The race between Representative Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican, and Max Rose, a Democrat, is a rare look at how national political campaign themes are playing in New York.
As a Democrat running for Congress in New York City, former Representative Max Rose would seem to have a straightforward playbook to follow: tie his Republican opponent to former President Donald J. Trump, pledge his commitment to the Democratic agenda and highlight his left-leaning stances on social issues that draw voters to polls.
But for Mr. Rose, the political calculus is far more complicated.
He is seeking to represent Staten Island, a borough with an independent streak and a larger share of Republicans than the rest of the city. Under the most favorable political conditions, Democrats like Mr. Rose have struggled to get traction there, and the challenge will be even greater during a pivotal midterm election year in which Republicans look poised to gain ground.
Across the country, a number of Democrats in crucial swing districts are trying to carve out identities independent of their party that will help them draw the moderate and unaffiliated voters they need to win, and help keep their party’s narrow majority in Congress.
But few have had to navigate this balancing act quite like Mr. Rose. In 2018, he defeated an incumbent Republican to take a House seat, only to lose it two years later to Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican whose re-election bid features an endorsement from Mr. Trump.
In this year’s rematch, Mr. Rose is working once more to convince voters that he is a common-sense politician who will put his constituents’ needs over politics.
“This is not a Trump district, it’s not a Biden district, it’s not a Republican district, it’s not a Democratic district,” Mr. Rose said this month, as he handed out fliers to voters at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, repeating what has become a mantra of his recent campaigns.
Ms. Malliotakis has followed her party’s strategy of seizing on voter concerns about the economy and public safety, pinning the blame for inflation and crime on Democrats, and trying to link Mr. Rose to national Democratic leaders and the party’s progressive wing.
But in a city and state where Democrats have a firm grasp on political power, she has also sought to cast the election as a referendum on President Biden and has appealed to undecided voters to elect her as a rebuke to one-party leadership.
“We need a balance,” Ms. Malliotakis said in an interview. “We don’t have that right now at the city, state or federal level. And I think the pendulum has swung too far to the left.”
It is a message that she expects to resonate in Staten Island, which has been a Republican stronghold. Though registered Democrats still outnumber registered Republicans in the borough, it is home to a significant number of working- and middle-class New Yorkers who lean conservative and who have generally preferred their politicians to be more like them.
Yet neither the island nor the district is a monolith: Staten Island’s northern neighborhoods tend to be liberal while those in the south are generally conservative, and the congressional district ropes in a section of Brooklyn — including parts of Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst and Dyker Heights — that has over the years tended to favor Democrats, even as Republicans have shown growing strength in recent elections.
A Spectrum News/Siena College poll of likely voters in the district released earlier this month found Ms. Malliotakis leading Mr. Rose by six percentage points, 49-43, roughly the same margin by which she defeated him in 2020. Among those who identified as independents, she held a 62-25 lead.
The poll found that 65 percent of likely voters in the district identified the economy as among their top two issues when deciding which candidate to back. Crime was the next-most important factor, at 42 percent. The poll echoed a recent New York Times/Siena College poll that found the economy to be the dominant concern for voters nationwide.
“People in this district — and most voters — go to the poll because of pocketbook issues,” said Christina Greer, an assistant professor of political science at Fordham University. “And so on the one hand, this election is about democracy and the ‘soul of the nation,’ as Joe Biden would say. But on the other hand, we do know that voters tend to go to the ballot box because they’re thinking about how they pay for groceries or gas.”
Mr. Rose has also sought to connect Ms. Malliotakis to the extremist wing of her party, pointing to her vote to decertify the 2020 presidential election results just hours after the deadly Capitol riots of Jan. 6, 2021.
That vote, Mr. Rose said, was “immediately disqualifying,” adding that he believed Ms. Malliotakis failed to meet the moral standards of her office and that he expected voters would punish her for that.
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“That’s morality. That’s values. That’s far beyond any single public policy issue,” he said.
At the start of the race, Mr. Rose’s path to victory looked clearer. During New York’s redistricting process, Democratic state lawmakers drew a map that tossed Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, a liberal bastion, into the district, which was expected to give Mr. Rose an advantage.
But a state court intervened earlier this year, creating a new map that largely restored the district to the one that chose Ms. Malliotakis in 2020, and supported Mr. Trump that year by about 10 percentage points.
Mr. Rose said he remained optimistic, insisting that over the past three campaigns he had spent months knocking on doors and canvassing at public events to build personal connections that would help him get re-elected.
Those ties were on display as he handed out leaflets to morning commuters, some of whom greeted him warmly, a few of whom asked for selfies and most of whom either politely took a flier or politely waved him away. One man gave him a hug and a handshake, saying that he had voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 but would be voting for Mr. Rose in November.
Still, to insist on his divergence from Democratic orthodoxy, Mr. Rose has had to walk a difficult line.
In 2020, he attacked former Mayor Bill de Blasio and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, separating himself from Democrats’ progressive flank. This year, he has distanced himself from the president and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, criticizing Mr. Biden’s actions on Covid-19 and immigration.
Though he served in 2021 as a senior adviser to Mr. Biden’s secretary of defense, Mr. Rose said this month that he does not think the president should run for re-election in 2024.
The issue, Mr. Rose said, was less about ideology and more about the need for generational change: Mr. Biden, Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Trump and their cohort had been in power too long, and Americans were eager for new, younger voices. “Across the board, the country does need a reset,” he said.
Ms. Malliotakis’s most forceful attacks have centered on crime and New York’s bail laws, which were changed in 2019 so fewer people would languish in jail awaiting trial if they could not afford bail. She, like state Republicans and even moderate Democrats like the city’s mayor, Eric Adams, blame the law for an uptick in crime in New York and have called for further alterations.
Mr. Rose was a federal legislator and not involved in the state bail reform efforts. But Ms. Malliotakis, who has been endorsed by the city’s major police unions, has criticized him as an ardent supporter of bail reform.
Mr. Rose pointed out that he and Ms. Malliotakis both agree that they would like judges to have more discretion over bail than the law currently allows. But though he acknowledged supporting criminal justice reform, he has said that he never supported the state’s initial changes, pointing to a letter that he and a bipartisan group of representatives sent in 2019, calling on the state to make revisions.
Ms. Malliotakis, for her part, has taken offense with Mr. Rose’s characterization of her position on abortion, which has been a focus of his campaign following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion.
His campaign released a pair of television ads this month asserting that Ms. Malliotakis had “voted to let states ban abortions with no exceptions.” One of the ads depicts a man whose wife apparently died in childbirth after not having access to an abortion.
In the interview, Ms. Malliotakis said that she supported exceptions from abortion restrictions in cases of rape, incest or where the life of the mother is at risk. She called Mr. Rose’s claims “shameless” and accused him of trying to “mansplain” her position.
But Ms. Malliotakis said that she does believe on restrictions in late-term abortions and that she opposes New York’s current law — which allows abortions after 24 weeks only if a fetus is not viable or if the procedure is necessary to protect the mother’s health — for being too permissive. She also earlier this year voted against House bills that would have prevented states from restricting abortions and blocked them from trying to limit access to out-of-state services.
But in the Spectrum/Siena poll of likely voters in the race, abortion ranked a distant fifth among deciding issues.