Blue state. Blue governor. Abortion on the ballot. Piles of money for Democrats, and tons of energy too. From the outside, everything seems set up for a Democratic sweep in New York. On the inside, though, there are signs that the state’s constantly malfunctioning, often corrupt political machine is at some risk of glitching out—again. And if that crash is as catastrophic as some Democrats fear, it could give a future president Donald Trump the most pliable of MAGA partners in the US Congress as he takes on his enemies from within.

After the 2022 midterms, everyone from Nancy Pelosi on down has blamed sleepwalking New York Democrats (in general) and Governor Kathy Hochul (in particular) for losing a half-dozen or so winnable Congressional seats—and flipping the US House to Republicans. Local Democrats and their allies swore they’d get their shit together and take those seats back. All the pieces seemed to be in place to make it happen. Democrats had total control of state government, meaning they could redraw the Congressional district maps to their advantage. A yes vote on an Equal Rights Amendment to the state constitution would enshrine reproductive rights and just might drive up turnout. And in the state’s dominant media market, there was a new, tough-on-crime Democratic mayor with the résumé and the megaphone to win back shaky suburban voters.

Then things got, um, complicated. I’ll explain how in a bit. But the upshot is that many of the dozen New York Democratic operatives, candidates, and elected officials I spoke with are giving one-fingered salutes to each other, right at the moment you’d expect them to be focusing all their anger in the Republicans’ direction.

Nobody thinks Trump is going to win New York—at least, no one outside of that fashy three-ring circus he brought to Madison Square Garden the other day. Who will run Congress, though? That’s another matter. “I don’t think it’s been a time in decades when New York has played such a central role in the national election,” Manhattan Borough president Mark Levine tells me. “Control of the House of Representatives will be decided here based on the outcome of half a dozen competitive districts. And in case you were wondering whether that factored into the Trump campaign decision to do a rally at MSG, [Republican House Majority Leader] Mike Johnson came out and said it explicitly.”

In a normal political culture, New York City’s Democratic mayor would’ve pushed back hard against a Republican rally spewing so much racist bile. But this is New York in 2024, where Mayor Eric Adams is currently under indictment on corruption charges (he’s pleaded not guilty); anonymous sources with “direct knowledge of Adams’s legal strategy” told the Post that they’re hoping a reinstalled president Trump will make the “bullshit case” go away. Adams himself mildly rebuked one of the rally’s more offensive jokes—while taking a swipe at those who’ve called Trump a fascist, which includes Kamala Harris’s campaign. “With all that’s going on to everyday New Yorkers, we’re asking questions [like] is someone a fascist or is someone a Hitler. That’s insulting to me. That is insulting,” he said.

It’s part of an ongoing effort to turn down the temperature on campaign rhetoric, the mayor’s team insists. And if it seems rather unhelpful to Adams’s fellow Democratic politicos right now, some of the ones I spoke with found it to be a small improvement. “The only silver lining about the indictments of Eric Adams has been that he has stopped giving Republicans talking points and sound bites for their ads about what a hellhole New York is,” Alyssa Cass, a local Democratic strategist, tells me.

For the better part of two-and-a-half years, Adams, a former cop, has warned the city was teetering on chaos—even as the crime rate kept coming down. He railed against the influx of migrants, and warned that the cost of caring for them will “destroy New York.” And when the Adams administration needed a migrant arrival center, it took over the Roosevelt Hotel, right next to the commuter transit hub of Grand Central Station. Horrified suburbanites watched as migrants by the thousands were forced to wait out on the streets for care, and Adams declared that New York was “past our breaking point.”

Republican candidates and the conservative media ecosystem have portrayed Adams’s New York as a shorthand for out-of-control migration—and urban entropy. Candidates from both parties have spent more than $10 million in local political TV ads that touch on the migrant issue, according to the New York Times. In the Hudson Valley, north of the city, Representative Mike Lawler hit his Democrat opponent Mondaire Jones for “supporting Joe Biden and Eric Adams’s open border policy.” Never mind that Adams doesn’t control the border, and the mayor has routinely bashed Biden on the subject. Lawler’s campaign has bet that Adams—and Democrats—have become synonymous with migrant chaos in his voters’ minds. Adams himself helped make the connection. “Before anyone got on TV with these messages, Eric Adams was saying them for two years,” Cass tells me.

Lawler is running a few points ahead of Jones in the polls, despite that the freshman representative had to recently apologize for wearing blackface during a Halloween party in college. In part, that’s because Democrats in Albany, the state’s capital, did the Republican a solid.

Democrats had the chance earlier this year to redraw the lines of every Congressional district in the state, including Lawler’s, to make them more favorable to themselves. (They tried in 2022, and the process went so far off the rails, they went for a do-over this year.) This is something that parties in power do all over the country; last year, Republicans in North Carolina scrambled their maps so that their Congressional delegation, currently evenly split, is now likely to go 10-4 (or even 11-3) in favor of the GOP. In a process too convoluted and too dumb to recap here—read this story from Slate if you want to get into the weeds—New York Democrats actually went in the other direction this February and made many of their maps slightly less friendly to themselves. “They utterly fucked it up,” one Democratic insider tells me.

New York representative Marc Molinaro, another freshman Republican, saw his upstate district get about four points redder. On Long Island, where my friend and former Daily Beast colleague John Avlon is running, the district changed from oh-so-slightly Democratic to a percentage point in the Republicans’ favor—a small but crucial difference in a race that polls show is currently neck-and-neck. Meanwhile, GOP-held districts like Lawler’s went virtually untouched. “👀 Yikes. There goes @MondaireJones campaign for Congress,” Lawler tweeted when the new maps dropped.

This election cycle hasn’t been all self-inflicted wounds for Democrats and their allies. The switch from Biden to Harris fired up the activist class. Blue candidates have raised far more money than red ones. New York’s Democratic Party, for the first time in decades, has radically increased its organizing efforts. They’ve set up 40 field offices in seven battleground districts, and hired more than 90 full-time staffers, who direct the party’s 20,000-plus volunteers. They’ve knocked on over 900,000 doors and made about 3.5 million calls to would-be voters. “I felt that in 2022 Democrats really were kind of asleep until very close to the end. And this time, we have not repeated that mistake,” Levine says.

Many of the races remain tighter than you might think for a state that’s seen as reliably Democratic, in part because of the party’s “significant challenges with working-class voters and working-class voters of color,” Levine adds. “But also, like, the base is so energized here; the participation in every manner of volunteer activities—from bus trips to postcard writing to phone banks—it’s unprecedented. I’m using that word deliberately. As long as I’ve been in politics, I haven’t seen as many people anxious to get involved…. We’re turning people away. The buses are overbooked. It’s incredible.”

In other states and in recent elections, that enthusiasm has been turbocharged by putting abortion rights initiatives on the ballot. This November, New York is one of 10 states with such a measure. But New York’s case, like so much of its politics, is anything but straightforward. Five years ago, state Senator Liz Krueger, a progressive powerhouse, began pushing for an equal rights amendment—a measure that would explicitly codify abortion and LGBTQ+ rights in New York’s constitution. As the push rolled on, it grew to include more protections: for the elderly and disabled people, and against discrimination based on national origin. The document became a bit of a catchall, but at least it was clear. Then the bureaucrats at the Board of Elections, who are tasked with writing up ballot initiatives, got involved.

The language they came up with is almost a parody of lawyerly gobbledygook. The words “abortion” and “LGBTQ” were stripped out of what came to be known as Proposition 1. Instead, it banned “unequal treatment based on ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, and pregnancy outcomes, as well as reproductive healthcare and autonomy.”

Opponents pounced on vague and confusing language. “Prop 1 will force schools to include biological males on female sports teams,” the local GOP harrumphs. “This isn’t about equal rights. It’s about special rights for illegal immigrants,” intones the narrator of one misleading ad, part of a $8 million barrage largely funded by the MAGA descendent of one of the founders of Schlitz beer.

Until recently, the left-of-center alliance supporting Prop 1 didn’t have the cash to counter with a major advertising push of its own. The $20 million they had hoped to raise never fully materialized, according to The New York Times. In part, that’s because the coalition was as broad as the measure itself. Ideas and operatives were hung onto the campaign like holiday ornaments, one Democratic insider says. “Honestly, the most generous way to explain this is it was like a Christmas tree push. But it was really like a gang bang. Everyone took this thing and fucked it,” she tells me. So what money the coalition did have was spent almost entirely on overhead, such as hiring consultants—only $320,000 out of $2 million went to contacting voters, according to Politico.

At one point, the collective wisdom in the pro-proposition camp was to treat the measure as nonpartisan, apolitical—just an amendment ensuring basic, all-American rights. Only later were Democratic politicians encouraged to champion the pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ+ proposition. Hochul and the state party are steering another $2 million to fund a larger multimillion digital advertising, text-message, and direct-mail campaign in the election’s closing days. Unless the polling is utterly, radically wrong, Proposition 1 will pass handily, but it won’t be the kind of electoral tailwind that some on the left had hoped for.

Advocates like Krueger are frustrated that it took such a white-knuckle effort to get there. “The governor in press stories appears to be sort of for Prop 1, but sort of busy explaining why it’s someone else’s fault if it doesn’t pass. And I’m like—am I saying this on the record? What the hell, I don’t care anymore—I said to her people, ‘Okay, not for nothing. I might have put five years of my life into trying to get this here, and I believe it’s the right thing to do for the State of New York,” Krueger tells me. “But if it doesn’t succeed…the blame is going to land with the governor and the state party because you’re the big gorillas in the room.’” (In response, a rep for the governor “encouraged everyone to focus their energy on getting out to vote for Prop 1.”)

Of course, if Prop 1 fails, it’ll likely signal a much broader Democratic collapse in New York, and a much broader victory for MAGA forces across the country. The blame and recriminations will reach far, and they will land all over.