Ritchie Torres: 'We Should Break That Cycle of Insanity'
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His turn to the center seems more pronounced against the backdrop of his party’s lurch to the left—especially on Israel, the topic on which he stands most apart. “I am celebrating the 10-year anniversary of my Zionism,” he says. “The first time I went to Israel was in February of 2015,” when he was in his first term on the New York City Council. He describes the visit—his first trip abroad—as “one of the most formative and transformative experiences of my life.”
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Mr. Torres is manifestly sincere in his support for Israel, but he is also ambitious. Although he declines an invitation to announce his plans in our interview, he makes clear that he’s thinking about a 2026 challenge to Ms. Hochul, whom he describes as “an absentee governor.” She “might have the best of intentions, but she’s utterly ineffective. My concern about the governor is not ideology, it’s about a lack of competence. She has neither the will nor the wherewithal to fix the broken system.”
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Whether or not he becomes governor, Mr. Torres wants to have a national impact. “I hope,” he says, “to be the face and voice of a movement to reorient the Democratic Party back to the center on issues like public safety and border security. There’s a need to return to the basics.” He says Kamala Harris’s defeat demonstrates “that we swung the pendulum so far to the left that we fell out of touch with working-class voters, including working-class voters of color, who historically have voted for the Democratic Party. . . . Trump managed to build the kind of multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual working-class coalition that Democrats like me dream of building.”
Most Democrats are center-left, Mr. Torres believes, but “the far left has an outsized impact in defining the public’s perception of the party. We in the center have to clearly differentiate ourselves from the far left or we risk being associated with something that is deeply unpopular. . . . We should break that cycle of insanity.”
He attributes the 2024 loss mostly to “inflation and immigration.” On the former, he argues, the party was “a victim of circumstances because of unprecedented supply chain disruptions.” But on the latter, Joe Biden was “catering to the far left, whose position on the border is out of touch with most Americans. And the most important lesson learned from 2024 is that we have to learn how to say no to the far left.”
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/ritchie-torres-we-should-break-that-cycle-of-insanity-democratic-congressman-c0bced53?st=Xd6S5L&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
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