Lee Zeldin slams Kathy Hochul’s subway crime plan as he surges in gov race
A surging Lee Zeldin slammed Gov. Kathy Hochul’s last-minute subway crime plan as New York’s neck-and-neck gubernatorial race entered its final stretch.
“Why is Kathy Hochul waiting until the day after the first poll that says we’re in the lead — two and a half weeks before the election — before she’s doing this?” the Republican asked The Post as he left a rally in Rockaway Beach.
“She should just have been doing the right thing out of the gate,” he said.
Zeldin ridiculed Hochul’s plan, announced Saturday with Mayor Eric Adams, to flood the subways with cops and cameras, and to establish two new inpatient units at psychiatric centers with 50 new beds to help get emotionally disturbed people out of the subway system.
“How out of touch are you if you think that providing 50 beds is going to take care of this issue?” Zeldin demanded. “She says nothing about cashless bail … nothing about DAs refusing to enforce the law.”
The latest poll, released Friday, put Zeldin in a dead heat with Hochul, a Democrat.
The independent co/efficient survey of 1,056 likely voters showed Zeldin with 45.6% support and Hochul at 45.3% — along with 9% undecided, an ominous sign for any incumbent.
The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.31 percentage points.
Seemingly in response to the steadily tightening race, Hochul pledged to increase cops and cameras in city subways and dropped a new campaign ad Friday focusing on crime — a top issue for voters that the governor had previously all but ignored.
“You deserve to feel safe, and as your governor, I won’t stop working until you do,” she promises in the spot.
Voters who gathered at an earlier Zeldin rally in Whitestone, Queens, Saturday, like Howard and Edythe Schaerf of Bayside, roared approval for Zeldin’s tough-on-crime platform.
“I’m 80 years old and I bought a can of mace,” Howard said. “I never thought the day would come that would happen.”
“We want to fire Hochul,” Edythe added.
About 175 supporters in Francis Lewis Park chanted “Lee! Lee! Lee” as the congressman from Long Island took the microphone and blamed Hochul for the thousands of New Yorkers who have left the state in recent months.
“The reason why everybody is hitting their breaking point and fleeing is because those in charge have been attacking wallets and safety and freedom,” Zeldin said.
Once elected, Zeldin said, he would act “in the first 100 minutes to save New York.”
“The first thing that we need to do, on day one as soon as we get there, is tell Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg he’s being fired,” he said, to cheers.
He promised to declare a state-wide “crime emergency” to end-run the state legislature and unilaterally “suspend cashless bail and other pro-criminal laws they passed.”
He also pledged to halt “any proposed COVID vaccine mandates, in grade school, in higher education, in employment or otherwise” — calling out the CDC’s vote this week to add the shot to the childhood immunization schedule.
“Nobody should have been fired for what is a personal decision,” Zeldin said. “Kathy Hochul … she thinks that she’s your mother, she’s actually said this stuff out loud.”
At least a dozen Zeldin yard signs speckled the sidewalk and the park’s grass, and cars parked along Third Avenue sported American flags, Zeldin banners, and pennants boosting the military and law enforcement.
Nearby, an SUV boasted bumper stickers reading “Vote Red” and “Catch the red wave New York,” while an elderly attendee tooled around the park with a Zeldin sign taped to his wheeled walker.
Russell Schneider, 29, a contractor from Long Island, and Upper East Sider Nick Rafael, 28, who works in corporate finance, agreed that crime was their big issue.
“If we don’t win I don’t know if New York is gonna be the same,” Schneider said. “Crime is gonna get worse…Quality of life is gonna get worse which is gonna be scary.”
“You see the news, the frequency of people getting pushed on the tracks, it could be any one of us,” Rafael fretted.
