New York state, of all places, is emerging as a potential bright spot for Republicans in the midterm elections, with recent polls showing the Republican candidates for attorney general and for governor within reach of the Democratic opponents.
The attorney general candidate, Saritha Komatireddy, 42, had a stunningly good performance in a televised debate this month against the two-term incumbent, Letitia James, 68. Not since Sleepy Joe Biden’s national debate meltdown against President Trump has a Democratic incumbent been so devastatingly trounced. James looked like she was in a hostage video. If every New York voter could just watch the debate on YouTube, Komatireddy would win the election in a landslide.
In the debate, Komatireddy called James a "political hack." In response to a question about the Cornell fraternity case, Komatireddy said of James, "She's certainly never prosecuted a sexual assault case, and she's already screwed this one up by prejudging it."
Komatireddy’s campaign team has also produced a 30-second ad spot that is so simple it has gone viral: "Just fight crime." "There’s a three word solution to affordability in New York," Komatireddy says straight to the camera. "Just fight crime. When crooks steal a car, your insurance goes up. When scammers siphon money from Medicaid, health care costs go up. … Letitia James spent $10 million bucks making herself a celebrity. My motto is my career: Just fight crime."
A former Republican congressman from New York, John Faso, told the Washington Free Beacon, "Saritha is one of the best statewide candidates from either party over the past 40 years. She has the experience, temperament, and skill to fix what is wrong in the AG's office. She will use the powers of the AG's office to fight crime, rampant theft in programs like Medicaid, and create a civil commitment office to get the seriously mentally ill off our streets and into proper care."
In an interview with the Free Beacon, Komatireddy stressed her service in the Biden and Obama administrations. "I’m really running as a nonpartisan law enforcement professional," she said, "following the facts and following the law." Unbelievably, James said in the debate that "you don’t have to look at the facts and the law."
"She’s had her chance," Komatireddy said, pointing to James’s eight years in office. "Crime is up. Homelessness is up. Fraud is up," Komatireddy said.
"She is political in everything that she does," Komatireddy said. "It’s time now to turn the page and focus on public safety."
Komatireddy has the endorsement of Ray Kelly, who served as New York City Police Commissioner under Mayor David Dinkins and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Kelly was also customs commissioner and a Treasury Department official in the Clinton administration.
Komatireddy also has the endorsement of Elisha Wiesel, son of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. Elisha Wiesel worked on Bloomberg’s 2020 Democratic presidential campaign.
Komatireddy was born in Brooklyn. Her parents are immigrants from India. She’s a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. She clerked for Brett Kavanaugh before he joined the Supreme Court, and then spent a career as an antiterrorism and anti-narcotics federal prosecutor. In the Biden administration, she served as chief of staff to the administrator of the 10,000-person Drug Enforcement Administration. She is the parent of two sets of twins. She is not a "country club" Republican.
"Tish James has assigned twice as many people to prosecute cops than criminals. So we need to move things around," Komatireddy said in a "spaces" interview on X with Bill Ackman. She also promised to shut down state-funded drug injection sites on day one. "It’s a cruel thing to do. I don’t think we should do it. We certainly shouldn’t do it with taxpayer money," she said.
"Everyone wants the same thing. They want a safer New York. It’s not partisan," she said in that interview.
The governor’s race in New York is a different story, but there, too, the incumbent Democrat, Kathy Hochul, hasn’t exactly covered herself in glory.
With political junkies focused on control of the House and Senate, it may be hard to get voters and donors focused on statewide races. But the stakes are high. Two recent attorneys general—Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo—became governor of the Empire State. Jacob Javits went from the attorney general’s office into the U.S. Senate.
But it’s not only a story about political steppingstones or ambitions. It translates into concrete differences in peoples’ lives. I lived in New York City for 15 years, between 1997 and 2013, and saw the effects of leadership at the state and local level that translated into policies—safer and cleaner, more orderly streets and subways, more business-friendly policies, lower taxes—that helped New York prosper under Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki.
In 1994, George Elmer Pataki was just an obscure state senator from Peekskill, a grandson of Hungarian immigrants.
As governor, Pataki—backed by some farsighted businessmen and civic leaders such as Peter Flanigan and some others who have since relocated to Florida—used the leverage of a state legislature wanting a pay raise to win passage of the New York State Charter Schools Act of 1998. Hundreds of thousands of children in Harlem and the Bronx and elsewhere in New York City have benefited from the alternative that those charter schools provided to failing New York City public schools.
So Attorney General Komatireddy—everyone seems to call her Saritha—or Governor Blakeman may be a long shot. But it’s potentially powerful if it happens.
