have shown that the program is politically toxic. It is the latest in a long list of unpopular policies enacted by Democrats in the Empire State, which started when they took complete control of the state government in Albany in 2018. 

That election year was a banner Democratic year in New York. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo won re-election in a landslide, winning more votes than any gubernatorial candidate in history. More importantly, Democrats gained control of the State Senate, gaining a near supermajority. To progressives, this indicated that voters had delivered a mandate.

The trifecta was only the second since the 1960s. Except for one two-year term from 2008 to 2010, Republicans had controlled the State Senate since the Civil Rights Era. Progressives came to Albany in 2019 with a list of priorities on the back burner for years. Among them was congestion pricing, first proposed a few years after a similar policy was successfully implemented in London in 2003.

In 2019, I talked to several progressive activists about these long-awaited policies. Two issues arose as top priorities: criminal justice reform and transit funding, specifically congestion pricing. Both, I warned, would break the Democratic coalition. Crime was always the third rail of New York politics. It sank Cuomo’s illustrious father, former Gov. Mario Cuomo. He was defeated in 1994 by Republican George Pataki over the issue of reinstating the death penalty. Cuomo opposed it, but New Yorkers, tired of high murder rates, supported it. Pataki won, promising to bring it back.¹

Transit funding is another hot potato issue in New York politics. In 2010, the short-lived Obama-era Democratic trifecta collapsed over it.

Before 2015, the only Democratic state senators elected on Long Island since the 1990s were defeated in 2010, falling in a GOP wave where the “MTA tax,” a payroll tax enacted in 2009 levied on employers in New York City and the surrounding suburban counties to fund the Metropolitan Transit Authority, became the dominant issue used against incumbent Democratic senators. By 2018, however, all of Nassau County’s State Senate seats had returned to Democrats, riding the anti-Trump wave, and the party also gained a seat in Suffolk County. Touching these two issues – crime and transit funding – that had severely damaged Democrats before was risky. Progressives shrugged off the risk.

“I’m okay with New York becoming a D+10 state if it means we get some of these policies enacted,” one prominent progressive activist told me, echoing words from other activists. “We don’t need Long Island.”

Be careful what you wish for.

As a result of criminal justice reform measures like no cash bail and policies like congestion pricing, New York’s days as a 20-point Democratic state might be over, at least for now. Gov. Kathy Hochul only won re-election by about six points in 2022, and Kamala Harris only carried the state by 13 points last year, much lower than the 23-point margin Biden won by in 2020. Further, both Nassau and Suffolk counties went Republican in a presidential election for the first time since 1988. Democrats lost their State Senate supermajority, and the Assembly supermajority hangs by a precarious thread. Senate and Assembly seats in the five boroughs, once considered safe Democratic, are now increasingly competitive.

When these progressive activists told me in 2019 that they were okay with losing Long Island, they exposed a level of naivety about politics that has mortally damaged them. It is disingenuous for progressives to solely blame the state’s Democratic establishment and Chairman Jay Jacobs for the party’s regression when even they admitted, as far back as 2019, that pursuing their top priorities would cost massive political capital. If the state’s Democratic establishment bears any blame, it’s for grabbing these political third rails in the first place and not moving slowly.

Long Island is the second-largest voting bloc in the state, and only a united front from New York City can outvote them. Unfortunately for progressives, much of New York City’s outer borough neighborhoods are more culturally and politically aligned with Long Island than with Manhattan or the gentrified neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Bayside and Queens Village have more in common with Manhasset and Elmont than with the Upper East Side and Astoria. Throgs Neck and Woodlawn have more in common with Tuckahoe than Washington Heights; Bensonhurst and Gravesend align more with North Jersey than the East Village or Greenpoint. Staten Island, which Democrats swept as recently as 2018, is pretty much Alabama. When you’re alienating the suburbs, you’re not just alienating those who live just beyond city limits but also tens of thousands of voters who live just within them. New York City’s suburbs don’t start at the city’s borders; they start where the subways end and the driveways begin.

Without a united front from New York City, progressives, and perhaps Democrats, are doomed. Donald Trump and Republicans have made tremendous gains in diverse neighborhoods like Flushing, Fresh Meadows, Corona, and Ozone Park in Queens; New Utrecht and Sunset Park in Brooklyn; and Throgs Neck and Pelham Bay in the Bronx. These neighborhoods are increasingly voting like suburban communities on Long Island.

With Long Island gone, suppose progressives continue to alienate Democratic voters in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Those voters could form an anti-progressive coalition that can elect moderate Democrats in statewide primaries or, worse, join with Republican voters to elect Republicans in statewide general elections and undo many things progressives care about. The last Republican to win statewide, Pataki, lost Queens in 2002, but only by slightly more than one percent. He won statewide by 15 points. It doesn’t take much more regression in a place like Queens before you start seeing the scales tip statewide. Progressives might face Governor Mike Lawler, who will use executive power to undo policies like bail reform and congestion pricing and shut the door on any progress for years.

Leftists should understand they will not win statewide with a coalition of Ithaca, New Paltz, and gentrified East River adjacent Neighborhoods. The delusion that New York is too blue to worry about overreach must end before New York joins its Rust Belt neighbors in competitive status. The state is too expensive for the national party to have to defend.

1. The death penalty was relegalized in New York in 1995 but later struck down as unconstitutional by the state’s highest court in 2004.