Part I of our primary preview covers the state of New York. For Part II, covering Colorado and Utah, click here.
NY-10 (Lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn)
Dan Goldman (i) vs. Bruno Grandsard vs. Evan Hutchison
Result (>95% in): Goldman 65.0%, Hutchison 23.1%, Grandsard 10.% | Goldman wins
Rep. Dan Goldman has no business representing one of the most progressive districts in America, but he’s going to get a second term anyway. The New York left’s failure to field a serious challenge here is almost as embarrassing as the New York left’s failure to figure out what the hell they’re going to do about Eric Adams next year. Goldman is a centrist who used his fortune as an heir to Levi’s Jeans to purchase this district in 2022, and his membership in the Congressional Progressive Caucus serves as a reminder that the CPC’s membership standards are meaningless. Local organizer Evan Hutchison is staking his low-budget campaign on a Gaza ceasefire, and climate activist Bruno Grandsard is an earnest policy wonk who seems to just bristle at the way Goldman got his seat in Congress; they’ll serve as outlets for protest votes.
NY-14 (Parts of the Bronx and Queens)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (i) vs. Marty Dolan
Result (>95% in): Ocasio-Cortez 81.8%, Dolan 17.8% | Ocasio-Cortez wins
After winning her 2022 primary uncontested, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a primary from insurance professional Marty Dolan. Dolan has raised a modest amount of money and self-funded nearly $300,000, and he’s running as an eccentric version of your usual conservative backlash candidate: he wants to undo New York’s landmark bail reforms and bring back the widespread use of cash bail, and he wants to “refund, not defund” the police, but he’s also a big proponent of a value-added tax to replace many current taxes and he wants to federalize Medicaid (that last one is actually a good idea.) He’ll get votes from more conservative voters in the whitest, wealthiest parts of AOC’s district; he might even win some precincts in Throggs Neck or College Point, as ex-Republican CNBC host Michelle Caruso-Cabrera did in 2020. He will not win, nor will he come close. The most interesting thing about this race is the potential it has to impact the AD-82 primary.
NY-16 (Westchester County and Co-Op City, Bronx)
Jamaal Bowman (i) vs. George Latimer
Result (>95% in): Latimer 58.4% Bowman 41.5% | Latimer wins
Paradoxically, we sometimes find ourselves with little to say about the biggest elections in these previews. There are state assembly elections in this preview with tons of details we wanted to share, but NY-16? You already know.
Jamaal Bowman defeated long-in-the-tooth incumbent Eliot Engel in an absolutely triumphant 2020 primary election. However, New York lost a congressional district almost immediately after, and the domino effect was that Bowman had to be drawn a much whiter district that was nearly all Westchester County and almost no Bronx. (The previous district had been about ⅔ in Westchester and ⅓ in the Bronx.) A Black leftist was never going to have an easy time in those wealthy, whiter new towns, and Bowman indeed did quite poorly with his new voters in 2022, taking only 55% of the vote against a pair of badly underfunded challengers. So AIPAC set their sights on him.
There’s no need to rehash the details: AIPAC recruited moderate County Executive George Latimer, who used his influence to keep NY-16 as white as possible in the 2024 redistricting, and after he got his wish, AIPAC began to dump millions upon millions into the district. They spent over $14 million on independent expenditures alone, an amount that might as well be $140 million or $140 billion—in a congressional primary race, it all becomes something approaching infinity at that point. (Some other PACs, including Democratic Majority for Israel and the cryptocurrency industry front Fairshake, threw down a couple million more.) Bowman and his allies on the left, like Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party had nowhere near that amount of money, and, even after a fundraising like hell for months, could only put together about $4 million to back him up. Polling has been ugly for Bowman, with the only independent poll of the race coming from Emerson in early June, and putting Latimer’s lead at 48% to 31%. Latimer has spent the closing stretch of the race making racist statement after racist statement, but they hardly seem to matter to the white voters of Westchester County, which is why Latimer fought so hard to keep them in the district, to give himself an “ethnic benefit”, as he puts it.
Progressives and the left, including NYC-DSA, who voted to re-endorse Bowman after pulling their support in 2022 over Israel-Palestine issues, are fighting like hell to pull off a miracle here, but are universally braced for a loss, and a painful one. AIPAC is funneling ludicrous amounts of Republican money to elevate a white grievance candidate in the suburbs of diverse, progressive city, and it all appears to be working. Bleak. The early voting numbers are even bleaker: Scarsdale, Mamaroneck, and Rye, all white majority towns that hate Bowman based on their previous voting patterns, have cast more early votes than majority-Black Mt. Vernon, despite Mt. Vernon being somewhere from two to five times their size. Bowman has to hope for an improbable surge of election day voters, something on par with the kind of turnout you would see in a contested presidential primary, or even greater. Again, bleak. We promise the legislative races have more reasons for optimism.
SD-06 (Hempstead, Long Island)
Siela Bynoe vs. Taylor Darling
Result (>95% in): Bynoe 53.2%, Darling 46.3% | Bynoe wins
A few years ago, New York State Democratic Chair and Nassau County Democratic Chair Jay Jacobs (he holds both titles) grew tired of then-Assemb. Earlene Hooper, and he backed challenger Taylor Raynor to unseat her. Raynor won, got married, changed her name to Taylor Darling, and, apparently, stopped answering Jacobs’s calls. Jacobs is supporting Darling’s opponent, Nassau County Legislator Siela Bynoe; Darling claims it’s because she wouldn’t bow to “special interests,” but, as Politico notes, she’s the one benefiting from a flood of charter school money in this race. (There are also a couple of donations from conservative PACs sitting in Darling’s bank account, like the tough-on-crime PAC Fair Just and Safe NY. Bynoe is almost entirely reliant on individual donations, unions, and public matching funds.) It seems like more of a personal beef, because Jacobs is normally quite moderate; he donated the federal maximum to George Latimer, for example. A candidate like Darling isn’t out of character for him, while Bynoe seems honestly a little too normal for Jacobs’s tastes. (Plus she ran as a less conservative alternative to Jacobs’s preferred NY-04 candidate in 2022 before dropping out.) Bynoe isn’t backed by progressive groups, but organized labor is with her and she has done quite well with matching funds; hopefully it’ll be enough to overcome Darling’s name recognition and cushion of conservative money.
SD-59 (Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan)
Kristen Gonzalez (i) vs. Gus Lambropoulos
Result (>95% in): Gonzalez 85.0%, Lambropoulos 14.7% | Gonzalez wins
Democratic socialist state Sen. Kristen Gonzalez’s primary is basically a formality—Gonzalez mopped the floor with a well-funded, establishment-backed opponent in Elizabeth Crowley (Joe’s cousin) two years ago, and the People’s Republic of Astoria is not changing course anytime soon. Moderate businessman and congestion pricing opponent Gus Lambropoulos might be able to collect some votes from Astoria’s Greek community and disgruntled rich voters in this district’s slice of Manhattan, but a district based in Astoria and Greenpoint will absolutely be reelecting its scandal-free DSA legislator.
AD-18 (Hempstead, Long Island)
Noah Burroughs vs. Lisa Ortiz
Result (>95% in): Burroughs 51.5%, Ortiz 48.2% | Burroughs wins
This incredibly low-key primary pits Hempstead village trustee Noah Burroughs, a former New York Jets player, against childcare business owner Lisa Ortiz. Almost nothing has been written about the race, and the two are both vague on policy, but Ortiz is running with the backing of moderate Rep. Tom Suozzi, while Burroughs is endorsed by the Working Families Party, which is enough to say Burroughs is clearly the superior choice.
AD-34 (Jackson Heights and Astoria, Queens)
Jessica González-Rojas (i) vs. Ricardo Pacheco
Result (>95% in): González-Rojas 82.6%, Pacheco 17.1% | González-Rojas wins
Retired cop and community activist Ricardo Pacheco is best known for raising a fuss about the city’s Open Streets program, though he swears on his website that he’s not anti-Open Streets. While he has a reasonable amount of money to work with, Pacheco stands little chance against progressive Assemb. Jessica González-Rojas, especially after redistricting added a large piece of ultra-progressive Astoria to this already quite progressive Jackson Heights district.
AD-35 (East Elmhurst and Corona, Queens)
Larinda Hooks vs. Hiram Monserrate
Result (>95% in): Hooks 59.1%, Monserrate 40.5% | Hooks wins
Corrupt domestic abuser Hiram Monserrate just won’t stop making comeback attempts, and the retirement of longtime Assemb. Jeffrion Aubry gives Monserrate the kind of opening he hasn’t had in years. Monserrate has been losing (or getting thrown off the ballot) in campaigns against Aubry and local CM Francisco Moya on and off since 2017, but the 76-year-old Aubry is retiring this year after more than three decades representing Corona and East Elmhurst. And Monserrate doesn’t just have an open seat to run for—he also has a wedge issue to exploit. Monserrate opposes Mets owner Steve Cohen’s proposal for a casino on a disused parking lot at Citi Field, a hot-button issue in Queens; Larinda Hooks, a nonprofit executive backed by a broad coalition of people who don’t want to see Monserrate return to power, supports the proposal, taking at face value the billionaire Mets owner’s promise of 23,000 union jobs. While taking Steve Cohen at face value is probably not a great idea, electing Hiram Monserrate is a worse one (and the proposal faces dim prospects anyway due to the opposition of other local figures like state Sen. Jessica Ramos.) Hooks has outraised Monserrate comfortably, and she’s seen a last-minute flood of donations from unions and business PACs alike. As with her endorsement list—which includes everyone from the Working Families Party to Ramos to Aubry to Eric Adams ally Jenifer Rajkumar—the campaign finance filings reflect the fact that certain things, such as disliking Hiram Monserrate, transcend ideology and the other usual fault lines.
AD-37 (Long Island City, Sunnyside, Ridgewood, and Maspeth, Queens)
Juan Ardila (i) vs. Johanna Carmona vs. Claire Valdez
Result (>95% in): Valdez 58.5%, Carmona 31.5%, Ardila 9.8% | Valdez wins
This will, of course, never be proven, but it’s pretty obvious to us that when open Senate and Assembly seats both appeared in the same part of western Queens in 2022, DSA and WFP struck a compromise to avoid fighting each other. DSA got the Senate seat and WFP got the Assembly seat. DSA chose Kristen Gonzalez for SD-59, and WFP chose Juan Ardila, a former City Council candidate, for AD-37, both of whom won with ease. While Gonzalez looks like she’ll have a long career ahead of her, Ardila’s freshman term was almost immediately derailed by revelations from multiple women that he was a sex pest. Ardila initially apologized for his behavior, before pivoting to claiming it never happened, and paying for an “independent” investigation to clear himself of wrongdoing. Ardila remains on the ballot and is kind of running for reelection, but all of his allies have abandoned him and he should place a distant third.
Naturally, other politicians are moving in after that went down. DSA immediately targeted the seat, and organizer Claire Valdez was the candidate they eventually endorsed. Moderates obviously weren't going to just allow DSA to grab a seat, but also saw the writing on the wall for Ardila, which is where Johanna Carmona, an ex-prosecutor and staffer to City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, comes in. Carmona has done her best to present as a viable, progressive alternative to Ardila that merely doesn’t have the “socialist” label like Valdez does, and has potentially even tried to confuse voters into thinking she’s endorsed by the Working Families Party. The actual WFP has endorsed Valdez, as has AOC, Brad Lander, Jumaane Williams, and Make the Road Action. Carmona is benefitting from a big centrist outside money push, but the whole thing feels kind of perfunctory—there’s not even the same level of energy for her that there was for Elizabeth Crowley in SD-59 last cycle.
AD-40 (Flushing, Queens)
Ron Kim (i) vs. Yi Andy Chen vs. Dao Yin
Result (>95% in): Kim 54.0%, 39.8%, Yin 5.9% | Kim wins
For a couple years now, Assemb. Ron Kim has been fighting against the rightward trend of Flushing, a bustling neighborhood that serves as a hub of Queens’s large Chinese and Korean communities. While Flushing was once lopsidedly Democratic, it has lurched to the right post-2020; in 2021, Eric Adams narrowly lost AD-40 to Republican Curtis Sliwa, and in 2022 Lee Zeldin also carried AD-40. (Joe Biden carried AD-40 by more than 20 points, a sharp drop from previous Democrats’ performances but still a comfortable margin.) That rightward lurch has shown in primaries as well as general elections. In 2022, Kim survived a challenge from conservative Democrat Kenneth Chiu by a margin of just 51%-49%, then held on to his seat in November’s general election by about the same margin while Zeldin carried AD-40. This time around, Yi Andy Chen is hoping to accomplish what Chiu almost did; he’s backed by police unions and a lot of Chinese-American business associations, and he’s posting fundraising numbers so high (with significant internal discrepancies) that they seem unbelievable, far outstripping Kim’s healthy fundraising. After Kim’s near-miss in 2022, we’d be extremely pessimistic about his chances of beating an even better-funded challenger were it not for the presence of a second conservative Chinese candidate in the race, Dao Yin. (We still are pessimistic to an extent.) Yin, much like Chen, has some issues with his campaign funding, but Yin’s are more serious: it seems an awful lot like Yin’s campaign forged some of the donation records that it used to qualify for public matching funds.
AD-41 (Flatlands, Midwood, and Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn)
Kalman Yeger vs. Adam Dweck
Result (>95% in): Yeger 70.1%, Dweck 29.0% | Yeger wins
The next member of the Assembly from District 41 will be City Council Member Kalman Yeger. Yeger, a popular politician in the conservative Jewish neighborhood of Midwood, is backed by outgoing Assemb. Helene Weinstein and just about everyone else who’s bothered endorsing in this race; Solidarity PAC, an anti-left, pro-Israel group that seeks to be a “mini-AIPAC,” added Yeger to their slate late, we think to juice their win rate by adding a basically uncompetitive race. But this is still a bluish district thanks to the overwhelmingly Democratic, mostly Black neighborhood of Flatlands, not a lopsidedly conservative white enclave like Yeger’s city council district. Yeger is conservative enough that he already has the Republican and Conservative ballot lines in the general election; in a district as blue as this one, those are the only ballot lines a politician as conservative as Yeger should be running on. Yeger might be able to get enough crossover support to win a general election on those lines alone, but Democrats should be trying to make him work for it instead of agreeing with Republicans to simply hand Yeger the seat. Yeger’s primary opponent, former government and campaign staffer Adam Dweck, is a moderate, but at least he’s only seeking the Democratic nod.
AD-50 (Williamsburg and Greenpoint, Brooklyn)
Emily Gallagher (i) vs. Andrew Bodiford vs. Anathea Simpkins
Result (>95% in): Gallagher 75.4%, Simpkins 20.7%, Bodilford 3.5% | Gallagher wins
Honestly, it’s very funny that the campaign of Anathea Simpkins has attracted as much money as it has, given her opponent and given the district. Assemb. Emily Gallagher is a democratic socialist who won without the support of DSA or WFP, the two most powerful engines of progressive primary challenges in NYC; to do it, she unseated Assemb. Joe Lentol, the incumbent since 1973. She was able to pull it off because this district takes in most of Williamsburg—a punchline and shorthand for lefty hipster Brooklyn for decades now—and the neighborhood of Greenpoint, which somehow votes even more left-wing than Williamsburg itself. Since her upset victory, DSA and all the progressive groups that counted her out in 2020 have become strong supporters, and she has become a prominent member of DSA’s bloc of state legislators as well as a leading voice in Brooklyn politics on urbanist issues like public transportation and street safety. Gallagher turned back a challenge from firefighter Paddy O’Sullivan 80%-20% in 2022, but her continued advocacy for street safety earned her the ire of local studio owner Anthony Argento, whose family owns dozens of soundstages where many well-known shows and movies are shot. For over a year, the Argento family has been fighting against a proposed redesign of McGuinness Boulevard, a Greenpoint thoroughfare which is the site of dozens of serious accidents each year, including the 2021 hit-and-run killing of a local schoolteacher. The redesign would add bike lanes and pedestrians at the cost of some lanes currently reserved for auto traffic, saving lives along the dangerous road and easing the commute of the many residents who walk or bike. Gallagher is a vocal supporter of the redesign and has criticized the Adams administration for hesitating, then eventually shelving, the plan, and that made the Argentos mad enough to donate a lot of money to Simpkins, who also drew Lentol to her campaign launch. (He’s still bitter about 2020.) Simpkins is pretty clearly a down-the-line centrist and not just a bike lane hater; the Real Estate Board of NY backs Simpkins as revenge for Gallagher’s strong support for good cause eviction protections, and Solidarity PAC has directed a good chunk of change to Simpkins as well.
Simpkins has been raising a lot (it helps that she’s an executive at the gun control nonprofit Sandy Hook Promise) and benefiting from a lot of outside expenditures, but it all seems so…silly. This is Williamsburg and Greenpoint. Gallagher is a democratic socialist incumbent backed by the overwhelming majority of organized labor, local elected officials, and influential political clubs. Most people in this part of Brooklyn walk, bike, or use public transit, putting her on the right side of the local wedge issue. She should win resoundingly.
AD-52 (Gowanus, Cobble Hill, and DUMBO, Brooklyn)
Jo Anne Simon (i) vs. Scott Budow
Result (>95% in): Simon 79.1%, Budow 20.3% | Simon wins
Jo Anne Simon would be an acceptable, even above-average, member of the Assembly in most of the state, but this district is on the periphery of the most progressive parts of Brooklyn, making her replacement level at best. The place where the need for an upgrade is clearest is housing—Simon, who lives in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Brooklyn, has been an ardent opponent of every upzoning or redevelopment project in the boro, and ran for Borough President as the NIMBY homeowner candidate in 2021. Even with that history, this year marks the first time someone’s actually challenging her on housing politics: attorney Scott Budow. Budow is centering his campaign on increasing housing supply to make New York more affordable, while making it as clear as he can that he’s not going to be any less progressive than Simon in any area. The only red flag we see is that he works in employment law…for employers. (Yikes, dude.) Simon, a well-known figure in the district by this point, is likely going to trounce Budow, who has only raised about $30,000 for this campaign, but an unexpectedly strong showing from Budow would indicate that housing is a compelling issue in the district.
AD-56 (Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn)
Stefani Zinerman (i) vs. Eon Tyrell Huntley
Result (>95% in): Zinerman 52.8%, Huntley 46.9% | Zinerman wins
This election is the biggest legislative contest of the night, carrying a symbolic significance about the health of the Brooklyn establishment, the reach and audience of the left in New York City, the importance of Palestine in local elections, and whether the AIPAC model of flooding the zone with outside money works at the assembly level.
In 2020, the left struck a body blow to the Brooklyn machine when Jabari Brisport won the open 25th Senate district 58%-34% against establishment-backed Tremaine Wright, then the Assemblymember representing AD-56. It was a tremendously ugly campaign, exemplified by the time a gaggle of Wright supporters, organized by the city councilmember for the area, Laurie Cumbo, showed up outside of Brisport’s house to yell racial slurs at him. Brisport’s victory came from winning towering 30+% margins in the whiter west side of the district, while the eastern, more heavily Black side was essentially a draw. Wright actually lost AD-56 to Brisport 50-47.
Since then, DSA has found victory mainly in districts that lie along the East River and are full of young renters, the left’s base, which has led many in the NYC establishment to take their original “white gentrifiers” understanding of the left and conclude that the left is limited to a single corridor in the city, and that that corridor is large enough to be an annoyance, but small enough to be ignored. Cumbo even got her chief of staff elected to succeed her on the Council, defeating a DSA-endorsed candidate. In this election, DSA is once again moving inland in Brooklyn to prove that their message can be successful everywhere.
Ultimately, elections are run between actual human beings, and the two competing here are second-term incumbent Stefani Zinerman, a nonprofit consultant who entered politics as a staffer to City Councilmember Robert Cornegy, and Eon Huntley, a fashion retail worker who went from excited by Bernie Sanders in 2016 to joining DSA in 2018. If there’s a single issue Huntley would like voters to know separates the two, it’s housing. Zinerman, a homeowner, inserted herself into the legislative battle over the Good Cause Eviction bill (giving tenants default ability to renew their leases and capping rent increases), a legislative priority of progressives this year, publicly begging Gov. Kathy Hochul to block it. Zinerman was protested a few times, and she had a Cumbo-esque response, repeatedly accusing state Sen. Jabari Brisport of “political violence”, though she at least had the common sense not to show up to his house to yell racial slurs at him. Thanks to the work of the landlord lobby and legislators like Zinerman, the initial proposal for the bill was watered down so badly it only covered New York City, and only about a quarter of the apartments in the city.
On Huntley’s website, Housing is the first issue listed. Four of the other five are expected—Education, Labor, Healthcare, and Transit—but the sixth has raised eyebrows: Ceasefire. NYC-DSA has repeatedly said that “Palestine is on the ballot” this election, and Huntley, more than any other candidate, is putting that into practice. From a joint campaign canvass/rally for the Not On Our Dime bill to campaign mailers on the issue of a ceasefire and ending military aid to Israel, Huntley has put Palestine front-and-center in a way no legislative candidate in the country is doing.
Zinerman, by contrast, has been listless in campaigning and rudderless on what her actual message to voters is, with the vacuum being filled by negative messaging against Huntley and the DSA. This isn’t to say Huntley hasn’t gone negative—even if nothing will top 2020, this is still a gloves-off campaign on both sides—but the lack of anything else coming from the Zinerman camp is noticeable. When the New York Times profiled contested Assembly elections over the weekend, every moderate candidate spoke to their own goals and accomplishments, except for Zinerman; the NYT had to go to state AG Letitia James for a quote. Intentionally or not, Zinerman is making the same argument that Cumbo and Wright made in 2020, that the Brooklyn establishment is the single greatest source of Black power in the state, and the left, in their telling, is a white movement hellbent on tearing down Black power. Unlike Cumbo, she’s stayed away from terms like “lynch mob”, but her insistence that protests are “political violence” originates in the same vein.
In fairness to Zinerman, if she wasn’t willing to make the election a referendum on the Brooklyn political establishment, seemingly everyone else has been willing to do it for her. Brooklyn machine chair Rodneyse Bichotte is a key Zinerman backer, as is Congressmember and Speaker-in-waiting Hakeem Jeffries. André Richardson, a staffer of both his and Zinerman’s, gave a statement to Politico calling Huntley’s campaign “The virtue signaling crowd and the carpetbaggers who work for them” (Huntley is a third-generation Brooklynite.) District Leader and failed council candidate Henry Butler called Huntley “a puppet for others”. Rev. Conrad Tillard, who challenged Brisport in 2022 with establishment support including Eric Adams, has said that “If [Huntley] wins with this team in the heart of Black Brooklyn with this team. Black politics is dead in NYC.” The stakes of this race are clearly being noticed outside of Brooklyn. Solidarity PAC, a “mini-AIPAC” launched this year for New York legislative races; New Yorkers for a Balanced Albany, funded entirely by $2.25 million from billionaires Michael Bloomberg and Jim Walton; charter school PAC Moving New York Families Forward; and zombie PAC, New York Women Lead, resurrected this year with real estate money, have all come to Zinerman’s aid, which Zinerman readily accepts, refering to the spending on her behalf as “reparations”. In all of the flood of mailers, the most solid hit they’ve landed on Huntley is that he lives a few blocks outside the district. By this point voters are probably wise to the reality that this primary is about preserving the Brooklyn machine, but no one’s sure what fate voters will decide for the machine, and absolutely everyone is treating this election as close. If Matthew Kassel’s anonymous source is to be believed, a recent poll showed Zinerman up by “just a couple of points'', but things were “not going in the right direction” for her.
AD-68 (East Harlem, Manhattan)
Eddie Gibbs (i) vs. Tamika Mapp vs. Xavier Santiago vs. William Smith
Result (>95% in): Gibbs 42.5%, Santiago 33.6%, Mapp 16.9%, Smith 6.4% | Gibbs wins
Assemb. Eddie Gibbs won this seat in heavily Latino East Harlem, also known as El Barrio, via a party convention after his predecessor Robert Rodriguez was appointed to serve as New York’s Secretary of State. Gibbs made history as the first formerly incarcerated New Yorker elected to the legislature; he has been admirably open about his journey after he spent years in prison on a manslaughter charge for fatally shooting a man who had attacked him. His position in the legislature is tenuous for reasons wholly unrelated to Gibbs’s past.
It was clear from the time of Gibbs’s installment that a non-Latino Black man would have trouble overcoming the intense racial polarization of Upper Manhattan, and that only became more evident when results for Gibbs’s first contested primary rolled in: two Latino candidates who Gibbs had defeated at the party’s replacement convention, Wilfredo López and John Ruiz-Miranda, combined for a little over 43% of the vote, more than Gibbs’s 37%. (The remaining 19% went to Tamika Mapp, a district leader and perennial candidate who is on the ballot again this year.) Gibbs did that poorly in 2022 despite the lack of a concerted effort to oust him by anyone other than the candidates themselves, and he doesn’t have that luxury this time around. Local Community Board chair Xavier Santiago is Gibbs’s leading opponent this year, and he’s backed by titans of Manhattan politics including Reps. Adriano Espaillat, the boss of a powerful political operation spanning northern Manhattan and the western Bronx, and Jerry Nadler, by far the most prominent white Democrat left standing in Manhattan politics. (Gibbs recently got himself in hot water by arguing with a constituent who took him to task for claiming endorsements he didn’t have; he responded by…falsely claiming he had Nadler’s endorsement.) The handful of predominantly white precincts in this district were strong for Gibbs in that 2022 primary, but we could easily see them following the Nadler endorsement this time around.
While Gibbs has been faking endorsements, he does have some real backers as well; Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and organized labor are coming to Gibbs’s defense, and the charter school PAC New Yorkers for a Balanced Albany paid for $69,000 in mailers in support of Gibbs. (Gibbs is supportive of charter school expansion.) Further complicating things is another district leader, William J. Smith, who has very little in the way of money but has been present at community forums and could further split the base of Black voters that Gibbs desperately needs.
AD-69 (Upper West Side and Morningside Heights, Manhattan)
Jack Kellner vs. Micah Lasher vs. Eli Northrup vs. Carmen Quinones vs. Melissa Rosenberg
Result (>95% in): Lasher 52.8%, Northrup 34.3%, Quinones 5.8%, Rosenberg 4.8%, Kellner 2.0% | Lasher wins
Upper West Side power brokers are excited for Kathy Hochul administration staffer Micah Lasher. He has the support of the area’s congressmembers (Jerry Nadler and Adriano Espillat), Councilmembers (Shaun Abreu and eternal god-emperor of the UWS Gale Brewer), Borough President (Mark Levine), and state senators (Robert Jackson and Brad Hoylman-Sigal). That really should be the end of the story, but Lasher is struggling to close the deal. It could be that this is the wrong moment to be traffic enthusiast Kathy Hochul’s Director of Policy, or that the 69th district, which includes Columbia University and the rapidly growing neighborhood of Morningside Heights, is getting more progressive than the political class currently supported by the UWS, but the reality is he doesn’t have this locked up.
Public defender Eli Northrup is giving Lasher a tough challenge with the support of the Working Families Party and other progressive groups, as well as outgoing incumbent Danny O’Donnell. While Northrup’s overall haul is dwarfed by Lasher’s—it turns out you can raise a lot when you’re backed by the local establishment in an affluent and politically engaged district—he has managed to leverage the new public financing system to keep things respectably close (both he and Lasher maxed out under the program; Lasher’s advantage is from large donors) and put a scare into Lasher. Northup understands he’s an underdog and has come out swinging. A large part of his campaign messaging is tying Lasher to special interests, especially the real estate industry. It’s an entirely fair attack, but one that is making some people very, very angry. Lasher’s closing message has been about how unfair and unsportsmanlike it is of Northrup to go negative at all.
AD-70 (Harlem and Manhattanville, Manhattan)
Shana Harmongoff vs. Maria Ordoñez vs. Craig Schley vs. Jordan Wright
Result (>95% in): Wright 48.3%, Ordonez 29.7%, Harmongoff 16.8%, Schley 4.9% | Wright wins
After nearly 20 years representing Harlem, first on the City Council and then in the state Assembly, Inez Dickens is retiring from elected office. The candidate with the inside track to replace her is Jordan Wright, the son of Manhattan Democratic Party boss Keith Wright, and Wright is enjoying a unified front from the normally fractious Upper Manhattan establishment. Councilman Yusef Salaam is backing Wright, who ran his successful 2023 campaign; so are Assembs. Dickens and Al Taylor, the two candidates Salaam (and Wright) defeated in 2023. Even Adriano Espaillat is staying out of this race, and Espaillat seldom passes up the chance to antagonize Harlem’s Black establishment. He’s staying out because the only Latino candidate in the race is Maria Ordoñez, a leftist Columbia grad last seen running for a city council seat that overlaps with AD-70 in Ordoñez’s lifelong home of western Harlem. Ordoñez has fundraised well, benefiting immensely from New York’s new public matching funds program, which gives candidates matching funds for their small, in-district donations; as a result, she has the resources to run a campaign operation as professional as Wright’s. A third candidate, Shana Harmongoff, ran unsuccessfully for Harlem’s state Senate seat in 2022; while she has less money to work with than either of her opponents, she is by no means broke, she’s been making the rounds at community events and local churches, and she’s backed by some mildly prominent local figures like District Leader Corey Ortega and former candidate Joshua Clennon, who Wright’s team successfully sought to disqualify from the ballot.
In racially polarized Harlem, the optics of backing a non-Black candidate are dicey, and it’s clearly kept some progressive groups from taking sides in this race. The ones that have gotten involved, like New York Progressive Action Network and Tenants PAC, are backing Ordoñez. Ordoñez’s path to victory likely involves winning a plurality with a coalition of white, Latino, and Asian voters as Wright and Harmongoff, who are both Black, split Black voters in a district that’s just about ½ Black. It’s enough of a possibility that Solidarity PAC felt the need to steer around $40,000 to Wright this spring.
AD-71 (Hamilton Heights, Washington Heights, and Hudson Heights, Manhattan)
Al Taylor (i) vs. Julien Segura
Result (>95% in): Taylor 70.8%, Segura 28.3% | Taylor wins
Al Taylor could, theoretically, be vulnerable. His weak third-place performance in the 2023 primary for Harlem’s city council seat didn’t inspire confidence, especially considering he lost his own Assembly district to eventual winner Yusef Salaam. However, political consultant Julien Segura, who is running as a progressive, is probably not going to be the one to exploit Taylor’s vulnerability, though a late infusion of $42,000 in public matching funds could be enough for Segura to make a dent.
AD-72 (Washington Heights, Hudson Heights, and Marble Hill, Manhattan)
Manny De Los Santos (i) vs. Francesca Castellanos
Result (>95% in): De Los Santos 79.8%, Castellanos 18.8% | De Los Santos wins
Manny De Los Santos’s only opponent is perennial candidate Francesca Castellanos, so this member of the famed Squadriano is headed for another term.
AD-77 (West Bronx)
Landon Dais (i) vs. Leonardo Coello
Result (>95% in): Dais 58.6%, Coello 40.9% | Dais wins
After Assemb. Latoya Joyner resigned to take a private-sector job, the local party committee selected attorney Landon Dais to replace her—and Adriano Espaillat saw an opportunity.
Due to disparities in turnout and citizenship rates, Black voters have always been able to elect the assemblymember in AD-77, but AD-77 is heavily Latino and specifically Dominican, which is Espaillat’s base. Dais, additionally, was an unexpected pick to replace Joyner; a local district leader, Yves Filius, had been expected to get the nod, not Dais, a former Harlem city council candidate who’s relatively new to the Bronx. Put together, it was enough to convince Espaillat that AD-77 was worth targeting next in his attempts to expand his Dominican-American political empire, already a dominant force in the politics of upper Manhattan and the west Bronx. Adams administration aide Leonardo Coello is Espaillat’s pick here—and Espaillat’s intervention has ruffled some feathers as Assembly leaders and other Bronx Democrats view it as an unjustified attempt to oust a Black assemblyman. Apparently, that’s why Coello isn’t endorsed by the full Squadriano—Speaker Carl Heastie reportedly was able to pressure Manhattan Assemb. Manny De Los Santos and Bronx Assemb. Yudelka Tapia, Coello’s former boss, into staying neutral against Espaillat’s wishes. State Democrats have also steered a good chunk of change Dais’s way, and he has a healthy financial advantage—but Espaillat’s candidates have ousted incumbents and beaten better-funded opponents before, so there’s always the chance it happens again.
AD-82 (Throggs Neck, Pelham, and Co-Op City, Bronx)
Michael Benedetto (i) vs. Jonathan Soto
Result (>95% in): Benedetto 62.1%, Soto 37.7% | Benedetto wins
This corner of the Bronx may be tired of voting in high-stakes battles for the soul of the Democratic Party. Parts of it have hosted AOC’s first election, one of the 2018 IDC primaries, Jamaal Bowman’s first election versus Eliot Engel, and now Jamaal Bowman’s challenge from George Latimer. Jonathan Soto is giving voters here yet another chance to change the course of Democratic politics in New York.
Soto ran against incumbent Michael Benedetto in 2022, losing the Democratic primary by a respectable 56%-36% margin with the support of WFP and AOC, who is still the local congresswoman. Soto won the precincts along the district’s heavily Latino western border, but faltered in Co-op City and got crushed in its whiter, Trumpier waterfront neighborhoods to the east. Benedetto didn’t take Soto particularly seriously in 2022, and he doesn’t seem to be taking him that much more seriously now, though the universe of centrist dark money PACs is treating Soto as a threat. There’s reason to think things will be different from 2022, too: in 2022, turnout was poor, and the state had a bifurcated primary due to a court-ordered redistricting—primaries for statewide offices and the Assembly were held in June, while primaries for Congress and state Senate were held later in August under court-drawn maps. In 2024, all non-presidential primaries are being held at once, and Soto is sharing the ballot with AOC and Bowman, who both have contested primaries of their own. Additionally—and we really buried the lede here—Soto is backed by NYC-DSA and its volunteer army this time around. DSA canvassers have fanned out across the Bronx for Soto, and on the doors those canvassers can now make the association between Soto and the applicable DSA-endorsed congressional incumbent—Bowman in Co-op City and AOC everywhere else. Bowman won Co-op City by nearly 30 points against Eliot Engel and is counting on a much larger margin this time, and AOC won her portion of AD-82 in her last primary (also in 2020) by an even wider margin.
As for the candidates themselves, Benedetto is an endangered species: a white Democrat in the Bronx. Well, white Democrats still exist in the Bronx, but they’re not numerous and concentrated enough for white candidates to routinely win Democratic primaries anymore outside of the very whitest districts, and Benedetto, who was first elected in 2005, is an artifact of an era when this part of the Bronx was a lot whiter. He also reflects the generally conservative politics of those white voters—there’s a strip of Trump precincts along the Bronx side of the Long Island Sound, and that’s where Benedetto did best in 2022. (Soto has, coincidentally, been attacking Benedetto for previously accepting donations from Trump, back when he was just a clownish racist real estate developer and not an aspiring fascist strongman.) Soto is a public school parent-activist who has been fighting mayoral control of NYC public schools for years, and he also organized for AOC’s campaign in 2018. Getting Jonathan Soto in office would transform the politics of the Bronx, and tonight we’ll find out whether Bronx voters are in a transformative mood.
AD-84 (Mott Haven, Hunts Point, and Highbridge, Bronx)
Amanda Septimo (i) vs. Hector Feliciano
Result (>95% in): Septimo 72.7%%, Feliciano 26.3% | Septimo wins
Amanda Septimo made it into office after the incumbent was disqualified from the ballot in 2020, but she held on to her seat in 2022 with just shy of 50% of the vote against two challengers, attorney Alberto Torres and Democratic District Leader Hector Feliciano. Though Septimo is continually delinquent on her campaign finance reports, she’s favored to get a third term in a one-on-one rematch with Feliciano, whose campaign barely seems to exist. Septimo is a consistent progressive vote who has always run on the Working Families Party’s ballot line, which she will once again have in this year’s general election regardless of tonight’s outcome.
AD-92 (Greenburgh and Mount Pleasant, Westchester County)
MaryJane Shimsky (i) vs. Thomas Abinanti
Result (>95% in): Shimsky 59.7%, Abinati 40.1% | Shimsky wins
MaryJane Shimsky, a low-key liberal legislator, unseated anti-vax centrist Thomas Abinanti in 2022 by a 9-point margin, backed by the Working Families Party and some of her friends in Westchester County politics. Abinanti, who was pretty high up in seniority before his ouster, isn’t ready to retire yet, and he’s leveraging his many connections for a comeback run, which we hope goes as well as his last election. He’s raised and spent a considerable amount, and he’s hoping to exploit a hyper-local wedge issue: the wealthy unincorporated village of Edgemont has been trying to incorporate for years, but the Town of Greenburgh, which contains Edgemont, vociferously opposes Edgemont’s incorporation because it would be damaging to Greenburgh’s finances. A piece of legislation Shimsky recently sponsored would make it harder for wealthy villages like Edgemont to break away from their larger towns—but the law contained an exemption for villages like Edgemont that are already considering incorporation, inserted by state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, who represents the area in the state Senate, and Edgemont’s Assemblymember Amy Paulin. (Edgemont is located within Greenburgh’s southeastern corner; this district takes in all of Greenburgh except for Edgemont.) Shimsky publicly opposes Edgemont’s incorporation, but Abinanti and his backers blame Shimsky for the Edgemont exemption.
AD-103 (Kingston area, Hudson Valley)
Sarahana Shrestha (i) vs. Gabi Madden
Result (>95% in): Shrestha 66.3%, Madden 33.7% | Shrestha wins
The election of climate organizer Sarahana Shrestha was the New York left’s biggest victory in 2022. Yes, Kristen Gonzalez’s victory in SD-59 was pretty consequential too, but the state Senate isn’t the conservative obstruction it once was—the state Assembly plays that role now, and Shrestha knocked out a leading opponent of one of the left’s legislative priorities. Assemb. Kevin Cahill was a key opponent of the Build Public Renewables Act, which set up a state agency to build out publicly-owned renewable energy generating capacity; the BPRA is not unreasonably compared to a state-level Green New Deal, or at least the beginnings of one. (Shrestha is also symbolically significant as the first DSA-affiliated New York state legislator elected outside of New York City; while Kingston and New Paltz are quite left-leaning themselves, they’re not New York City, and much of this district is rural.)
After Shrestha narrowly unseated Cahill, New York Assembly Democrats conceded defeat and included a version of the BPRA in the next state budget, and as the administration of Gov. Kathy Hochul has dragged its feet on implementing the BPRA’s transformative objectives, Shrestha has become a dogged advocate for greater oversight and frequent public reports by the New York Power Authority, the agency selected to build out New York’s public renewables. She’s also been pushing for a bolder vision of public power—rather than stopping at a public option for renewable development, she’s taken the fight straight to her district’s beleaguered utility monopoly, joining with the area’s state senator to introduce a bill which would force a state takeover of Central Hudson. Central Hudson is one of New York’s smaller utility companies, and just this past Thursday the company agreed to eat a $65 million fine for billing mishaps that led to thousands of customers being overcharged. (The company is, however, confident enough in its new billing system to resume shutoffs for unpaid bills.) Suffice it to say that Sarahana Shrestha has made a lot of powerful people mad, and they’re trying to get back at her for it. Gabi Madden is a staffer for state Sen. James Skoufis who formerly worked as Cahill’s chief of staff, and she’s outraised and outspent Shrestha while running on a boilerplate centrist platform (with an entire page of word salad about Central Hudson.) Many of the outside groups helping Benedetto, Zinerman, and other moderate candidates are also helping Madden. Her basic problem is that Cahill had most of the advantages she does, and he still lost to Shrestha with the power of incumbency on his side.
AD-106 (Rural eastern Hudson Valley and Poughkeepsie suburbs)
Didi Barrett (i) vs. Claire Cousin
Result (>95% in): Barrett 57.1%, Couson 42.9% | Barrett wins
Sarahana Shrestha’s win demonstrated that progressive and even socialist candidates could win in the Hudson Valley. In the district next door, progressives are trying to follow in her footsteps and upset another incumbent. While DSA isn’t involved in this race, another progressive who wants to join the Assembly’s growing left-wing bloc of loyal DSA and WFP members is running, Claire Cousin. Cousin is in her second term on the Columbia County Board of Supervisors, representing a piece of the small town of Hudson, and she was recruited by the Working Families Party to challenge Assemb. Didi Barrett. For The Many, a local progressive group that ran a field program in support of Shrestha’s successful 2022 campaign, is also backing Cousin. This district is a bit of a tougher lift than Shrestha’s: while AD-103 is based in the Hudson Valley’s most eccentric and left-leaning towns, including the city of Kingston, the college town of New Paltz, and the artists’ colony of Woodstock (the namesake, though not the location, of the famed music festival), most of AD-106 lives in the suburbs of Poughkeepsie. Granted, the town of Poughkeepsie (which is in the district and not to be confused with the city of Poughkeepsie, which is not in the district) is home to Vassar College and Marist College, but that would be a lot more helpful to Cousin if classes were still in session. (On the other hand, Shrestha swamped Cahill in Kingston’s Black and Latino neighborhoods, and AD-106 is less white—and more Black and Latino—than AD-103; additionally, Cousin is the first Black woman elected to the Columbia County Board of Supervisors, while Barrett, like Cahill, is white.)
Cousin is seeking to define the race on her own terms—while she’s running to add another vote to the progressive bloc, and doesn’t shy away from that, she has Barrett on the defensive for specific legislative actions she’s taken. Environmentalists and climate activists were furious when Barrett, in coordination with Gov. Kathy Hochul, proposed a slate of changes to the 2023 state budget which would have gutted the state’s landmark climate law and allowed far greater emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, by measuring methane’s warming impact on a 100-year timescale instead of a 20-year one. (After progressives and environmentalists balked, Hochul thankfully backed down.) Barrett’s repeated votes against extending pandemic eviction moratoriums drew protesters to her office. Her continued lack of support for the NY HEAT Act, which would end subsidies for gas hookups and cap utility bills for low-income New Yorkers, led some environmental advocates to launch an ad campaign opposing Barrett, independent of Cousin’s campaign. The coalition of centrist groups which assembled to fight DSA primaries is treating this race like one of them, too: Solidarity PAC has sent more than $40,000 Barrett’s way, and New York Women Lead has spent $22,000 on phonebanking for Barrett. Barrett probably wishes she was getting even more help, because Cousin has brought in more in public matching funds than all but five legislative candidates in the entire state, allowing her to blanket the district with mailers and digital ads. (It’s harder to tell what Barrett is spending her money on, because she’s routing nearly every expense through a consulting firm, Hamilton Campaign Network, run by Luis Miranda, the father of Lin-Manuel and a New York Democratic power player in his own right.)
AD-109 (Albany and suburbs)
Owusu Anane vs. Ginnie Farrell vs. Jack Flynn vs. Andrew Joyce vs. Dustin Reidy vs. Gabriella Romero
Result (>95% in): Romero 29.7%, Farrell 21.1%, Reidy 17.0%, Anane 14.3%, Joyce 9.0%, Flynn 8.0% | Romero wins
This race is a crowded affair. All six candidates hold elected office: Owusu Anane, Gabriella Romero, Ginnie Farrell, and Jack Flynn are members of the Albany Common Council, and Andrew Joyce and Dustin Reidy are Albany County Legislators. Anane distinguishes himself by supporting conservative DA David Soares for reelection, and Farrell has the support of outgoing Assemb. Pat Fahy, who is running for state Senate, as well as Albany’s local paper, the Times-Union. However, the top two candidates in terms of both endorsements and financial capacity appear to be Romero and Reidy. Reidy, who has the bulk of organized labor backing him along with a good chunk of the local establishment, has served as a Democratic campaign staffer and volunteer for years, most recently as the campaign manager for area Rep. Paul Tonko, and is running mostly on being a generic Democrat. Romero, a public defender, stands out from the field as a progressive: originally elected to the Albany Common Council with the support of her local DSA chapter, Romero carries the WFP endorsement and supports policies like tuition-free public college and tenants’ right to counsel.
AD-137 (Rochester and suburbs)
Demond Meeks (i) vs. Willie Lightfoot
Result (>95% in): Meeks 66.4%, Lightfoot 33.5% | Meeks wins
Like their counterparts in many Northern cities, Rochester Democrats have a decaying party machine helmed by a centrist old guard that increasingly struggles to win primary elections. In 2020, the Monroe County Democratic Committee picked a fight with progressive Assemb. Harry Bronson while simultaneously trying to win a pair of open Assembly seats and lost all three races. Four years later, they’ve narrowed their approach, targeting just one legislative race: Assembly District 137, where progressive Demond Meeks beat them four years ago. Meeks won his 2020 primary against the Monroe County Democratic Committee’s endorsed candidate by a comfortable 44%-33% margin, but Rochester City Councilman Willie Lightfoot is hoping he can turn that around in a one-on-one race. Lightfoot, whose main focus is crime (and undoing or weakening the state’s landmark 2020 bail reforms, which ended cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent offenses), will have to overcome Meeks’s incumbency and his financial advantage if he wants to compete.
Albany County DA
David Soares (i) vs. Lee Kindlon
Official Result: Kindlon 54.8%, Soares 44.6% | Kindlon wins
Albany County DA David Soares has always been a tough-on-crime type in a way that sets him apart from his fellow Democrats in law enforcement, but it’s something other than his obnoxious conservatism and opposition to criminal justice reform that finally crossed a line for many mainstream Democratic elected officials in the Albany area. Local TV station CBS6 discovered that Soares used state grants to boost his salary for years—state grants that were meant for junior prosecutors and long-tenured county employees. Local media seized on the scandal, and so did local Democrats; Assemb. Phil Steck called for Soares’s resignation, and the Albany County Democratic Committee pulled its endorsement. Soares eventually returned $23,000 to the state, but the damage was done. Defense attorney Lee Kindlon, who ran unsuccessfully against Soares in 2012, jumped into the race and began collecting endorsements: WFP, Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan, County Executive Dan McCoy, ¾ of Albany County’s Democratic state legislators, and the leading local newspaper, the Times-Union. Kindlon supports and promises to actually implement all of the criminal justice reforms Soares opposes and obstructs: the state’s bail reforms, which eliminated the practice of jailing people before trial based on their ability to pay; discovery reforms, which require prosecutors to share more evidence with defense attorneys to ensure a fair trial; and a new law called Raise the Age, which raised the age at which defendants can be charged as adults for serious felonies from 16 to 18. Soares is especially animated by Raise the Age; apparently, the only way to prevent Albany County from eventually slipping into The Purge is giving David Soares the ability to charge high school sophomores as adults.
Westchester County DA
Susan Cacace vs. William Wagstaff III
Result (>95% in): Cacace 60.5%, Wagstaff 30.1% | Cacace wins
Mimi Rocah went through all the trouble of ousting an incumbent DA in 2020, only to retire after a single term, meaning the suburban county of 1 million is going to choose a new DA yet again. We hope that choice winds up being civil rights attorney William Wagstaff III, who would be the first Black DA of the county and, despite not really identifying himself as a progressive prosecutor, is skeptical of “the traditional path of incarcerating people regardless of the underlying drivers of crime”. He has the support of various politicians and organizations associated with New York's recent successful criminal justice reform efforts. The county party, outgoing DA, and police unions, by contrast, all agree on Susan Cacace, a former prosecutor running as a continuity candidate with Rocah’s administration. Cacace might be worse than Rocah—her ties to Republicans are a red flag that Rocah, who ousted an especially atrocious incumbent, never had—but she remains the favorite.