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Zeldin Proved the GOP Could End Damaging One-Party Control of NY If They Had the Will to Repair Its Toxic Brand

By Gary Tilzer

“Competition between parties is not just healthy for a political system but for the life prospects of the population.” Gerald Gamm, University of Rochester

The 2022 gubernatorial campaign of Lee Zeldin is clearly the blueprint on how to end the anti-democratic one-party control of NYC, which is really progressive Democratic rule.  Even after Zeldin’s surprisingly close race, it is unclear whether the lessons of his campaign have been learned or even discussed by the leaders of NYC Republican Party, even as the party is looking for a new chairperson.  Zeldin ran on fighting crime—the platform of his campaign was ironically created by Albany ideological progressives, who blocked changes to the bail laws that protect career criminals and allows the violent mentally ill to attack the innocent on the City’s streets and subways.  Only through the vehicle of a campaign or political party, can public opinion build enough momentum to change government policy and politics.  Without a vehicle, the city’s common-sense majority values are silenced, disconnected, and left powerless by NY one-party politics and government.  Those leaving the city blame bad government and high taxes, but they also feel isolated and abandoned because nobody speaks for their needs and outrage on what has happened to the city.

The city’s Republican leaders have made no effort to effectively oppose or even explain to New Yorkers and the media that a one-party city or state creates a monopoly of power among the special interests that ignores the public’s needs, resulting in legislators who believe public safety should be addressed by elected officials’ ideology, ignoring the effect on the public of increasing crime.  This monopoly of power causes runaway spending, increased corruption, a waste of resources, and the lack of transparency.  This absolute power shuts off New Yorkers’ needs from the government and is creating a City Hall that is destroying NYC’s economic engine built by past generations, while nobody notices.  This City Council believes that the only way to raise revenue is to increase taxes.  It is not even discussing how to create conditions where small businesses grow and the middle class and rich would want to stay in the city.  It is clear that the City Council does not understand how the City’s economy grows.  What is not clear is why hasn’t the NYC Republican Party commented on the City’s anti-business policies or JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon statement that he joined the growing list of corporate executives who are touting the advantages of expanding their business footprints in the Sun Belt?

After Trump received few votes in NYC in 2016, the Republican Party leaders allowed Democratic elected officials and candidates to brand NYC’s Republicans as the Trump Party.  The Democratic branding of the NYC Republican Party helped Democrats to win elections and made NY into a one-party city and state.  The Republican Party’s failure to stand for common sense issues and develop its own identity led to the defeat of the Independent Democratic Caucus (IDC) and the progressive takeover of the State Senate in 2018.

Election Results show that NYC is anti-Trump:  In 2016, Hillary Clinton received 79% of the vote to Trump’s 18%.  In 2020, Biden received 2,321,759 votes, 76%, to Trump’s 691,682 votes, or 23%:  a margin of 1,630,077.  The Zeldin campaign made good use of the crime issue, showing up at major crime scenes to give press conferences, each time a violent crime occurred during his campaign.  Zeldin  lost to Governor Hochul by 515,688 votes in the city–1,114,389 less than Trump lost to Biden two years before. Zeldin lost the governor’s race statewide by 317,342 votes.

Zeldin’s TV commercials, which made crime the centerpiece of his campaign for governor, forced NYC’s mainstream progressive media to cover the city’s crime epidemic, is clearly the blueprint on how to repair the Democrats damaging branding of the NYC Republican Party.  The Zeldin campaign’s crime platform partially rehabilitated the Republican Party from its toxic Trump brand, with tens of thousands of the City’s Democratic and Independent voters supporting Zeldin.

The three Republican Mayors elected in recent times:  John Lindsay (1965), Rudy Giuliani (1993) and Michael Blumberg (2001) were all elected with the help of the Democratic Party public relations genius David Garth, who chose his own issues to run his Republicans candidates on.  There is a need to examine why the NYC Republican Party insiders made no attempts to continue publicizing the effective anti-crime message the Zeldin campaign used, despite polls showing that 75% to 80% of New Yorkers agreed with the former candidate’s crime bail reform plans.  Long time Republican leaders believe that if a quarter of the two million residents that have moved out of NY during the last decade would have stayed, Zeldin would be Governor.  The old-time party leaders warn that if the Republicans do not fix their brand, they will not win a statewide or citywide office for a long time. The improper branding, the hundreds of thousands moving out of the city, have also left the NYC Republican Party with an enrollment problem.

Since George Pataki, the last Republican Governor was elected in 1995, NYC lost over 20% of its Republican enrollment (200,000) while the Democratic Party added almost a (629,315) registered voters.

In the end, Zeldin’s well run campaign was not able to recover from the Republican Party dysfunctional brand and enrollment deficit in NYC.  When Zeldin started his campaign, most NYC voters did not think of his party as the anti-crime party, the pro charter schools party, the favoring lower taxes party, the fighting for Mom-and-Pop small business owners party or the party of the middle class.

Repairing its brand is not the only thing the NYC Republicans Party has to do.  It should also put together a war room like the Democrats, cable news stations and even Republican candidates create to investigate their opponents.  Republicans should be investigating Comptroller Brand Lander’s misuse of his office to build his socialist political machine using City funded nonprofits to elect him Comptroller, help him prepare for the 2025 Mayoral race and elect other candidates loyal to him to public office.  The Comptroller is also involved in a conflict of interest, auditing nonprofits that do business with his wife’s nonprofit company servicing other nonprofits.  Lander’s use of woke pension investment policies, offers the NYC Republican Party the opportunity to examine and criticize in the media his pension strategy, his nonprofit auditing conflicts of interests, and whether he is doing all he can to make sure the City does not go broke or fall into a recession.

City Councilman Robert Holden Twitter @BobHoldenNYC: Are we paying Comptroller Lander’s salary for him to protest, engage in activism and run for Mayor? Or should we expect him to prioritize his job of overseeing our finances and auditing providers to prevent waste of our taxpayer dollars?

The Zeldin campaign could not overcome the current sentiment of the NYC voters that voting on the Republican ballot line only shows support for Trump.  It is unclear why the Zeldin campaign did not create a public safety or pro-charter school party ballot line, which would attract voters who would never cast their ballot on the GOP ballot line.  It is unclear as to why the NYC GOP allows City Councilmen Kalman Yeger, State Senator Simcha Felder and Assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein to run on the Republican line as they sit in the legislature as Democrats and not use them and their resources to fix the Republican Party’s damaged brand.  The only group that does not understand that The City’s Republican Party has a message, and a branding problem is the insiders who lead the Republican Party in the city.  It is political malpractice that The NYC Republican Party ignores Newt Gingrich rebranding of 1994, which was based on a platform of important issues facing the county at that time.  Gingrich who called his platform “Contract with America” made himself Speaker and gained 54 House, 9 U.S. Senate seats, flipping both chambers.

It is a clear mismanagement of the Republican leaders’ failure of not developing a political platform attacking the UFT, which funds progressive democratic campaigns, blocks creation of charter schools and pushes other policies that hurt the ability of NYC to educate our children.  It is no secret that Asian voters support charter schools and quality schools.  It makes no sense that the Republican Party, which is increasingly attracting Asian voters, is not effectively using their newly acquired Asian supporters to voice their opposition to the UFT.  If the Asian leaders supporting charter schools spoke for the party in the media, it would have the same positive effect on the party platform that the Zeldin crime issue did.

It is clear that the insiders running the NYS Republican Party are reluctant to either change the way the party is run or bring in new people, because many of the newcomers will eventually compete with the insiders for control of the party.  The NYC GOP insiders keep their control by not getting involved in issues that would attract new supporters to their party.  This approach shows no strategy or willingness to include Afro-Americans, Latino, Asian and immigrant leaders fighting for Charter Schools, or Latino Bodega and immigrant small store owners afraid of being held up at gunpoint in their stores as spokespeople for their party.  NYC’s Republican Party insider’s inability or unwillingness to embrace NYC’s changing demographics to repair its damaged brand is not the party’s only problem.  The insiders’ refusal to adapt to the changes in the election law that allows voting by mail and ballot harvesting, caused Zeldin’s campaign to lose hundreds of thousands of voters.  Instead, the Republican Party uses its resources on failed consultants, while failing to pay for mailings to its voters explaining how to cast ballots by mail, voting early, or setting up canvassing teams to harvest voters door to door, akin to Democrats.

Republican Insiders Like Treasurer Marks Uses Campaigns To Make Money With Failed Insider Consultants Who Sometimes Run Unqualified Candidates

Republican Party insider Nancy Marks, the former Treasurer of serial lying Congressman George Santos and many other campaigns, used campaign funds to hire the same failed consultants who lose year after year, because their campaigns use or benefit from her financial services and hire her campaign companies.

Marks’ inside the party pay to play, including interlocking businesses, like the mysterious Devolder Organization where much of Santos’ personal money came from, merged with the printing company GMG located at Marks’ home address.  Devolder merged with Red Strategies USA and several other companies connected to Santos to run campaigns, according to The Daily Beast.  Marks’s and Congressman Santos’s money making campaign operation can take down many Republican insiders, elected officials and campaign consultants, because of the numerous state and federal investigations into the finances of the lying Congressman Santos’s campaign, for which Marks was the treasurer and his business partner.  Marks’ Campaigns Unlimited Company assists candidates and political insiders with political action committees and Super PACs with accounting, fundraising, and campaign finance matters.   Marks has been a treasurer for dozens of GOP campaigns.  In the 2022 election cycle, Campaigns Unlimited worked for more than 30 PACs and candidate committees, according to FEC records.

The Result of NY One-Party Politics and Government is A Media Devoid of Opposition and Dissent Especially on the Assembly, Council & Senate Levels

“If our democracy is to flourish, it must have criticism; if our government is to function it must have dissent.” Henry Steele Commager, American Historian

Left-wing nonprofit foundations fund liberal online local news organizations like “The City,” which covers politics through a progressive narrative filter.  Republican political operatives like treasurer Marks, funds herself and party insiders while ignoring local media news outlets like The Jewish Voice that writes about the NYC Republican Party and covers conservative issues.  Conservative common-sense and online local news organizations could increase their political coverage and readership if they were properly funded like The City.  The City is the only news organization that covers the  Brooklyn progressives’ battle to defeat the Brooklyn machine for control. The progressives want a woke Democratic Party, while the machine just wants to stay in control to keep making judges to make money in the courts for themselves and their friends.

There is little or no coverage on how the insiders control the Republican Party, what that party stands for and how effectively it operates.  As a result of poor media coverage of the Republican Party, the current fight for control of its chairmanship is not about its rebranding so that the Republican Party is more accepted in NYC, but about familiar insider fault lines between upstate and downstate, old guard and new blood, in other words a fight between party insiders.  Rebranding the Republican Party is the best shot to end one-party control of NY, restore local democracy and offer New Yorkers a real choice of candidates opposing the status quo at the ballot box.  According to the Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, “democracy feeds on argument, on discussion as to the right way forward.”

City Council Minority Leader Joseph C. Borelli, Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis and other elected officials who publicize Republican issues and values on Fox News and by the op-eds they author in the local papers are not reaching the city’s Democratic and Independent registered voters to change the toxic Trump brand image, the Republican Party has with most of NYC’s voters.

Most of NYC media today is very liberal and their young reporters are anti-Trump.  They follow the progressive news narrative script, which means the reporters who interview Republican candidates try to prove their positions wrong or against society’s moral principles.  The Republican Party’s refusal or inability to create a platform that criticizes the policies of NY’s one-party government and the failure of the party’s deep pocket contributors to publicize their opposition of the Democratic Party’s policies, gives liberal local media permission to ignore real dissent or criticism of NY’s elected officials and government.  With the media failing to cover opposing views and limited to positive press releases written to gain support for the policies of those in power in one-party NY, many New Yorkers’ concerns are silenced.  Since the one party politics and government occurs behind closed doors and in secret, the voters are alienated and stop participating, because they are not allowed to see and understand how their government really operates.

We know that New Yorkers are moving to Florida because they believe nobody in NY’s government or politics represents their interests.  The NYC Republican Party’s silence on the important issues facing New Yorkers, such as the out-of-control crime or the anti-business policies by the City Council, is partly to blame for the 450,000 NYC residents who recently left Gotham for Florida, or the two million who left NY in the past decade.

The Republican Party lost so many registered voters who left the NY state, it now trails well behind the No Party in enrollment. 464,125 (GOP), 906,165 (Blank), 3,101,902 (Dem).  Yet, the Republican Party not only has no strategy to rebrand, it has no plan to change the election law that prevents non Democrats from voting in the primary.  Two million non-democratic registered city voters, including half a million registered Republicans are prevented from voting in the Democratic Primary–the election that elects 95% of NYC’s elected officials.  Even Chicago, the home of the corrupt Daly’s Democratic Party machine, has open elections where everyone can vote.

The Republican Party has no strategy to stop the City’s progressive media’s silencing of political dissent while deliberately limiting campaign coverage that favors Democratic progressive incumbents and unqualified politicians.  Both Congresswoman AOC and Congressman Santos’s campaigns were ignored by the city’s media when they first got elected.  Councilwoman Tiffany Cabán’s statement that claimed that the subway attack on Elizabeth Gomes last September was a one in a million event, was not challenged in the media, even after each additional attack in the subways.  For Republicans to gain the additional seats on the City Council they targeted, the party operatives must make sure the media covers progressives’ outrageous statements like Cabán’s false allegation that serious crimes on the subway were rare.

The party must continue the progress made by Zeldin on fixing the party’s toxic brand.  Opposition to progressives must come from a revamped Republican Party because all elected Democratic moderates in Albany and City Hall fear primary challenges from the left if they speak out against progressive policies.  There is no clear way for the Mayor, Governor or moderate Democratic legislators to pressure the progressives in changing the bail law or fix other problems facing the city, without a political cost.  Change must come from a rebrand of the growing Republican Party, requiring a 180 degree turn around in how the party is run.

The Internet Destruction of Strong Newspaper and the Republicans Not Acting As the Opposition Party is Destroying NYC and Its Local Democracy

“The end of the age of newspapers resulted in a change in our political system itself, where insiders and progressive activists gain more control.”  Paul Starr, Princeton Media Professor

Before the internet broke the newspapers business model, the papers applied pressure on elected officials to represent the interests of the middle-class common-sense readers.  Paul Starr, the distinguished Princeton scholar, maintains that NYC’s newspapers used to set the public agenda, serving as the focal point of controversy, and credibly represented themselves as symbolizing and speaking for the city.  The NYC Republican Party has not filled the void in rallying and organizing the City’s middle-class public abandoned by the newspapers.

While local conservative narrative radio is well informed and presents Republican Party issues, it broadcasts into a silos audience, talking to those who already support the party’s common-sense issues.  The Republican Party’s brand healing process of converting anti-Trump voters with the crime issue that occurred during Zeldin campaign, is not happening on conservative radio, because it does not reach the anti-Trump voters that make up a majority of the city’s voters.  One encouraging green shoot in conservative radio is WABC’s host Sid Rosenberg friendship interviews with Adams in which the conservative radio host asks the City’s chief executive to answer questions that reflect Republican opposition to the mayor’s policies. The promising aspect of the Rosenberg interviews is that they are reaching beyond conservative radio audiences because of the wide-spread main street media coverage. It would be interesting if Adams and Rosenberg hosted a Town Hall meeting together in Harlem or on the Upper West Side about the future of NYC.

Another WABC radio host Guardian Angel Curtis Sliwa has the right idea of running a candidate against socialist Councilwoman Tiffany Cabán.  However, Silwa is putting the cart before the horse by expecting the Democrats who live in Astoria to join a Republican Club or support a non-Democratic Party candidate without first creating a more attractive platform issues brand for NYC’s Republican Party.  Silwa and other prominent Republicans do not have to take over the party to reform it.  The weakness of the party’s grassroots support in Queens means that all he has to do is “go fungo”, put out an issues platform and run candidates for elective office in the Republican primaries all around the borough or city on those issues.  If the new Medical Freedom Party follows the model of the Working Families Party, running candidates on the Democratic Party line in liberal neighborhoods, it could elect some candidates, if it works with the Republican Party in the city’s non-liberal neighborhoods.

Silwa, Rosenberg and WABC conservative radio owner Catsimatidis and other members of the party must pressure the NYC Republican Party to come up with an issues platform and find ways to publicize it.  They must find ways to equip the party with the skill and resources to operate a War Room; to not only oppose and expose progressive candidates, but to build new issue leaders in City districts where few registered Republicans exist.  Repairing the NYC Republican Party brand would require creating a diverse group of issues’ leaders, making them into Republican Party District Leaders, to organize and attract community involvement around those issues and to build support in neighborhoods where the party’s brand currently repels voters.

The Republicans Did Well in 2022 in NY…With A Lot of Extenuating Circumstances 

The Zeldin crime issue campaign helped to pull out enough voters in the Russian speaking and Asian majority districts in Southern Brooklyn, and elect two Russian-speaking and one Asian candidate that ran on the GOP ballot line.  Notably, these districts were gerrymandered to protect Democratic non-Russian speaking and Asian incumbents.  The effective campaign of Zeldin helped to pull out Russian-speaking and Asian voters who previously only voted heavily on the Republican line during the presidential elections.  This unusual Republican voter pull-out, helped to defeat the Assembly incumbents during the 2022 governor’s race.  In the rest of the City, except for Staten Island, Zeldin’s campaign was not enough to overcome the party’s toxic Trump brand and the strong city and state Democratic Party enrollment advantage.

Ironically, the man who made lying Santos a Congressman and gave the Republicans the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives was not a NY Republican leader, it was the NYS Democratic State Senate Deputy Minority leader.  Michael Gianaris gerrymandered the Congressional district lines, ignored the State Constitution during the approval of the State Senate’s redistricting plan he was in charge of.  The NYS Court of Appeals, after ruling that Gianaris’s redistricting plan was unconstitutional, appointed a special master who redrew all the Congressional lines, including the 3^rd District on Long Island and parts of Queens, resulting in the inclusion of strong Republican areas that gave Santos a good chance to win.

The Democratic Party is not the only party that is responsible for the destruction caused by one-party rule in NY.  The Republicans’ dysfunctional brand and its insiders and candidates allowing failed pay to play campaign consultants, are also responsible.  The cost of the absence of a two-party democracy in NY is not felt by party insiders and elected officials, it is felt by average New Yorkers, especially those who are not well off, who are suffering because of bad government that one party control produces.

@GaryTilzerTips