NYC NOW - What's at stake in New York: An election round-up with Brian Lehrer

Episode Date: November 2, 2024

WNYC’s Janae Pierre and Brian Lehrer sit down to discuss some of what local voters have to consider in the upcoming election. From key congressional races, to ballot questions, and of course the race for the White House. It’s a special episode of NYC Now ahead of the November 5th election.

You're listening to a special weekend episode of NYC Now. I'm Jene Pierre. With the election just days away, we wanted to unpack some of the bigger races and issues in our region. There's a handful of key congressional races and several ballot questions. And of course, there's the presidential contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, which, as many polls show, remains on a razor's edge. With all that anticipation, a record number of early voters in New York City have cast back. Here are a few of those voices.

I'm excited because people's choice really have an impact on the future decision and what's going to happen in this country. This is a very different election, as most of us know, and I think exercising my right to vote on day one has been the best decision that I've made. I want to not only be an advocate for my community, but encouraging my friends that you should go out and vote, so it starts with me. My dad was a military guy, so, you know, So, you know, he's out there in the military cemetery. So honor him by voting and honoring his sacrifice. I'm here with WMYC's Brian Lera, who has covered the election extensively on his show. Brian is so good to have you just days before this closely watched election.

How are you feeling? Probably like a lot of listeners, I'm excited, I'm anxious, I'm obsessed. I look at my news feed every five minutes. Probably like a lot of folks listening right now. Yeah, of course. I mean, there's clearly a lot at stake. So let's start with some of the key races in the New York City metro area that could determine control of the House of Representatives. I'm curious, which ones are you watching and what stands out about them? Well, first of all, as you know, Jeanne, how weird to an outside observer, like,

let's say, a non-New Yorker, that blue New York is practically the only place where a so-called red wave happened in the midterm elections of 2022. And it was a certain. so crucial as it turned out to giving control of Congress to the Republicans by a hair. So here we are with a number of the same congressional districts on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley in play again and one in New Jersey. And I'll mention a few of the specific races as we go. But this year, I want to frame the whole thing this way. It's not so much about the individual candidates, do I like this person or that person. It's about which party do you want to have in power in the House of Representatives. You're voting for or again.

Mike Johnson to remain a Speaker of the House. You're voting for or against Donald Trump to have a compliant Congress for his agenda if he's elected president or same with Kamala Harris. Like Speaker Johnson was an election denier in 2020. If you're concerned about Donald Trump and democracy, does it matter more what a local Republican candidate says about that or that you're giving the Republicans a majority in Congress to have the power over what to bring to the floor and even have a debate on changing the rules of certifying elections or considering overturning specific ones. I could say the same thing about abortion rights issues.

It really matters whether Johnson or presumably Hakeem Jeffries is the Speaker of the House because they have the power to decide what even gets voted on. Yeah. So let's circle back to some of the local races here in the New York City area. I'm thinking about the Hudson Valley and Long Island. Right. So in the Hudson Valley, will freshmen Republicans, Mike Lawler in Rockland and parts of Westchester and some points north be reelected or will former

Congressman Mondair Jones be able to recapture that seat. That race and a few others are complicated by the fact that the district lines changed going into 2022 and again this year. There's also the case further up in the Hudson Valley where Democrat Pat Ryan and Republican Mark Molinaro are defending their seats. Either of those races could be close. And on Long Island, the state's mess of a redistricting process two years ago definitely helped Republicans take all four Long Island seats last time around. I think that's the first time, or first time in a long time, that all four Long Island seats were held by Republicans.

Now, the two Long Island races with freshman Republicans considered very much in play are the one with Anthony D. Esposito facing a strong challenge from Democrat Laura Gillen, They're both very well known to voters of southwest Nassau County adjacent to southeast Queens. And out on the East End, centrist media commentator John Avlon, he's written books about centrism, running as a Democrat. He's apparently given freshman Republican Nick Lolaota a run for his money. So if your local member of Congress is named Loller or Di Esposito or Lolta or Ryan or Molano or Tom Kane Jr. in New Jersey, Your vote really matters. People should listen to the people in the montage you just played

and know the important thing, no matter your politics, is to vote in those districts this year because you're going to make one set of things or another go down in Congress in 2025. So voters in New York City will also have the opportunity to decide six ballot proposals. Now, we're not going to go through all of them, but I would like to talk about Proposal 1, which is statewide.

It proposes adding anti-discrimination, provisions to the state constitution. Now, this one's interesting because arguments for and against the bill have split along partisan lines. What seems to be the argument here, Brian? Yeah, you're definitely right along partisan lines. Or another way to put it is this is basically a culture wars debate. So if you support abortion rights and LGBTQ New Yorkers rights and senior citizens' rights not to be discriminated against us, things that should be in the state constitution, you're probably voting yes. If not, you're probably voting no. The Republican leadership is campaigning for a no vote. The Catholic Church is campaigning for a no vote. The New York Times reported a few

days ago that a Republican mega donor named Dick Euline is how I think you say his name, has poured more than $6 million into a last minute vote no campaign blitz. The Times says Uline, along with his wife, have given generously to Donald Trump, as well as to groups opposed to. gay and transgender rights. And last year, Mr. Uline says the Times spent $4 million to defeat Ohio's abortion amendment providing the bulk of the funding against the measure, that from the Times. So, Janay, seeing who's for it and against it is a pretty good way to gauge how you want to vote on Proposition 1.

Yeah. I'd like to talk about, you know, some of the key issues driving this election. One of them that we're hearing a lot from listeners is women's rights. Here's voter Trisha Hayne. The freedom to make your own choice. Definitely, I have a 16-year-old daughter, and I think it matters a lot for her to be able to make her own choice. And then, of course, there are concerns about the economy. Charles Forbes says he wants the cost of groceries and other goods to come down.

Everything expensive. Basically, we got to bust our tails to get what we can get. We have to bust our tails because everything going up is not going down. Now, public safety is another concern for folks. well. Here's Mary Beth Romeo. God, I can't sleep at night thinking about violence and school shootings and other kinds of shootings with a kid. It keeps me up at night. So, Brian, listening to those voters, I'm wondering what you're hearing from callers to your show. What issues are most important to them right now? Yeah, definitely the issues in that montage. And this is also where some of

the national choices I was talking about before intersect with local ones. All these New York Republicans are freshmen or first-term members of Congress elected two years ago, partly because of a dysfunctional redistricting process and a bad Democratic get-out-the-vote effort, but also because it was still very much pandemic time, and Democrats were being held responsible for the crime wave that it hit the city, that people in the suburbs also felt affected by. Now that crime wave has abated to a very large degree, per the city's official crime statistics, but there are also now the issues of asylum seekers and congestion pricing that favor Republicans. Crime and congestion pricing are not congressional issues.

The federal government doesn't much affect those things, but these local matters mattered locally in 2022 in votes for Congress and could matter again. So we've seen suburban Democrats go conservative on those issues to a meaningful degree. They've mostly come out against congestion pricing. Congressman Tom Swazi, another example from northern Nassau County and northeast Queens. Remember, he replaced good old George Santos. Swazzi is running ads that label him tough Tom Swazzi. Democrat Laura Gillen running against Republican Anthony Di Esposito and Southern Nassau is running ads on how she'd be tough on the border,

even though there aren't so many recently arrived asylum seekers in the United States. the district like there are in the city itself, but that's where the local intersects with the national, I think. Yeah, yeah. And I guess, B.L, this is the time for us to turn now to the political elephant in the room, and that's the race for the White House. It's a really tight one. So let's talk about how the fight for the presidency is influencing local races.

Let's expound on that a bit more. Right. There's a vulnerability for some of the local Republicans, I think, that none of them are breaking with Donald Trump. You know, like there are no Liz Cheney's might be one way to put it in our local delegation saying, I disagree with Democrats on many issues, but Donald Trump is an existential threat, so I won't support him. Now, Trump is also popular in some of the more conservative New York suburbs. So I think it'll matter a lot where exactly the district lines are in some of these races as to whether they are majority Harris or majority Trump districts.

And so look for that to be reflected potentially. in the local congressional outcomes. I'm looking for a possible negative Trump coattails headline in some local suburban congressional races when these elections are eventually called. We'll see if it happens. Yeah. You talked about Trump supporters in the suburbs.

There was a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden last weekend, and that included a lot of vulgar and racist rhetoric. And it's been the talk of the week, honestly. Do you see that impacting the race in swing states? It could. You know, about the Trump rally, there were other repeated instances of hate speech there that aren't really getting covered so much that that same comedian, for example, who called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage, managed to spew both, for example,

a vile anti-Palestinian and an anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish hate joke. I will pass on repeating them here. A speaker called Kamala Harris the Antichrist, a speaker basically, labeled her a prostitute by referring to her aides as pimp handlers. Also not covered enough, I think, was that Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, was a speaker, and he was reveling in the fact on stage at Madison Square Garden that Donald Trump would cut his taxes and cut trillions of dollars from federal government programs to do so.

But of course, the one that most people are aware of because of media coverage is the Puerto Rico slur. But will that hurt Trump? in swing districts and swing states. Honestly, Jeanne, I don't know. I remember 2016 when the Access Hollywood tape came out, just a month before the election. Everyone said, oh, he's really toast now. But I think it may have even helped him

with many men who wanted to be able to laugh about women sexually that way without being labeled misogynist. And I don't know how much anti-Latino racism there is in America that that language might strike a positive chord in as many swing voters as it does, a negative one in others. I just don't know. Yeah. What about Harris's closing argument speech in D.C.? What are your thoughts on that, her speech on Tuesday? I think a big thing for Harris will be whether she's done a good enough job of selling her economic policies as being better than Trump's, better on cost of living issues,

she argues, especially housing and health care and child and elder care costs. I think that's where a lot of undecided voters are living politically. This is one thing I keep seeing in the polls, that people who are not very engaged in politics, like a lot of the listeners to this podcast probably are, a lot of the people who are undecided, who they're going to vote for, or even whether they're going to bother to turn out, are concerned about their cost of living. And a lot of the other hot-pottent things, abortion, immigration, democracy, don't feel relevant to their lives.

So the question, I think, is if she has spent enough of the campaign making it clear to voters what her to-do list contains, you know, she has this line, Trump has his enemies list, I have my to-do list. But has she made it clear enough to voters what her to-do list contains, or has she spent too much time attacking her. Trump, which a lot of people might be numb to by now. Yeah. All right. We'll have to leave it there. Thanks so much for stopping by. Great to be with you, Dene. That's WNYC's Brian Lair. Thanks for listening to this special episode of NYC Now. I'm Jenae Pierre. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. See you on Monday. That's Election Day Eve.