It was reported last night that Democrat Governor Nurse Ratched Hochul has called in Vice President Kamala Harris and 2016 Democrat loser Hillary Clinton to campaign on her behalf in deep blue New York. Yup. Nothing screams “Kathy Hochul is panicking” quite like bringing in the Democrat big guns to help drag her over the finish line.
As a registered Republican in the Empire State, I can tell you that I am definitely in the minority here. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by about a 2-to-1 margin. No incumbent New York Democrat should be panicking a week before the election. But Kathy Hochul is panicking.
It turns out that repeatedly screeching “extremist!” isn’t the winning campaign strategy Hochul’s people thought it was.
Not that Governor Ratched has figured that out yet. If Kathy loses in this race, the last words she will say after giving her concession speech will be, “LEE ZELDIN IS TOO EXTREME FOR NEW YORK.”
Having never seen her run for governor in the first place, voters haven’t had the dubious honor of watching just how incompetent Kathy Hochul is at campaigning.
It’s been so bad, at this point, I’ve decided to officially retract my previous statement calling Kirsten Gillibrand the worst candidate to ever run for office. Kathy’s got her beat by a country mile.
Hochul is in so far over her head, she’s touching bottom.
Poll after poll has shown that voters are deeply concerned about rising crime. So what does Hochul do? She dismisses the concern, calling it a fabricated invention of those “master manipulators” in the Republican Party.
When I saw the clip from last week’s debate where Hochul told Republican Lee Zeldin that she doesn’t understand why rising crime matters so much to him, my jaw hit the floor.
Kathy Hochul isn’t just a bad candidate. She’s also out-of-touch and indifferent to the concerns of New Yorkers.
But because Kathy is running for a full term as governor of a deep blue state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1, she thought she could sleepwalk her way to victory.
In that sense, Hochul is a lot like Hillary Clinton in 2016. Hillary believed her election was a fait accompli. That’s why she didn’t bother campaigning in states like Wisconsin. She thought had it in the bag. Why waste time and trouble traveling to that cheese-eating state?
Hochul was so convinced she would win without breaking a sweat that she didn’t even bother campaigning, choosing instead to spend millions on ads accusing Lee Zeldin of being an “EXTREMIST” and calling it a day.
And now, Republican Lee Zeldin is within striking distance of the Democrat incumbent in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1.
You can see why Hochul is panicking.
The only way Lee Zeldin could be in a dead heat with Hochul is if Democrat voters are among those supporting him.
And clearly, they are.
Yesterday’s Trafalgar poll had Zeldin slightly ahead of Hochul, 48.4% to 47.6%. When you get into the details of the poll, you discover that Democrats made up 53.6% of the voters surveyed while Republicans only made up 27.5%. Another 18.9% of respondents were unaffiliated.
But even with Democrats making up more than half of the respondents in the Trafalgar poll, Zeldin still topped Hochul by nearly a point.
No wonder Kathy Hochul is panicking.
For the last few weeks, my brother and I have been discussing how hard it’s been to temper our excitement over Zeldin’s rise with some much-needed perspective. This is New York State after all. The idiots that elected a dummy like Kirsten Gillibrand and a corrupt, murderous pervert like Andrew Cuomo would happily vote for a decomposed muskrat if it had a D after its name. And it isn’t much of a leap from decomposed muskrat to Kathy Hochul.
At the same time, something is going on that hasn’t happened in this state in almost 20 years.
I saw this yesterday and I felt a thrill run up my leg:
Over the weekend, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was in Long Island campaigning with Lee Zeldin. Dan was there and from the cheers heard on the videos he posted, it’s obvious the crowd was enormous.
Then Lee Zeldin tweeted this picture from the rally, and I couldn’t believe the size of the crowd or the fact that it was happening for a Republican candidate in New York:
Oh, yeah. I can see why Hochul is panicking.
But let’s be honest here. If Kathy Hochul thinks bringing in the wildly unpopular Kamala Harris and the equally unpopular Hillary Clinton is her ticket to turning things around, she’s even dumber than I thought.
Now, given that this is New York State, I know the inestimable Lee Zeldin still has an uphill battle.
We haven’t had a Republican governor since 2004. And, as I think I might have mentioned already, Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 2-to-1 margin. So unlike Kathy Hochul, I don’t see this race as a fait accompli.
Turnout is the key.
According to last month’s Coefficient Poll, Zeldin was beating Hochul among respondents who either haven’t voted in the last four general elections or only voted in one of the last four. Among respondents who hadn’t voted at all in the last four elections, Zeldin topped Hochul 51% to 31%. For those who only voted once, he was beating her 54% to 38%.
If Zeldin can drive those ordinarily indifferent voters to the polls next Tuesday, he could just pull this off and we can put an end to the reign of New York’s Nurse Ratched once and for all.