In this special episode of the Red Apple Podcast Network's newest show, host Alex Blumberg reacts to the results of the Democratic primary and primary election, and takes a look at the impact on the upcoming mid-term elections.
00:00:13.260It was a tough night for Republicans across the country.
00:00:17.300But as expected, radical socialist Zoran Mamdami relatively easily won his election for mayor of New York City.
00:00:25.640The disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo was ultimately unsuccessful in upending Mamdami.
00:00:33.460I think the story was written in the Democrat primary, in all honesty.
00:00:38.360And the substantial demographic changes in New York City since the days when Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor manifested themselves last night.
00:00:49.200Now, some Republicans, including President Trump at the very last minute, to my surprise, rallied around Cuomo as the only hope of stopping Mamdami's reign of terror in New York City.
00:01:02.420I've never agreed with that political calculus.
00:01:06.000The idea that if Republican candidate Curtis Lee, who won the Republican primary and headed a ticket of city council candidates and civil court judge candidates, had dropped out of the race.
00:01:21.240The idea that all of his votes would have redistributed to Cuomo is simply untrue, particularly given the fact that he was a Republican nominee and was maintaining most of the Republican base.
00:01:34.540These are people who historically have some animosity for Cuomo, particularly after Cuomo said that if you believed you needed to own a gun or you didn't support the right to an abortion, there was no place for you in New York State.
00:01:52.480Looking at this as a professional, one observation I would make is that polling has become even more unreliable in the age of mass communications, in the age of the Internet.
00:02:08.480When I began working on political campaigns 100 years ago, all polling was done on hard line home phones.
00:02:18.320Before that, Gallup and Harris, who were the leading pollsters in the country, actually conducted their polls on a door to door basis, finding voters who they checked against the voter rules.
00:02:31.060Then they moved, of course, to telephone polling using the home, the phones that were in people's homes or businesses.
00:02:39.860And of course, today, with the rise of the cell phone and Internet polling and the fact that in this atmosphere, many voters, both left and right, don't want their opinions to be known because they don't want to be targeted and abused.
00:02:56.020I think polling has become far more volatile.
00:03:00.740So keep this in mind and take a grain of salt or whenever you look at all of the polling going into any of these races.
00:03:54.140And of course, in 1984, George Bush carried it in 1988.
00:03:59.440But after that, it began to shift democratic and it had substantial changes in its demographics as well.
00:04:10.080I think that the fact that Cittarelli, Jack Cittarelli, who I think waged a valiant fight, came so close in the governor's race last time was really due to the unique time of the COVID-19 pandemic.
00:04:24.700And as you may remember, one of Phil Murphy's top aides mistakenly blurted out that after the election, he would put in place even more draconian COVID-19 lockdowns.
00:04:38.660An event like that can skew a race, particularly at the last minute.
00:04:44.240And I think it explains the close finish that Cittarelli had last time, which I think raised the expectation levels that he might be able to win this time.
00:04:55.280I do think he put on a spirited campaign.
00:04:58.120I thought he bested his opponent, Mikey Sherrill, in the one debate that I watched.
00:05:04.500It's kind of amazing to me that Mikey Sherrill, as a member of the House of Representatives, engaged in three different stock transactions in which she tripled her net worth for a net gain of about $7 million.
00:05:19.100And she paid a fine for this, I believe.
00:05:21.560She was a member of the House Defense Appropriations Committee.
00:05:26.600But when she when she was confronted with all this, she said that she couldn't remember.
00:05:31.220I thought that was a that was a key moment in the debate.
00:05:35.560I thought that it might be a turning point, but I was incorrect about that.
00:05:41.140Also, Virginia had been a red state only after the surprising victory of Glenn Youngkin.
00:05:47.960In Virginia, by the way, the governor is allowed by Constitution to serve but one term.
00:05:52.760And now Virginia is going back to the trend of turning blue.
00:05:56.660You want to know how blue Virginia is?
00:05:59.360Well, you can run for attorney general there.
00:06:03.000You can get caught threatening to shoot your opponent in the head and kill all the members of his family, as Democrat candidate Jay Jones did.
00:06:15.160So anybody who says this was a referendum on Trump or this was a referendum on Trump's policies, I've seen this movie before, had Republicans won one or either of those seats.
00:06:28.980Republicans would be saying that this was a referendum on Trump.
00:06:32.080But because the president, as is tradition and historical, both of these Democrat states went Democrat.
00:06:39.540I don't believe it is a measure on how Trump is doing.
00:06:43.400It's also worth noting that neither Earl Sears or Jack Cittarelli were MAGA Republicans.
00:06:50.180Both had in the past made public comments critical of President Trump, with with Earl Sears demanding that President Trump remove himself from politics after the 2024 election that he ended up winning.
00:07:02.460So the public didn't reject MAGA on Tuesday.
00:07:10.820Republicans need to put forward candidates who will win over disaffected, independent voters.
00:07:16.360They need political figures who will authentically embody the MAGA spirit.
00:07:23.320I would point out that in all of his races for president, in the urban areas of states like Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Ohio, Donald Trump has always consistently been able to reach candidates that Mitt Romney and John McCain were never able to reach.
00:07:43.660And that was the margin of difference in the two races he won.
00:07:48.360Let's put the 2020 race aside, because I think there are still reasonable questions about the anomalies and irregularities in that particular race.
00:07:59.240If those kind of candidates, though, Republicans who are who are rhinos, who don't support Donald Trump's pro growth, pro law and order, low tax, pro tariff policies are on the ballot, I think we won't lose again.
00:08:21.300So yesterday's election will be a dark omen for the establishment Republicans, but I don't think it tells us anything about who will win the 26th election.
00:08:33.160Again, in politics, a week is a lifetime.
00:08:38.400While we're at it, let's dispense of one other very common theory, and that is the theory that somehow if Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, had dropped out, that all of his votes would have gone to Andrew Cuomo, who would have then have beaten Zoran Mandami.
00:08:54.160Once again, as a professional, I've never seen any empirical evidence or any polling that that supported that theory.
00:09:04.620It is true that some of those votes would have moved to Cuomo, but certainly not all of them.
00:09:09.700And most of the surveys I saw showed that in a two way race, Governor Cuomo, because he was carrying very high negatives, probably would have lost anyway.
00:09:19.320I do think there is a silver lining for Republicans in New York State.
00:09:24.860Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who is one of President Trump's most vocal supporters in the U.S. House, is expected to announce her run for governor of New York any day now.
00:09:34.860One of Stefanik's top allies, GOP Councilwoman Ina Varinkova, said,
00:09:41.100We have a governor's race coming up, and I think we can win that race, especially if Mamdami is the mayor.
00:09:46.960I'm going to be working my butt off, she said, to make sure that if it's Elise Stefanik, she wins.
00:09:52.400She's supposed to announce right after the mayoral election.
00:09:55.160I think that there's a pathway for her to win the governorship, and I think that we can change a lot if she's governor.
00:10:00.860I could not agree more with that analysis.
00:10:04.560I must tell you, in the over 50 years that I have worked on political campaigns, and in the literally thousands of pages of polling that I have studied,
00:10:16.380and cross tabs of polling that I have studied, I've never seen a candidate with a higher unfavorable rating and a lower job approval rating than Governor Kathy Hochul.
00:10:28.700My great fear, if I were Elise Stefanik and the Republicans, would be that a candidate as yet to emerge beats Hochul in the Democrat primary.
00:10:39.080It didn't go without being noticed that Hochul endorsed Mamdami, but Mamdami refused in the debate to endorse Hochul.
00:10:48.320That's proof that Hochul, like Chuck Schumer, who said yesterday that he voted but wouldn't say who he voted for,
00:10:55.100refused to say he voted for the Democrat nominee, of fear the rise of power in the party's most progressive and radical socialist wing.
00:11:06.360So the silver lining, if there is one, and I feel badly for my many friends who live in New York City,
00:11:12.920is that it will make it, I think, possible for a strong Republican, like Elise Stefanik, to get elected.
00:11:20.740The Emerson College poll, which is a very credible poll, only has her trailing Hochul today by five points.
00:13:30.760And there are all kinds of unforeseen negative consequences yet to be determined.
00:13:35.180The voters who got duped will be running back to the Republican Party for some shred of normalcy outside of New York City.
00:13:42.400Stefanik could be the perfect candidate to hold the banner as someone who's undoubtedly MAGA, but also has the right temperament to win over moderates and disaffected Democrats.
00:13:54.240As the Lord tells us, sometimes we need to go through trials and tribulations in order to wake up and see the light.
00:14:00.500Mamdami will certainly provide many trials, but the rise of Elise Stefanik, which I predict here and now,
00:14:06.780could help mitigate this damage and keep New York City from falling into complete ruin.
00:14:13.640If you understand how New York City is funded, you understand that the governor has an enormous influence on New York City.
00:14:22.320It has been traditional for New York governors to fight with New York mayors.
00:14:26.340Nelson Rockefeller fought with John Lindsay.
00:14:29.540Mario Cuomo fought with Mayor Ed Koch.
00:14:32.860That has always been a natural tension.
00:14:36.100But it's very clear that Kathy Hochul will not put the brakes on the radical agenda of Mamdami.
00:14:41.280Indeed, she will embrace it in an effort to save herself in her own Democrat primary.
00:14:48.400I've been watching Empire State Politics for, well, over 50 years.
00:14:53.720Once lived in Lewisboro, New York, and was a member of the Lewisboro, New York Republican Town Committee.
00:15:00.040Those days, up the northern part of Westchester was a heavily Republican area.