While there wasn’t a nationwide tsunami on Nov. 8, “Red Waves” unrolled as expected in some places across the country, such as in Texas and Florida, where Republicans enjoyed a historic midterms romp.
But “Red Waves” also stormed ashore in unexpected places, such as on New York’s Long Island and across its lower Hudson Valley.
Republicans entered the 2022 midterm election cycle needing to flip five seats to gain control of the U.S. House of Representatives for its next two-year term beginning in January.
A week after Election Day, the GOP was still one win away from securing that chamber majority. According to the Associated Press, with 13 mostly California races still uncalled, Republicans held a 217-205 advantage on Nov. 15.
Most forecasters put the eventual Republican House advantage at anywhere from 219-216 to 222-213.
Regardless how many majority seats the GOP captures, the party would not have secured the advantage without gaining seven seats just from Florida and New York.
Florida entered the midterm cycle with Republicans leading a 16-11 congressional contingent. After gaining four seats on Nov. 8, the Sunshine State will send a 20-8 GOP bloc to Washington, in January 2023.
New York entered the 2022 midterms with Democrats leading an 19-8 congressional delegation. The Empire State will send a Democrat-led 15-11 team to the House in January.
Before Nov. 8, the states’ combined 54 seats favored Democrats, 30-24. After the elections, the GOP is up 31-23—a combined gain of seven seats, two more than the five needed to secure House majority.
Messaging varied in securing GOP wins in each state—in Florida, fear of socialism resonated while in suburban areas of New York City, fear of crime drove voters to polls—but the courts also played a role.
NY Courts Acted, Florida Courts Didn’t
In New York, what the courts did helped shape the election. In Florida, what the courts didn’t do helped shape the midterms but left unresolved legal challenges that could reshape 2022 results and elections to come.
Following the 2020 Census, New York lost a congressional seat while Florida gained one. Instead of both states each having 27 congressional districts, Florida would have 28 and New York 26 beginning with 2023-2024 terms.
The 26-district map adopted by New York’s General Assembly was rejected as gerrymandering in court rulings. A judge ordered a special master to re-craft the maps for congressional and state senate districts.
As a result, the redrawn maps weren’t available until early June, forcing the state’s June 26 primaries to be postponed until Aug. 23 for congressional and state senate races.
According to analysts, the redrawn maps offered GOP candidates competitive odds in 15 to 17 districts, double the number on the map adopted by New York’s Democrat-controlled assembly.
Ultimately, the GOP gained three seats and Democrats lost four, trimming a 19-8 majority into a 15-11 Democrat-led contingent.
The opposite happened in Florida, where primaries and the general election were allowed to proceed despite state and federal suits claiming maps drawn by the legislature’s GOP leadership and Gov. Ron DeSantis unconstitutionally favored Republicans.
The suits’ argue the maps guaranteed Democrats losing three seats and Republicans gaining four, accurately predicting the 20-8 outcome confirmed by voters Nov. 8.
Those lawsuits, including one filed in Leon County Circuit Court led by the League of Women Voters, are headed for 2023 litigation. Rulings could skewer 2022 midterm results and reconfigure districts for future elections.
As Florida Republicans were racking up 20 congressional seats on Nov. 8, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied the state’s request to dismiss a suit alleging its redistricting is “intentionally racially discriminatory.”
The federal challenge claims the state’s redistricting plan violates the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and the 15th Amendment.
In redrawing its 27 districts into a new 28-district map, DeSantis rejected lawmakers’ draft and called an April special session to adopt his version, which did away with the state’s Fair Districts Amendment approved by voters in 2010 to preserve “historically performing minority districts.”
The state argues the amendment is a “racial gerrymander” that also violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause by prioritizing race over “compactness” in drawing districts.
Florida’s post-2010 Census congressional district map drafted in 2012 were also legally contested in court battles that lingered for four years. In 2016, the state’s Supreme Court re-crafted the congressional district maps that were in place for the 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections.
Florida ‘Wave’ Began in 2016
Florida has gone from a battleground purple state with pockets of deep blue against a red rural landscape to a solid bloc of radiant crimson since 2016 when Democrats had a 260,000 advantage in registered voters.
As of Nov. 1, the GOP had a 300,000 voter advantage in registrations, according to the Florida Secretary of State Office, meaning Republicans have gained more than a half-million registered voters in the past six years.
Boosted by the registration surge, DeSantis, his Cabinet, and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), all breezed to reelections by double-digit percentage points.
Buoyed by that same voter registration advantage, and also by courts allowing the election to proceed, Republicans rolled on Nov. 8 to winning a 20-8 congressional bloc.
Only five of the state’s 28 congressional races were deemed competitive. Republicans swept them all, including a Congressional District 2 (CD 2) clash between Rep. Neal Dunn (R-Fla.) and Rep. Al Lawson (D-Fla.), one of only two races between sitting House reps nationwide in the Nov. 8 midterms.
Dunn secured nearly 75 percent of the vote in dispatching Lawson, who had won three previous terms in CD 5, which is among the “historically performing minority districts” dissolved by DeSantis.
If there was drama in Florida’s midterms, it was in South Florida where Republicans defended gains made in the formerly blue stronghold since 2016.
In CDs 27 and 28, incumbent Republican Reps. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) and Carlos Giménez (R-Fla.) — who both defeated incumbent Democrats in 2020 — held off state Sen. Annette Taddeo.(D-Miami) and state Rep. Robert Asencio.(D-Miami) to keep those Miami-Dade County seats red.
With Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart’s (R-Fla.) reelection in CD 26, three of Miami-Dade County’s four congressional reps will again be Republican.
This is a county that former President Barack Obama carried by almost 24 percentage points in 2012 and, even while losing the state to former President Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton won by 30 points in 2016.
Florida Republicans deployed the standard partisan campaign package—inflation, border chaos, crime, federal overreach—in their campaigns but emphasized how they would confront “socialism” while labeling Democrats as “socialists.”
Vowing to fight “socialism” while claiming your opponent is a “socialist” has always been a winning argument in South Florida’s conservative Cuban community.
But during the 2022 midterms, in contested South Florida districts, such a strong anti-communism message also appeared to resonate among the broader population, which includes Latinos whose families have recently escaped from failed socialist regimes of Latin American dictators.
Court Ruling, Crime Fear Boost N.Y. Republicans
In New York, the GOP also deployed the standard partisan campaign package—inflation, border chaos, federal overreach, “socialism”—in their campaigns but emphasized fear of crime in declaring Democrats soft on criminals.
Republicans have always been competitive in upstate New York and remained so on Nov. 8 with GOP candidate Brandon Williams winning a contested Syracuse-area seat being vacated by Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.) but failing to unseat Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.) in a Rochester-area congressional district race.
Downstate, however, the GOP flipped two seats formerly occupied by Democrats on Long Island, and two more in the lower Hudson Valley, ousting five-term incumbent Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair who lost his own race.
Long Island and the lower Hudson Valley—like northern New Jersey and western Connecticut—are part of a sprawling suburban swath of commuter communities built around New York City.
The region’s 20 million residents are within the city’s massive media market, including television and tabloids such as the conservative New York Post, which inundates residents with ceaselessly updated accounts of crime and mayhem across the metropolitan area.
Republicans piggybacked their campaign messaging with the city’s media crime reporting, making it the campaign’s top issue. That emphasis may not have worked well for Republicans in many areas of the country but it certainly played as a top issue on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) campaigned extensively on crime, especially after two teenagers were shot outside his Long Island home in October. He nearly upset heavily favored Democratic incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul on Nov. 8 by almost exclusively bashing Democrats over crime.
On Long Island, voters said crime was their top concern in electing GOP candidates George Santos and Anthony D’Esposito in Long Island’s CD 3 and CD 4 races, replacing two retiring Democrats in 2023.
In CD 2, incumbent Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.) successfully defended his seat while Republican Nick LaLota won his CD 1 race to succeed Zeldin, meaning Long Island will send four GOP reps to the House in January.
Republicans also campaigned heavily on how Democrats have allowed urban crime to escape from the city to menace their safe streets in the Hudson Valley, taking two of the region’s three congressional seats..
The biggest upset in the state—and certainly among 2022 midterm wins most celebrated by Republicans nationwide—is Assemblyman Mike Lawler’s (R-Pearl River) victory over Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney in CD 17.
Lawler, a former Orangetown deputy town supervisor and New York Republican Party executive director, ousted Maloney, who was a five-term incumbent who had represented CD 18 for a decade but chose to run in CD 17 after redistricting because it appeared to be an easier path to reelection. That calculation proved to be mistaken.
Rather than square off with a fellow incumbent in newly crafted CD 17, which spans parts of Rockland, Dutchess, and Putnam counties, the district’s actual incumbent, Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), ran in deep blue Manhattan’s CD 10 Democratic primary, and lost.
Lawler defeated Maloney by about 3,200 votes, 50.6 percent to 49.4 percent, removing one Democrat while Republican Marc Molinaro’s victory in CD 19 moved another Hudson Valley blue seat into the red column.
The only congressional Democrat left standing in the Hudson Valley is Rep. Pat Ryan (R-N.Y.), the sitting congressional rep in CD 19 who on Nov. 8 won election in CD 18, where Maloney is now the lame-duck occupant.
Ryan, a former Ulster County executive, assumed the state’s lame-duck CD 19 seat in September after scoring an upset Aug. 23 special election victory over Molinaro, the Dutchess County Executive and GOP’s 2018 gubernatorial candidate.
Ryan’s special election victory in his closely-watched late summer battle against Molinaro buoyed Democrats’ hopes of blunting, if not reversing, the projected “Red Wave” that would deliver Republicans House and Senate majorities in 2023.
But in the end, while winning the CD 18 seat helped blunt Democratic losers on a national basis, Ryan’s victory leaves him as the only Democrat representing the congressional districts that frame New York City where, on Nov. 8, an unexpected “Red Wave” did, indeed, storm ashore.
