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Few politicians had a rougher 2022 midterm election cycle than Mondaire Jones, who faced newly steep competition in his district north of New York City after a tumultuous state redistricting process, then ran unsuccessfully for a new seat in Brooklyn. As Jones makes a bid for his former House seat this year — and as Democrats try to regain their majority — he has laid blame for the party’s lackluster midterm performance at the feet of the state’s party leaders, including Governor Kathy Hochul.
In an interview with The New Yorker published on Wednesday, Jones said that “gross incompetence” from Democrats in Albany was to blame for the midterm results and appeared to suggest that former governor Andrew Cuomo, who was known for his controlling personality, might have been better at keeping the party on track during that election cycle. (Notably, Cuomo nominated the Court of Appeals judges who voted ultimately against the state legislature’s aggressive gerrymander, which could have netted Democrats even more seats.)
“I want my Democratic governor of New York to be a political animal — I want them to maximize Democratic power,” Jones said. “I want my Democratic governor of New York to be Nancy Pelosi, O.K.? And not some, like, little bitch who is afraid to stick his or her neck out.”
Despite specifically naming the state’s highest office, which Hochul currently occupies, Jones insisted that she wasn’t his target. “By the way, I’m not talking about any specific person,” he told the outlet.
But after the interview was published, the New York Times reported that Jones had called Hochul Tuesday night to apologize for his comments which he confirmed in a statement to the outlet. “While I was not talking about the Governor, and made clear during the interview that I was not referring to the Governor, I should have chosen my words more wisely,” Jones said. “I have spoken with the Governor and apologized for this distraction.”
When asked by Politico about Jones’s comments Wednesday, Hochul acknowledged that he called her and said she accepted the former congressman’s apology. The governor said she hasn’t read the New Yorker piece, but said she didn’t take Jones’s words as an attack against her.
If Jones was indeed airing frustrations about Hochul, he’s hardly the first to do so. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom Jones name-checked in his own comments, has made no attempts to hide how she feels about the governor’s midterm performance. In a 2023 interview with the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, Pelosi suggested that the state party’s mishandling of the issue of crime played a key role in their midterm losses, saying it needed to be “dealt with early on, not 10 days before the election.”
“The governor didn’t realize soon enough where the trouble was,” Pelosi added.
Pelosi, whose is known for her political savviness, continued to point to the losses in New York a year later. During a Politico event during the Democratic National Convention last month, she attributed the party losing to the House to “five seats in New York,” pointing to Hochul’s 2022 governor’s race where crime became the defining issue of that cycle. Though the former Speaker cites New York, Republicans were also able to flip a similar number of House seats in California, Pelosi’s home state, in that same election cycle.
Hochul has pushed back against that characterization. “I’ll tell you this. No governor in the history of the state of New York has worked harder to elect members of Congress than I have,” Hochul said in an August interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “We are going to win this on the ground because I know how to do this. I now have the chance to focus on this.”
With November approaching, the party is hoping to flip back as many of the now Republican-held House seats as possible. Currently, Cook Political Report ranks the races for the districts held by Congressmen Anthony D’Esposito, Marc Molinaro, and Jones’s rival Mike Lawler as toss-ups.
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