Evan Roth Smith on the GOP’s inroads in NY

Slingshot partner Evan Roth Smith spoke to New York Magazine about how to interpret Republican Lee Zeldin’s strong performance in the 2022 New York gubernatorial race: 

In order to win, Republicans need to get around 35 percent of the vote in New York City. Zeldin, at last count, was at just above 30 percent. Over the last half-decade, noncollege voters, and in particular noncollege voters of color, have been moving into the GOP column. Many Republican strategists feared that this was simply a Trump phenomenon that would dissipate once he was no longer on the ballot. Zeldin, however, nearly doubled the GOP vote of the 2018 gubernatorial candidate Marc Molinaro by making inroads with outer-borough white and Asian voters. A few more points in that direction, and a Republican statewide candidate is suddenly looking at a very different map.

“You can play all the turnout games you want, but for a Republican to have a glimmer of hope they would need to make serious inroads with registered Democrats,” said Evan Roth Smith, a Democratic pollster. “You can do everything right in the swing districts and suburbs, and even if you do well in all of these places and clean up in Republican strongholds, you still need to win 10 percent of registered Democrats, and if you don’t it’s just not enough. It looks like Zeldin did well with Asian voters, and it looks like he did relatively well with Latino voters, but the domino that never fell was that you didn’t have wealthy white Democrats who were scared about crime and decided to vote Republican.”

Read the full New York Magazine story here.