Is it possible that Rob Astorino could deliver a historic upset in the gubernatorial race? That will be the question in the final two weeks between last night’s debate and the election Nov. 4.
To judge by the polls, Gov. Cuomo’s re-election is a lead pipe cinch. I could find only one political sage who thinks Astorino has a chance. The others think the question is how close he’ll get.
Neither side landed anything like a knockout blow in last night’s debate.
The latest Siena poll has Cuomo ahead of Astorino 54 percent to 33 percent. That’s a lot softer than the 63 percent that Cuomo was running at this point against Carl Paladino. It is whereCuomo wound up with two weeks later.
At this stage of the race four years ago, Paladino, a political amateur, was floundering. Astorino, by contrast, is a veteran of political office, a Republican executive who was re-elected to lead, in Westchester, a Democratic county.
The governor’s lowest blows against Astorino in the debate were to suggest he’s running a racist county because he’s defending the county, as have Democrats before him, against lawsuits over housing.
Astorino’s reply is that he’s won handsomely in Democratic Westchester, proof of his ability to win with diverse voters in a county that is supposedly “where Republicans generally go to die.”
The Republican also also insists that he can shellac the governor upstate. Siena’s poll shows Cuomo ahead of Astorino upstate, 47 percent to 38 percent. But Astorino reckons upstate voters resent the extremism of Cuomo’s opposition to gun rights and support for late-term abortion.
He reckons that the key number to look at is not the one in the polls. It’s 0.7 percent.
That’s the economic growth in New York last year, emblematic of the fact that the state in the Cuomo years has been falling behind the national average. New York is now 46th in the nation.
Since Cuomo became governor, New York has added a paltry 502,000 private-sector jobs. Texas added 252,000 jobs last year alone. Astorino says that upstate New Yorkers are “dumbfounded” by these comparisons.
Particularly in view of the fact that Cuomo has blocked fracking, which could easily produce a boom and jobs upstate. That New York is the only state that has natural gas and doesn’t permit fracking is, says Astorino, “ludicrous.”
What about the award to Cuomo the other day from the Tax Foundation? It was for lowering the corporate tax rate. Cuomo touted it in the debate.
Astorino isn’t impressed, noting that New York is still at or near the bottom in the rankings of states’ business climate.
He calls that “ridiculous,” and asserts that New York still has the highest overall tax burden in the country.
“Eight different [income-tax] brackets!” he exclaims. He wants what he calls “flatter, fairer” taxes, with two brackets. He would set the bar at $300,000 in income for married persons filing jointly, $200,000 for individuals. Below those incomes, it would be 4 percent; above, 6 percent.
Astorino insists he’d take the tax rate for New York City residents to below 10 percent for the first time since 1960 (when Dwight Eisenhower was president, Nelson Rockefeller governor and Robert Wagner mayor).
On the sunset written into Cuomo’s cap on property taxes, Astorino is withering. Cuomo’s cap would end in 2017; it leaves New Yorkers unprotected from the Assembly, which need only refuse to act in order to kill the cap. Astorino would make the cap permanent.
Then there’s the corruption question. The debate last night sizzled with the question, though without casting much light.
Astorino at one point suggested that Cuomo could even get indicted by a federal prosecutor, Preet Bharara, who’s picking up the pieces from the governor’s disbandment of his own Moreland Act Commission.
Cuomo called Astorino’s sally outrageous. The Green Party socialist candidate, Howie Hawkins, put in a plug for complete public financing of campaigns.
No wonder Astorino has come out for the radical anti-corruption strategy of term limits — on which Cuomo is waffling — and penalizing felonious public employees by taking away their pensions.
So could Astorino win? The cognoscenti say “no,” but I’m not convinced. There is a governor who’s brought out an autobiography titled “All Things Possible”: great highs, and deep lows, and even bitter humiliations. The author is Andrew Cuomo himself.