Democrats are suddenly losing in New York. What’s going on?
NEW YORK — The small subterranean bar in Little Italy is as packed as every other downtown bar on a drizzly Friday night in early March, with what look like the same kind of scenesters you’d find in other clubs down the street. There are men in streetwear and women in slinky cocktail dresses, wading through dense cigarette smoke and trying to talk over throbbing techno beats provided by a pair of DJs, Chinese Spy Balloon and Non-Non-Binary Jeff.
Outside, Lucian Wintrich is busy chain-smoking cigarettes under the cigar tent. Wintrich is the former White House correspondent for Gateway Pundit who in 2016 founded “Twinks for Trump” and is now the “Media Chairman” for the New York Young Republican Club, the sponsor of this evening. The theme is “Martinis and Cigars with Roger Stone,” in which the longtime political “dirty trickster” and Donald Trump ally would be sharing Richard Nixon’s favorite martini recipe and pouring it for the crowd.
Wintrich, wearing an “I Love Jesus” hat, is screaming about the person he’s taken to calling the “mafia don owner of this place,” yelling at the wait staff because they’re refusing his insistence that each hors d’oeuvres be served with either Russian or Ukrainian flag toothpicks in them. (The owner, he is told, has decreed that only American flags be allowed.) The idea, Wintrich tells me, is that at the end of the night they will collect the detritus and see if more people chose Ukrainian appetizers or Russian ones in order to declare “who won the war.”
“It’s a middle school joke, I’d admit,” he adds.
I tell him I don’t really get it.
“Exactly! Exactly!” he says, and goes off to greet Martin Shkreli, the so-called Pharma Bro who was only recently released after serving a four-year prison stint for securities fraud.
The NYYRC is a more than century-old political club that once provided ballast for the campaigns and administrations of figures like Thomas Dewey, Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay. Even as late as 2016, it was a redoubt for Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush supporters to find succor in a sea of Manhattan Democrats.
In 2019 though, Gavin Wax, who has spent his career in digital marketing for conservative groups and was recently fired from the Babylon Bee, became president and turned the NYYRC into a full-throated citadel of Trumpism. The group was the first club in the country to endorse Trump for president in 2024. It’s black-tie gala in December was attended not only by the likes of Steve Bannon, George Santos (a club financial supporter), Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump Jr., but also then-Project Veritas head James O’Keefe, Peter and Lydia Brimelow of VDARE (which the Southern Poverty Law Center and others have labeled a white nationalist website), “Pizzagate” promoter Jack Posobiec and members of the European far-right Alternative for Germany and Austrian Freedom Party.
There, Wax thundered from the dais “We want total war.” He told the hundreds of attendees, “We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets. This is the only language the left understands. The language of pure and unadulterated power.”
It wasn’t so much a speech as a battle cry for a party that hasn’t come within 15 points of winning the state in a presidential election since the 1980s — and hasn’t won any statewide race since 2002, the longest losing streak in the country.
But then last year, something remarkable happened: Republicans flipped four Democrat-held U.S. House seats, which provided almost the entire margin that Kevin McCarthy needed to become speaker. The incumbent Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul got just over 53 percent of the vote. Republicans improved their margins in the gubernatorial race in every single one of New York’s 62 counties compared with Joe Biden’s results in 2020. And perhaps most confounding of all for liberals, the turn came as the state GOP embraced the style of politics first propagated by native son Donald Trump and echoed by figures like Wax.
NYYRC has been at the forefront of the MAGA-fication of New York politics. The group’s members have knocked on thousands of doors in the still relatively few areas of the city where Republicans compete. In the process, the group has brought to the local political scene a Trumpian sense of spectacle and activated a far-right, nativist and nationalist sentiment in the city and its surrounding suburbs that was previously kept underground.
At the party in Little Italy, Wax is doing an interview with the New York Times when Dasha Nekrasova, the actress who played Comfrey, Kendall Roy’s put-upon PR adviser in the third season of Succession, shows up, standing off in a corner smoking cigarettes and trying to look bored. Nekrasova is the co-host of Red Scare, a podcast which was once associated with Bernie Sanders and the so-called dirtbag left but has since become, if not exactly aligned with the ethos of the NYYRC, at least a fellow traveler on a mission to deliver a gigantic middle finger to the liberal establishment and (what they perceive to be at least) its finger-wagging pieties. When I ask Nekrasova what she was doing there, she threw her head back with a laugh. “I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it,” she says before running off inside, ducking behind a curtain that barely covered the “VIP Room” where a half-dozen women sat around smoking. Sitting in front of the curtain was her co-host, Anna Khachiyan. When I ask her what she thought about this scene, she replied, “I don’t think anything,” and got up to join Nekrasova.
After Stone gives his spiel on the history of the martini, the Red Scare hosts take over the microphones and give a shout-out to “All the lady-boys in the audience,” tell everyone “to relax, we are all Republicans here,” slag “Joe Brandon” and say “the president who returns smoking indoors is going to have my vote.”
Vish Burra, a club officer who has become ubiquitous on TV thanks to his job as a chief aide to Santos, holds out his phone. “I want a photo with the hot Russians,” he says, attempting to take a selfie. “SEX, MAGA, and ROCK N’ ROLL!” he shouts, wearing a three-piece suit with an official-looking pin on his lapel. “Fornication and edgy politics. You can see why we win!”
As the night wears on, Wax is ecstatic. The scant protests piddle out, tons of new people from the supposedly anti-Republican neighborhoods in downtown Manhattan pour in and the burlesque dancing — featuring Russian and Ukrainian folk tunes — goes off without a hitch.
“This is us,” he tells me. “This is the new Republican Party. … It’s blue collar, transgressive, Irish, Italian. It’s a motley coalition but it works. And it wins elections.”
Source: Politico
