John Avlon is the Absolute Worst

Let me begin by alienating the core audience most excited to read this column: Nancy Goroff is going to lose the NY-01 Democratic Congressional Primary.

From everything I’ve observed, I think her entire campaign is a bluff. Her canvassing operation is small, enthusiastic and not built to scale a district of this size. Key donors, even prior to her opponent’s entrance, have been hesitant to commit. Allies she once cultivated among leadership ranks have either chosen to remain neutral, or have joined her opponent’s campaign outright. Her campaign’s messaging is without exclamation or purpose, and is largely a factor of personal loans and an over-reliance on 314 Action Fund attack ads.

Things are happening in this primary that have never before happened. The State Democratic Chair, Jay Jacobs, has not only endorsed Nancy’s opponent but has been a firm and frequent advocate for him and against her. The teacher’s union, one of the few labor unions (along with police) whose endorsement actually matters in terms of resource allocation, is working to defeat her. Within the Goroff campaign itself, their events would be considered poorly attended for a town race, let alone Congressional. She has no presence on the East End, where over a third of likely Democratic primary voters reside, and the next highest populous portion of the district, Huntington, has been consolidated in support for her opposition. Her only true base of strength is the North Shore of Brookhaven, and her campaign in that area has been completely overshadowed by a hotly contested State Assembly Primary.

This isn’t going to be a particularly close result. I have Nancy losing in the range of 6-8 pts, and only that close because I do believe the negative ads against her opponent have successfully driven down his positive name association. The gap in effectiveness between the two campaigns is precisely why those negative ads are happening in the first place. It’s a desperate move, but a necessary one. Nancy has to campaign like this, because there’s no other realistic path to victory for her. She knows this, 314 Action Fund knows this, and it is very likely that one or both of them have seen internal polls indicating as much.

More than anything, Nancy is going to lose for one core reason that can explain all the others: in a Congressional district where Democratic primary voters have been conditioned to value nothing but winning for winning’s sake, and exclusively define the ability to win by who has the most money and commercials, Nancy was dead in the water the moment voters witnessed her lose in 2020 with more money and ads than anyone else.

Back then, she was the beneficiary of voter shallowness when the district grew tired of watching Perry Gershon, the 2018 Commercial McMoney candidate, run back the same losing effort for a second go around. He learned that there’s always a bigger, richer, shinier object on the horizon.

This year, Nancy has met the bigger, richer, shinier object.

His name is John Avlon, and despite possessing the media training and oratory mastery that NY-01 Democrats have always dreamed about for our candidates, he is also the culmination of every bad idea that has made NY-01 one of the least successful suburban swing districts for Democrats during the Trump era.

This Is Not A Drill

I’d like to answer a question that you’ve no doubt been wondering: why did I use that awful screen captured photograph of John Avlon instead of a professional campaign photo?

The honest truth is that I’m convinced Avlon has never seen a bad photograph of himself in his life. And it’s a fundamental belief of mine as an American (to borrow John’s phrasing), that every person should have to be completely repulsed by their own image at least one time in their life. For Avlon, there is no better time for his one time, than this time. I want John to see himself as I see him between the frames of overcooked political ads: as a bronzed East End book tour messiah with a pinch of crazy in his eyes, and a devilish smirk that uncoils PBS Documentarian word salad that is positively message tested to ruin my f#$%! summer, as it were, capsuled through an ad campaigned designed for no other purpose than to get the Lincoln Project vote, all 10 of them.

I don’t know John Avlon. He might be a good guy - he might be a great guy. But as a candidate, he is highly mockable. More-so than any local candidate before him, which is a testament because Perry Gershon and Kate Browning ran here. He is so mockable, that it’s becoming somewhat of an issue for me. I find myself speaking in his voice more than I’m comfortable admitting. My cat, who is tragically dying at the moment and relying on me for his daily food and medicine, is unable to get through a single human interaction without being reminded that this is not a drill.

When my wife asks if I want to watch the new season of the Kardashians with her, I reply that this is not who we are, as Americans. When she tells me that I just like to argue, I remind her that I can’t afford to lose this fight - the stakes are just too high for our community, and our country. I’ve even tried to win said arguments by claiming that I have the endorsement of Democratic leaders like Tom Suozzi (note: I do not have the endorsement of Democratic leaders like Tom Suozzi).

I’ve followed up the bad news that I deliver to people with the good news is, titled my rebuttals Reality Checks, and referred to other drivers on the road as Donald Trump and his MAGA minions (that one might actually be true; these are Suffolk County roads, after all).

Worst of all, Avlon Mania has reached my youngest son, age 5, who has seen so many Avlon ads run on the children’s YouTube channels he watches that he’s now taken to defending Avlon against Nancy’s attacks.

This isn’t satire. This is not a drill. This is real. I legitimately heard my son yell at the TV, “Oh BE QUIET NANCY! You lost by 10 points!” Another time he said to me, “Dad, John Avlon’s cool, bruh.” And now that Mark Hamill has endorsed Avlon, I have the sad responsibility of informing my son that Luke Skywalker, one of his idols, has finally succumbed to the Dark Side.

If John Avlon were a pandemic, we’d all be wearing masks and Nancy would be campaigning full-time from her tea room again.

I say all this not to make a point about John Avlon’s ineffectiveness, but to illustrate that he’s actually running the most effective ad campaign we’ve ever seen, by a country mile. All of it: the catch-phrases and call-backs, the impressionable characteristics, defining the stakes and contrasting them with the hope he’s selling, it’s high level marketing that, in a word, makes him tangible. Contrast this with Nancy, who is perpetually nonplussed and monotone, whose best commercials feature other, more talented speakers than herself, and who completely lacks any kind of cohesive, tangible messaging.

Critics, in retrospect, criticize Nancy for sticking so rigidly to “I’m a Scientist” branding in 2020, but that’s partly what made her successful over Perry Gershon and Bridget Fleming that year. Nancy was the only candidate with a definable brand, and “Scientist” wasn’t a bad word association in a year where “trusting the science” was at the forefront of public discourse in a way it had never been before.

Effective marketing around a defined brand worked for Nancy in the primary. It became a different story altogether when she realized in the general election that the average voter didn’t connect with messaging that went no deeper than “Trust me, I’m a Scientist who makes Scientific Decisions and that’s pretty good, right?”

Effective messaging doesn’t always mean successful messaging.

John Avlon is effectively convincing primary voters that he is an author and CNN analyst from the East End with consolidated support from the entire Democratic leadership establishment, who has devoted his career in media post-2016 to defending Democracy from Donald Trump and his minions. Millions of dollars have been spent creating and maintaining this brand; he’s not moving away from it.

But Avlon’s messaging is not going to be successful in a majority Republican district that is heavily favored to vote for Trump in the general election. There’s nothing about “wealthy CNN liberal from NYC who changed his address so he could run on saving Democracy from Bad Orange Man’s minions” that is going to pull the support of swing voters and crossover voters.

A well defined brand with bad messaging makes it that much easier for the opposition to brand you negatively.

A Different Type of Same Old Candidate

The most effective digital attack ad John Avlon has run on Nancy Goroff said something to the effect of, “Every scientist knows that running the same failed experiment twice is a bad idea.” Witty, yes, but based on merit. Nancy has not made a good argument for a second turn, and that’s because there is none.

She isn’t a better communicator than she was four years ago. Her messaging is moderately tweaked from “I’m a Scientist” to “I helped prevent MAGA from taking over school boards”. She hasn’t raised more money than last time (in fact, she’s raised less and made the rest up with personal loans). She has less institutional and grassroots support than in 2020. And this is a more difficult electorate, with President Biden at under 40% approval and losing massive amounts of support from young voters, black voters, hispanic voters, and women, compared to his 2020 campaign.

The district lines have also changed, shifting the registration advantage slightly more in favor of Republicans than before, while the Suffolk County Democratic Party is significantly weaker than it was in 2022, 2020, 2018 and 2016, having lost dozens of incumbents and therefore patronage labor (including the County Executive, all but one of our Senators, our senior Assembly member, and half the legislature) in disastrous election seasons.

Not only is underperforming Biden’s NY-01 numbers not an option, it’s likely that the Democratic candidate will have to run upwards of 6-8 pts better to have a realistic chance of defeating incumbent Nick LaLota. Not impossible to achieve, but unlikely for a non-incumbent House candidate in a light red district that has shown no signs of trending blue.

These are factors that Avlon’s campaign is aware of, which is why he’s been pitching himself as “A Different Kind of Candidate” to contrast Nancy’s rinse-repeat campaign.

The only problem? Avlon’s campaign is a replica of what has been tried, and what has failed, before.

For reference, here is a quick rundown of each winning candidate and runner up from every NY-01 Democratic Primary since 2016:

2016: Anna Throne-Holst (Wealthy Hamptoniite)/ Runnerup: Dave Calone (Millionaire from North Shore)

2018: Perry Gershon (Millionaire from NYC who established residence in Hamptons)/Runnerup: Kate Browning (Legislator from Shirley)

2020: Nancy Goroff (Millionaire from North Shore)/Runnerup: Perry Gershon

2022: Bridget Fleming (Wealthy Legislator from Hamptons)/Dropped Out: Kara Hahn (Wealthy North Shore Legislator who lives around the block from Nancy Goroff).

The idea that John Avlon, a millionaire from Manhattan who established residence in the Hamptons so he could run for office, is something we haven’t seen before, is outrageous. This Congressional district has been held captive to internecine ballot battling between rich people from the Hamptons and rich people from Brookhaven’s North Shore for the last decade, at least.

Nor would Avlon be the first candidate to frame his messaging as a battle of values between reasonable Americans and MAGA acolytes. Perry Gershon ran exactly this type of campaign in 2018, a blue wave election year, and lost. Avlon knows this, because Avlon himself has cited Perry’s campaign as something he wanted to build on, has used Perry in his commercials, and even cited Perry as evidence that carpetbagging doesn’t matter because he “almost won”. (How Avlon came to this conclusion despite Perry being one of the only Democrats in the country that year to lose in a swing suburban district, against an opponent who ran a heavy amount of “Wealthy Manhattann Carpetbagger” attack ads against him, is downright mystifying)

Nancy also positioned herself in 2020 as a champion against right wing extremism, while moderating her platform to comfortably fit the Biden mold.

In 2022, Bridget Fleming ran an entire ad campaign labeling Lalota as a “right wing extremist who is faithfully following the MAGA playbook”.

Despite this, some NY-01 Democrats seem to think there is a batch of untried but obvious strategies that will unlock victory.

“But we haven’t run on abortion!”

Perry Gershon sent a mailer with a bloody coat hanger to voters in 2018. Nancy and Bridget were not quiet about abortion rights. Trust me, we ran on abortion.

“We have to activate the non-white voters!”

By running rich white people who live in all white neighborhoods?

“We need Common Sense Democrats who do that Tom Suozzi stuff! You know, the Common Sense stuff that Tom Suozzi does?”

This one’s my favorite. The old “Sprinkle Suozzi Dust on ‘em”. Indeed, Tom Suozzi has been a major backer of Avlon. I would argue that Tom Suozzi’s Special Election victory for Congress earlier this year was the worst thing to ever happen to Democrats on Long Island, because it breathed new life into election strategies that have been failing us for a decade, at a time when we desperately needed to go in another direction. Strategies that have worked for one person, in one district.

Tom Suozzi is the former Mayor of Glen Cove. His father was the Mayor of Glen Cove before him. Suozzi became Nassau County Executive. Before winning his special election to Congress this year, he represented the same district for four years prior. In 2020, he won by a slim margin over George Santos. When Santos was forced to leave office, Suozzi returned and won his heavily, heavily blue district by a margin that is less than the Democratic registration margin there.

You can’t replicate Tom Suozzi. He is one of one, tailor made for a blue district where he and his family have positive name recognition going back decades, and despite this you could still argue that Suozzi underperformed his advantage margin in two straight elections (and probably would have lost to Santos had he decided to run again in 2022).

There is no magical Common Sense Democrat platform. Unless your name is Tom Suozzi, and you’re running in Tom Suozzi’s district, you shouldn’t be running on Tom Suozzi’s platform.NYS Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs, widely regarded as one of the worst, most ineffective party chairs in the country, has embraced the idea of a Common Sense panacea because, well, what else does he have going for him at this point?

Nobody is even quite sure what Common Sense, as a platform, really means, but we think it might be something like, “No substance, passion, or specifics, unless the topic is Bad Orange Man Trump”.

In any event, this, too, has been tried. I recall Perry Gershon being way ahead the curve on “Sprinkle Magic Suozzi Dust On It” in the 2020 primary, hiring Suozzi’s long time campaign manager Kim Devlin as a strategy consultant. Suddenly Perry was referencing Common Sense, rejecting extremism on the left (The Squad!) and right - his jeans got a little dustier, his shoes became a little less Italian, even the tone in his voice shifted to where I wasn’t sure if he might slug me if I said the wrong thing. I’m not saying he transformed into Patrick Swayze from Roadhouse, but the man hardened is my point.

For the 2022 campaign, Bridget Fleming had the endorsement of the Suffolk County Police Union, a major coup against the Republicans that year. It didn’t move the needle.

Last year, in our County Executive race, Dave Calone poured $4 million into an ad campaign that transformed him from environmental planner to “Common Sense crusader against crime who put Al Qaeda in prison!”

That didn’t work either. Dave spent a small fortune to perform marginally better against Ed Romaine than I did in 2019 with a paltry $40k.

I’m not saying this to shame past candidates. I’ve been there myself, and failed too. We all have. In Suffolk County, no Democrat is an authority on winning. But I’ll be damned if I let anyone tell a Democrat living in this district that we don’t know losing when we see it! We practically invented the loss. And the plain fact is that the 2024 campaign has been a re-run of tried and failed strategies all over the map.

There is legitimately one thing that John Avlon possesses, in spades, that no candidate before him has had.

That Man From TV

When did I know that Nancy was in trouble? The same time everybody else knew. The same time that Nancy herself knew. Within the first ten seconds of John Avlon’s announcement video.

“Welp, she’s done,” was the first reaction I heard as a well-connected friend called me. In fact, though none would admit it due to my tendency to provide blunt, unfiltered analysis in a public manner (see: this column), but I regularly take calls from party leaders, media, elected officials, and former elected officials (some of whom should shock you) who are interested in my thoughts on a particular race or political development.

These names include Avlon supporters, Goroff supporters, Avlon supporters who are only backing him because they think he’ll win the primary, and Goroff supporters who are only backing her because she throws her money around.

Not a single one of them believes that Nancy is going to win the primary.

And it has everything to do with the one thing John Avlon brings to the table that no candidate before him has: his media profile and speaking ability.

Avlon is not only a master orator who presents a slick image on television, he is also the sole Democratic candidate we’ve ever had in NY-01 who could get through a sentence without vomiting all over themselves or putting others to sleep. Not only has our district lost every election since 2014, we’ve been almost comically plagued with bad candidates in our primaries.

Typically, we get two archetypes: unrelatable wealthy people who could barely communicate with Siri much less a working class district, and boring candidates from the Suffolk County Legislature who run the same vanilla Suffolk Democrats platform they’ve been copy/pasting on palm cards for 20 years, running on water quality, crime, and taxes.

John Avlon embodies the type of media personality that captivates nightly the Boomer Democrats who still remain glued to cable news, popcorn in hand as they glare at some wet-haired analyst on their screen who regals them with tales about Trump and Putin, the trial, the arrest of Steve Bannon, and a Democracy that is slipping between the cracked foundation at the feet of an orange mad man. These aren’t just Avlon’s CNN viewers, they are also the bulk demographic of Democratic primary voters in NY-01, and they are clustered in three wealthy areas: the Hamptons, the Three Village area in North Shore Brookhaven, and Huntington around Greenlawn. Avlon’s campaign is focused on two of those areas, Nancy is preoccupied on the North Shore.

You couldn’t create a better candidate in a factory to appeal to this voting demographic than John Avlon.

And that’s fine if your goal is to win a primary. In the general election, Avlon will come face to face with a district that is not waiting for political media establishment to come and save them from Donald Trump. His TV appearances, his book deals, his slick Wall Street look, his Manhattan address, his celebrity endorsements and his perpetual narrator voice, all of it will be used by Lalota’s campaign to create a narrative of regular people vs. elites.

I never bought into the Goroff attack ads about Avlon’s connections to Rudy Giuliani. I find them stupid, and an obvious twisting of facts to paint a negative picture. Nobody who has paid an ounce of attention to Avlon’s career believes that he is secretly in league with Trump’s MAGA folks. The reality is, there are a number of Democrats who enthusiastically associated with Rudy Giuliani pre-Trump.

The idea that any past association with Republicans is indicative of a person not sharing our values is ludicrous. The overwhelming majority of voters in Suffolk County, I’d be willing to bet, have either been registered Republicans at one time in their lives, crossed over to vote for a Republican, changed their mind on a political issue or many, or once thought positively of Rudy Giuliani.

In this respect, I share something in common with Avlon. As someone who began his young career in the Republican Party before changing many, many years ago (and currently branded as one of those extreme leftists who lack Common Sense) I was attacked by one of Nancy’s allies who happened to be running for Town Council at the time and served with me on the Brookhaven Town Executive Committee, for “interning for Republican Senator John Flanagan” when I was 21 years old (I am now 40). My reply was, “60% of your district voted for a Republican last time. Feel free to tell them not to associate with you either.” (Spoiler: they didn’t)

It’s an inherently elitist notion. No middle class person actually thinks this way. None of us who grew up poor or middle class had the luxury of exclusive association. Friends aren’t bullet points on a CV, they are the people who have your back. So we don’t screen people for ideology or past transgression. We simply roll with the people we would trust in a dark alleyway.

At her core, Nancy is an elitist. But Avlon’s got the same problem in his messaging.

How does one take a message about “saving Democracy from Donald Trump and his MAGA minions” to a general electorate who…have mostly supported Donald Trump and his MAGA minions?

Especially when we’ve used this messaging here before.

And the only thing I can come up with is that Avlon thinks it just sounds better coming from his mouth. He believes that the unwashed middle class of Suffolk County will listen to him sooth us with liberal patriotic narration, and the moment will come when they collectively realize that the Orange Bad Man has lied to us, tricked us, turned brother against brother, mother against daughter, and we will pull the imaginary voting lever for Reverend Democracy Father John Avlon, not because we have to, but because we get to.

That’s the part where Avlon wakes up, and reads a quote in the Newsday article about his 7 point loss to Lalota, from a voter who says, “Who, that ***hole from CNN?”

Welcome to the real NY-01, John.

This is not so much a Democrat or Republican district, as it is a populist working class district. You’re capping your support at under 50% if you run a campaign that is intentionally vague on every issue besides “Donalt Trump is a threat to democracy”. The Republican and Conservative voters here have far better turnout than Democrats, and the Suffolk County Republican Machine is at an apex it hasn’t enjoyed since the 90s, so their capacity to leverage municipal patronage labor as a volunteer force is massive.

So as a candidate, you have two options.

Option One is to run a movement-based progressive campaign that drives Democratic turnout and attracts new independent voters who don’t normally vote. Very hard to do, and you legitimately risk alienating another portion of independents and some conservative Democrats, and you guarantee that crossover votes won’t happen.

The better choice is Option Two: do something no Democrat here has done in a very long time, which is to run on urgent working class issues that are non-ideological, like corporate price gouging that is driving inflation, and outrageously high rents, with proposed solutions that are borderline severe, and immediately lets regular people know that their lives would immediately improved if you were to be elected.

This district, and people broadly, are looking for someone to take up the sword for the middle class that is being squashed by greed and bad government. It’s fine to campaign against the instability and chaos that Trump brings - and I agree with everything Avlon says about Trump - but it can’t be the core of your campaign message in this district.

If you want an example of what works in NY-01, look at Lee Zeldin. Not his god awful politics, but his imagery, background, and messaging. More than being just a veteran, Lee was a middle class kid from Shirley-Mastic. The Republican Party vested their time and money in him early, through a losing campaign and later a Senate campaign, and eventually put him up as their Congressional (and Gubernatorial) candidate.

If Lee Zeldin or someone like him were in the Suffolk County Democratic Party, he’d be run in non-competitive races and asked to be the social media manager for a wealthy person running for Congress.

In this party, our rich people don’t understand their role. They should be putting their financing and connections behind capable candidates who can relate to average people.

The Republican Party made a wise choice in getting behind Zeldin, as despicable as I find him. And Zeldin rewarded them by cultivating a following that, on the outside was able to earn independent voters by positions himself as their defender against the elite (much like Trump), and on the inside was very much appealing to the ideological extremes of his party to ensure that he would have a robust donor and volunteer base.

Zeldin was able to balance the ideological populism with the non-ideological populism, to make himself stand out among the average politician. Nick Lalota lacks the candidate skills of Zeldin, particularly among his party’s base, but in every way he is leading with working class populism to counter-message what has been lackluster wealthy person messaging courtesy of the East End and North Shore. As I write this, he’s already put out a post on social media mocking John Avlon as a “Manhattan elitist on his way to a swanky Hamptons party while I’m on my way to a meeting about drug policy.”

You can look forward to an entire general election campaign of just that sort of messaging, and it will be hard for Avlon to combat that unless he embraces full-scale working class populism.

The biggest mistake the Democratic Party made during the Era of Trump, was to be so possessed with the idea of defeating him that we collectively forgot what made us passionate about leading government in the first place.

Just as it was with Joe Biden in the 2020 primary, the arguments we consistently hear for why we need to make the choices we do in our local Democratic primaries is “because they can win.”

Nobody has ever bothered to define “can win”. It seems to be an intangible quality that gets assigned to wealthy people and past incumbents, without care for messaging, values, or ability to connect with voters.

John Avlon is the epitome of the “be quiet, we just need to win” crowd’s political ideal. It doesn’t care about the issues, it doesn’t care about quality of life. It just wants to beat Donald Trump.

Do you know why working class voters aren’t motivated by wealthy people who run for office on “Saving Democracy From Trump”?

It’s because we don’t believe them. Deep down, we know that their quality of life isn’t impacted whether or not Trump is elected. They find him repugnant, and offensive to their sense of propriety. But at the end of the day, they have the luxury to focus on no other issue than keeping Trump from power. Because they aren’t the ones avoiding the meat section because beef has doubled in price; they aren’t the ones having to find a new apartment because Fairfield increase the rent 25% from last year; they aren’t the ones whose daughters are getting abortions, or whose sons can’t afford rehab. These are problems exclusive to the middle and lower economic classes, people whom the John Avlons of the world would never associate with unless they felt it got them closer to being elected.

That’s what this is for the Avlons, Goroffs, and Gershons of the world: political fantasy camp, bankrolled by small fortunes.

Until and unless the Democratic Party begins to understand that fact and adjust to reality, we will continue to lose seats like NY-01 that should be competitive.

No matter how good your speaking voice is, how many books you’ve written, or how many television appearances you’ve made.

William Ferraro is a former Democratic candidate for Brookhaven Town Supervisor, and is currently a district leader in Council District 3 for the Brookhaven Town Democratic Committee. He is co-founder and former leader of Brookhaven Action Network and Central Brookhaven Democratic Club.