November 8, 2022, was a surprisingly good night for Democrats—but it would have been an extraordinary triumph were it not for what happened in New York.
Midterm elections are typically rough for the party that holds the presidency. That conventional wisdom, combined with Biden’s anemic approval rating and the races that were on the calendar, led to dire forecasts for Democrats.
Throughout the year, pundits predicted a “red wave” would sweep through the House. The Center for Politics at the University of Virginia reported signs the GOP could “build its biggest majority since the Great Depression.” The Democrats’ Senate majority, already balanced on a razor’s edge, was in doubt despite a favorable map and key GOP senators retiring in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. CNN’s Chris Cillizza published multiple columns projecting Republican wins, including one that declared, “The real question, at this point, is how big the red wave will be.”
When the votes were counted, the Democrats vaulted over that abysmally low bar. They held onto the Senate, expanding their threadbare majority by one crucial seat, and Republicans were left with a smaller than expected nine-vote edge in the House.
The midterm results represented a surprising triumph for Biden. However, on a national map filled with tenacious defensive stands, New York—normally a blue-state stalwart—stood out as the place where Democratic lines broke. The losses there cost the Democrats four critical seats.
It was an embarrassing bloodbath. One of the Republican winners was George Santos, a man with a fabricated résumé and questionable campaign finances. And one of the Democrats who went down was Sean Patrick Maloney, who, as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, had been the man responsible for securing the House majority.
Yuh-Line Niou and Alessandra Biaggi both fell victim to New York’s midterm chaos. Making it to Washington proved far more difficult than any of the fights the pair had previously taken on. They were not able to repeat the success they enjoyed locally when faced with the twin engines of Big Dem power—big money and the party establishment.
Yet, even as their campaigns exposed the limitations of progressive insurgents, those same races showed the weaknesses of the moderate party machinery. The situation in the state illuminated the factors that have conspired to keep Democrats from winning despite popular support for their policies—including internecine disputes, influxes of Republican megadonor cash, and the steady barrage of right-leaning media machinery.
Timing also played a role. Niou and Biaggi made their plays to join New York’s congressional delegation in a year when the existing members had been forced into a last-minute game of musical chairs. The scramble was set in motion in 2020 when the state fell short in the once-a-decade US Census count.
While the census is conducted by a federal bureau, governors play a role in funding, promoting, and planning for the effort in their states. Leading up to the count, which determines the apportionment of seats in the US House of Representatives, some progressives expressed concerns that New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, wasn’t doing enough to run up the numbers. They criticized the governor, one of the powerful officials supported by the donors and the establishment, for failing to provide sufficient resources for the benefit of the broader party. It was an important cause for Democrats at the national level, since their House majority runs through the two biggest, bluest states; New York and California.
When the 2020 census was done, New York lost one of its House seats by the slimmest margin in modern history. If the state had counted eighty-nine more people in a population of more than twenty million, its footprint in Washington would not have diminished. Leaders in New York City, the state’s largest population center, had aggressively tried to encourage residents to participate. After losing the seat, they pointed the finger at Cuomo for not doing more.
“The state was simply M.I.A.,” New York City Census Director Julie Menin told the New York Times. “The governor and the state simply did not want to prioritize the census.”
The blame game was just beginning. The midterms turned the state’s Democratic Party into a thicket of finger-pointing.
After the census debacle, with the encouragement of nervous Democratic leaders in Washington, the party’s lawmakers in Albany advanced a plan to make up the difference. During Cuomo’s administration and at his insistence, New York had passed constitutional changes that created an independent commission charged with proposing new district lines to the legislature. Following the census, that commission redistricting process had broken down, the legislature had rejected the first set of maps the commission had proposed, and the commissioners had declared themselves unable to submit any more proposals for the legislators to consider. Each party blamed the other for throwing a wrench in the gears. Many progressives blamed Cuomo all over again for the flawed design of the redistricting commission.
In January 2022, Democratic state lawmakers seized the initiative. They passed an aggressive map that would have left Republicans with only four solidly red districts. Overall, the new map would have likely cost Republicans three seats and delivered them to the Democratic delegation.
The map was an ambitious project that gave Democrats a glimmer of hope amid the predicted Republican House gains. The data wonks at the website FiveThirtyEight described it as “heavily biased” and “ruthlessly efficient.” It was a partisan gerrymander with every line drawn to maximize the number of Democratic voters in each district.
However, by overriding the independent redistricting commission process, the legislature created a risk that its map could be thrown out by the courts. And by attempting such an egregious gerrymander rather than mounting a more subtle effort to shore up seats, they almost certainly increased the likelihood of a judicial backlash.
In other words, if the state’s Democrats had just sought to grab one extra seat rather than three, they might have avoided a showdown. Instead, they proposed a map that was almost asking for a legal fight.
Ultimately, tactically astute Republicans petitioned a judge in rural Steuben County, a deep-red region five hours from Manhattan, to review the redistricting process. The judge pounced on the Democratic plan. He ordered the maps redrawn and appointed a “special master,” Jonathan Cervas, an academic who specializes in preparing remedial district maps, to draw new lines.
The impending release of Cervas’s maps produced a breathless moment in professional politics, with operatives and candidates on tenterhooks. When the new lines came out in May 2022, they sent shock waves through the state’s political system.
Cervas’s map erased the advantage Democrats hoped to have over their Republican rivals. It also set incumbents up to challenge each other. Two veteran committee chairs in the House, Jerry Nadler and Carolyn Maloney, woke up to find themselves in the same district, and they resolved to battle it out.
The fight over the map also pushed the primary date into late August, the dog days of summer when many New York residents—especially in the city—decamp to more genial climates. Midterm primaries are never high-turnout affairs, but this race, a dauntingly complex jumble of personalities and ideologies, would concentrate the turnout and enthusiasm problem like few contests before it.
One of the House members upended by Cervas’s map was Sean Patrick Maloney, the head of the national Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Maloney, whose mission at DCCC was fighting for the House majority, had tried to score extra points on his home turf and was one of the Democratic leaders who put forward aggressively partisan maps.
A top New York Democrat who was involved in the process blamed the overambitious map on Maloney and Mike Gianaris, the party’s deputy majority leader in the state senate who had previously encouraged Biaggi to run and had helped take out the IDC.
“They wrote stupid lines, Maloney and Gianaris. They were pigs,” the Democrat said. “They were pigs.”
Gianaris and the legislature had crafted the lines. Maloney and the DCCC submitted their own aggressive proposal through a public comment process.
Gianaris, for his part, blamed Cuomo’s past efforts to weaken the Democratic majorities in the legislature and consolidate his own power. The governor had left the state with a court system dominated by conservative judges and a redistricting commission that was designed to take authority away from lawmakers.
“Cuomo used every lever at his disposal to impose his rule on state government,” Gianaris said in an interview for this book. “It’s his negative influence. Like, we’re still cleaning up the mess that he made.”
Maloney described the state court system as a monstrosity and offered a verdict that would seem to apply to many of the issues Democrats faced as they stumbled through the midterms in New York.
“Democrats are really good at giving away our power, and Republicans are really good at using theirs,” Maloney said in an interview for this book.
A raspy-voiced former aide to President Bill Clinton, Maloney had a closely cropped gray crew cut and a congressional career that began with taking out a Republican incumbent in 2012. In speeches, Maloney often leaned into the idea that his moderate platform was the common-sense approach needed to win in battleground districts. Despite highlighting his appeal with more conservative voters, Maloney also never tired of bringing up his identity as an openly gay “father of interracial kids” to burnish his liberal bona fides.
However, the home Maloney and his husband purchased in 2012 so that he could run in New York’s Eighteenth District was suddenly about two and a quarter miles outside of it. Maloney now found himself living in a new Seventeenth District, three-quarters of which had been represented by Mondaire Jones, a Democrat who had been in office for just over a year.
For Maloney, this was a serious inconvenience, particularly since, as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or “D-Trip” as it was known to insiders, one of Maloney’s major goals was protecting incumbents like Jones.
Even without moving again, Maloney would have been allowed to run in the district just next door. It would have been somewhat awkward, but he had represented most of the constituents in the Eighteenth District for about a decade. However, the Seventeenth District was seen by experts as a relatively safe seat, whereas the redrawn Eighteenth District now looked far more competitive.
Instead of letting Jones be and trying for the Eighteenth—or moving to a new house—Maloney decided to run in the Seventeenth. His choice meant going after Jones, but it was a shorter commute and a safer seat. Maloney disputed the analysts’ ratings that labeled his new target safer for Democrats and insisted the decision was all about the location of his home.
Maloney’s choice set up a generational and ideological clash. Both men were openly gay lawyers, but Maloney was a white man in his mid-fifties and had run as an unabashed centrist and Jones was a Black, thirtysomething ally of Ocasio-Cortez’s “Squad” in Congress. The move also meant that Maloney, the man tasked with securing the Democrats’ majority in Congress, had gone from using his incumbency and experience to hold onto a newly competitive district to almost certainly costing the party at least one member of Congress—either him or Jones. In the end, Jones sought to run in a crowded race in the city rather than take on Maloney.
Leading the DCCC requires striking that balance between protecting incumbents and trying to swing poachable districts. When he took the helm of the organization, Maloney argued the prior leadership was overly focused on taking out Republicans and insufficiently invested in protecting its own incumbents. He also faulted the left and argued calls to “defund the police” hampered the party’s standing nationally.
Progressives had their own ideas about what was wrong with the party committee. Following the 2018 races that brought in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad, the DCCC made it official policy to refuse to work or even communicate with consultants that supported Democratic insurgents who mounted primary challenges against incumbents. Ocasio-Cortez and others argued this “blacklist” cut the party off from firms that were coming up with innovative ways to raise small-dollar donations and engage young and diverse voters. Despite his disdain for the left, it was actually Maloney who ended the “blacklist” policy when he took the reins of the committee in 2021.
His position leading the party’s campaign arm also exposed Maloney to personal criticism. Along with concerns about his level of engagement in his own district, Maloney faced questions about having the DCCC invest in his race. Ocasio-Cortez, who had battled with the organization over her desire to challenge incumbents, also blasted Maloney for his decision to encroach on Jones’s district. Speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill, she called it a “terrible,” “hypocritical” move and said he should step down due to the “conflict of interest.”
“I think it’s ridiculous,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “If he’s going to enter in a primary and challenge another Democratic member, then he should step aside from his responsibilities.”
Maloney insisted he had spoken with Jones, who was not interested in running the competitive suburban race.
“I think, if Mondaire was being honest, he would tell you that he had real concerns about running in a district that was more conservative and it was those concerns that led him to … ultimately run in the city,” Maloney said. “I essentially offered to rethink the whole thing if he wanted to run in New York 17 and he told me not to worry about it.”
Jones told a very different story. In an interview for this book, Jones said Maloney blindsided him when he decided to run in the Seventeenth.
“There was no … meaningful communication, when, as soon as—I think it had been twenty minutes after the maps came out—that he went on Twitter and said he was running in my district,” Jones said.
As a progressive, Jones was not shocked to find himself on the wrong side of the party leadership.
“Perhaps in retrospect, it should not be surprising. When I ran in 2020, the establishment did not support me and that’s because, while I do battle with people who want to overthrow our democracy, and tell women what to do with their bodies, and rig this economy for the super-rich, I also push members of my own party to do better for working families,” said Jones. “That, it turns out, can create resentment among some Democratic elites.”
While he denied surprising Jones with his decision to run in the district, Maloney conceded he made some mistakes.
“I’m sure he has some hard feelings against me,” Maloney said of Jones. “I could have done things better, to be sure.”
Maloney also admitted one of the things he could have done was call Jones when the lines came out to warn him of his decision.
“Sure. Sure. I could have done that,” he said.
Maloney was right that Jones had hard feelings. In his interview for this book, Jones argued Maloney’s handling of the situation was especially awful given his role leading the congressional campaign committee.
“The job of the D Triple-C chair is to keep and expand our majority,” Jones said before noting that Maloney “lost the majority” and adding, “The essence of your job is to give candidates the resources to win tough fights. It sent a horrible message that he then would leave a district that was, by a few percentage points tougher, to have a better shot at remaining in Congress even if it meant, you know, screwing me in the process.”
Maloney’s decision sent Jones on a collision course with Yuh-Line Niou. And it put Maloney into the ring with Alessandra Biaggi.
After successfully taking on the governor, Biaggi came into 2022 considering her next move. She eyed multiple different offices as the lines evolved and was initially prepared to run for a congressional seat that included parts of Long Island. When the new maps came out, Biaggi decided to stay close to her home just north of the city and take on Maloney. Biaggi was driven by his handling of the redistricting process and his treatment of Jones.
“I felt like this guy fucked up our congressional lines,” Biaggi said of Maloney. “You have taken away our ability … for New York to have as many seats as possible because you got cute with the lines. That’s fucked up.”
The race had clear echoes of the battle that initially brought Biaggi to Albany. Once again she was challenging a member of leadership with a message that they were not doing enough to deliver progressive reforms. In their lone debate on August 5, 2022, Biaggi noted the similarities.
“I ran for the state senate for the exact same reasons that I am running for Congress today, because I was frustrated with corruption and corporate-backed politicians,” Biaggi said.
Maloney countered by painting Biaggi as too far to the left for the upstate district. He highlighted the fact her state senate seat covered portions of New York City and dubbed her “the leading advocate for defunding the police in the state senate.” While both Biaggi and Maloney were for police reform, Biaggi had used the divisive “defund” terminology, some of which she deleted from her prolific Twitter page as she prepared for the congressional campaign.
And, once again, Biaggi had to overcome the advantages incumbents and power players have at their disposal. Maloney raised over $4 million compared to about $800,000 for Biaggi.
Even though the new district did not include any part of the five boroughs, Maloney was also bolstered by about $410,000 from a political action committee affiliated with the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York. The union and its longtime leader, Patrick Lynch, regularly sparred with progressives and had endorsed Trump in 2020. They funded a slew of ads attacking Biaggi in the last two weeks of the primary. Biaggi described the spending from outside the district as “dark money.”
While Biaggi had been able to overcome a massive funding gap en route to Albany, she was unable to make lightning strike twice. The August 23, 2022, primary was a relatively low-turnout affair with approximately 37,000 of the more than 775,000 residents in the district coming out to vote. Roughly two-thirds of them voted for Maloney.
To Biaggi, the chaos with the maps was a major factor in her loss. The first time around, she defeated the remnants of the IDC machine by running a huge ground game. Even more organizing would be necessary in a race coming in the middle of summer when few people were accustomed to participating in elections. With the lines scrambled, all of this needed to be done in just three months.
“Ninety days is like no time at all, just to be fucking clear,” Biaggi said.
Yet the ultimate factor was clearly cash. The experience convinced Biaggi fundraising was an issue the left would need to focus on more going forward to avoid similar defeats. She alluded to strong poll numbers for policies like expanded health care and public education.
“People actually find the message of what we’re talking about as progressives really powerful, but it doesn’t reach as many people as the moderate message reaches. What’s the reason? Money,” she said.
On election night, Biaggi held a small gathering for her supporters at an ale house where most of the patrons at the bar were watching the Yankees and completely unaware there had been a primary. She walked in shortly after the polls closed and stood on a chair to make a speech for the cameras. Biaggi struck an optimistic tone. She also urged her supporters to get behind Maloney for his general election fight against a Republican opponent.
“What we are doing is honestly transformational work and transformational work takes time. It takes time, it takes patience,” she said, punctuating her words by bending down and clapping her hands, before adding, “This is the beginning of something bigger, but here’s the reality. What is even bigger than that is November, because what we’re up against in November is not a political party, it’s fascism.… So, I understand the disappointment that we feel right now, but here’s the deal, we have to show up in November and we have to come together.”
The boilerplate call to unify around a man who, in Biaggi’s view, had done more to damage the prospects of both progressives and Democrats than nearly any other official in the state rang a bit false. And, when November came around, amid questions about whether he had done enough to excite and engage voters in the district, Maloney became the first Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair to lose his own race in over forty years.
Roughly forty miles downstate, Yuh-Line Niou faced a battle of her own. When the lines came out, the newly cut Tenth District included all of her Lower Manhattan assembly district along with a swath of South Brooklyn that included the center of the borough’s Asian community. She was instantly drawn to the race.
“First off, open seats don’t happen very often. This was an open seat … a hundred percent of my district was inside of it … and it was, two Chinatowns basically, Brooklyn and Manhattan’s,” recounted Niou. “I just knew that it was really important for us to be able to have representation and we have very little representation and diversity inside of our congressional body.”
However, with the maps in flux, the proposition wasn’t nearly that simple. The heavily Democratic district also attracted an array of progressives who relished the chance to vie for the kind of uncompetitive seat that often translates to what is essentially a lifetime appointment. Along with Niou, the group included city council member Carlina Rivera, former mayor Bill de Blasio, and a variety of viable but noncompetitive supporting characters.
The district also attracted Mondaire Jones, who had opted not to defend his territory against Maloney. Instead, Jones left his suburban district, avoided the neighboring seat held by Bowman, skipped the Jerry Nadler versus Carolyn Maloney thunderdome that was playing out on both sides of Central Park, and moved to an apartment in Brooklyn to run in the Tenth.
Biaggi had been undone by one major progressive weakness—the fundraising gap. Niou was being stymied by campaign cash too, but she was also dealing with the perennial lack of unity on the left.
Niou, Rivera, Jones, and de Blasio were all staunch progressives who were clearly competing for some of the same votes. With a crowded left lane, the race also drew Daniel Goldman, heir to the Levi Strauss & Co. denim fortune, and the former House counsel who had taken a star turn during the 2019 presidential impeachment hearings.
In a race with an odd midsummer schedule that wasn’t exactly designed to attract media attention, Goldman brought a unique asset to the contest: his massive bank account. Goldman spent approximately $4 million of his own money on the primary. Most importantly, Goldman stood out from the crowded field of progressives as a relative centrist who opposed some more left-wing policy priorities like Medicare for All and student debt cancellation.
De Blasio, who ended eight years in City Hall at the start of 2022 with low approval numbers, bowed out of the race in July. His team cited polling that made clear the former mayor didn’t necessarily have a viable path to victory. De Blasio wasn’t the only one whose cause looked lost, but the rest of the pack stayed in even as the polls increasingly indicated it was a race between Niou and Goldman.
As the campaign stretched on, some wondered why the progressives in the field could not consolidate and rally behind a single champion as more moderate Democrats had done for Biden at the presidential level. In an interview for this book, De Blasio, who did not endorse any of his rivals following his departure, offered a simple answer—progressives don’t know how to do that: “That trick never works. Clearing the field or, you know, consolidating around a single progressive, I have seen that work so few times.”
The ex-mayor recalled the 2020 presidential race where he was (very briefly) part of the Democratic field along with the progressive senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
“What they failed to achieve … was that, if one or the other had not reached whatever milestone by X date, they would fold in,” he said.
De Blasio couldn’t imagine a scenario similar to the one former president Obama orchestrated among moderate candidates in 2020 unfolding on the progressive side. “I couldn’t go to these other folks and say: ‘Defer to me.’ It wouldn’t have made sense to them. If they said it to me, it wouldn’t have made sense to me, and there was no other entity that could have mediated,” he said.
In other words, part of the problem was that there was no leader of Obama’s stature on the left who was willing to weigh in. Regarding the congressional race in the Tenth District, de Blasio suggested New York’s progressives would have needed an “elder statesman” or an overarching “single organization” to give the impetus to a consolidation, and observed that the Working Families Party evidently did not serve that function.
Rather than marshaling its resources effectively, the WFP had found itself paralyzed in the 2021 mayoral contest, the race to replace de Blasio. In that election, the WFP made a co-endorsement of two candidates before ultimately getting behind the top progressive contender. It left many activists wondering whether a more decisive approach could have prevented the subsequent victory of the eccentric centrist Eric Adams.
For his part, when asked why he didn’t give way to Niou when he had no path, Jones suggested the Tenth District race was far more complicated than armchair pundits might have realized. Jones didn’t see it as a simple question of progressives versus a moderate. His campaign’s polling indicated voters in the district were either drawn to him and Goldman or Niou and Rivera. Jones believed this was because he and Goldman had the most federal experience.
“Voters don’t behave as ideologically as people on Twitter … appear to think,” Jones said. “People consider a candidate’s record, the way the candidate presents, a candidate’s story, and so many other things.”
It was a similar view to the one Warren’s allies offered when asked why she didn’t consolidate behind Sanders. Warren and her campaign believed that—despite overlap in their platforms—she had a fundamentally different base and brand than Sanders that meant her supporters might not have transitioned to him so easily.
One progressive who could have brought the left’s voters together in the Tenth District was Ocasio-Cortez. She stayed out of the contest due to her relationships with both Niou and Jones, according to a senior staffer to Niou.
While Niou didn’t have any harsh words for the allies who didn’t come out for her, she was far more critical of Maloney’s choice to run in the district that was a clear fit for Jones. “Like I get that he would’ve run in a place that would’ve been a little bit more challenging for him, but he’s got millions of dollars at his disposal and he’s the D-Trip chair,” Niou said of Maloney.
Niou also had some criticism for Jones’s decision to switch districts. “I also think Mondaire could have stayed and fought,” she said.
In the end, when the votes were counted on August 23, Niou lost the primary to Goldman by just 1,306 votes out of more than 64,000 cast. In a sign of how hard-fought the race in the city had been, there were nearly twice as many votes cast in the Tenth District as there were in the Biaggi-Maloney contest in the Seventeenth. The two other progressive candidates were nowhere close to the front-runners, but they had more than enough votes to put Niou over the edge if they had managed to come together.
The WFP had ended up throwing its support behind Niou in late June. With the party’s ballot line and the slim margin of her defeat, there was widespread speculation Niou could remain in the race and take on Goldman again in the general election on the WFP line. A move like that would have embarrassed the Democratic Party, forced it to devote resources to propping up Goldman in an otherwise deeply safe seat, and seriously strained relations between Democrats and the WFP across the state.
Niou nevertheless considered the play for two weeks, but on September 8, she posted a seven-minute video on Twitter announcing that she was conceding and would not be moving forward as a third-party candidate.
“We simply do not have the resources to fight all fights at the same time, and we must protect our democracy now,” she said, seemingly near tears.
Later that month, as she reflected on the loss, Niou indicated there was some division among WFP leadership about whether she should have continued on the party’s line, and she made clear that she had not been given free rein to break with the Democrats.
“So, that was a, you know, a co-governing decision by the WFP,” she said, her voice catching. “I think that it’s really tough to even discuss.”
Progressives had failed to unite behind her twice in the same cycle.
The primary races in New York revealed how the left was hampered by a lack of unity and a fundraising gap as they faced off against incumbents. Maloney’s ultimate defeat would show that the mainline Democratic establishment struggled with these exact same issues as they took on Republicans.
It was the night of the 2022 midterm elections, and Sean Patrick Maloney was supposed to be in four places at once.
Even as votes started to come in, the country and its political class were preparing for a Republican rout. According to one DCCC staffer, the campaign committee was looking at a map filled with “one- or two-point races.” They could have broken either way, the staffer said, for reasons that were largely out of party control.
“It was going to depend on the price of gas, Donald Trump, if people still cared about abortion, and whether or not Joe Biden had, you know, taken a full senior moment by election day,” the staffer said.
Maloney started his day in his district where he cast his vote. His campaign planned an election-night reception with the Rockland County Democratic Party. Ahead of that event, reporters were told it was unclear whether or not Maloney would make an appearance. After voting, Maloney had rushed down to Washington to join Speaker Pelosi, who had her own election-night routine.
“She has a tradition of watching results at the D-Trip with her family and some senior staffers … a few top top-tier donors, personal friends,” said a staffer at the DCCC. “It’s a catered buffet dinner and she’s in her own war room.”
But Pelosi, too, had been forced to scramble her plans for the day. She had planned a celebratory dinner, but with the numbers looking bleak, guests were turning down the invitation. Pelosi pivoted to a lower-key meal.
“They changed it to a lunch, which obviously wasn’t a great omen,” the staffer said.
Even in the afternoon, before that evening’s results could start rolling in, DC power players were reluctant to dine with Pelosi. “They invited K Street and didn’t get a lot of lobbyist RSVPs, so they opened it up to members,” the DCCC staffer explained.
As head of the House’s reelection efforts, Maloney had reason to stay close to Pelosi on election night. According to the staffer, Maloney was “going back and forth” between three locations in DC: Pelosi’s election-night buffet “to have a glass of wine with the speaker and some donors,” a space with DCCC staffers monitoring the national map, and a “bunker” where his own campaign team was tracking results in the Seventeenth District. He was everywhere and nowhere.
Maloney’s experience spoke to criticism leveled by Ocasio-Cortez and others, who had pushed for the party to have a professional operative leading its congressional campaign committee rather than a sitting member—and certainly not one who needed to focus on a tough race in a frontline district.
As election night wore on, it became clear that Maloney wouldn’t be making it to New York. His campaign team set up a television feed so he would be able to deliver remarks remotely to the crowd that was beginning to gather at the Nyack Seaport, a catering hall on the shores of the Hudson River.
In Maloney’s absence, Rockland Democratic Party chairman John Gromada served as the event’s main speaker. Gromada was a bespectacled Broadway composer and former DSA member who became more involved in politics as the founder of a “local resistance group” in 2016. While he wasn’t a moderate himself, Gromada shared Maloney’s view that only a centrist pitch could win the purple counties straddling New York’s suburbs and more rural regions.
“I wanted to come into the party and help change the party,” Gromada said. “We’ve got to meet people where they are … instead of trying to get people to move to where we are.”
In between speeches at the election-night soirée, Gromada explained why he thought Maloney had been a better bet than a progressive like Biaggi.
“I saw Sean as more of a bridge to try to get back Democrats in Rockland County that haven’t been voting for our party,” Gromada explained. “He said he wanted to try to move those guys instead of always trying to throw rocks at them.”
But Maloney and Gromada’s theory would prove incorrect. With Maloney absent from his own election-night party, Gromada found himself emceeing as downcast Democratic candidates came up to deliver concession speeches for races in the state legislature and a local town council. Every conceding candidate stood across from a television showing live footage of the empty podium that was set up at the DCCC for Maloney to speak.
Gromada blamed the down-ballot failures on the cash spent to take out Maloney. Some reports calculated that $10 million had been raised to oust the DCCC chairman. “We really were the victim of dark money here,” Gromada said with clear frustration. “We were the target of Republican PAC money from around the country that hurt all of our candidates.”
Maloney conceded as well the next morning. In his interview for this book, he pointed out that—apart from New York—Democrats did well in a year when they faced “the universal expectation that we were going to get our ass kicked.”
“I think the Republicans had an assumption that they would win based on historic trends and we had a plan,” Maloney said. “It didn’t work perfectly, but we won thirty-five of thirty-nine frontline races.”
However, Maloney’s home state and his own loss were black marks on the otherwise strong performance. Maloney noted that congressional Democrats outraised Republicans when it came to capped campaign contributions. But they were vastly outspent when it came to dark money PACs funded by major donors. Maloney suggested this was an area where Democrats might want to catch up.
“They definitely won the war of highly interested billionaires who gave north of $10 million bucks—and that’s a real thing,” Maloney said. “It might be somewhere where we want to have equally motivated, super-high-net-worth individuals helping us at that level.”
The cash advantage helped Republicans put a target on Maloney’s back, but his loss wasn’t the only embarrassment for Democrats in New York. Republicans had a net gain of three seats in the state and, on Long Island, the DCCC had failed to expose George Santos, who won the Third District despite having a résumé full of brazen lies. DCCC staffers compiled an eighty-seven page “research memo” on Santos, but it largely focused on criticizing his policy positions and past work in the financial industry. Instead of digging into Santos’s many fabrications—such as his claim to have been an asset manager at Citigroup, where he never worked—the DCCC simply listed “dates unknown” next to his periods of supposed employment and moved on.
Maloney believes the Democrats’ congressional campaign organization “could have done a better job” and needs to make some strategic “tweaks.” This includes the DCCC research operation, which he said “should be completely overhauled.” Nevertheless, he was adamant that the ultimate blame for Santos lies with the Republican Party.
“Let’s start with the Republicans who put up that asshole and who continue to defend him. So, let’s just lay this at the right doorstep,” Maloney said, criticizing the GOP for running “shithead candidates who lie about their résumés” and how “they stick with them nonetheless.”
Maloney also pointed out that Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid New York Post had hammered a narrative that Democrats had let crime in the Big Apple run wild. The coverage sent tremors of terror through the suburbs and rural upstate counties. Maloney blasted the content as “industrial-strength lies.”
Even in loss, however, Maloney claimed a Pyrrhic victory. According to the DCCC staffer, Maloney gave a brief speech to the team on election night arguing that the $10 million Republicans spent on him had been wasted as it would have been more effective if it was doled out across a few more competitive districts.
“Those stupid motherfuckers spent millions of dollars trying to take me out,” Maloney said, according to the staffer. “They, in the process, took other seats off the map for themselves.”
Maloney denied cursing in front of staff, but he said the sentiment was correct. “The Republicans sometimes act like a bunch of drunk guys at a fraternity,” he said. “Like, they think it’s going to be really cool to beat the gay chair of the DCCC. And they became obsessed with it.”
Maloney insisted he deliberately tried to “encourage” the GOP to use its cash on him, rather than more fragile frontline Democrats. He characterized himself as the GOP’s “white whale.” In this case—unlike the situation in Moby-Dick—for a relatively minor investment of time and money, the Republicans had indeed landed a big fish.
While Maloney and his home state underperformed relative to the party nationally, Democrats managed a better midterm performance than anyone expected. The DCCC staffer credited the overall success to a “dual-track” strategy that consisted of highlighting “positive” narratives about Democratic candidates and their plans to lower the cost of living while going “negative” on Republicans’ opposition to abortion, which was a white-hot issue after the landmark June 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade and ruled abortion was not protected by the Constitution. The White House—and particularly a barnstorming Vice President Harris—helped to bring the issue to the fore. Harris rallied the troops by holding events in multiple states with 200 local legislators and by beating the drum about reproductive rights in a series of campaign and media appearances. The focus paid off.
“Some Democrats wanted to make protecting democracy a thing and it didn’t catch fire,” the DCCC staffer said. “Abortion was something that voters latched on to where they were like, ‘Shit, these guys don’t respect bodily autonomy; they actually are the raging monsters Democrats have been saying they are.’ ”
This was an attack line for which Republicans had no answer. “Their committee did not have them prepared for how to deal with Dobbs,” the staffer said. “It was a free-for-all on their side.”
The intense battles between progressives and centrists in 2022 didn’t exactly settle the debate of which might be the winning approach going forward. Nor did the results heal deep schisms that had formed.
Both Biaggi and Niou indicated they still might consider attempting to make a political comeback. And the pair clearly haven’t lost their appetite for taking on the establishment.
“I think that Yuh-Line and I have done a number on lots of powerful people and interests in this state that they won’t be able to recover from for like a generation,” Biaggi said. “I feel pretty good about it actually.”
Meanwhile, Jones, who gave up his district for Maloney, packed up the home he had moved to in Brooklyn. He headed back to the Seventeenth District and, in July 2023, launched a campaign to run against the Republican who had defeated Maloney and taken his old seat. As he announced, Jones declared that he was focused on both fighting the GOP as it tried to “overthrow our democracy” and on pushing his fellow Democrats “to fight harder for working people.”
“I’ve never been Washington’s choice,” Jones wrote on Twitter, adding, “I’m running to finish the work I began.”