Saritha Komatireddy, the Telangana-origin Republican taking on New York’s Attorney General, raises $1 million in three weeks

New York’s attorney general race was supposed to be a formality. Letitia James, the Democrat best known for her civil fraud case against Donald Trump, is seeking a third term in a state that has not elected a Republican to the office since 1994. Her challenger is a 42-year-old daughter of Indian immigrants with roots in Telangana whom most voters had never heard of in September.

Saritha Komatireddy has made the race a contest, at least on television. Her campaign says it has raised more than $1 million since 9 October, the morning after her only debate with James, and has used it to outspend the incumbent on air. The money came after a debate in which she pressed James on crime and on antisemitism, and in which, asked directly, she said Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

The résumé

Komatireddy is a Harvard Law School graduate who clerked for Brett Kavanaugh when he sat on the DC Circuit, served as a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York and went on to be chief of staff at the Drug Enforcement Administration. Richard Donoghue, the former US Attorney in Brooklyn who was her boss, calls her the “go-to person in terms of our most complex and challenging cases.” Trump nominated her to the federal bench in his first term; the nomination lapsed and she never took the seat.

Her platform is law and order. She promises to more than triple the number of attorneys handling criminal cases in an office of about 700 lawyers, where fewer than 100 do so now. Democrats backing James reply that the office’s enforcement powers are fundamentally civil and that the plan misreads the job. She has endorsements from former Yankees first baseman Mark Teixeira and former police commissioner Raymond Kelly, who said it was “time for a change.” Trump has endorsed her too, though her campaign rarely mentions him; asked about diversity, she pointed to Usha Vance and said “I don’t think one party has a monopoly on diversity.”

The numbers

A Siena poll had James at 52 per cent and Komatireddy at 39, with more than seven in ten likely voters saying they did not know enough about her to have an opinion. The campaign’s own OnMessage survey, taken on 12 to 14 October, put James at 50.7 and Komatireddy at 44.7. Early voting is under way and polls close on 3 November. A Telugu name on a statewide New York ballot is itself new; the result will say whether it was more than that.