7 Keys to Democrats Winning NY-01

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Rep. Lee Zeldin will be the Republican nominee for New York State Governor in 2022.

Rep. Lee Zeldin cannot win that race.

Rep. Lee Zeldin, at this moment, understands both those statements to be true.

That might seem like a strange way to begin a column on winning an open Congressional seat, but it's important that Democrats comprehend these three points at the outset of what will be Suffolk County's most important House race in a generation.

Lee Zeldin, the NY-01 incumbent, is running for Governor and currently touring the state, county by county, solidifying endorsements from Republican County Chairs and conservative influencers at such a rapid pace that his nomination, at this juncture, is a foregone conclusion. His support among both grassroots conservatives and establishment New York Republicans, as well as his fundraising pace, will be impossible for another Republican to overcome.

So his Congressional seat will be open, a reality that the Suffolk County Republican Party is swiftly preparing for.

Zeldin will lose the gubernatorial race whether his opponent is Andrew Cuomo, Leticia James, or someone else. He would have to utterly dominate the statewide suburban vote to an extent he has not even achieved in his home county, while finishing with 29-34% of the New York City vote, which no Republican since Bloomberg has done. I'll repeat that last part: a visibly Trump-aligned Republican couldn't jump in a time machine and win 30% of votes in New York City 20 years ago, let alone 30% in today's considerably more progressive, leftist NYC, where establishment Democrats are picked off in primaries at will by Democratic Socialists of America-aligned candidates.

There is no bigger fool in politics, than a candidate who doesn't understand their own odds. And Lee Zeldin, stable maniac he may be, is not a fool. Barring a supremely credible third party leftist challenger in the general election to split the Democratic vote -a miracle event, and we plan for likelihoods, not miracles - Lee Zeldin will lose the election, and he knows it.

Why is this relevant to the open NY-01 seat? Because Zeldin's gubernatorial strategy will have direct impacts on this race, and many others.

The Republicans' best available strategy can be summed up like this:

Partisan turnout is the prime-mover of mid-term election upheaval. Donald Trump was a godsend for Republican turnout when he was on the ballot the first time. Donald Trump was a godsend for Democratic organizing and turnout, when he was in office but not on the ballot. And Trump drove turnout in both directions, when he ran for re-election.

Without Trump on the ballot, and with the House of Representatives Majority on the line, Republicans need turnout drivers. Right now (and this could change significantly) Joe Biden enjoys good approval ratings, and is not likely to face a mid-term backlash in New York State. Yes, Republicans are mad at him, but the urgency isn't quite there. That's not the case with NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Enter Lee Zeldin, who is one of the most beloved figures in MAGA World, not just in Suffolk County but across the country. A fact that's born out by his raw number of small, grassroots donors in every zip code. Lee Zeldin is one of the House leaders in small donations and has a massive media following, fed by his repeat appearances on FOX News. Zeldin has attracted big name MAGA stars at his fundraisers, including Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and Donald Trump Jr.

If I had to draw up a national Top 5 Most Beloved and a national Top 5 Most Hated within the MAGA movement, Zeldin and Cuomo would both make appearances.

So NY Republicans will have a superstar in Zeldin at the top of the ballot during the mid-terms, and Zeldin's campaign will be hyper-focused in swing Congressional districts where there are Democratic incumbents or Open Seats, including his own.

If the strategy pays off, Zeldin will achieve 43-47% of the vote, and create enough down ballot momentum to flip NY-03 (Suozzi), NY-18 (Maloney), and NY-19 (Delgado), while protecting NY-02 (Garbarino), NY-11 (Malliotakis), NY-22 (Tenney), and NY-24 (Katko), and help Republicans flip State Senate seats in counties like Nassau. This result would give the GOP a better than good chance at reclaiming the House Majority, and possibly break the Dems' supermajority in the NY State Senate. [Note: Redistricting will have an impact that we can't yet account for]

What's in it for Zeldin? He'll be primed for a key role in the Trump 2024 campaign, and thus the second Trump Administration if Biden loses. Don't discount the remote but real possibility that Zeldin could put himself in position to be considered as Trump's running mate. Zeldin could also land a prime gig at FOX News, more high profile than what he could get now.

What does this all mean for NY-01? It means that the Democratic candidate, while not directly running against Zeldin, will have to grapple with his campaign strategy all the same, and the controlled chaos populism that is his messaging signature.

What advantages will Suffolk County Republicans have in NY-01? Their biggest local advantage is the supreme level of party infrastructure they command at the town levels. 5 of the 8 Suffolk Towns spanned by NY-01 district lines are controlled by Republican Town Supervisors. If you just take the three most populous towns (Brookhaven, Islip, and Smithtown) which make up nearly 80% of NY-01's population, all three are unanimously controlled by Republicans from the townwide seats to council seats, save for one council district in Brookhaven (and soon, one council district in Islip). That's a massive advantage of influential elected officials and patronage employees who owe their living to the party.

The GOP advantage is more pronounced when you examine conservative influence in fire departments, civic associations, and even on many school boards. This translates to a mass of committee members, corporate donors, municipal contractors and labor unions who make a point to bet on the winning side, and municipal employees who are often the best source of volunteer hours. Another advantage: the GOP is unlikely to have a primary, and will name their candidate. Their authoritarian committee structure has its advantages, and in the one case where Chairman Jesse Garcia's hand-chosen candidate was challenged in a primary (NY-02, 2020), the challenger was crushed. Primaries can actually be good for parties, but the one indisputable advantage of having no party primary is that it allows the candidate to fundraise and message squarely for the general election.

What advantages will Suffolk County Democrats have in NY-01? Money, name recognition, and the benefit of running for an open seat. Despite having the superior local donor base in Suffolk, Republican national fundraising is critically weak at the moment, while Democrats continue to fundraise in record numbers. This will impact competitive house seats all over the map, and without Zeldin running for re-election, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is likely to be far more active in funneling donors and resources to this district. Democrats also have arguably the two strongest primary candidates coming out of the gate in Legislators Kara Hahn and Bridget Fleming than they've had since prior to 2018 (recall that Perry Gershon and Nancy Goroff, while very strong, respectively, were unknowns when they launched, while better known past contenders like Vivian Viloria-Fisher and Kate Browning were not as prolific and were years removed from their past incumbencies).

Unless Brookhaven Town Supervisor Ed Romaine enters the race (unlikely), both Hahn and Fleming would have name recognition and media advantages over any candidate the GOP could pluck from the county legislature or town boards. If you could handpick the strongest possible Democrats from the two NY-01 base areas (The East End and the North Shore of Brookhaven), you would probably pick Hahn and Fleming. There is a greater than 99% chance that one of those two candidates will be the Democratic nominee, and that fact should give Democrats confidence.

The X-Factor for both Dems and Republicans: Andrew Cuomo. The Governor is sitting on the worst approval ratings of his tenure in office, and whether you buy or sell Cuomo as a strong candidate in the 2022 General, the fact is that the NY-01 Democratic candidate will be married to Cuomo's credibility with the electorate. The Democrat, specifically, will field questions about Cuomo's sexual harassment allegations, the nursing home scandal, and a COVID-19 strategy that in recent months seems to be based more on political realities than science. If Cuomo decides to seek re-election and faces a primary, it could cause a schism down ballot that Democrats won't recover from. If, on the other hand, Cuomo doesn't run and a candidate like Tish James cruises to the nomination, it would be a major coup for Democrats in local races like NY-01.

The 7 Keys to a Democratic Victory in NY-01

To pull this off, the Democratic candidate cannot run a predictable and safe campaign. There has to be a comfortable level of distinction from past attempts, and a few calculated risks with high potential payoffs. These are 7 strategies that I believe will be critical to the Democratic candidate declaring victory in this race.

1. Transcend The District

The phrase, "All politics is local" is becoming increasingly less true, from school board races all the way up to the Governorship. And this is especially pronounced in Congressional races, where House candidates and the perception of their campaigns is driven as much by forces outside the district as inside of it.

Why does this matter? Because the candidate perception inside NY-01 will be shaped and influenced by what other people are saying, and that drives momentum as well as dollars. In fact, outside-the-district perceptions can have inside-the-district impacts that cannot be bought. Perhaps they can be measured, though.

I put together a spreadsheet of every Democrat who flipped a red House district in 2018 and 2020, minus Pennsylvania (data was not available for this state). It also includes the 2018 and 2020 NY-01 Democratic candidates, Perry Gershon and Nancy Goroff, as well as the 2018 NY-02 Democrat Liuba Grechen-Shirley. There are three categories of data for all 40 successful House Dems, plus the three local runner-ups: In-District Donations, Out-of-District Donations, and Small Donations, each as a percentage of total funds raised (data courtesy of OpenSecrets.org)

Conventional wisdom says that a strong candidate has a high percentage of donors who live in the district, but that doesn't correlate with successful challengers. You'll notice a trend among the Dems who flipped red seats: most of them had a relatively high percentage of outside donors, coupled with an unusually high percentage of small donors. This indicates two things: winning challengers attract attention from outside PACs and large donors, and winning challengers win the hearts of small donor Democrats from around the country who have adopted them as "their" candidate (often from districts where the local Democrat has no chance of winning).

So for example, a successful challenger with 85% of donations from outside their district usually had 18-25% of their raised funds come from small donors, which is an extraordinarily high number for well-funded candidates.

In 2018 and 2020, out of the 40 successful Dem challengers measured, the average percentage of donors Outside-the-District was 83.11%, and the average percentage of small donors was 17.82%.

However, in NY-01, Perry Gershon had 72.85% and 7.25% in these respective categories, well under the average. And it was no different for Nancy Goroff in 2020, who had 69.66% and 10.75% respectively. That would put Gershon and Goroff as having the 4th and 5th worst percentage of small donors on this list, and the 8th and 5th worst percentage of outside donors. Only three winning challengers boasted worse combinations of these percentages than the NY-01 Dems: Donna Shalala (FL-27), Jeff Van Drew (NJ-02), and Kathy Manning (NC-06). Out of those three, Shalala lost re-election in 2020, Van Drew switched to the Republican Party, and Manning won in a newly-drawn blue district after losing in a swing district in 2018.

The numbers indicate that a winning Democratic challenger has to generate national media coverage and digital media momentum to attract out-of-district attention. It's not attention for attention's sake: swing voters and low turnout Democrats are drawn to candidates who appear to be unique from the ordinary. Looking at this list of candidates, it's easy to spot people who went on to establish themselves as media stars: names like Katie Porter, Katie Hill, Lucy McCBath, Sharice Davids, and Abigail Spanberger. Many of these candidates I recognize as Democrats who had particularly good digital media presence before they won. That is no accident, and it's reflected in the donor data.

In 2018, NY-02 candidate Liuba Grechen-Shirley lost her bid to unseat long-time incumbent Pete King. Liuba lost the race with just under 47% of the vote, but she also came closer to unseating King than any previous Democrat, and performed in-line with Gershon and Goroff, who each raised close to three times the total amount that Liuba raised. What was the difference? Liuba raised 84.67% and 28.61% from out of district and small donors respectively, which would place her in the elite category among challengers who flipped red districts, had she won. Her small donations percentage was 2nd highest on the list.

These numbers were driven by her campaign that made news by winning a Supreme Court case that led to a campaign finance rules breakthrough for women candidates with children, and the momentum carried from there with several viral tweets throughout her campaign, and a celebrity appearance from comic Amy Schumer at a comedy show fundraiser that packed a large theatre. Her campaign drew the attention of national Democratic superstars like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren. Was it enough to win? No. But Liuba's ability to transcend her district, born not solely from charisma but also a combination of creative strategic factors, enabled her to dominate a heated local primary, and over-perform in the general election in a race that wasn't expected to be that competitive. Two years later in the same district with a major funding advantage and open seat, Democrat Jackie Gordon performed worse.

Don't confuse "transcendent" with "quality candidate". There are many successful challengers on this list who are not charismatic, do not possess great oratory skills, and generally don't own the room when they enter. And there are absolute rockstar candidates nationwide who failed to get out of their primary or attract outside attention.

This data does not reflect some natural quality that candidates do or don't possess - it's a reflection on media and messaging strategy. There are tens of thousands of Democrats in NY-01 who really liked Perry and/or Nancy as candidates, myself included. But the question is: did they receive the level of attention and quality of coverage needed to win? Transcending the district has been a problem for every Democrat in NY-01, including past primary challengers. Overcoming this problem means placing our candidate's messaging, branding, and digital strategy within the context of a basic question: How does this create a narrative that fuels universal interest in our candidate? That question can also be answered by addressing several of the strategic points below, including...

2. Define The Culture War On Our Terms

Democrats have a bad habit of avoiding anything remotely controversial, only to allow themselves to be dragged into it anyway on someone else's terms.

Here is a fact: every Democrat running in 2022 will be connected by their Republican opponent to socialism, Black Lives Matter, race riots, Critical Race Theory, and voter fraud. No matter what you say or don't say. And whether or not swing voters believe it has nothing to do with how hard the Democrat defends themselves.

If someone publicly announced to your next door neighbor that they live next to a killer, and you had a million dollars to defend yourself in the media, what would be your strategy? Would your messaging be, "I'm not a killer!" The more you remind people of an allegation, even through denial, the truer it becomes in their mind.

Or would you spend that money reminding people what a good neighbor you are, and by the way, here are some reasons why the person living on the other side might actually be the killer? Defend yourself in less words than it took the other person to defame you, then counter-claim in a way that keeps them on the defense.

In boxing, we call that counter-punching.

And in politics, like boxing, the winner is usually the person who landed more punches while taking less damage.

How could this work in NY-01? Simple. We have to attack the Republicans, in graphic, emotionally gut-wrenching terms, on the most controversial political action in modern memory: the Jan. 6th capitol riot.

Democrats never really went after Zeldin as hard as we should have. There were painfully few communications sent out about his ties to extremism and white nationalists, including Sebastian Gorka and Stephen Bannon. You don't just link Zeldin with them - you drill down into Gorka and Bannon, make the commercials and mailers about them, and link Lee Zeldin at the end. That's how it should have been done to Zeldin from the jump.

Whoever the Republicans choose to succeed Zeldin, they must be tied to the Jan. 6th riots over and over. Every defense against a Republican Culture War attack must include a counterpoint about Jan. 6th.

As far as our messaging is concerned, every Republican running for office is as guilty as the man who beat a D.C. police officer to death with the American flag on the capitol steps. The Democrat has to run against their opponent as if they are running against the very man who was stalking the House chambers on Jan. 6th with zip-ties, calling for the hanging of AOC and Pence.

Generic mailers on the SALT tax repeal aren't going to cut it.

The events of Jan 6th glorified insurrection, cop killing, and conspiracy mongering. We have video of it, right down to the smallest detail.

For the Democratic candidate to win the culture war messaging, they must not utter a sentence with their opponent's name that does not include a point about Jan. 6th.

In addition, the Democrat cannot appear disconnected from a majority of registered Democrats on cultural issues. In Suffolk County, in races up and down the ballot, this has too often been the case and, in my view, has had negative impacts on turnout. No one is asking our candidate to be a social justice warrior with the wokest hot take on Twitter. But we do need our candidate to be identifiable with the social views of our base, as well as the candidate's running mates down ballot.

3. Don't Be Over-Consulted

All politics isn't local. But some politics still is!

There is no doubt that electoral politics has been in the era of Big Consulting for quite some time, and it's only getting worse. This is a product of federal elections becoming far more complex, from everything to advertising, event planning, canvassing, and fundraising. It wasn't until 10 years ago that "paid canvassing" was even a thing. Now, some federal campaigns don't even bother soliciting volunteers to knock doors! Races are more expensive than at any other point, involve more planning, and therefore require large organizations that run well. If you're going to achieve this level of planning and execution on your own, it takes significant volunteer dedication, coordination, and training.

Turns out, doing that is not easy and 99% of candidates plus their inner circles do not possess the ability to learn how to do this on a large scale in under a year, or if they do, simply don't have the time. So in the era of $6 million House races, consulting firms set up to handle the strategic and organizational motherload are a necessary evil.

Many of them are great at what they do. Many are not. And for small money candidates that can't afford major league firms, there are smaller outfits ready to take their money too.

The choke point of the Big Consulting-Big Candidate partnership is when the consultant manages the campaign instead of the other way around.

Two giants red flags: your consulting firm should not be your campaign manager, and your consulting firm should not manage your campaign account.

Why? Because a consultant's goal is not to win, it's to make money. Winning builds repertoire, and repertoire earns clients, but every consulting firm on planet earth with more than a few years in business has a lopsided Win-Loss record in the L column. And it doesn't matter. If a consultant has had nothing but a cup of coffee with a winning candidate, they have a testimonial from that candidate. "Best cup I ever had, contributed to victory." There has to be separation between a campaign account, and the consultant. Otherwise, it's like paying a wolf to manage a hen house.

It's not just the consultants who can wield too much power within a campaign. The truth is, there are competing interests, all with their own strengths, biases, and blind spots. That includes the local party establishment, local activists, DCCC mercenaries who travel state to state working on different campaigns, and whiz kids who work grueling campaign hours for crap pay as they build their resume.

The trend that I've noticed in not just here Suffolk County, but around the state, is that Democratic candidates build out a team from their comfort zones during the start of the primary, and fail to adjust when necessary. Candidates produced from local legislative bodies are far too establishment centric, because that's the world they've lived in for so long, and their digital outreach and messaging suffers for it. Progressive candidates surround themselves with activists who have a tendency towards magical thinking when it comes to real time strategy. Well-funded first time candidates are more in-tune with the consultant and finance world, or the Beltway crowd.

The 2022 Democratic nominee in NY-01 will have to maintain a proper balance between committee, activists, and consultants.

In particular, I think the committee establishment's weak point is digital outreach. You can kind of get away with that in local races, but having less than stellar digital in a House race is absolutely lethal.

Consultants must manage digital, with constant audience testing and feedback from local grassroots Dems, students, parents, and seniors.

On the other hand - I think consultants need to be kept as far away from field management as possible. Paid canvassing is so much less effective when canvassers know nothing about the district. Consultants make boatloads of money off of recruiting, training, managing, and paying people to knock on doors. In reality, this is one of those areas where campaigns can absolutely handle this themselves, in partnership with committees.

Big time field consultants far too often have poor training practices, are abusive towards volunteers, don't properly manage canvassers, and when put in charge of compensating the canvassers, are egregiously late with payments or outright stiff them (which then gets blamed on the candidate). These companies are a horror show.

You don't need a field consultant to train, manage, and pay people. Just a team of paid field leaders and, if necessary, a candidate can just flat out pay everybody, including committee members, to canvass. Either way, put district leaders to work. These folks know the area, they have cache with voters, and we must leverage that.

To be quite honest, I thought Nancy Goroff's field operation in 2020 was a good representation of this model, and it would have been interesting to see how it worked had COVID-19 not restricted everybody to phone banking.

4. REFOCUS ADS AND OUTREACH: Split Ad Budgets Equally Between Digital and Television, Invade Social Inboxes, More Texting and Kill The Postcard Party.

Winning challengers in Congressional races routinely spend $4-8 million - sometimes they spend that much just to get within a few points of victory. I think campaigns could reach just as many if not more voters, with higher quality outreach, spending much less.

There are several campaign cottage industries that are getting rich off candidates, with direct mail being the biggest culprit. Mailers seem to get more frequent each cycle, and direct mail companies produce nearly all research related to the effectiveness of direct mail, so we'll never really know to what extent campaigns need it. That's how you wind up with idiotic money-burning strategies like, "Hey, what if we sent three or four mailers out the same day! Flood their entire mailbox with our mail, same day."

That's right up there with, "Hey, what if we ran a social media account off of paid engagement and nothing was organic!"

And, "Hey, in-between knocking on everybody's doors, calling them on their cell phones, and paying for robo-calls, let's experiment with texting but not TOO much because...texting could be annoying."

Also, "Hey, you know what our volunteers should be doing as we prepare to spend $2 million packing tens of thousands of mailboxes with 15 pieces of professional grade direct mail per week? They should spend hours hand-writing crappy postcards that we send once to 400 people. Cause it's fun."

And my personal favorite, "Hey, what if our ad spending allocations were only 10% different than they were prior to the popularization of internet and Smart TVs?"

Just to be clear, these aren't all problems that have necessarily plagued NY-01 candidates - past strategies in these areas, from what I can tell, have ranged from great, to average, to bad.

In 2022, the Democratic candidate will need to accelerate in a more progressive direction concerning ad spending and outreach.

Digital ads must take equal or greater priority than television ads. From 2016-2020, digital ad spending went from 2% of total ad spends to 18%. Instead of adjusting ad budgets to that level, the NY-01 candidate should anticipate and arrive at a digital ad spend percentage that is closer to what it will be in 2024. Product advertising has already made this adjustment, and is far ahead of political advertising when it comes to digital buys. I propose a full 50/50 split between digital and television. Local broadcast television advertising is dropping precipitously in favor of digitally-purchased Connected TV/Smart TV ad buys that appear via streaming apps like Hulu and YouTube. These advertisements are far more targeted, and far less regulated than traditional television ad buys. More of the right people will see the candidate's ads, at cheaper cost. In addition, social media advertising should be more focused on quality video content than money-begging. A fundraising pitch should not be the first interaction a voter should have with a candidate on Facebook.

List building should migrate out of ad spaces and into inboxes. The best asks are personalized. Volunteers should be deputized to build relationships on social media, and prime targeted voters for supporting our candidate before moving towards a personalized inbox or DM request to donate or volunteer. Every person who likes a candidate's status update or Instagram photo with even a slight degree of frequency should receive a direct message from someone involved with the campaign. Solicit their opinion on the campaign before you solicit them for money or volunteer hours. If you do the former, you'll achieve the latter, and your lists will grow in quality.

Texting parties should permanently replace postcard parties.

When I ran for Brookhaven Town Supervisor in 2019, I was broke and facing a behemoth of an incumbent. I had no choice but to invest in outreach methods that could touch a large amount of people at low cost. I was the very first local candidate in Suffolk to use mass texting for a municipal election. And I was among a crop of candidates, over a couple of cycles, who began to routinely use postcards throughout the course of a local campaign.

Texting and postcard parties are fun, and I highly recommend them for candidates who are on a shoestring budget like I was.

For $5 million Congressional campaigns, it's imperative that you stop holding postcard parties. You don't need them - you're already investing heavily in direct mail. Moreover, the postcard party has become the default cop-out action for volunteers who don't want to do anything else. It's bad enough that the era of paid canvassing has killed peoples' desire to knock doors for free. The COVID-19 lockdown further killed off canvassing and led to silly opinions of convenience like, "Actually, phones might be better than doors anyway!" And with the advent of postcard parties, the lazification of the modern Democratic volunteer is near complete.

I'm kidding. Sort of. Democrats really do have the best, most dedicated volunteers, and often we just want guidance as to how we can best contribute to a campaign.

So campaigns need to help our folks by letting them know that postcards are off the menu for multi-million dollar campaigns because they're redundant, but they can have just as much fun (and drink just as much beer and wine!) at a texting party, without making their hands cramp trying to write a cursive S in neon blue. Save that effort for the legislative and town council candidates!

Texting, on the other hand, has become the very best method of reaching voters under the age of 40. Political texts have a 99% read rate, and you can directly get people to your website, volunteer form, ActBlue page, or anywhere else. Campaigns have done a great job moving towards text messaging since 2018, but it's time to accelerate the process.

As campaigns shift dollars from television to digital, list build more directly via social, and accelerate the texting campaign, they should reduce the number of mailers by a small order, experiment with different timing on direct mail that does get sent out (like prioritizing early introductory pieces before the Republican has a chance to his mailboxes), and shift most of the phonebanking to late GOTV (Get Out The Vote period) when following up with voters who identified as supportive of the campaign takes priority.

5. Leverage Local Issues That Connect With Larger Narratives

Platforms aren't so simple that you can just take a position and win or lose because people agree or disagree. Too many local Democrats tell our candidates what they need to run on, instead of recognizing that what might be in this person's best interest, is to run on issues that motivate them to be in public service.

If you're an environmentalist, your number one issue should be the environment. If child care funding got you into politics to begin with, run on child care.

What our candidate shouldn't do is run on something they don't really care about. And what they definitely shouldn't do is run on nothing. There have been instances where local Congressional candidates didn't have a tangible platform until midway through the primary. That's cowardice, it's evasive, and it will turn people off. Call me old school, but I think a candidate should have their platform published before they ask for a dime of anyone's money.

You need time to build and establish a brand that connects to things people care about. Whatever your platform is centered around, it needs to create urgency and paint a narrative. Urgency motivates voters to turn out. Narrative creates a bond between a person and a brand.

Personally, I don't think people care about the SALT tax repeal like they did in 2018, and Democratic voters in NY-01 have been conditioned not to expect tangible support for Medicare 4 all. So for the moderates and progressive who continuously argue about which of these two issues should take priority, speaking from a standpoint of what I think the candidate should run on, I don't see either of these issues as needle movers.

What I do see, are two hyper issues that have serious potential to drive local turnout while connecting with people to a degree that transcends the district.

The first local issue is the Brookhaven Landfill. The areas surrounding the landfill are heavily Democratic and include many low turnout districts. The people in these towns, from North Bellport to Medford and Mastic, feel ignored and left at the mercy of a town (Brookhaven) that is content to let them be poisoned by potentially toxic ash. It's an issue that I have first-hand experience campaigning on, and know that audiences outside of the landfill areas deeply care about this issue once it's been explained to them in urgent terms.

Most importantly, there is a grassroots group in the area, the Brookhaven Landfill Action and Remediation Group (BLARG), which has achieved incredible success in pressuring the town to take action, and have hit their local media stride by putting the spotlight on an issue that once upon a time did not get much coverage.

The NY-01 Democratic candidate should meet with BLARG, and develop a federal and state action plan which is published near the top of the candidate's platform. The candidate should hold campaign events centered on this issue.

Doing this would connect the candidate's platform to the wider theme of environmental justice, which has a national constituency due in large part to there being other toxic landfills in areas of color around the country. People in states everywhere can understand and identify with a narrative about injustice at an environmentally toxic site, pitting a town against its underdog residents.

The second local issue with federal connections is infrastructure. NY-01 residents suffer with some of the worst road infrastructure in the state, despite paying exorbitant property taxes. If the Republicans are successful in defeating President Biden's massive infrastructure bill in Congress, our Democratic candidate must campaign frequently on the idea that Republicans killed our chance to have key infrastructure improvements at a time when our roads and highways have never been worse.

6. COVID-19 Must Not Impact The Way We Campaign in 2022

Democratic candidates did the right thing by not campaigning in-person last year due to COVID restrictions.

But here's a fact: we ceded a major advantage to the Republican Party, who was able to go door to door meeting folks while Democrats remained at home. There is no doubt in my mind that this contributed to Democrats' losing margin here in Suffolk County, up and down ballot.

Fast forward to the present day. Adult vaccination rates are climbing past 60%. The economy is opened back up, and mask mandates are lifting by the week. By next year, mask mandates in New York will likely be gone, with the economy opened up at 100% capacity.

I know some people are hesitant, but if we want to win this open seat, every Democratic volunteer has to be willing to knock on doors and speak directly with voters. No literature drops - we have direct mail for that. It has to be quality, in-person interaction like before 2020.

7. Keep Our House In Order

The last point is the most brief, but could be the most important. I don't fear a divided primary - personally, I don't think primaries have hurt our candidates the past three cycles, as loyalist hold-outs couldn't possibly have made up the vote differentials. And I don't suspect that there will be any dirty campaigning between Kara Hahn and Bridget Fleming, two class individuals and colleagues who are widely respected.

What I fear is old grudges within our committees, permeating throughout the duration of the election cycle.

The eventual candidate and party leaders must make it known that there will be zero tolerance for personal attacks, rumor mongering, grudge holding and general refusal to participate in the campaign alongside a fellow Democrat based on personal differences or territorialism. The Republicans certainly don't tolerate this crap, and neither should Democrats.

Frankly, we don't have the luxury.

If committee members or volunteers want to prioritize their egos and axe-grinding, there shouldn't be space for them in our organization. Full stop.

The 2022 election is that important. This is Democrats' best chance to win back NY-01, and we have to get right.

Will Ferraro is a Democratic organizer and Founder/Co-President of the Central Brookhaven Democratic Club and Brookhaven Action Network. He was previously the 2019 Democratic candidate for Brookhaven Town Supervisor, and a former school board trustee in the Middle Country Central School District.