Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney’s loss wounds NY Democrats, puts his future in doubt: strategists
With the embarrassing loss of his seat in Congress, five-term Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the once-powerful head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, may have destroyed his political future — and could weaken his party for years to come, Democratic strategists told The Post.
Maloney’s defeat at the hands of Republican state assemblyman Mike Lawler was historic. The last time a sitting chair of either party’s congressional campaign arm lost his own race was in 1980, 42 years ago.
“Do you think he’s eligible for Social Security yet?” asked one disgusted Dem operative. “Maybe he looks for a different line of work.”
The 56-year-old congressman’s downfall came despite a last-ditch $600,000 outlay from the campaign committee’s own coffers that routed crucial cash away from other embattled Dems — a decision that infuriated many within the party.
“When you become a national figure, you can spend too much time worrying about national responsibilities and not enough time worrying about your district,” said Bob Liff of George Arzt Communications. Liff compared Maloney’s fall to that of Queens Rep. Joe Crowley, a political boss and veteran congressman who lost a primary to the up-and-coming Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018 — and has not returned to the political fray.
Worse, Maloney engineered his own humiliation. When Gov. Hochul’s disastrous redistricting plan was rebuffed by the courts, the congressman big-footed a fellow Democrat, freshman Rep. Mondaire Jones, out of the race for the newly redrawn 17th congressional district — thinking that it would be an easier electoral lift than Maloney’s own 18th district.
The Election Day flop will reverberate in New York state politics for years, predicted Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf.
“The Republicans are going to have the fundraising advantage. They’re going to have the capacity to raise an extraordinary amount of money,” Sheinkopf said. “And the Republican organizations where these victories took place are going to become stronger.”
Maloney, a former aide to disgraced Gov. Eliot Spitzer, was New York’s first openly gay elected congressman when he first won office in 2012.
In the wake of Maloney’s loss, his husband Randy Florke, a real estate and home-furnishings exec, signaled that the two were cocooned at Lower Windwolde, their 8-acre spread overlooking the Hudson River in Cold Spring, NY.
“When life is crazy it is nice to be quiet at home,” Florke posted on Instagram Thursday, alongside a sunset snapshot of the couple’s century-old $3.7 million estate house.
But a politically active Dem in Maloney’s district said locals have seen no sign of him.
“He disappeared before Election Day,” the activist said bitterly, “and nobody has seen or heard from him since.”
The luxe digs seen in Florke’s post stood in sharp contrast to Maloney’s most tone-deaf campaign moment: his apparent advice that cash-strapped Hudson Valley families should be “eating Chef Boyardee” in the face of rising inflation.
“Well, I grew up in a family where if the gas price went up, the food price went down, so by this time of the week we’d be eating Chef Boyardee if that budget wasn’t gonna change,” Maloney said in a Nov. 5 interview. “So that’s what families have to do.”
Five days later, as Maloney delivered a tearful concession speech, Florke posted a supportive note to his spouse.
“If anyone can fail upward it is SPM,” Florke wrote.
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