POLITICS: NY Dems distracting from failure

Former President Donald Trump is gaining in swing-state polls — and you can bet one group is secretly pleased: New York’s elected officials.

The city’s Democrats use big, bad Trump as a cartoon foil to district the public from their own failures.

Last week, Trump announced a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27, two weekends before Election Day.

State Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, whose Manhattan district includes MSG, immediately lodged a complaint via Trump supporter Elon Musk’s X.

“Allowing Trump to hold an event at MSG is equivalent to the infamous Nazis rally at Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939,” Hoylman-Sigal whined.

The rally will “endanger the public safety of New Yorkers and has the potential to incite widespread violence . . . I demand The Garden keep our city safe by cancelling the Trump rally.”

This “demand” — ignored by MSG — is rich.

It’s not that Hoylman-Sigal is wrong: Voters in his district are terrified about “public safety” and “widespread violence.”

It’s just that they know these crises have nothing to do with Trump.

How’s the crime rate in Manhattan’s 14th precinct, which includes MSG?

So far this year, the area has suffered four murders, twice the number seen by this time last year. In 2022, over the same time period, it clocked six murders.

That makes an average of three killings annually every year through early October since early 2020, when New York City abruptly became more dangerous.

For the previous decade, for comparison, the average number of annual murders in the district through each fall hovered between one and two.

Three of this year’s murders were on or near 8th Avenue, in a stretch of five blocks from 38th to 43rd Streets — minutes from MSG.

The fourth killing was at 33rd Street and 7th Avenue, just off the MSG property line.

The victims included a 22-year-old woman stabbed on the avenue around 10:00 p.m. in June and a 55-year-old man stabbed by a fellow resident of a “supportive housing” hotel in July.

Felony assaults in the area, at 409 in 2024, are higher than at any time since at least 1998. They are nearly three times 2019’s levels.

This year’s assaults include the stabbing of a tourist on 8th Avenue by a supportive-housing resident with a long arrest history and the shooting of another tourist by a migrant shoplifter.

Anyone who walks 8th Avenue regularly knows that The Post is right to call it the “strip of despair.”

Until five years ago, police would have intervened in drug dealing, drug use, public drinking, disorderly conduct and menacing before it escalated to felony assault or murder.

Now people are sometimes arrested — but they get put right back on the street, as judges release suspects without bail.

We can forget about deterring lower-level crimes: Petty larceny, at 3,347 incidents year to date, is the highest it’s been in a decade, 45% higher than in 2019.

National Democrats tell us that the big rise in crime after 2020 was an aberration, an artifact of COVID-19 lockdowns.

Maybe — national crime data is inconsistent — but one thing is sure: It’s not an aberration in the area Hoylman-Sigal represents.

And much of the change is due to policies he supports: Easing up on using the criminal-justice system to incapacitate criminals, while ignoring the fact that New York is still failing to use the mental-health system to handle some of them instead.

If our senator is so worried about public safety and violence around Madison Square Garden, he should be asking himself what Albany can do to make Midtown safe again.

But it’s easier to play off Trump.

Gov. Hochul does it, too: In August, she used her speech at the Democratic National Convention to castigate Trump as a “fraud, a philanderer, and a felon. He wasn’t raised with . . . New York values.”

Her rhetoric deflects attention from her failure to deal with the migrant crisis and the subway-murder crisis — nine this year, five times the pre-COVID level — and New York’s continued loss of middle-income residents.

But this “Look! Trump!” tactic may not be working so well anymore.

In 2022 Lee Zeldin, the GOP gubernatorial candidate, nearly beat Hochul despite being a vocal Trump supporter. He doubled the Republican share of the city’s vote, getting 30% in the five boroughs.

No, Trump is not going to win Gotham in 2024 — but he’ll likely do better than the 23% he pulled here in 2020, as he peels off voters upset by both crime and the rising cost of living.

Voters are tired of Democrats shouting “Trump!” to divert attention from the mess they control.