New York Democrats are leveling up, by necessity ON POLITICS

New York Democrats, at last, seem to understand the urgency of their situation.

Recently Hu Post reported that Hakeem Je ries, the House minority leader, was spearheading a coordinated e ort within the state Democratic Party to ensure Republicans don’t run roughshod over Democrats again in the state. In part the move is a concession that the statewide party itself isn’t up to the task, but it’s also good for Democrats that the state party, led by Jay Jacobs, is even engaging at all.

is move comes in addition to a $45 million super political action committee run by House Democrats that was set up solely to aid congressional Democrats in New York. A few years ago all of this would have seemed strange. New York is a deep-blue state, and the idea that a congressional majority could hinge on what happens here (and not, necessarily, in Ohio, Michigan or Wisconsin) is a testament to how far local Democrats have fallen—at least in the suburbs beyond the city.

gled to return as governor against Republican Lee Zeldin, Democrats lost every House election on Long Island and dropped two seats north of the city.

Sean Patrick Maloney, the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, lost a redrawn district in Westchester and Rockland counties, and the seat Antonio Delgado vacated in the Hudson Valley fell to Republican Marc Molinaro, the former Duchess County executive.

ROSS BARKAN have for these suburban voters next year. What can they promise? What can they deliver? e good news is that national trends should be in their favor. they don’t want to keep losing it in subsequent years, they’ll need to learn the virtues of party building.

No answer on crime Democrats—Hochul in particular, who picked Delgado to be her running mate—were wholly unready to counter Republican narratives on crime, particularly the idea that changes to the state’s bail laws have fed an uptick in the city. ough the evidence linking the crime spike to a reduction in cash bail is weak (shootings and murders, although elevated from 2019 levels, have tailed o in the past year in the ve boroughs), Republicans were able to convince enough voters that Democrats didn’t have an answer on crime.

Joe Biden recently announced his re-election bid, and his presence at the top of the ticket should drive Democratic turnout, especially if his opponent is Donald Trump. Republicans such as Molinaro and Mike Lawler, the former assemblyman who defeated Maloney, should be especially worried. Westchester and the Hudson Valley are home to many liberal voters who will show up to vote against Trump and safeguard abortion rights.

Long Island, as always, is the wild card. e House super PAC and coordinated campaign through the state party may be enough to at least win back the Nassau County seats that were traditionally in Democratic hands. Su olk County has proved daunting for Democrats in the past decade.

In 2022, as Kathy Hochul strug-

What’s not yet clear is what overriding message Democrats will

In the longer term, Democrats will have to aggressively invest in building a large and functioning state party, which barely exists in its current form. If Democrats want to control the House in 2025, they’ll have to get New York right. And if

Quick takes

● Legislative leaders and Hochul have reached an agreement to raise the minimum wage to $17 an hour. Given the cost-of-living challenges in the city, few are likely to celebrate such a minuscule bump in pay.

● e new state budget does appear to provide funding for a pilot program that would make ve Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus routes free. e program is intriguing and could help many working-class New Yorkers travel around the city far more easily. ■

Ross Barkan is a journalist and author in New York City.

KATE WITTELS HR&A Advisors

INTERVIEW BY CARA EISENPRESS

Technology has altered the fabric of New York City through on-demand taxis (Uber), decentralized apartment-booking platforms (Airbnb) and never-ending e-commerce deliveries (Amazon). Kate Wittels has been working behind the scenes to get the city and the tech industry on the same page. From her post as head of the urban tech practice at HR&A Advisors, she has thought about how the city can attract more tech companies—and how they can engage with the public and provide economic opportunity to residents. She has also worked with both the government and the private sector to galvanize the city’s own tech adoption to improve municipal services and make sure that advancements reach all New Yorkers. And she says it’s important to see how those advancements play out before we over-regulate them.

Is New York ahead of the curve in terms of being a tech-forward city?

I know it’s a priority of the mayor. The MyCity app has been a big effort going back to Bill de Blasio and Michael Bloomberg—getting something out there to help the city transform. There are other cities that are willing to deploy tech in the public sector more easily, like San Jose, Houston and Nashville. I think we will get there.

What can technology do to benefit New York?

First, there’s government and city services. How do you improve the delivery of the service so residents benefit? Each time you have new technology, you have new ways of deploying it that can improve upon the service. Then you have the city’s big goals around climate, and we’ll need new tech to rapidly change how we approach building and installing EV chargers and putting in other infrastructure that’s needed. And then, it is a driver of

Dossier

WHO SHE IS: Head of the urban tech practice, HR&A Advisors

AGE: 43

RESIDES: Prospect Heights, Brooklyn

TECH ON THE GO: Wittel’s personal tech stack includes her favorite tools for getting around the city: Omny and Apple Pay. “I use them constantly,” she said.

MIDDLE GROUND: What drives Wittels is mediating between city officials and technology CEOs, two sides that often come at tech problems from totally different worlds. “It’s demystifying the process of finding the middle ground.”

A.I. MENU: The latest rage—generative A.I.—has not yet carved out a central place in Wittel’s work or life. She has found one decent use for ChatGPT. “I ask it for recipes for making dinner from what’s in my fridge.” our economy, accounting for a big share of city jobs.

Still, it wasn’t that long ago that New York drove away Amazon’s proposed HQ2. Were there any lessons from that episode?

I hear from companies now that as-ofright incentives are the third rail. The companies aren’t chasing it as much. They’re afraid to use it. There was a lot of momentum that had been building in Queens, but after we said no [to Amazon], companies left, including Citi. We did invest in Brooklyn, and that’s why it grew.

Will the promise of tech jobs wane as hiring weakens?

In the technology report we have worked on for over 10 years, we note that there are tech workers at tech companies and in the rest of the economy. It’s about one-third of all tech jobs that are at non-tech firms. They have had a hard time competing with the tech firms for talent. Now there is an opportunity to spread the talent through the rest of the economy, with non-brandname companies and smaller businesses. It’s also a great opportunity because a lot of our startups and newer companies are desperate for tech talent, so having talent be unlocked a little more lets it spread across all the companies in New York

Not everyone is gung ho about tech. There are calls to slow down on artificial intelligence and prohibit TikTok. New York state is regulating cryptocurrency, and City Council members have conveyed wariness about facial recognition and the centralized benefits app at recent hearings. How do you balance the worries and calls for regulation with the promise of

Anytime innovation is created, going back to the printing press, people are fearful that it’ll change our morals. But we do have to let tech breathe. We don’t want to have our most vulnerable be manipulated and abused and harmed, and we don’t want tech that goes against our basic commitments in the constitution. Worrying about monopolies of the bigger tech companies is fair too—it’s harder for startups to get started because of the

But we do need to let a lot of it play out. We can see how it’s adapted. For example, there was a lot of worry about the 15-minute grocery model. But then it fizzled. We have to let the market manage certain things. ■