| Eric Lach
Staff writer  Illustration by Ben Hickey Over the summer, I spent time with many of the candidates, Democrat and Republican, who are running for Congress in extremely close contests in New York. Both parties believe that control of the House of Representatives will be determined in these races, specifically in six that are located in the suburbs and exurbs of New York City. Most of these districts have changed political hands at least once in the past few years. I went there to figure out why, when the rest of the country seems so hopelessly polarized, these suburbs appear politically ambivalent, at least in the aggregate? It turns out there’s more than one explanation. After the 2022 midterms, when Republicans flipped four New York congressional seats, analysts digging into the numbers discovered a striking trend: districts in the New York City media market had gone red, even as a predicted midterm “red wave” had mostly failed to materialize elsewhere. The theory was that the local and national media’s obsession with a spate of grisly crimes and “hell hole” post-pandemic conditions in New York City had freaked out voters in the suburbs and exurbs, and that the impression had persisted even as conditions in the city had improved. Another explanation could involve the Democratic Party’s botched redistricting process in 2022, when the State Supreme Court rejected a map drawn by the Party in Albany, and outsourced redistricting to a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, who made the eventual maps much less favorable to Democrats. Top figures in the Democratic party, including Nancy Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries, are paying particular attention to New York this cycle, hoping to learn from and avoid past political mistakes. They’re up against a slate of Republicans who have found a way to bridge the politics of their districts, such as housing costs and general political fatigue, with the priorities and stylistic choices of a party led by Donald Trump. If anything, the switch this summer from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris only made these races more competitive, and all anyone can say for sure is that when the votes are counted in November things are going to be close. Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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