The Democratic party’s anxiety levels – already raised by mounting evidence it is heading for a drubbing in next week’s mid-term elections – have been further heightened by polls indicating that one of the deepest blue states might be about to flip to the Republicans. 

The New York governorship – which the party retained by over 20 points four years ago – is now teetering, with a Jewish Republican threatening to inflict a humiliating defeat far inside enemy territory. 

Lee Zeldin, a former congressman from Long Island, is, moreover, no liberal Republican, cut from the centrist cloth which has occasionally triumphed in the state and elsewhere in the liberal north-east. Instead, he’s a fully signed-up Donald Trump acolyte who has done little to distance himself from the former president who was crushed by 23 points in his home state just two years ago.

In a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one, victory for the Democrat incumbent, Kathy Hochul, was once thought to be in the bag. Now, however, the race for governor is rated a “toss-up” by RealClearPolitics. Its poll of polls places Zeldin seven points behind, although some recent surveys have suggested Hochul’s lead is shrinking fast. 

If she prevails, Hochul - who took office last year following the resignation of the scandal-strewn governor Andrew Cuomo, will be the first elected female chief executive of New York.

But a victory for Zeldin – an Iraq veteran who has served three terms in the US Congress – would not be without historical significance, either. If he emerges victorious next Tuesday night, Zeldin will be the first Republican to defeat a sitting Democrat governor since the 1994 landslide which swept Newt Gingrich to power on Capitol Hill. George Pataki racked up a decade as governor but his party has gone down to double-digit defeats in every subsequent gubernatorial race.

Nonetheless, like his post-war Republican predecessors, Thomas Dewey and Nelson Rockefeller, Pataki hails very much from the party’s now decimated moderate wing. Zeldin, however, is a conservative hardliner. As the New York Times reported last month: “There is perhaps no other major candidate as deeply associated with Mr Trump and his campaign of election lies who is seriously contesting a state that has so thoroughly rejected the former president.”

Zeldin’s relationship with Trump is both close and longstanding. The Republican congressman backed the former reality TV star early in his bid for the presidency, dismissed criticism levelled against him following the White Supremacist rallies at Charlottesville in 2017, and strenuously defended him when the House of Representatives voted to impeach him in 2020. A year later, in the aftermath of the assault on the US Capitol by Trump supporters, Zeldin voted against certifying Joe Biden’s election. 

As the election heads into its final days, Zeldin is now walking a tight rope and is acutely aware that his backing for Trump is an Achilles’ heel.  When the two candidates met for a televised debate last week, Hochul poked at the issue time and again. While carefully not denouncing the former president, Zeldin refused to endorse a run by Trump in 2024. The Republican challenger also wouldn’t give Hochul a “yes or no” answer as to whether he viewed Trump as a “great president”.  

Certainly, Zeldin won’t have thanked Trump for choosing to publicly back his gubernatorial bid on the same day the former president warned American Jews to “get their act together” and “appreciate” Israel “before it is too late”. Zeldin brushed away questions about Trump’s endorsement, saying only that it “shouldn’t have been news” because he “supported me before”. (Zeldin says that his objections surrounding the 2020 election revolved around “evidence-filled issues”, specifically covid-related changes to election laws in Pennsylvania and Arizona, and he accepts that Biden is president. “It’s neither simple nor clear what he believes,” commented Politico magazine earlier this year).

Alongside his association with Trump, Zeldin’s other major vulnerability in New York is the Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn the nationwide right to an abortion. Hochul says that “abortion is on the ballot” next week.

But although he has previously touted the fact, if elected, he would be the first “pro-life governor” in “many, many, many decades” and pledged that “anti-abortion advocates would have “open door” access to him, Zeldin has sought to neutralise the issue in the general election campaign. “I will not change and could not change New York’s abortion law,” Zeldin says in a newly released campaign ad.

Downplaying his ties to Trump and opposition to abortion, Zeldin has reached for what he believes to be his ace-card: New Yorkers’ fear of crime. “I am running to take back our streets and to support unapologetically our men and women in law enforcement,” he argued in last week’s debate.

Critics accuse the Republican of providing “a steady stream of fearmongering about crime”, but Zeldin has ploughed on relentlessly. A random drive-by shooting outside his home, for instance, provided the candidate with the opportunity to dramatise the fact that although murder rates in New York City are lower than they were two years ago, rates of rape, robbery, assault and burglary are all up. “I didn’t think that the next time I’d be standing in front of a crime scene, it would be crime scene tape in front of my own house,” Zeldin suggested.

Zeldin’s solution is to sack Manhattan’s district attorney and roll back progressive criminal justice laws introduced in 2019. Hochul – who contrasts her efforts to tighten firearms restrictions with her opponent’s pro-gun record – has run for the protective cover of New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, a fellow Democrat and tough-on-crime former police captain. 

If Hochul is defeated, it is likely that crime will have proved fatal to her chances. Anxiety over the issue in heavily Democrat New York City, Mark Penn, Bill and Hillary Clinton’s former pollster, warned last weekend, “could make the difference in this election”. He pointed to surveys showing that 36 percent of the city’s residents say crime is their greatest concern. Zeldin, Penn says, needs 30 percent of the vote in the city to carry the state; a figure some polls indicate he is exceeding by around seven points.

These worrying statistics for the Democrats combine with evidence of a lack of enthusiasm for the party in New York City which may depress turnout in liberal areas. Party leaders, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, unions and left-wing pressure groups are now riding to Hochul’s rescue, while the candidate herself has begun a push to fire-up support among black and Latino voters. Both Hochul and Zeldin spent the weekend continuing their efforts to court Hasidic voters, although the Democrats will likely carry the Jewish vote as a whole. 

Hochul may be lacking enthusiasm, but she’s not short of cash, allowing her to blanket the airwaves with $30.5m in advertising. Zeldin’s attempts to close the fundraising deficit have been helped by so-called super PACS which, so long as they operate independently from the campaign, can accept unlimited donations. These laxer rules have allowed wealthy donors, like cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, to pour $12m into efforts to boost Zeldin. (Late last week it was reported that New York’s election watchdog is probing the activities of the pro-Zeldin super PACs, although Republicans in the state have successfully slowed the investigation until after election day). 

Hochul may well yet pip Zeldin to the winning post next Tuesday. But he’ll still have proven himself that rare political beast: a Republican who can give the Democrats a run for their money deep in their heartlands.