How Zeldin’s Anti-Abortion Stance May Affect the N.Y. Governor’s Race

The confetti was still falling at her Democratic primary victory party Tuesday night when Gov. Kathy Hochul rolled out a general election warning: If her Republican opponent wins in November, he could follow the Supreme Court’s lead and curtail New Yorkers’ abortion rights.

Yet in his own victory speech, that Republican opponent, Representative Lee Zeldin, had not a single word to say about the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Just days after he had lauded the ruling, Mr. Zeldin instead stuck to criticizing Ms. Hochul’s handling of crime, inflation and the pandemic.

As New York enters what may be the most competitive general election the Empire State has seen in two decades, their divergent approaches were no accident.

To win in New York, a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one, Mr. Zeldin needs to reach well beyond his conservative base and present himself as a common-sense alternative in an effort to appeal to political independents and Democrats worried about public safety and spiking living costs.

To stop him, Ms. Hochul is determined to convince those same voters that Mr. Zeldin’s views are far more extreme than he lets on — above all, when it comes to a woman’s right to an abortion.

“This is not an ordinary Republican,” Ms. Hochul, the state’s first female governor, said Wednesday morning on NY1 shortly before rolling out a new website labeling Mr. Zeldin a figure from the “extreme fringes.”

“He also supports taking away women’s right to choose,” she said. “This is New York.”

Indeed, the issue has the potential to be an unusually potent one in a state like New York, which in 1970 became just the second in the nation to broadly legalize abortion. Since then, New Yorkers have never elected a governor who opposes legalized abortion, and they remain overwhelmingly supportive of abortion rights.

An average of recent polls calculated by The New York Times before the Dobbs decision showed that roughly 63 percent of adult New Yorkers believe abortion should be legal, compared with 32 percent who do not. Only seven states, and the District of Columbia, were more supportive.

Mr. Zeldin, a conservative four-term congressman from Long Island, has been a reliable vote to limit abortion access and to bar federal funds from going to Planned Parenthood. He co-sponsored legislation that would, with few exceptions, federally ban abortions after 20 weeks and criminally penalize doctors who violate it. Those positions have won him top marks from anti-abortion groups.

Just days before a draft of the Dobbs decision leaked this spring, Mr. Zeldin told New York Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, that he supported appointing a state health commissioner who “respects life as opposed to what we’re used to,” according to a recording of the event obtained by NY1.

“For a Republican to win in New York, you need to run the straight flush, a perfect campaign,” said Thomas Doherty, a top aide to the former Gov. George E. Pataki, a Republican, who suggested Mr. Zeldin may have made costly missteps by talking up his anti-abortion views.

“I don’t know what Zeldin’s thinking was, other than maybe he had a problem in the primary,” Mr. Doherty said.

Mr. Zeldin’s allies argue that Democrats are vastly overestimating how much everyday voters will care about the abortion issue come November, particularly at a time when many New Yorkers are fearful about public safety and struggling to make ends meet amid rising costs for rent, gas and groceries.

Those issues have helped drive Republicans to victory in Democrat-friendly turf in Virginia, New Jersey and parts of New York over the last year. In New York, polls consistently show voters believe the state — and the country — are headed in the wrong direction, views that Mr. Zeldin, a lawyer and Army veteran, hopes could help propel him to victory.

“The Democrats are pushing this abortion debate because they’ve failed so miserably in the other areas that they don’t want to talk about those things,” said Bruce Blakeman, the Republican Nassau County executive who upset a Democratic incumbent last November. Besides, he contended that many voters agree with Mr. Zeldin’s abortion stance.

“The fact that he may be more restrictive than others with respect to abortion is his personal choice,” Mr. Blakeman added.

Mr. Zeldin himself has repeatedly tried to stress that the governor has limited power to change abortion laws in New York, particularly given Democrats’ tight hold on the Legislature in Albany and a 2019 law codifying federal protections in case Roe was ever overturned.

“New York has already codified far more than what Roe provided, so the law in New York State is exactly the same the day after the Supreme Court decision gets released,” Mr. Zeldin said in a recent interview with The New York Times. (His spokeswoman did not return a request for comment for this story.)

But, as Ms. Hochul has shown by initiating an advertising campaign to clarify New Yorkers’ abortion rights and dedicating $35 million in state funds to promote abortion access, the governor does have broad discretion to interpret, enforce and reinforce the state’s status as an abortion safe haven.

If Mr. Zeldin may now be trying to sidestep the abortion issue as he heads into a general election fight, he has made no secret of his views in recent months.

When the Supreme Court handed down its decision last week, reversing nearly 50 years of precedent, the congressman celebrated it as“a victory for life, for family, for the Constitution, and for federalism” and shared his own experience as a parent of twin daughters born more than 14 weeks prematurely.

“In a state that has legalized late-term partial birth abortion and non-doctors performing abortion, in a state that refuses to advance informed consent and parental consent, and where not enough is being done to promote adoption and support mothers, today is yet another reminder that New York clearly needs to do a much better job to promote, respect and defend life,” he said in a statement.

The issue is unquestionably a difficult one for Republicans to navigate in New York, where primary voters tend to prefer more socially conservative candidates, but the general electorate tilts more leftward. Still, Mr. Zeldin’s views depart from other members of his own party who have successfully won statewide office in New York in recent decades, like Mr. Pataki, who was last elected in 2002.

When Mr. Pataki was still in office, his political staff conducted a poll asking voters to identify his views on abortion. The results showed that about a third of voters believed Mr. Pataki was for abortion rights, about a third thought he was opposed and the rest said they had no idea.

The governor and his aides were pleased.

Mr. Pataki was, in fact, a supporter of a woman’s right to choose. But the poll suggested he had managed to thread a sticky needle for a Republican in a state where his primary voters opposed abortion but the vast majority of residents believe women have a right to end a pregnancy. The model helped Mr. Pataki win three terms.

Flush with millions of dollars to spend on campaign ads, Ms. Hochul and her Democratic allies are not trying to hide their strategy. They are prepared to go after Mr. Zeldin not just on abortion, but his views on gun restrictions and support for former President Donald J. Trump, including a vote to overturn 2020 election results in key states.

“You’ve got an extremist view held by Lee Zeldin, and we’re not going to keep that a secret,” said Jay Jacobs, the state Democratic Party chairman. “The voters need to know what they are buying.”

Dana Rubinstein and Jesse McKinley contributed reporting.