For much of their one-hour debate, Saritha Komatireddy, the long-shot Republican challenger to Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, seemed to be punching above her weight.
She forcefully criticized Ms. James, who she said ignored the public safety concerns of ordinary New Yorkers, and leaned on her own credentials as a veteran federal prosecutor.
And, as if she were delivering an opening statement, she used a case in the headlines to preview her case against Ms. James. The attorney general, she said, had made a grievous error when she expressed sympathy for a woman known as Jane Doe, who has accused several men of raping her at a fraternity house at Cornell University. The comment came before Ms. James was named as a special prosecutor to investigate Jane Doe’s claims and led to calls for Ms. James to recuse herself.
“She’s already screwed this one up by prejudging it,” Ms. Komatireddy said during the Oct. 8 debate. “This case requires a real prosecutor.”
Ms. James said in a statement earlier this month that she would be impartial. “I am committed to leading a comprehensive investigation they can trust, guided only by the facts, the evidence and the law,” she said.
Ms. Komatireddy, 42, can recite chapter and verse on federal laws targeting terrorism, the illegal drug trade and sex crimes. She has touted her experience leading cases against ISIS fighters and bosses of Mexican drug cartels, calling herself “the only prosecutor” running for the office.
What she has not done, at least until very recently, was convince her party’s donors that she has a chance of unseating Ms. James, a popular Democrat who has who has used her perch as the state’s top lawyer to aggressively counter President Trump’s policy agenda and also go after his business empire for what she has termed illicit behavior.
But Ms. Komatireddy’s performance in the debate seemed to slightly change that dynamic. Her campaign says it has raised more than $1 million since Oct. 9, the day after the debate, enabling it to vastly outspend Ms. James’s on television ads.
“She presents herself and her credentials in a very apolitical way,” said John Faso, a former Republican congressman and lawyer who endorsed Ms. Komatireddy.
The race has tightened in recent months, with a recent poll from Siena University showing Ms. Komatireddy trailing Ms. James by 13 percentage points, 52 to 39. Still, the survey suggested that more than 70 percent of likely voters had never heard of Ms. Komatireddy.
Even a strong showing by Ms. Komatireddy — say, a loss by less than 10 percentage points — could signal a weakening in enthusiasm for New York’s elected leaders, all Democrats, on what is projected to be a strong night for the party nationally.
In a state where Mr. Trump is among the least popular politicians, Ms. Komatireddy has largely avoided invoking his name. In response to a question during the debate, she plainly stated that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the 2020 election, avoiding an association with a baseless theory that many of Mr. Trump’s favored candidates have embraced.
Still, Mr. Trump’s presence has been inescapable during the race.
Ms. James’s campaign emphasizes it. “Just like her top endorser Donald Trump, Saritha Komatireddy has no respect for the law and plays politics every single day,” a spokeswoman for Ms. James’s campaign said in a statement.
In 2022, Ms. James brought a fraud case against Mr. Trump and his family, winning a half-billion judgment, a penalty that was thrown out by a divided New York appeals court last year. Not long after, Ms. James was indicted by Mr. Trump’s Justice Department after he publicly demanded it. A federal judge dismissed the indictment, but prosecutors have kept trying to charge Ms. James.
Her legal broadsides against the president and his apparent acts of retribution against her have won Ms. James a national following. For some Democrats, she became a symbol of the resistance to Mr. Trump’s policies.
Without referencing Mr. Trump explicitly, Ms. Komatireddy has accused Ms. James of going after her political opponents instead of protecting New Yorkers. For her part, during the debate, Ms. James accused Ms. Komatireddy of “auditioning for a job with the Trump administration.”
In the last push of her campaign, Ms. Komatireddy has focused on boosting her name recognition. On Wednesday, she stood outside a subway station on the Upper East Side, greeting thousands of commuters. A number stopped to commend her on the debate performance.
“Have you met Saritha?” her campaign manager, Bill O’Reilly, belted out. “Make the streets safe again!”
Her campaign has drawn attention from Raymond W. Kelly, whose served two stints as the New York Police Department commissioner. Mr. Kelly said that a mutual acquaintance had introduced him to Ms. Komatireddy, and that he came away impressed by her intelligence and commitment to battling street crime.
“It’s time for a change,” he said in a brief interview.
The focus on street crime points to a central tension in her campaign. Ms. Komatireddy sees the attorney general’s office as a vessel for expanding criminal prosecutions of street crime and various forms of fraud, even though the office’s responsibilities lie primarily in civil matters. What is more, poll after poll shows that crime has dipped as a concern among New York voters, with the economy and cost of living surging to top of mind.
Under New York law, there are instances that allow an attorney general to bring criminal charges. For example, Ms. James’s office investigates civilian deaths during encounters with law enforcement officers. She has broad investigative powers in the Cornell investigation as well.
But Ms. Komatireddy has homed in on issues like subway crime and retail theft that are more typically handled by district attorneys, accusing Ms. James of not doing enough to address public disorder. Ms. James and her allies say that Ms. Komatireddy profoundly misunderstands the authority of the office.
“The enforcement powers of the office are fundamentally civil in nature,” said Micah Lasher, a Democrat who backs Ms. James and is expected to win his election in New York’s 12th Congressional District.
Currently, fewer than 100 of the 700 attorneys in Ms. James’s office are assigned to prosecuting crime. Ms. Komatireddy wants to more than triple that number.
James Tierney, the former Democratic attorney general of Maine who now lectures at Harvard Law School, said that Ms. Komatireddy’s vision for the office relied on a faulty premise about what actually brings down crime.
“If you want to do more about street crime in New York state, give more money to your D.A.s and hire more judges,” Mr. Tierney said. He added, “The real anger for Tish James in the Republican Party has nothing to do with street crime at all. It has to do with her promises to go after white-collar crime.”
Ms. Komatireddy, who lives on the Upper East Side on Manhattan, is the child of Indian immigrants and has followed a path familiar to the most polished federal prosecutors. She graduated from Harvard Law School, clerked for Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and worked for a corporate firm. She was nominated by Mr. Trump as a federal judge, but never assumed the bench after Mr. Biden won the 2020 election.
As a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York, Ms. Komatireddy presided over high-profile cases involving national security and drug gangs. She served as chief of staff for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Richard Donoghue, who was Ms. Komatireddy’s boss when he served as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District, said that even in an office of brilliant lawyers, her intellect stood out.
She mostly focused on national security investigations including ones related to cybercrime, and Mr. Donoghue said she was the “go-to person in terms of our most complex and challenging cases.”
“She served in Republican and Democratic administrations, and I had never gotten any sense of her political persuasion before she decided to run,” he said.
Ms. Komatireddy describes herself as “an immigrant kid” who believes in a meritocracy. As evidence of what she sees as the Republican Party’s comfort with multiculturalism, she pointed to the fact that Usha Vance, the wife of the vice president, is Indian American.
“I don’t think one party has a monopoly on diversity,” she said.
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