I don’t see him winning in a Democrat wave, no. New York is always prone to toss out pretty much all swing seat incumbents depending on the national mood. See 2010, 2012, 2014, 2018 and 2022.
Katko?
I don’t see him winning in a Democrat wave, no. New York is always prone to toss out pretty much all swing seat incumbents depending on the national mood. See 2010, 2012, 2014, 2018 and 2022.
At the same time, upstate NY (and more generally New England) has been home to a lot of the most extreme examples of ticket splitting at the federal level in recent history. Brindisi, Delgado, and Katko were all prime examples of this in 2020.
That district - the old NY19, that is - is especially extreme. It voted for Obama by 6 or 7 points in 2012. But in 2014, incumbent GOPer John Faso* - who had only been in office for two terms as well - won by a whopping 29 points (admittedly it was a red wave, and he faced an entitled multimillionaire carpetbagger in Sean Elridge, but still). Mighty impressive overperformance. Then the district swung quite a bit to the right in 2017 to vote for Trump by a margin similar to Obama's 2012 margin - but it nonetheless flipped blue in 2018 with Delgado. And then presidentially, it swung and trended sharply leftward in 2020 to narrowly support Biden.
*Sidenote: I later read more about Faso, and he seemed like a genuinely good representative and one of the more moderate and pragmatic Republicans. Fwiw, especially given the opponent he faced, I would most definitely have voted for Faso in 2014 was I eligible to do so. For more info about Sean Elridge, his absolutely trash opponent, I recommend reading this
insightful (and hilariously caustic) article.
