NR PLUS Elections

Lee Zeldin’s Viral Debate Strategy

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Rep. Lee Zeldin (left) and Gov. Kathy Hochul (right) square off in the first and only gubernatorial debate in New York, October 25, 2022. (Eyewitness News ABC7NY/YouTube)

Kathy Hochul helped Lee Zeldin make his case to more New Yorkers than the few who watched their debate.

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Kathy Hochul helped Lee Zeldin make his case to more New Yorkers than the few who watched their debate.

W ho won Tuesday night’s debate between New York governor Kathy Hochul and her Republican challenger, congressman Lee Zeldin? Declaring someone the winner or loser of a political debate invariably involves a cross between partisan advocacy and sheer guesswork. The most important element of a debate is the audience. In this case, the two candidates made starkly different bets on who the audience was.

Despite the fact that their state is home to the broadcast media capital of the United States, Hochul and Zeldin held just a single debate on Spectrum NY1, a cable channel not carried in many homes throughout the state (including my own — I had to find it live-streamed elsewhere). That was a choice by Hochul that sparked a furious protest from Zeldin, who had asked for multiple broadcast debates and complained that the debate came a month into mail-in voting and was aired where many New Yorkers couldn’t even see it.

Despite his momentum in the polls in recent weeks, Zeldin remains the underdog, so it is not surprising that he wanted more chances to make his case to voters — or that Hochul only grudgingly agreed to a low-profile debate as the race tightened. That may have been a miscalculation on Hochul’s part, given the different messages the candidates delivered and how they did so, and given that her biggest risk on November 8 could be the apathy of her base as compared with Zeldin’s.

The two candidates’ demeanors mirrored their strategies. Hochul was dry and patronizing in the style of a town-council chair lecturing the rubes to sit down and let her run the show. Zeldin was caffeinated and aggressive, looking and sounding every inch a backbench congressman accustomed to scrapping.

Blue on Red

Hochul took a two-pronged approach. One, given the huge imbalance between Democrats and Republicans in New York, she sought to convince disaffected Democrats that Zeldin was at best an unacceptable option they couldn’t vote for or, at worst, a menace whom they needed to turn out to oppose. That’s why she returned relentlessly, even when off-topic, to partisan wedge issues: abortion, the 2020 election, Donald Trump, guns, and (perhaps unwisely) tax cuts and Covid. At one point, Hochul gave Zeldin the full buzzword litany: “You’ve been an election denier, a climate-change denier. You and Donald Trump were the masterful Covid deniers.”


More in New York

That’s in line with the entirely negative and abortion-and-January 6–focused strategy of Hochul’s TV ad campaign. It may work with persuadable fence-sitters who cared enough to find out where this debate was airing and tuned in. But the message’s repetition throughout the debate likely didn’t reach the sorts of apathetic Democrats whom Hochul needs to turn out.

Hochul made no effort whatsoever to distance herself from the national Democrats, the Albany Democrats, or New York City progressives. When asked if she wanted Joe Biden to run for reelection in 2024, Hochul responded, “Yes I do. He has delivered for the people of this country in ways that we still don’t know the benefits, the Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure dollars that Lee Zeldin voted against. Thank God they showed up here. So yes.” But she stepped on the party line by touting “the Inflation Reduction Act that would have brought more money to help protect our environment.” Even a blue-state Biden loyalist couldn’t bring herself to claim that the bill was about inflation reduction.

Second, in a pitch that was clearly aimed at less partisan voters, Hochul leaned heavily on the theme that she’s an executive with a proven record and Zeldin is all rhetoric — never mind that Zeldin’s been in Congress for nearly eight years, while Hochul has been in office little over a year and never previously ran anything bigger than a town clerk’s office. Hochul emphasized spending money on things like filling potholes; I don’t think I laughed harder all night than I did at Hochul’s claim that “People love the LIE now” — if you know anyone on Long Island, you know that nobody loves the Long Island Expressway. Zeldin shot back that Hochul has been using a “Rose Garden strategy, how’s that working out. Going around every single day, and doing press conferences, handing out your [the taxpayers’] money. Now, I think if you get your money back, as taxpayers. . . . This governor actually put on the property-tax check that it was courtesy of her, as if you owe her a thank you.”

Yet, it is a sign of how the political winds are blowing right now that Hochul, even while attacking Zeldin for being too focused on tax cuts, cast herself as a tax cutter: “If you’re really serious about helping people, you cut their taxes in middle-class families. I did that this year with the legislature. We gave people property-tax rebates this year. We suspended the state tax on gasoline to help get more money back in their pockets.”

In fact, one of the weirder moments in the debate came after Hochul ripped Zeldin for texting former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows early in the 2020 election controversy (it is not a coincidence that the publicly released Meadows texts have been repeatedly used as a club against Republican candidates this fall). Zeldin argued that he was being responsible: “My concern was that I expressed, was that you should only be putting out confirmed, verified, actual irregularities.” Hochul shot back that Zeldin should have spent November 2020 sending texts about . . . the SALT deduction:

If you had the ability to be text messaging the White House, I would’ve much rather you text message said, “Hey Mr. President, while you’re heading out the door, can you at least undo the damage you did to New Yorkers when you eliminated the state local tax deduction, which resulted in a high tax rate for our citizens?”

Will voters think Zeldin is too big a risk? That depends how unhappy they are with the status quo. For older New Yorkers, Zeldin reminded them that the state elected a Republican governor not so far in the past and profited from it: “We were at a crossroads in 1994 when New York elected George Pataki, and we’re at a crossroads right now.”

Red and Redder

Like Hochul — and perhaps surprisingly, given the state’s partisan tilt — Zeldin leaned aggressively into angles of attack that would fire up his own base. Notwithstanding his tactical retreat on abortion (more on that below), Zeldin never backed away from an inch of his own conservative record. He’s running as Lee Zeldin. That means he was comfortable blasting the “Biden travel agency” on immigration, calling for completion of the border wall, touting voter ID laws and defending his votes to object to Biden electors in Arizona and Pennsylvania, denouncing vaccine mandates, complaining about the pervasive smell of pot in Manhattan, and embracing the Supreme Court’s view of the Second Amendment. He even rattled off a litany of reasons why he was proud to work with Donald Trump:

I believe that from our work to combat MS-13 on Long Island, our work to secure a 2 billion electron-ion collider for Brookhaven National Lab, and all of the many decades of jobs, not just for the construction, but the research will be humanity-changing research, whether it’s our work to secure the southern border, strengthening the US Israel relationship, moving the embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, getting the Abraham Accords . . . maybe the effort to go after the Iran nuclear deal, which was fatally flawed, and fortunately he stopped it. When it was the pandemic that hit. And I was calling, picking up the phone, and I got PPE here, and we’re getting the approvals for the semi-automated testing, the public lab testing, the private lab testing, bringing the USNS Comfort up to New York. Bringing the Javits Center online. All that work is our job.

Zeldin plainly knows that he might lose this race because he’s a conservative Republican running in a deep-blue state, and he seems to be fine with that. He’s betting that the national environment and pent-up voter frustration with one-party rule in a decaying state will yield enough votes to topple Hochul, and if it won’t, he wasn’t going to win anyway.

Hochul Gets the Zeldin Virus

Where Zeldin’s strategy differed from Hochul’s was in aiming for more eyeballs than those of the people watching Spectrum NY1. Hochul’s combination of repetition and condescension was geared to produce a cumulative effect across the length of the debate. Zeldin, by contrast, was playing for viral moments that could reach a wider audience, and he got them.

The big one came the second time he drilled into Hochul for the fact that her answers to questions about crime never seemed to mention actually sending criminals to prison:

Zeldin: We’re halfway through the debate, she still hasn’t talked about locking up anyone committing any crimes.

Hochul: Anyone who commits a crime under our laws, especially with the change we made to bail, has consequences. I don’t know why that’s so important to you.

This was a bloodless, disdainful answer in the Michael Dukakis tradition, followed by Hochul immediately pivoting back to wanting “a nationwide ban, but certainly a state ban, on teenagers be able to get guns, assault weapons.” The New York Post led with it on Wednesday morning:

The second big moment was over Covid-vaccine mandates. Zeldin pounced on a carefully worded answer from Hochul, who — when asked by the moderators about mandating Covid vaccines for children — responded, “Not at this time. . . . It’s something that comes down the legislature anyhow. The legislature makes the determination and consultation with health experts for next year’s school year. You’re talking about this year. We’re not talking about mandating a vaccine for children in school at this time.” Zeldin responded with fury: “My opponent just said she will not mandate Covid vaccines at this time, let me be clear to all of the parents who are out there. I will not mandate Covid vaccines for your kids ever.”

He then tore into her for employer vaccine mandates that led to the firing of cops, firemen, teachers, and health-care workers. Zeldin blamed the state’s shortage of health-care workers upstate on that mandate, and urged “everyone who has been fired to be offered their jobs back with back pay” (something a New York state judge ordered New York City to do earlier in the day). Hochul’s response was utterly unrepentant:

I would do it all over again, what I did last year, that mandate for health-care workers. Because no one, after what we went through in this state, and the loss of life, and how people didn’t survive being in a nursing home, I said, our health-care workers, when you walk into a doctor’s office, a hospital, or nursing home, you shouldn’t contract Covid from the person charged with taking care of you. It was a tough decision. We limited to health-care workers. But, that is something I believe saved lives.

Zeldin, clearly incredulous at his good fortune at this exchange, responded, “What everyone out there just heard is that she would do it again, so take notes at home.” He then pounced on Hochul having the gall to mention nursing homes, given the complicity of the statehouse Democrats in sending Covid patients back into nursing homes and then covering up the death toll:

What about the meeting with the Covid families who lost their loved ones, who were promised the long overdue Covid investigation, and never got it? Why didn’t you speak up with regards to the deadly nursing home order and cover-up? Why aren’t you looking into the transparency and accountability that these families of thousands of deceased New York families have? Why didn’t you stick up for the people weren’t able to see their loved ones in their final hours, and being denied? You had, time after time, after time, opportunities to stand up for these families. But you are silent, or complicit, or out to lunch every time.

Once again, Hochul responded with a cold-fish retreat to reciting procedure, not offering even a hint of empathy for the victims of a decision made while she was lieutenant governor:

Nursing homes has been investigated by at least three or four different entities, the legislature, different law enforcement entities. I have called for a comprehensive overhaul, and a look at what went right, what went wrong. So I can handle, when I hand off to a future governor many years from now, the blueprint for how you handle this crisis based on this, that is underway.

It speaks volumes about how far, how fast Andrew Cuomo fell from his onetime status as the Democrats’ Covid hero that, in a debate featuring his own two-time running mate, his name was never mentioned once — not by Hochul, not by Zeldin, not by the moderators. It was as if he’d never existed.

Less dramatic, but no less embarrassing, were Hochul’s lame defenses for her shady no-bid contracts and wasteful subsidies for the Buffalo Bills. Zeldin, sounding very much like a pre-2015 Republican and capitalizing on Albany’s endless parade of corruption, hammered away at the theme that, “We shouldn’t be picking winners and losers in business. . . . We should level the playing field. Stop picking winners and losers based on political connections.” Hochul simply brushed off the detailed allegations and scoffed at the notion that her administration had any ethical problems: “There’s no pay-to-play corruption and the policies are, we don’t do it anyhow, so why would I change?”

On the Bills stadium boondoggle, Hochul was asked to justify the economic benefits of subsidizing the Bills, and effectively admitted that she sees them as a public-charity case:

You think about the identity of a community, like Broadway is to New York City, the Buffalo Bills are to Western New York. . . . You have to understand the Buffalo Bills market, it’s small. It’s not Las Vegas, it’s not Miami. You can’t have the same price of tickets, so you need more assistance, so you can’t really compare. And this is what the analysts have said, for a small market team to still being in Buffalo in the first place is quite extraordinary. We’re proud to have them, it’s part of who we are.

Not mentioned was that Hochul’s husband is the general counsel of the company that does concessions for the Bills current stadium. Hochul also bragged about squeezing tax money out of the Seneca tribe to pay for the deal, which undermined her repeated claim that Zeldin would need to cut essential services to cut taxes — Hochul herself just blew half a billion dollars in tax money on a football stadium that could have been used for schools or hospitals.

The Spirit of Talk Radio

Zeldin got his own viral rants in, warming to them like a talk radio veteran. The big theme was the state’s own people voting with their feet:

I’ve been asking for months, and my opponent still can’t finish this sentence. You can’t expect her to ever finish it. But, New York leads the entire nation in population loss because ______. She actually got asked this question by the media a few weeks ago when she was at Binghamton Airport. She probably would love to have a redo because she messed it up that time. For me, you ask me why does New York lead the entire nation population loss? Because their wallets, their safety, their freedom, and their quality of their kids’ education are under attack. They’re hitting their breaking point. They’re looking at other states like the Carolinas, Tennessee, Texas, Florida, and elsewhere. They feel like their money will go further, they’ll feel safer, and they’ll live life freer.

Another made-for-talk-radio rant from Zeldin was on how Hochul keeps talking about guns and ignores other crimes that emblemize social disorder:

Unfortunately, Kathy Hochul believes that the only crimes that are being committed are these crimes with guns, and you got people who are afraid of being pushed in front of oncoming subway cars. They’re being stabbed, beaten to death on the street with hammers. Go talk to the Asian American community and how it’s impacted them with the loss of lives. Jewish people targeted with raw, violent antisemitism on our streets.

As Dave Weigel noted on Twitter, this is not just a problem for Hochul: “This Zeldin answer gets to why Dems aren’t neutralizing the crime attack by talking about gun control. The ‘crime’ stories getting the most attention are urban ‘disorder’ stories — sociopaths on subway, homelessness, addiction.”

When asked if he agreed with the Supreme Court’s striking down New York’s restrictive concealed-carry law, Zeldin bored into Hochul for being a posturing flip-flopper more interested in going after legal gun owners with symbolic bills doomed in the courts than in violent armed criminals:

New York did have an unconstitutional concealed carry law. But listen, just a couple of Sundays ago, I had a gang-related drive-by shooting at my own house, while my 16-year-old daughters were sitting inside. I don’t know who the shooters were, what the gun was that they used, what their motive was. But I guarantee you, unlike my opponent who put out a tweet a few weeks ago and said that she is calling on American Express, and MasterCard, and Visa to flag every attempted purchase of a firearm as a suspicious purchase. I guarantee, the person who opened up his or her gun on my front yard didn’t start with a swipe of an American Express card.

Instead of going after illegal firearms committed by criminals, and they’re still out on the streets committing additional crimes. What my opponent, who used to be, by the way, when it was politically convenient, an A-rated NRA endorsed member of Congress, she goes after the law-abiding New Yorkers. So she went so far the next week to pass a new law that was even more unconstitutional than the last law, infringing on First Amendment rights, to infringe all over Second Amendment rights. So what’s going to happen? Drum roll, it’s going to get overturned by the courts, of course, because it’s unconstitutional.

If you watch this on the video, Zeldin did an actual drum roll with his fingers on the podium.

Abort! Abort!

The one area where Zeldin was legitimately on the defensive is the centerpiece of Hochul’s campaign: abortion. Legal abortion is highly popular in New York, and zealously protected by its courts and legislature. When Hochul argued that “There is very few people in Congress who have a more pro-life record” than Zeldin, Zeldin didn’t disagree. His argument is simply that he’s not going to change the state’s abortion laws, and that the Democrat-controlled state assembly wouldn’t let him do that anyway (a position that required Zeldin to state bluntly that “There’s not going to be a Republican legislature in January.”)

Hochul, for her part, was asked by one of the moderators, “Is there any restrictions around abortion that you would approve of?” Like every Democrat this fall, she declined to name any, besides claiming nonsensically that “we have the same restrictions” as before Dobbs because the state has “a codification of Roe v. Wade.”

Where things got more interesting was on the question of Planned Parenthood funding. Zeldin clearly doesn’t want to commit himself on either continuing that funding or attacking it, and noted that the state assembly would demand it at the budget bargaining table. But he did turn the issue on Hochul for funding abortion tourism by non–New Yorkers at the expense of the state’s taxpayers — and in so doing, signaled to pro-life New Yorkers the one line he would draw to fight against the most extreme pro-abortion policy:

I’ve heard from New Yorkers who say that they don’t want their tax dollars, for example, funding abortions for people who live 1,500 miles away from here. What’s important is the will of the people, and we have to listen to what New Yorkers want. And I’ve actually heard from a number of people who consider themselves to be pro-choice, who are not happy hearing that their tax dollars are being used to fund abortions many, many, many states away. And listen, that’s the priority of my opponent. I get it. But the will of the people that I’ve heard from, they’re not happy about it.

Maybe none of this will matter; maybe New York is too far gone. But Zeldin has already accomplished something few thought possible: He has made a race of this and given hope to every Republican, conservative, or just-plain-tired-of-Albany independent. His debate performance ensured that more people who agree with him will know they have a choice. After that, it’s in the hands of the voters.

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