New state GOP chair says no more 'playing patty cake,' vows party comeback

ALBANY — Nick Langworthy took over Monday as the new Republican leader in New York, vowing the party will rebound from a series of defeats and saying his colleagues needed to take lessons from President Donald Trump and be tougher and more aggressive if they are to do so.

Langworthy of Erie County delivered an energetic speech to hundreds of GOP delegates who formally elected him at the party’s organizational meeting. He promised a spirited voter registration drive, a full slate of congressional candidates in 2020 and full-throated support for Trump, who is unpopular in New York.

“If we have learned something from President Donald Trump, it’s we have to be tough enough to fight back and be aggressive. We are done playing patty cake in the New York State Republican Party,” Langworthy told cheering delegates at a hotel in suburban Albany just after he was unanimously elected to replace Ed Cox, who had led the party for 10 years but who had shouldered some of the blame for GOP losses last year.

At 38, Langworthy is the youngest state Republican chairman ever, almost half the age of Cox, 72, the son-in-law of the late President Richard M. Nixon. Though Langworthy thanked Cox profusely for his stewardship of the party, he made it clear he thinks the party needed a wake-up call and new blood.

“Our day is here. A new generation of leadership is reporting for duty,” he said.

Langworthy promised to rouse a party that suffered important political and legislative defeats in the last 12 months. In November, Republicans lost their last bastion of power in New York government — the State Senate — as well as every statewide contest and some congressional seats. In Albany beginning in January, Democrats seized the moment to approve far-ranging new laws on criminal justice, marijuana, voting, rent control and driver’s licenses and college aid for people in the country illegally.

Speaker after speaker at the GOP convention said the Democrats had moved too far left and would suffer electoral losses in 2020. They bashed Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (“drunk on power”) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Queens) as empowering an “extreme liberal agenda.”

“Do you even recognize New York State?” Monroe County Executive Cheryl Dinolfo asked delegates. “The answer is no!”

If there was a convention theme, it was many Republicans believed electing Langworthy means an immediate “comeback” for the party — a word they used repeatedly in speeches and on Twitter.

“Our comeback starts now. Today,” declared former Buffalo-area Congressman Tom Reynolds, who hired a then-18-year-old Langworthy as an intern a generation ago.

But many in the party also acknowledged  that the voter registration gap  has widened dramatically this century, with Democrats now holding a better than 2-1 enrollment advantage, and that they haven’t done well attracting new and younger members.

“At 58 years old, I’m still considered a young Republican,” Senate Minority Leader John Flanagan (R-East Northport) told delegates. It got a lot of laughs, but, underscoring the point, he said: “We have to do better to attract new people to the party.”

Langworthy said the party can appeal across demographic lines on pocketbook issues and must do more to reach Democrats and independent voters — along with “doing a better job of recruiting candidates.”

“We need to do a better job of listening” to voters, the new chairman said. “We need more dialogue.”