NEW YORK — In the end, the contest between Gov. Kathy Hochul and her Republican challenger, Rep. Lee Zeldin of Long Island, was not quite as close as some Democrats had feared in the final days of the New York governor’s race.
Hochul won by about 5 percentage points, according to incomplete Board of Elections results, a margin large enough to allow her to celebrate before midnight Tuesday.
But Hochul, who assumed her office after former Gov. Andrew Cuomo resigned last year, still experienced the closest contest any Democrat had faced in a New York governor’s race in two decades.
Zeldin, running hard on crime, was boosted by a massive influx of outside spending targeting Hochul late in the race, and the governor’s campaign appeared slow to respond to his surge.
The race’s anxious finish, coupled with deep Democratic losses in House races — on a day when the party outpaced expectations across the U.S. — left many local Democrats grumbling about their state party and its leadership.
“When New York’s Democrats are dragging behind Michigan and Pennsylvania, it’s time to clean house,” Monica Klein, a Democratic strategist, said of the state party.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive Queens Democrat who campaigned with Hochul, declared on Twitter that the “underperformance is a testament to years of prioritizing calcified machine politics.”
She renewed her calls for Jay Jacobs, chairman of the state Democratic Party, to resign, leading a growing chorus among progressive voices within the party.
Jacobs, in turn, said that Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet was “inaccurate” and that the state party had raised significant sums of cash and driven large turnout in key areas in the race’s final days.
Noting policy differences between himself and Ocasio-Cortez, he said no candidates lost because they were “not progressive enough.”
“I think it would be beneficial for her to pick up the phone instead of writing a tweet — she can get a hold of me and call me,” he said in an interview. “I’m going to keep on doing the job I’m doing.”
Still, many Democrats felt that the state party’s get-out-the-vote efforts were severely lacking.
At the end of the race, Hochul’s well-funded campaign brought a staggering lineup of Democratic heavy hitters to the New York City area to gin up excitement ahead of Election Day.
Former President Bill Clinton spoke in Brooklyn, Hillary Clinton stumped in Manhattan and President Joe Biden descended on Westchester County.
Ultimately, Hochul benefitted from solid turnout in New York City by historical standards, running up the score on Zeldin. Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly 7 to 1 in the city.
The left-leaning, labor-backed Working Families Party appeared to also give Hochul a boost.
The party said it collaborated with more than 50 elected officials and candidates on outreach in the field, and that its ballot line scored twice as many votes for Hochul as it did for Cuomo in 2018. (Cuomo and the Working Families Party had an adversarial relationship.)
The Working Families Party said it expected to account for about 300,000 votes for Hochul. Around 300,000 votes separated her from Zeldin in incomplete election data reported by the Board of Elections on Wednesday.
City Comptroller Brad Lander, a progressive Brooklyn Democrat who handed out campaign literature in the final days of the race, said the Working Families Party stepped in on the ground in the absence of the state party “doing almost anything.”
“The WFP worked really hard,” Lander said by phone. “The people that asked me to step up and do more were the Working Families Party.”
