For weeks, residents of Staten Island and southern Brooklyn encountered a TV ad from the campaign of Nicole Malliotakis, a state legislator trying to unseat Congressman Max Rose.
The ad is frenetic, and shows what appear to be Black Lives Matter protesters roaming the streets of New York earlier this year, stomping on one police vehicle, smashing in the windows of another.
“The only thing standing between us and violent chaos,” warns the voiceover, “is a thin blue line.”
There’s tear gas. Trash cans filled with flames. Defaced American flags. A sort of urban apocalypse.
The ad repeatedly targets Rose as someone who is attached at the hip to Mayor Bill de Blasio, and that the two are equally complicit in New York’s imminent unravelling.
“De Blasio and Rose’s policies aren’t just radically liberal. They’re radically dangerous.”
Malliotakis has been outraised by Rose, who won the district in a surprise victory over Dan Donovan as part of the “Blue Wave” in 2018, by around $4 million. But in the last couple months she’s made it clear she has a strategy to win: law and order.
“I think for the public, for New Yorkers, it was when they started seeing rioting in the streets, when they saw the looting taking place, I think that was the point where the public saw that what we were saying all these years wasn't fear-mongering,” she told WNYC/Gothamist in an interview.
“It was reality."
Meaning that anything less than full support for the police would lead, she said, to higher crime.
“When you have people who are chanting ‘defund the police,’ and then you have elected officials that go and vote for it and try to villainize our police, it almost sends a green light to criminals to say, you know, they're on their side as opposed to being on law and order’s side,” she added
In reality, the vast majority of the looting in New York City took place over just two nights -- May 31 and June 1. And while murders have gone up, they’re on pace to be under 600 this year, less than a quarter of what they were in the early 90s. Still, Malliotakis argued the city is regressing to “anarchy” and “chaos” thanks to Democratic leadership.
“They’ve created a sense of anarchy here where people feel they can get away with it and quite frankly they are,” she said during a Fox News interview.
This is similar to the sort of doomsday scenario President Donald Trump likes to offer.
“Americans know the truth,” he said in June. “Without the police there is chaos. Without law there is anarchy and without safety there is catastrophe.”
Malliotakis didn’t support Trump during his first presidential campaign but she’s come to embrace him. She prominently features his endorsement on her campaign website. Together, they have helped advance the notion that American cities—cities run by Democrats, that is—are spiraling out of control. Some Republicans think this message resonates with voters in her district, who voted for Trump in 2016.
“It's a lot of civil servants,” said political consultant Bill O’Reilly. “And it's people who are very pro-police, pro-fire department. It is a traditionally conservative district.”
Which helps explain why in June, in the midst of the Black Lives Matters protests, Malliotakis led a Blue Lives Matter march in Brooklyn.
The pro-police narrative has helped put Malliotakis on the national Republican party’s radar. And it’s placed her Democratic opponent Max Rose on the defensive. Despite his campaign’s substantial financial advantage, Roll Call has said he’s one of the 10 most vulnerable members of the House.
“I think that he's facing some very difficult headwinds,” said Republican political consultant Jessica Proud. “You know, given where his party is, I think he's tried to straddle the lines.”
In some sense Rose has straddled the lines between traditional Democratic and Republican ideology. On one hand he did march with Black Lives Matter protesters. But he also said he doesn’t want to defund the NYPD, and that bail reform in Albany had gone “too far, too fast.” Malliotakis has tried to tie him to Mayor Bill de Blasio— -- but Rose went on Fox News and did his best to distance himself.
“This mayor is not only the worst mayor in New York City,” said Rose, “he’s the worst mayor in the history of this great country.”
His campaign thinks he’ll prevail this November, but his words before a national audience suggest he’s taking nothing for granted. It’s a tight race, and, at the moment, Malliotakis appears to be setting the terms.
