How Marc Molinaro Lost then Won NY19

Our congressional district, the 19th, has seen three elected congressional representatives in 2022. Antonio Delgado (D), elected first in 2018 then again in 2020, was so successful in the district that he was elevated (or not, depending on your point of view) to Lt. Governor by Gov. Kathy Hochul.

So we had a special election in August to replace him, with Pat Ryan (D) beating Marc Molinaro (R) handily. But in the November regular election, Molinaro won over his Democratic challenger, Josh Riley.

Marc Molinaro in a CBS interview, credit CBSNews

Hey, what happened to Pat Ryan? How come the Dems didn't put him up again? Wouldn't that have been the smart thing to do?

It's a complicated story, and in fact it's complicated enough that the Democratic Party totally blew their messaging around and about this election. Acting as though they had everything figured out, they failed to keep voters informed and engaged enough to keep this District under Democratic control.

Their first blunder was an epic one. In 2014, then governor Andrew Cuomo accomplished a major change in policy through a constitutional amendment that would have a bipartisan redestricting commission draw district boundaries as population fluctuated, instead of the state legislature. This was supposed to "end gerrymandering forever".

Unfortunately, by 2021 loopholes in the amendment created a deadlock between the Republican minority and the Democratic majority in the legislature, and the Dems received the OK from a NY judge to proceed with drawing the maps themselves. This they did, to their own advantage of course, which is the definition of gerrymandering.

It didn't work out so well: their map was thrown out on appeal. With no alternative map in place, a quickly appointed Special Master was tasked with redrawing the maps in a few weeks. In the end, part of the old NY CD19 was moved into CD18, and new counties to the west, in the mostly conservative center of the state, were added. Columbia County and Claverack are now on the bluer side of the spectrum within the new district map, but with the city of Hudson (pop. ~6000) the only populous one in the county, Columbia County is not going to make the district blue.

With Delgado headed to Albany instead of Washington, CD19 needed to host a special election to fill the seat for the remainder of his term. Because Delgado was elected to represent the old district map, the special election was across the old district. Now, Pat Ryan is well known in the old district, having run for the congressional seat in 2018 when he came second in the primary to Delgado. He's maintained a strong social media presence ever since, and has high name recognition.

But Ryan decided (or someone decided, and we don't know who) that Ryan would be the Democratic candidate in the November election in CD18. Despite repeated attempts to learn about the logic, we've been unable to discover why. My best guess is that a strong candidate in CD18 was needed for the fall, and it was thought that Ryan's name recognition would not only hold CD19 for the special, but would set the stage for a new candidate to win in November.

There were two potential choices - Jamie Cheney (no relation to the former VP) and Josh Riley, both qualified but neither well-known or experienced. That meant a Democratic primary was needed prior to November to choose one for the ballot. Wisely - because elections themselves are expensive, costing roughly $500,000 to produce - the Dems decided to have the primary on the same day as the special election, August 23.

Republicans had decided to run Marc Molinaro, the former Dutchess County Executive, in both the special and the November elections. Easy peasy - no primary, only one candidate for the voters to recognize. Molinaro was known for his failed but credible challenge to Cuomo for the governor's office in 2018. In that campaign he represented himself as a moderate Republican, although in the 2022 run he flirted with positions held by MAGA Republicans to capture the attention of former Trump voters. But notably, he was the only Republican candidate, so there was no Republican primary held in conjunction with the special election.

With a Democratic primary and the special election on the same day, it should have seemed obvious that the Dems would get more of the turnout, and Ryan was in fact the winner.

Media outlets - and the Democratic string-pullers - chose to represent this as a victory for the party's platform, in particular cheering their opposition to the recent Dobbs vs. Jackson decision that overturned Roe vs. Wade. By couching the victory as a referendum on women's rights and progressive positions, instead of seeing it as related to the underlying structural issues that drove voting, Democrats set themselves up to miss the point in November.

It's not that Dobbs didn't drive more people to the polls - it did. In addition, the pandemic-related migration of city Democrats upstate, where they registered in great numbers, did swing the district toward the blue. But in the end, Josh Riley could not capitalize on his August primary victory, and he could not ride Pat Ryan's victory to a Democratic win in November.

Marc Molinaro lost in August to Ryan because of Ryan's reputation with voters within the old district boundary, and because he didn't have the boost of a Democratic primary held the same day.

He won in November because the redistricting painted the new CD19 a little more red, and because no one had much experience with his opponent, the novice politician Josh Riley.

As the New York Times said the day after the election, "[The] chaotic redistricting process was intended to help Democrats. But {instead] Republicans made significant gains." Had Democrats not tried to pull off their own gerrymandering effort, and indeed crowed about how it would give them an election advantage, they might not have lost 4 congressional seats in a state everyone usually identifies as strongliy blue.

I would add this: the decision to run Ryan in one district then another was confusing and obscure to voters. And running Riley using the same sound bites that worked in August, instead of establishing his voice and personality, was a huge miscalculation. A little care in crafting message might have been helpful. Oh, wait -- I forgot for a second we were talking about the Democrats.