Can Mike Lawler Make New York Red Again?
New York hasn't elected a Republican governor in over twenty years. What would it take for a GOP candidate to build a winning statewide coalition?
Mike Lawler addresses the media following his election to the House of Representatives in November 2022. Douglas Healey/New York Post.
Many people are saying that Republican congressman Mike Lawler could be the next governor of New York. Ever since Lee Zeldin posted the best statewide performance by a GOP gubernatorial candidate in twenty years during the 2022 midterms, Republicans have been eager to take another crack at the top office with an even stronger candidate, and Lawler certainly fits the bill. Not only is he much more handsome and charming than Zeldin, he’s also one of only three Republicans in the country to have prevailed in a district that Kamala Harris won in the 2024 presidential election. This demonstrates an ability to win over Democratic voters – something that Zeldin never had to cultivate while representing his safe red district on Long Island. Plus, there are signs that New York politics may be shifting to the right at baseline. Donald Trump cut the Democratic margin of victory here in half between 2020 and 2024, and Republicans have been gaining ground among minority voters at the state and local levels for a number of years.
Lawler has yet to confirm his intention to seek the governorship, though he’s been hinting that he will ever since his re-election to the House of Representatives last month. High-profile Republicans and conservative activists appear eager to rally around him, so if he does enter the race, he’ll almost certainly clear the GOP primary field. And if he eventually unseats incumbent governor Kathy Hochul, Lawler will earn another notable distinction: he’ll be the first governor in New York history to have ever been interviewed by a Marxist publication. In March 2022, I sat down with Lawler when he was still a state assemblyman to discuss the dysfunctional way that staff budgets are allocated to assembly members, leading to low legislative staff pay and poor constituent services. A quaint topic in retrospect, given recent events.
But if you ask me, it’ll be much harder for Lawler to earn this distinction than many people believe. To see why, let’s begin by examining the results of the last three gubernatorial elections in four different areas of the state: New York City, referring to Bronx, Kings, New York, Queens, and Richmond counties; “Downstate Suburbs,” referring to Nassau, Rockland, Suffolk, and Westchester counties (the affluent suburbs around New York City); “Upstate Metros,” referring to Albany, Erie, Monroe, Onondaga, and Tompkins counties (home to the cities of Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Ithaca, respectively); and “Other Upstate,” referring to the other forty-eight counties in New York.1
The first order of business is to understand the geographic distribution of the electorate. Depending on the year, New York City, Downstate Suburbs, and Other Upstate typically account for between twenty-five and thirty percent of the electorate each, while Upstate Metros account for between fifteen and twenty percent. Sometimes the national environment can push these figures outside of their usual bounds. Notice that in the historic blue wave year of 2018, the five boroughs’ share of the electorate climbed to an impressive thirty-four percent. Still, the point is that New York City, Downstate Suburbs, and Other Upstate all account for comparable shares of the electorate, while Upstate Metros pack a much lighter punch.
The second order of business is to understand the nature of New York’s Democratic and Republican coalitions at baseline. The bluest area of the state is New York City, which Democrats won by between forty and seventy points in each of the last three gubernatorial elections. Upstate Metros are also blue, but a much lighter shade; Democrats only won them by around ten points in recent elections. Still, New York’s urban centers represent a formidable electoral base for Democrats: altogether they account for almost half of the electorate, and Democrats win them by blockbuster margins. The reason that Republicans usually aren’t competitive statewide is that they’re not able to win the other areas of the state by margins convincing enough to overcome the Democratic advantage in the cities.
Other Upstate is New York’s reddest area, but it’s far less red than New York City is blue; in the last three gubernatorial elections, Republicans only won it by around twenty points. Contrast this with the Pennsyltucky region of Pennsylvania, which not only accounts for almost half of that state’s electorate – remember, Other Upstate accounts for less than one-third of New York’s – but also typically goes for Republicans by around thirty points. Thus, New York isn’t only much more urbanized than Pennsylvania, but its rural areas are also significantly less conservative. These are the main reasons that Republicans struggle in New York but are highly competitive in Pennsylvania and often win statewide races there.
This brings us to the Downstate Suburbs, which are another big problem for the GOP. Once upon a time, these counties were ruby-red symbols of suburban reaction. But lately, they’ve been on the same trajectory as affluent suburbs all over the country. In favorable cycles, Democrats have won them by as much as sixteen points. In 2022 – despite an otherwise impressive performance, running against the charisma vacuum that is Kathy Hochul, in a national environment favorable to his party – Zeldin won them by a paltry six points. The “suburban revolt” around New York City that allegedly occurred in 2022 is one of the most pernicious myths to emerge out of the mainstream media in recent years, and it’s one that this newsletter has worked hard to debunk. In January 2023, I published a piece showing that it was New York City’s swing to the right that accounted for the lion’s share of the improvement in the GOP’s statewide performance in 2022, while their numbers in the suburbs were frankly underwhelming. In other words, while Republicans can sometimes win over the Downstate Suburbs, they haven’t been able to win them by enough to make up for the fact that Other Upstate is far less red than New York City is blue.
Now that we’ve gotten the lay of the land, we can ask what it would take for Lawler to unseat Hochul in the upcoming midterms. To help us answer this question, let’s examine another set of gubernatorial elections, namely the elections that George Pataki won between 1994 and 2002. As New York’s last Republican governor – indeed, the last Republican elected to any statewide office – Pataki provides us with the only semi-recent example of what a winning Republican coalition might look like.
The first thing to note is that Zeldin did better in New York City than Pataki did in 1994, both in terms of his vote share and his losing margin. Zeldin got thirty percent of the city’s vote to Pataki’s twenty-eight percent, and since Hochul and Mario Cuomo both got seventy percent of the city’s vote, that means Zeldin lost it by forty points while Pataki lost it by forty-two. The second thing to note is that Zeldin got the exact same share of the vote in the Downstate Suburbs that Pataki did in 1994: fifty-three percent. Pataki’s share in this area might have been two or three points higher were it not for the candidates running on the Right to Life, Libertarian, and Independence ballot lines, but still, the fact is that his downstate performance had very little to do with his initial victory. What pushed him over the top were his numbers upstate.
Not only did Pataki win the Upstate Metros by eleven points in 1994, but he also won Other Upstate counties by a whopping thirty-eight points – almost double Zeldin’s margin. It’s also worth noting that Rochester billionaire Tom Golisano received nine percent of the vote in the Upstate Metros and six percent of the vote in Other Upstate counties that year on the Independence ballot line. Golisano ran on a centrist platform, but if you ask me, most of his supporters probably would have opted for Pataki over Cuomo. The conventional wisdom when it comes to third-party voters is that they’re motivated to vote against the incumbent, and Cuomo was running for an unprecedented fourth term. In other words, Pataki’s already impressive upstate margins likely would have been even more dramatic in a forced choice between the two major party candidates.
Golisano ran again in 1998 and 2002, earning a larger share of the vote each time. While his support downstate was always minimal, he received seventeen percent in the Upstate Metros and ten percent in Other Upstate counties in 1998, then twenty-five percent in the Upstate Metros and twenty percent in Other Upstate counties in 2002. Given that Pataki was the incumbent in these races, as well as the fact that Democrats struggled to crack thirty percent of the vote in any area of the state besides New York City – shockingly low numbers even against a popular opponent – it seems likely that Golisano was pulling more votes from Democrats in these races than from Pataki. In any case, the key trend to pay attention to is that after growing his vote share to an eye-popping seventy percent in Other Upstate counties in 1998, Pataki’s vote share in that area declined to fifty-seven percent in 2002, which is comparable to more recent Republican performances.
The GOP’s standing in Other Upstate counties declined even further over the next few cycles. They supported Eliot Spitzer by a wide margin in 2006, and in 2010 they went for Andrew Cuomo over Tea Party candidate Carl Paladino. But even after emerging from their libtard era, Other Upstate counties have never backed a Republican candidate as strongly as they backed Pataki in the 1990s. More than any other single factor, the erosion of Republican dominance in the reddest part of New York is why the GOP has struggled to compete statewide for the past twenty years. If you’re still not convinced, consider this remarkable fact: if Zeldin had achieved his widely reported goal of earning thirty-five percent of the vote in New York City and tripled his margin of victory in the Downstate Suburbs, all while his upstate numbers stayed the same, he still would have lost by around three thousand votes.2
Call it cope-ium, but something tells me that Lawler isn’t going to triple Zeldin’s margin of victory in the Downstate Suburbs (not that I particularly care which arm of our bourgeois dictatorship rules us at any particular time). Even if the Resistance doesn’t seem likely to re-emerge with the same ferocity that it had before, the first midterm after Trump’s restoration will be a much less favorable environment for Republicans to run in than the one that Zeldin enjoyed in 2022 – congestion pricing notwithstanding. Lawler might end up getting thirty-five percent of the vote in New York City, if the trends that this newsletter has been reporting on continue. But without a Republican renaissance upstate, that won’t be nearly enough to make him the next Pataki. All that being said, it’s a long road to 2026, and I’ll be writing more about the governor’s race soon.
To view the raw data, click here.
For the math behind this claim, see the “Counterfactual” tab in the spreadsheet above.