Lee Zeldin’s New York Republicans Party Like It’s 1994

So dominant are Democrats in the Empire State that Republicans haven’t won a statewide race in 20 years. Since 2008, the Democratic presidential candidate has carried New York by an average of 25 points. The last Republican to represent New York in the U.S. Senate was

Alfonse D’Amato,

who left office in 1999, when

Bill Clinton

was president and Beyoncé was a member of Destiny’s Child.

That political track record has led state Democrats to believe they could do as they pleased without consequence. In 2014, New York voters amended the state constitution and set up an independent commission to ensure that new congressional and state legislative districts aren’t “drawn to discourage competition or for the purpose of favoring or disfavoring incumbents or other particular candidates or political parties.” Ignoring public will, Democrats this year proposed new maps that would have gerrymandered Republicans almost out of existence. The GOP sued, and the state’s top court eventually appointed a special master to draw competitive maps in line with the constitution.

Republican

John Faso,

a former New York congressman and lawyer who was involved in the litigation that got the Democratic gerrymander tossed, told me the episode is emblematic of Democratic overreach that could backfire this year. “Kathy Hochul and the Albany Democrats made assumptions that they could just rig the electoral districts to eliminate any viable Republican opposition,” he said. “They arrogantly assumed the courts would let them do whatever they wanted. It’s sort of like their assumption that because they’ve won every governor’s race since 2006, that they could pass anything they wanted and that it wouldn’t affect their electoral prospects.”

Enter Mr. Zeldin, whose situation today bears more than a passing resemblance to that of the last Republican governor of New York,

George Pataki.

Mr. Pataki ousted three-term Democratic Gov.

Mario Cuomo

in 1994, which turned out to be a wave year for the GOP. The party gained 54 seats in the House and eight in the Senate. The previous year, Republicans

George Allen

and

Christine Todd Whitman

won the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, respectively, and a crime-fighter named

Rudy Giuliani

was elected mayor of New York.

Last year, Virginia elected Republican Gov.

Glenn Youngkin.

New York City replaced its progressive mayor,

Bill de Blasio,

with Democrat

Eric Adams,

a former police officer who campaigned on stronger law enforcement. And New Jersey Democrat

Phil Murphy,

who won his first election as governor in 2017 by a 14-point margin, was re-elected by only 3 points in a state that

Joe Biden

carried by almost 16 points. Is New York state history about to repeat itself?

It’s not uncommon for races to tighten down the stretch, but Democrats fear something more may be going on.

Barack Obama

is cutting ads for Ms. Hochul and planning a rally with

Hillary Clinton

on the governor’s behalf. The Democratic Governors Association is scrambling to funnel more money into the New York contest. Last week, prognosticators at the Cook Political Report changed their rating of the race from “solid Democrat” to “likely Democrat.”

Mr. Zeldin, a congressman from Long Island, has been gaining steadily on the governor by talking primarily about the economy and crime. He’s hit Ms. Hochul especially hard for siding with progressives in her party who passed disastrous criminal-justice “reforms” that have undermined law enforcement and diminished public safety. For her part, the governor has lackadaisically echoed many other Democrats running this year in trying to keep the focus on abortion and

Donald Trump,

even though abortion rights aren’t under threat in the state and Mr. Trump doesn’t live there anymore. In an August poll, Mr. Zeldin was trailing by 24 points. Two surveys released on Friday—one by liberal polling firm Slingshot Strategies and another by Emerson College—had him down by only 6.

Mr. Zeldin’s surge notwithstanding, Ms. Hochul still has plenty going in her favor. Democrats in the state outnumber Republicans by more than 2 to 1, and their voter-registration advantage has grown in recent decades. The governor, a Buffalonian, has a natural base in upstate New York, where Republicans traditionally need to overperform to win statewide. Win or lose, however, Mr. Zeldin has performed a public service if only by putting a good scare into a complacent and self-dealing Democratic establishment that thinks it can run the state as if its political opponents didn’t exist.