Oct 28, 2024

By Jeff Coltin, Nick Reisman and Emily Ngo

Presented by

With Timmy Facciola

Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally on Friday night in Novi, Mich.

Former President Donald Trump didn't mention any of New York's embattled congressional candidates, but he did shout-out the mayor. | Alex Brandon/AP

NEW YORK MINUTE: With the Yankees returning to the Bronx tonight down 0-2 in the World Series, the Transportation Workers Union is spending more than $100,000 on ads slamming Gov. Kathy Hochul for “foul play” in a long-simmering dispute over contract negotiations with Metro-North workers.

Anyone in and around Yankee Stadium should get served anti-Hochul ads on their phones, TWU President John Samuelsen said, calling her “a freaking miserable backstabber.”

”There is one week until the election and everyone's energy and resources should be focused on making Hakeem Jeffries the next Speaker of the House and electing Kamala Harris president,” Hochul spokesperson Jen Goodman said.

MAGA SQUARE GARDEN: New York City Mayor Eric Adams broke with Democratic leadership — and former Donald Trump aides — Saturday to say Trump should not be called a fascist.

And Trump was listening.

“He’s been really great,” the Republican presidential nominee said about Adams at a Madison Square Garden campaign rally Sunday night. “And he said that they shouldn’t be calling Trump a dictator. Because it’s not true. That’s nice. That was nice. Very nice. So we want to thank Mayor Adams. He’s been going through a hard time with these people.”

As he has done before, Trump also downplayed Adams’ federal bribery charges as just an “upgraded seat on an airplane” and suggested that the Justice Department indicted Adams for speaking out about migrants — a claim for which there’s no solid evidence.

It was an 80-second aside in an 80-minute speech — the closing of a half-day event marked by anti-immigrant rhetoric and a “joke” insulting Puerto Rico so bad that even Trump’s campaign tried to disavow it.

Adams’ opponents jumped at the praise from Trump. “Our city deserves a Mayor who isn't afraid to call Trump out, reject his hateful rhetoric, and stand up for NYC values,” state Sen. Zellnor Myrie posted on X.

Adams has said he is solidly behind Kamala Harris for president but has entirely avoided the campaign trail — perhaps a function of his unpopularity within his own party.

Unlike basically every other prominent Democrat in the country, Adams avoids criticizing Trump — a strategy that has come under more scrutiny as Election Day approaches and follows reporting that Adams’ allies hope Trump would drop his case.

Adams is often at odds with left-leaning Democrats and seems more simpatico with the handful of Republicans in power in the city than some in his own party.

Adams spokesperson Fabien Levy declined to comment on Trump’s remarks.

NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell attended the rally, and his decision to conduct an interview on far-right TV outlet Newsmax drew criticism from liberal Democrats

Trump kept the focus squarely on his own race Sunday and didn’t shout out any of the swing seat Republicans whose races will help determine which party controls the House.

But those candidates could be hurt by something that was said on stage: comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s quip that “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

At least one Republican House candidate in New York, Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, attended the rally and later denounced the insult.

New York Democrats, meanwhile, seized on the political opportunity.

“I need every Boricua on here to take that rally clip and drop it in your family WhatsApps and group chats,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted on X.

“Desperate House Republicans from Long Island and the Hudson Valley shamefully invited this filth into our community,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries posted about Hinchcliffe. “Vote them all out.” — Jeff Coltin

HAPPY MONDAY. Got news? Send it our way: Jeff Coltin, Emily Ngo and Nick Reisman.

A message from Uber:

New York City Uber riders pay $700 Million in taxes and fees annually* That’s more than the entire budget for New York City Parks Department. *Based on trips originating from NYC in 2023. Learn more.

WHERE’S KATHY? Makes an announcement on voting rights in Brooklyn.

WHERE’S ERIC? Makes a labor- and affordability-related announcement at City Hall.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “If it’s too inconvenient for you to show up in the Bronx today, maybe it’ll be too inconvenient for the voters to show up on Election Day.” — Racial justice activist Kirsten John Foy, on the first forum for 2025 mayoral candidates on Saturday, which included neither Adams nor former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

ABOVE THE FOLD

Governor Hochul celebrated the creation of about 71,000 new apartments in New York City Thursday

The governor’s combative rhetoric coincides with growing concerns among Democrats that the push for the so-called equal rights amendment is falling short. | Don Pollard/Office of Governor Kathy Hochul

PROPPED UP: Hochul is deploying aggressive rhetoric to boost the so-called equal rights amendment as supporters fear efforts for the measure are falling short.

The governor over the weekend called opponents of the proposed amendment, which is meant to enshrine a broad array of rights in the state constitution, the “forces of darkness.”

“They’re trying to scare us and say all these things are going to happen if you pass this,” she said during a rally with Democrats on Saturday in Yonkers. “Don’t let them win. Do not let darkness win over light. Don’t let bad, evil win over good.”

The governor’s combative rhetoric coincides with growing concerns among Democrats that the push for the so-called equal rights amendment is falling short.

Critics of the amendment received more than $6 million in last-minute funding from a beer heir that has helped pay for a TV ad to slam the proposal. The spot charged the amendment will enable “non-citizen voting” and “give illegals a constitutional right to taxpayer benefits.” That message dovetails with Republican claims the amendment would also enable trans people to play in girls’ sports.

The forces opposing Prop 1 — the measure in question — were also buoyed last week when the editorial board of Newsday urged its Long Island readership to vote against the referendum.

"Gov. Hochul clearly overreached on this disaster of a ballot amendment,” said Bill O’Reilly, a spokesperson for the anti-amendment group Coalition to Protect Kids-NY. “The ambiguity of the proposal would open up a Pandora's Box of Constitutional challenges unlike anything New York has ever seen. It was totally irresponsible to even put this carelessly worded Hydra of a proposal on the ballot."

Supporters have insisted the claims raised by opponents are false and meant to distract from the primary goal of the amendment when it was first approved in 2022: protecting the right to an abortion.

But the amendment’s broad language, which includes bolstered rights for LGBTQ+ people and protections for “pregnancy outcomes” has given critics an opening.

Hochul has moved in recent weeks to boost the amendment, with $1 million from the state Democratic Committee she controls. Democrats raised concerns during the summer that a campaign to promote the amendment has fallen short, and POLITICO reported last week the committee, New Yorkers for Equal Rights, has spent heavily on polling and consultants, with a relatively small percentage of funds for direct voter outreach.

The proposal’s failure in deep blue New York would be devastating for the state’s Democratic leaders, who initially considered the amendment a way to energize voters for the state’s battleground House races.

“We need this win,” Hochul said. “We need a large number of people to support proposition one to overshadow those who will not understand the power of what we’re trying to do here.” — Nick Reisman

KEEPING UP WITH THE DELEGATION

House Speaker Mike Johnson is seen at the Capitol Visitors Center on March 20, 2024.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is trying to get a few candidates across the finish line in New York to keep his party's majority. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

SPEAKER IN THE HOUSE: House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will make a swing through New York battlegrounds this week to boost his vulnerable GOP colleagues, including Mike Lawler in the Hudson Valley and Marc Molinaro farther upstate.

BLUE STATES SEE IE GREEN: A staggering avalanche of money is pouring into congressional elections in just two states: California and New York, POLITICO reports this morning.

Roughly one in three independent expenditure dollars in House races have been spent in the two blue states this year, up from one in five over the 2022 election cycle, according to a POLITICO analysis of Federal Election Commission data.

For Democrats, the spending is also a kind of political penance. It comes after Democrats underperformed in their strongholds in the 2022 midterms when embarrassing losses in New York and California contributed to the GOP seizing control of the House. Biden-district Republicans, meanwhile, are refusing to relinquish their footholds without a fight.

In New York, the Democrat-aligned House Majority PAC is on track to shell out $50 million, nearly four times what it spent in 2022. The Republicans’ Congressional Leadership Fund is dropping at least $35 million on New York House races this election, versus $24 million in the midterms.

In 2022, the House Majority PAC had spent nothing on the race that allowed Republican Mike Lawler to dethrone then-DCCC chair Sean Patrick Maloney.

House Majority PAC plans to spend $6 million between last week and this week in Lawler’s Hudson Valley district in efforts to take down the moderate Republican who’s been a cable TV news circuit staple in his first term. Lawler’s Democratic challenger is former Rep. Mondaire Jones, a strong messenger in his own right for his party. NY-17 is the Congressional Leadership Fund’s most expensive race in New York at $6 million and counting.

In NY-19, where Democratic challenger Josh Riley has handily outraised GOP Rep. Marc Molinaro, $8.8 million to $5.2 million, in a bitter rematch, the Congressional Leadership Fund has invested $5.5 million and the House Majority PAC expects to double the $2.7 million it has already given by Election Day. — Emily Ngo