After taking NY for granted, Democrats have a new plan to win back the House in 2024

Democrats defied expectations in the 2022 midterm elections, beating back President Joe Biden’s low approval ratings and record inflation. By the end of the cycle, they expanded their majority in the Senate and narrowly lost control of the House.

They came close but ultimately couldn't hand Biden another two years of total Democratic control in Washington.

Unexpectedly, the state that helped Republicans to clinch the House with a five-seat majority was reliably blue New York. Republicans there flipped four Democratic seats and snagged several other competitive races.

Now, Democrats are looking to reclaim lost ground in 2024 and usher in a new era of leadership, elevating House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., to serve as the first Black speaker of the House.

Democratic strategists and leaders put it simply to USA TODAY: In 2022 and all elections before, New York was taken for granted.

“You can’t take it for granted because it never should have been taken for granted,” Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime New York-based Democratic strategist and president of Sheinkopf Communications, told USA TODAY.

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Money flows into New York ahead of 2024 elections

After seeing what happened in 2022, national Democrats have recognized they can't afford to lose New York in 2024.

House Majority PAC, House Democrats’ largest super PAC, said in February that it would funnel $45 million to New York. That unprecedented amount of cash will run the gamut, according to Mike Smith, president of House Majority PAC and former top aide to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“We’re planning to invest in everything from messaging research, to voter registration, field planning (to) Republican credibility,” Smith told USA TODAY.

All that messaging, including billboards and digital ads, is coming from a New York-based rapid-response war room handled by multiple communications and opposition-research staffers.

The push is centered on seven seats: New York’s 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 22nd Congressional Districts. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is targeting the same districts. Only the 18th Congressional District is held by a Democrat in Rep. Pat Ryan.

“It’s less about any particular issue and about the gamut of where Republicans stand.” Smith said. “And that’s everything from the debt ceiling to be willing to cut Social Security and Medicare, to be willing to cut infrastructure jobs.”

The recognition of the heightened importance of New York has dawned on Republicans as well. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., House Republican Conference Chair, announced in April that she would be launching a New York “battleground fund" after the fourth-highest-ranking House Republican flexed her fundraising muscles, raising $3 million in the first quarter of 2023. The battleground fund will be dedicated to defending the GOP's newly gained ground in the Empire State.

"It is paramount that we hold those seats," Stefanik told Time. "We are really ground zero politically for maintaining and expanding the House."

New York Democratic chair: Party infighting is ‘disheartening and sometimes frustrating’

After the November elections, New York Democrats conducted a postmortem, and more than 1,000 individuals and organizations signed on to a letter laying the blame at the feet of Jay Jacobs, the state party chair, and called for his resignation.

“Jay Jacobs is not fit to serve as Chair of the State Democratic Party,” read the letter, but Jacobs ultimately survived the calls for his ouster and told USA TODAY he plans to dig his way back through 2024.

“It’s been a very, I’d say at times, disheartening and sometimes frustrating post-election period of time,” Jacobs said, attributing Democratic losses to New York-specific headwinds, including a strong GOP gubernatorial candidate leading the top of the GOP ticket and poor Democratic countermessaging on crime.

As the 2024 election nears and national Democrats step into the Empire State, Jacobs disputed accounts the moves are a sign of a lack of confidence in him as a leader. Instead, Jacobs said, his party is working in tandem with national groups, and the initiatives were a long time coming for New York Democrats, who have long needed the resources after being overlooked.

“This is a reflection of the fact that, whereas in the past, New York has been overlooked and national money has gone everywhere but New York,” Jacobs said. “We also have competitive races which are more purple than blue. We need attention, too.”

A large driver behind strong GOP performance in New York was Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin. Democrat Kathy Hochul won the governor's race over Zeldin by just over 6 percentage points, an uncomfortably close margin for a statewide race in deep blue New York.

“We had a very energetic, good gubernatorial candidate,” New York GOP chair Ed Cox told USA TODAY, who expressed disappointment in Zeldin’s loss but credited Zeldin’s run for boosting several Republicans in highly competitive House races.

Redistricting, even after 2022 midterm elections, is not over in New York

After November, a major point of contention among New York Democrats was a failure in redistricting following the 2020 census when state Democratic lawmakers drew an ambitious map that gave House Democrats a much stronger advantage in the state.

New York’s highest court ultimately rejected the map in a victory for Republicans, ruling the maps were gerrymandered and violated the state Constitution. The court later appointed an independent special master to redraw the maps in a significant defeat for Democrats.

But Democrats are not willing to stick with the maps until 2030. Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James filed a court brief in April asking the New York Independent Redistricting Commission to redraw the maps before the 2024 elections and arguing the map drawn by the special counsel was not done in accordance with the state Constitution.

Jacobs argued the courts should take another look at the maps and echoed Hochul and James’ sentiments, saying New York should not stick with a map drawn by a special master until 2030.

“If your big argument as a Republican was that we have to do this according to the constitutional process,” Jacobs said. “OK. Let’s agree. Let’s go by the process and follow the process.”

Cox thinks otherwise of Democratic efforts to replace the maps, accusing them of sidestepping fair and competitive races. The redrawn maps benefited Republicans but not at the expense of Democrats, Cox said. The red wave in New York, as Cox sees it, was a mix of good politics from Republicans and poor politics from Democrats.

“They do not want to just compete. They want to cheat,” Cox said.

On crime, New York Democrats have to assure voters they can keep them safe, strategist says

Republicans bet big on attacking Democrats for violent crime, but when results started pouring in from election night, GOP candidates floundered and multiple exit polls showed that voters did not rank crime as high on their list of priorities – except New York.

Basil Smikle, a New York-based Democratic strategist and director of the public policy program at Hunter College, said Democrats could have done better on assuring voters they could keep them safe from violent crime. Heading into 2024, Smikle expects the GOP to keep pinning what they claim as rampant crime rates on Democrats.

Voter blocs that have generally trended Democratic have started a very slight tilt to the right that was a major contributor to Republican victories in New York, Smikle said. Groups such as Asian American voters and Jewish voters, according to Smikle, came around for Republicans amid a spike in hate crimes against Asian Americans and a rise in antisemitism.

GOP holds hearing on NYC crime: Democrats say it's to do the bidding for Donald Trump.

“It put Democrats in a very tough spot, but I do think they could have handled it better,” Smikle said, pointing to state Democrats’ reformation of New York bail laws which ended cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies. In the lead-up to the midterms, Republicans accused Democrats of letting criminals run free, and Smikle said Democrats let the message stick.

“There’s a way to talk about crime in a way that is both empathetic but also signals to voters that you will keep them safe,” Smikle said. “That’s a challenge that Democrats faced last cycle and didn’t execute well.”

Jacobs demurred when asked what issues will be most important to voters heading into 2024 and said it was too early to determine. But, unsurprisingly, Jacobs projected confidence the state’s Democrats will sweep the next elections. And for all the blame he has received for 2022, there will not be much of it in 2024, he predicted.

“We’ll win, and I assure you this,” Jacobs said. “When we win back those four congressional seats and we have all these huge victories in New York and everything goes great, you will not a hear a single person say ‘Thank you state party chair.’”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 2024 elections: NY Democrats have new plan for winning back the House