Ron DeSantis Stumps for Lee Zeldin
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis campaigns alongside New York Republican gubernatorial hopeful Rep. Lee Zeldin (R., N.Y.) at a Get Out The Vote Rally in Hauppauge, N.Y., October 29, 2022. (David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)
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By DAN MCLAUGHLIN
October 30, 2022 12:12 AM
Lee Zeldin’s campaign for governor of New York now has a classic puncher’s chance: His is still very much an underdog race, with Kathy Hochul still holding a seven-point lead in the poll average, but with nine days to go, the national tailwind at his back, and fresh from capitalizing on gaffes by Hochul at their lone debate Tuesday night, Zeldin is still in the game. Republicans are not sending their frontline talent to help dead-in-the-water candidates like Darren Bailey in Illinois, Geoff Diehl in Massachusetts, or Dan Cox in Maryland. In fact, you know who is campaigning in Maryland the night before the election? Joe Biden.
But for Zeldin, they are rolling out the big guns. In heavily upscale suburban Westchester County north of the Bronx, maybe the single most critical swing county in this race, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin is campaigning for Zeldin on Monday. That’s a change from 2014, when Rob Astorino ran a respectable but obviously doomed race against Andrew Cuomo, and couldn’t get Chris Christie to campaign for him. Meanwhile, Hochul is calling in Hillary Clinton — maybe the most tone-deaf choice possible even in New York — and First Lady Jill Biden is campaigning for New York congressional candidates upstate.
Then, there’s one of the few Republican stars bigger than Youngkin: Ron DeSantis. DeSantis has been intensely focused on his own re-election campaign — he was noticeably absent from Republican primary fights except in his own state — and he was at the Florida-Georgia game earlier today, but one of the luxuries of a double-digit poll lead is that you can afford to spend a little time helping to build your party’s team. DeSantis planned to come to a Zeldin fundraiser in late August, but had to cancel to attend a funeral for a former member of his protective detail killed in the line of duty. This time, he made it. I drove out to see both Zeldin and DeSantis live on the stump.
The event was behind Zeldin’s campaign headquarters in Hauppauge, which is geographically in the center of Long Island. If Youngkin is the right man for Westchester County crowds, DeSantis is the right man for the Island, which is not the fully-Trumpy areas of economically-desolate upstate, but is stocked with cops, firemen, nurses, and other blue-collar types. It was a cold night, dropping into the mid-40s by the time of the rally, and it was only publicly announced yesterday, but there were thousands in attendance — I’m bad at counting crowds, but an hour before the event, there was a nearly half-mile line to get in. There were people packed behind the press riser where I was stationed with some two dozen members of the media.
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A visit from DeSantis was treated as a big deal by the New York Republicans. We were treated to speeches by Suffolk County GOP Chairman Jesse Garcia, state chairman Nick Langworthy (who is also running for Congress in New York’s 23d district, but could spare the time from a district Donald Trump carried by 17 points in 2020), Nassau County executive Bruce Blakeman (who was elected in the red wave that swept the Island in 2021), Zeldin’s running mate, NYPD Deputy Inspector Alison Esposito (not to be confused with former NYPD detective Anthony D’Esposito, who is the House candidate in my district on the Island), and then finally Zeldin and DeSantis.
This was a very law enforcement-heavy and pro-cop, anti-crime crowd. Langworthy and Blakeman pulled no punches in their warmup speeches: Langworthy said of the supporters of New York’s bail reform laws, “there’s blood on their hands,” and Blakeman urged the crowd to “get down to business throwing out those government officials who masked our kids…and sent our senior citizens back to nursing homes to die!” Esposito zeroed in on Hochul’s big gaffe at the debate, when Zeldin pressed her to talk about actually locking up criminals, and she responded, “I don’t know why that’s so important to you.”
Langworthy also set what would become the central theme of the night, repeated by both Zeldin and DeSantis: that Zeldin would be “our own Ron DeSantis” for New York. A skeptic might say that New York is too ungovernable for a governor in the Ron DeSantis mold to have a similar impact, and it is surely true that getting the Democrat-run state legislature on board would be a harder slog, but New Yorkers of a certain age remember being told the same thing about an ungovernable state and city before Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York City in 1993 and George Pataki was elected governor of the state in 1994 — leading to positive changes in the state’s day-to-day life as dramatic as any in American political experience in the past three decades.
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The two headliners are, at first glance, quite similar. DeSantis, at 44, is the nation’s youngest governor; Zeldin, at 42, would supplant him for that title if elected. Both served in Iraq; both have law degrees and have been prosecutors. Both were elected as Tea Party congressmen, then served together in the House during the Trump era and adapted themselves accordingly. Both are fathers of two daughters, although Zeldin’s girls are teenagers and DeSantis also has a son. Zeldin has survived leukemia; DeSantis has seen his wife through breast cancer. DeSantis is an Italian Catholic in the South, Zeldin a Jewish Republican, making both of them outsiders of a sort. DeSantis was an eyewitness to the congressional baseball shooting, having passed and spoken with the assassin on his way out of the practice; Zeldin survived an attempted stabbing while giving a speech upstate during this campaign.
DeSantis played up the parallels. His speech settled into a recurring callout: Here’s what I did in Florida, New York didn’t do it, but Lee Zeldin will. They also offered bookends: Zeldin talked about why people are leaving New York, and DeSantis talked about why New Yorkers are coming to Florida. Those themes recurred across issues: vaccine and mask mandates, taxes, crime, parents’ rights in education, rogue prosecutors who won’t enforce the law. Zeldin emphasized, in terms that could have come straight from a DeSantis stump speech, that “A parent has a fundamental right to control the upbringing of their children, and they do not relinquish that right when they send their children off to school.” DeSantis argued that New York has twice the budget of Florida with 3 million fewer people, worse infrastructure, higher debt, and worse educational results. He talked about rebuilding a bridge to Pine Island in three days after the latest hurricane, and offered to sell oceanfront real estate in Arizona to anyone who thinks Hochul could do the same thing in New York. (The Second Avenue subway line began opening stops in 2017, but is still a decade from completion; it was first proposed in 1920).
But there were also noticeable contrasts in style. Zeldin is a little bit nebbishy, and comfortable with self-deprecating humor. He talked about the importance of humility. He noted that he is the fourth-ranking person in his own household and would stay that way if elected. He contrasted this with Hochul calling herself the “mother” of the state, and calling voters her “apostles.” “I promise you, if elected governor, at no point will I refer to myself as the father of New York’s 62 counties.” He also offered a humorous riff on how he wasn’t sure he’d have the courage to show up today after actor Mark Ruffalo made a video attacking him. “And then Leonardo diCaprio retweeted it! I was crushed!”
DeSantis doesn’t do self-deprecating; he radiates intensity and swagger. In fact, his entire presentation on the stump is a testament to the power of narrative. DeSantis isn’t naturally charming or funny. Crowds warm to him because he offers them a story of accomplishment and victory, backed by specific fights he had and won, specific things he did. He rarely rails with futility against unstoppable forces; like Giuliani 30 years ago, his message is this can be done, I did this, I fought and won, come with me if you want to win. For the Republican voters of Long Island, desperate to be heard, this is a powerful message. I was at the Mets-Padres game when Jacob deGrom took the mound, the wounded ace at home with the team down to an elimination game, and the mood tonight was much the same combination of desperate determination. Langworthy set the stakes: “This is our last stand in the State of New York.” If DeSantis runs nationally, he won’t be selling the sizzle, he’ll be selling the steak to people who are hungry for it.
In what might in some quarters be a nod to the next presidential race, DeSantis emphasized in his endorsement of Zeldin how nice it is to vote for somebody who is not just a lesser evil:
He stuck the landing, too:
