8/23 Primary Preview Part II
New York, again
New York already had its primaries for statewide and local offices, which were unaffected by the state’s highest court invalidating the state’s congressional and legislative district maps, and for the state Assembly, where maps were invalidated too late for new lines to be implemented in time for a 2022 primary. The congressional and state Senate maps were thrown out earlier, so they got a new court-ordered primary date, two months after New York’s regular June primary to accommodate for the unexpected changes to district boundaries. The maps being used today are the ones approved by a court, and they will remain in effect for the rest of the decade.
NY-04 (South Shore, Nassau County)
Keith Corbett vs. Laura Gillen vs. Muzib Huq vs. Carrié Solages
The race to succeed outgoing Rep. Kathleen Rice, who unexpectedly retired this year, is probably going to be a comfortable victory for moderate former Hempstead Town Supervisor Laura Gillen. Considering her opposition, that’s not as bad as it sounds. Malverne Mayor Keith Corbett is the candidate of erstwhile Cuomo crony and open conservative Jay Jacobs, who chairs both the New York State Democratic Party and the Nassau County Democratic Party because nobody has bothered to get rid of him yet. And Nassau County Legislator Carrié Solages is a self-described “Renaissance man” who was arrested in 2017 for domestic violence, eventually pleading to a charge of disorderly conduct.
NY-10 (Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn)
Quanda Francis vs. Peter Gleason vs. Daniel Goldman vs. Elizabeth Holtzman vs. Jimmy Jiang Li vs. Mondaire Jones vs. Maud Maron vs. Yuh-Line Niou vs. Carlina Rivera vs. Brian Robinson vs. Jo Anne Simon vs. Yan Xiong
We hate this race SO much.
Dan Goldman is the frontrunner here. He’s an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune who’s made a career out of being a nepotism baby, stumbling from elite sinecure to elite sinecure and occasionally getting a real job in between, which is how he somehow ended up as lead counsel to House Democrats during their first impeachment of Donald Trump, despite (if his campaign is any indication) lacking the public speaking skills and attention to detail that one might expect of a trial lawyer tasked with impeaching the president of the United States. He has a ton of money, and it’s bought him an embarrassment of advantages: an onslaught of bland-as-hell TV ads, glossy mailers, and big-name endorsements. We use the word “embarrassment” deliberately, because it’s the only emotion Goldman’s endorsers should ever feel again. Among them are Assembs. Bobby Carroll and Brian Cunningham, future Assemb. Grace Lee, state Sen. Brad Hoylman, and the New York Times editorial board (though that last one was possibly, if not just plain likely, due to the interference of the Sulzberger family, the wealthy family which publishes the Times and generally stays out of endorsements, but also counts Goldman as a friend of the family.) When he does take firm issue positions (something he generally avoids) they’re relatively conservative, and if anything he’s even more conservative than he lets on—in an interview he expressed support for a partial abortion ban until a staffer intervened and convinced him to retract that statement. If you live in this district and haven’t voted yet, please do not vote for Dan Goldman. Vote instead for one of his five credible opponents: Yuh-Line Niou, Carlina Rivera, Mondaire Jones, Jo Anne Simon, or Elizabeth Holtzman. They span the ideological spectrum, with Niou pretty far to the left, Simon and Holtzman more to the center, and Jones and Rivera somewhere in between. They’re all committed public servants—Niou and Simon are well-respected state legislators, Rivera is a similarly well-respected member of the city council, Jones is already serving in Congress representing the suburban NY-17, and Holtzman had a long career in twentieth-century New York and national politics. All of them genuinely care about the people they serve and the minutiae of the policies they’ll vote on if they win. None of them are what Goldman is: a rich dilettante and professional failson spending millions of his own money to purchase himself a seat in Congress, where he’ll surely protect the interests of the wealthy and powerful because few candidates scream “candidate of the wealthy and powerful” quite like Dan Goldman does.
Yuh-Line Niou would be the first openly autistic member of Congress. An assemblywoman representing Chinatown and the Financial District, Niou first came on the scene in 2016, when Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver resigned in the face of corruption charges. In New York special elections, party nominees are chosen by party committees, not primary voters, so Silver was able to install a loyal foot soldier as the nominee to replace him. Niou ran on the Working Families Party line against Silver’s handpicked Democrat in that special, and held her to an unimpressive plurality; when the regular Democratic primary for a full term came around in September, Niou easily beat Silver’s pick and a crowd of other aspiring politicians. In office, Niou has been a reliable and vocal progressive, a constant thorn in the side of Andrew Cuomo even before the anti-IDC wave in 2018 and DSA’s slate of legislative primaries in 2020 brought a coalition of Cuomo-skeptical progressives and leftists to Albany. While her record isn’t perfect, particularly on local issues, she would be a truly excellent member of Congress, and she’s proven time and time again that she won’t buckle under pressure on her progressive convictions, which sets her apart from the field. However, this is about beating Dan Goldman, which is why we’re not just telling you to vote for Niou and skipping the other candidates.
Council Member Carlina Rivera has a generally progressive record on the council, but she’s not as reliably progressive as Niou and she’s very much a go-along-to-get-along type. She would be a better-than-average member of Congress, and an improvement over whichever one of the warring NY-12 incumbents ends up leaving Congress. Polling paints a very muddled picture here, but it seems like Rivera and Niou are the two candidates with the best chance of beating Goldman; if we had to guess, we’d say Niou, not Rivera, is slightly better positioned to beat him, but it could be either of the two, especially with the last-minute help Rivera’s getting from Nuestro PAC, a mysterious PAC affiliated with consultant Chuck Rocha that may or may not be connected to cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, whose network is already backing Rivera.
Rep. Mondaire Jones should have ran in his own district. The panicked, whiny campaign Sean Patrick Maloney is running against Alessandra Biaggi would’ve had no shot against Jones, who currently represents the old NY-17 (which contains about 70% of the new NY-17, where Maloney is running.) But the daunting task of challenging the DCCC Chair apparently proved unappealing to Jones, who decided that he’d ditch his suburban district, move to Brooklyn, and run in NY-10. Despite having more money than anyone but Goldman, Jones has struggled to break through.
Assemb. Jo Anne Simon is…running. She’s become a bit of a nonentity in this race, honestly. A standard liberal who represents the wealthier, whiter side of brownstone Brooklyn in the state Assembly, Simon is probably going to siphon votes from Goldman? We think? It probably won’t matter either way how she does.
Elizabeth Holtzman is a blast from the past. Holtzman first achieved some measure of national renown during the presidency of Richard Nixon, when she, then a freshman representative from Brooklyn, broke with decorum and seniority-based congressional norms (as well as with the noxiously misogynistic culture of Congress in the 70s) by speaking up in favor of impeaching Nixon, one of the first members of the House Judiciary Committee to do so. She left Congress to run for Senate in 1980, and would have won had incumbent Sen. Jacob Javits not stubbornly stayed on the ballot on the Liberal Party line; out of federal politics, she turned to local politics, beating the police-friendly machine choice for Brooklyn DA in 1981 and serving a single term as New York City Comptroller before making another unsuccessful Senate run in 1992 and leaving politics entirely in 1993. Now, at 81, she’s not really the liberal firebrand she was in her youth; Niou, Jones, and Rivera take up all the oxygen on the left anyway. She’s a choice for moderates who don’t like Goldman, and, we suppose, for voters who really loved the 70s.
As referenced above, Yuh-Line Niou and Carlina Rivera have consistently polled in the top tier of this race along with Goldman. They are the two candidates with the greatest chance of beating Goldman. Based on polling, we think Niou is slightly likelier to win than Rivera, but that is in no way a prediction of any sort. Rivera is very much in this, and we wouldn’t even discount Jones entirely—a lot of voters are undecided, and Jones has been advertising far more than most of his opponents. Simon and Holtzman are the only two candidates we’re sorta comfortable writing off before the polls close.
NY-12 (Upper East Side and Upper West Side)
Carolyn B. Maloney (i) vs. Jerrold Nadler (i) vs. Suraj Patel vs. Ashmi Sheth
The special master did what redistricting should have done at least two decades ago: accept that the wealthy Manhattan mega-neighborhoods of the Upper West Side and Upper East Side were no longer big enough for a congressional district each, and should just be combined to make one district. The result was a clash of titans: Carolyn Maloney, fearless eternal leader of the Upper East Side, and Jerry Nadler, god-emperor of the Upper West Side, were now destined to fight to the death. Okay, not death, but at least permanent retirement, which New York politicians evidently fear more than death.
Maloney began with plenty of advantages: a larger share of the district, more money, and more experience campaigning. There was only one thing holding her back: Carolyn Maloney. Maloney has a history of anti-vax statements, a record of neoconservative foreign policy that includes supporting the Iraq War and opposing the Iran Deal, and what appears to be a generally poor campaigning ability for how often she does it. Despite a solid lead in polls to begin with, Maloney lost ground as she and Nadler began to trade blows. Nadler stayed relentlessly on message about being the more progressive of the two candidates, consolidated the progressive establishment and much of labor behind him, and benefitted from an outside group running ads hitting Maloney on her anti-vax history. The most recent polls show that it’s paid off and Nadler is now ahead. The final Emerson poll of the race showed a bleak situation for Maloney. Jerry Nadler had a commanding lead at 51%, with Maloney at 29%, and Suraj Patel at 19%. Speaking of Patel, you probably remember him—the wealthy hotelier who ran against Maloney twice before, and even came close to winning in 2020, but who could never get progressives behind him owing to his sketchy personal and professional behavior. He’s spent the last few months claiming this was a three-way race, but it’s clearly not.
NY-16 (Westchester County and a small segment of the Bronx)
Jamaal Bowman (i) vs. Vedat Gashi vs. Mark Jaffe vs. Catherine Parker
Jamaal Bowman was almost guaranteed a tougher district after the 2020 Census. New York, it was thought, would lose at least one, maybe two congressional districts, and that would push Bowman’s district northward, out of the Bronx and further north into Westchester County. That ended up being sort of true—New York did lose a congressional district. But it only did so barely, and strong population growth in New York City meant that Bowman even got to keep some of the Bronx. (The special master kindly let Bowman keep Wakefield, a predominantly Black neighborhood where Bowman got more than two-thirds of the vote in 2020 against Eliot Engel, while passing relatively Engel-friendly Riverdale off to NY-15 Rep. Ritchie Torres.) And as a Squad member he was probably going to get a primary—only Ayanna Pressley (in 2020 and 2022) and AOC (in 2022 only) have managed to go unopposed for renomination. At first it appeared he might get a primary from someone who made sense—Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano, perhaps, or an ally of the ex-Republican mayor of Bowman’s hometown. But when New York Democrats’ original planned gerrymander was released, it gave someone else an idea, because that gerrymander included his home of Yorktown, a relatively conservative suburb on the far northern edge of Westchester County. When the redistricting ruling came down and put Yorktown back in NY-17, Westchester County Legislator Vedat Gashi was unmoved. His base (and his home, for that matter) might have been cut out of the district, but the checks were already hitting his campaign’s bank account, so he might as well see it through, right? And then there’s Catherine Parker, another Westchester County Legislator who ran a lowkey weird campaign for NY-17 last cycle and has chosen to dial up the weirdness to 11 this cycle by running a self-funding vanity campaign at the last minute. If we had to guess, it’s good news for Bowman because it splits the vote of affluent suburban moderates, but mainly we’re just confused.
Bowman is a decent favorite, even with Squad member Ilhan Omar’s unexpected close call two weeks ago. Omar let herself get pummeled on TV without airing a single ad in response. The priciness of New York TV advertising has made that less of a problem for Bowman: he’s not on TV, but neither is Gashi, because even Gashi’s very well-funded campaign (presumably supplemented by the rolodexes of Eliot Engel and Nita Lowey, the two Westchester County reps chased out of Congress in 2020 by Bowman and Mondaire Jones who are backing Gashi this year) can’t afford a TV ad campaign. J Street and Justice Democrats have both stepped in to help Bowman a bit, while Gashi hasn’t benefited from outside spending according to the FEC.
If you’re wondering why we’ve said so little about Gashi himself, it’s because that’s the campaign he’s run so far—entirely about Jamaal Bowman. Gashi is too busy questioning Bowman’s Democratic credentials and darkening Bowman’s skin in his mailers (a racist campaign tactic that’s pretty much as old as the use of visual media in campaigns) to make any sort of positive case as to why he, Vedat Gashi, should go to Congress.
NY-17 (Northern NYC suburbs and the Hudson Valley)
Sean Patrick Maloney (i) vs. Alessandra Biaggi
Sean Patrick Maloney is a selfish ass who cares more about his own personal advancement than House Democrats’ slim chances of holding the majority in November. That’s barely even opinion—Maloney, who currently represents NY-18, elbowed current NY-17 Rep. Mondaire Jones out of this district, even though Maloney currently represents far more of the new NY-18 than the new NY-17, and Jones currently represents close to three-fourths of the new NY-17. Why? Joe Biden did slightly better (and we mean slightly—it’s a difference of about one percentage point) in the new NY-17. From a detached, purely partisan standpoint, it makes more sense for Jones to defend NY-17 and Maloney NY-18, because those are the districts where each man is already known to voters, and where the electoral benefits of incumbency should be the strongest. It’s the reason Andy Levin was begged to run in MI-10, and Vicente Gonzalez in TX-15, instead of the bluer districts containing their homes, but not most of their constituents, which they ultimately chose to contest. Andy Levin and Vicente Gonzalez, however, do not run the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Keeping Republicans out of power should be important to every Democratic politician, but it’s the job of the DCCC Chair. And Sean Patrick Maloney is the DCCC Chair.
State Sen. Alessandra Biaggi was already looking for a chance to move up this cycle—she had mulled a statewide run before the downfall of Andrew Cuomo, and when Democrats’ gerrymander placed her Westchester County home in the Long Island-based NY-03 she jumped at the opportunity. Biaggi is a progressive who got to the state Senate by defeating Jeff Klein, the boss of the IDC—a group of renegade conservative Democrats who caucused with Republicans. She was struggling to establish herself as the leading progressive in NY-03 thanks to the presence of Melanie D’Arrigo, a repeat candidate who had been running for months and was already known on Long Island, where most of the district’s voters still lived. Then court-ordered redistricting put NY-03 back on the south side of the Long Island Sound, leaving Biaggi with a federal campaign bank account and an address once again located in Jamaal Bowman’s NY-16 (and leaving D’Arrigo with an uncontested claim to the progressive lane in NY-03, which we aren’t covering anymore because the new NY-03 is swingy enough to make us quite nervous with a Democrat in the White House.) That same redraw precipitated Sean Patrick Maloney’s district swap, and when Jones acquiesced by moving to NY-10 rather than staying to fight Maloney, Biaggi saw an opening. She announced she’d challenge the DCCC Chair in his newly-adopted district, and quickly landed endorsements from AOC and the Working Families Party (as well as a non-endorsement statement of support from Jamaal Bowman.) The fact that she lives in Pelham and represents a Bronx-based state Senate district, both far from the new NY-17, might be more of a problem against an opponent other than Sean Patrick Maloney (and it is still a problem for her, frankly—just mitigated by Maloney’s own district-shopping.)
Maloney is quite likely to win, especially after the New York Times endorsed his campaign. He has more money, more endorsements, more…everything. But the flurry of spending against Biaggi from DMFI, a shadowy PAC called the Our Hudson PAC, and even the NYPD’s main union make it look like someone in Maloney’s camp is afraid of Biaggi. The intensely negative tone Maloney has taken towards Biaggi (which has become downright whiny, to be honest) is also indicative of some concern within Maloney HQ. And the congressman has battled a drumbeat of negative headlines: one New York Post investigation revealed he lied about his business experience; another one revealed he had a “body man” working as a live-in personal chauffeur and assistant on both government and campaign payrolls, earning Maloney an official ethics complaint; the DCCC’s ratfucking of a Michigan Republican primary to boost a right-wing fanatic made a lot of liberals, including the Times editorial board, very angry; Biaggi’s allies in the Working Families Party began running ads picking apart Maloney’s voting record and history of endorsing Republicans. Polling has shown Maloney ahead by comfortable margins, but at least in public polling, he’s short of a majority. His loss is, unfortunately, rather unlikely, but it would be richly deserved.
SD-04 (Interior Suffolk County, Long Island)
Monica Martinez vs. Philip Ramos
After Democrats took the state Senate in 2018, they immediately found passing the bills they wanted a lot harder than they expected, thanks to the “Long Island Six”, an unofficial caucus of centrists representing Long Island, who were not majority makers for the Democrats, but who, through their near-universal opposition to progressive legislation, made getting to a majority on most major bills a difficult task for Senate leadership. Suffolk County’s Monica Martinez was probably the worst of the bunch. She was not only more likely to vote against progressive legislation than her other LI6 colleagues, she was the loudest in denouncing it publicly, and was the closest to Andrew Cuomo of the bunch. Somehow, Martinez managed to lose reelection in the otherwise fantastic-for-Democrats 2020 cycle. Redistricting provided her with a much bluer district to try again, and she’s taking advantage of it. Fortunately, there’s at least someone preventing her from waltzing back into the Democratic Senate caucus, a caucus which she clearly despises.
Assemblyman Phil Ramos, a former police officer elected to the Assembly in 2002, is the other contestant for this district. Ramos is no progressive, but he has, for 20 years, reliably voted with the Democratic majority in the Assembly. Ramos ran for both for reelection and for the Senate, and has been approaching the latter campaign a bit lackadaisically, to be honest (though so has she - it’s an oddly sleepy contest). However, he represents as much of the district as Martinez does, if not more, and he has had decades to build up name recognition in the district. Monica Martinez has the Democratic County Committee endorsement, while Ramos is mostly on his lonesome for this election. A late-breaking endorsement from the Working Families Party represents the biggest push any outside group is making for him.
SD-07 (North Shore of Nassau County)
Anna Kaplan (i) vs. Jeremy Joseph
Anna Kaplan, another member of the Long Island Six, also finds her path to the Senate complicated by an opponent. Jeremy Joseph is a progressive activist running against the moderation of Kaplan. Joseph, though he has been endorsed by a handful of progressive and left-wing organizations including the DSA of Nassau County, unfortunately doesn’t have the support or the resources to give Kaplan a real scare.
SD-15 (Central Queens)
Joseph Addabbo (i) vs. Albert Baldeo vs. Japneet Singh
Joseph Addabbo Jr. is a political relic. His father was a congressman in the Kennedy administration, and he was first elected (to the city council) in 2001. He moved up to the state Senate in 2008 by taking down a Republican incumbent, and has spent the years since as one of the more notably conservative members of the Democratic caucus. Redistricting transformed SD-15, which had awkwardly strung together conservative white neighborhoods from central Queens to the Rockaways, into a compact, diverse, strongly Democratic district in central Queens. That’s reason for Addabbo to worry, so he’s probably thankful that one of his opponents is Albert Baldeo. Baldeo is a perennial candidate with a solid base of support in his home neighborhood of Richmond Hill, and he’s…a character. Albert Baldeo runs for something pretty much every cycle, and in fact already ran for state Assembly in the separate June Assembly-and-statewide primary earlier this year. He’s got bizarre vibes, nonsensical-but-still-terrible policy prescriptions, and a conviction for interfering with an investigation into his own campaign finance transgressions. Baldeo’s presence probably blocks any path that might have existed for Japneet Singh, a taxi-driving accountant who ran for City Council in 2021 (he got 19% of the vote to former Council Member Ruben Wills’s 24% and future Council Speaker Adrienne Adams’s 56%.) Addabbo’s base of older, more conservative white voters isn’t anywhere near a majority anymore, but combined with years of incumbency and a huge financial advantage, it’ll very likely be enough for Addabbo to coast to another term, especially in the face of divided opposition.
SD-21 (Flatbush, Flatlands, and Bergen Beach)
Kevin Parker (i) vs. David Alexis vs. Kaegan Mays-Williams
State Sen. Kevin Parker is a pretty obvious target for plenty of reasons. He chairs the Energy Committee in the state Senate, which makes him a major obstacle to bold climate legislation. He’s propped up by the Brooklyn Democratic machine, a corrupt mess that mostly exists to dole out patronage and meddle in primaries to hurt the left. And he’s…well, an unstable and violent man. From punching a traffic cop in the face over a parking ticket, to threatening and assaulting a staffer, to tweeting “Kill yourself!” at a critic, to nearly attacking a female Senate colleague (in two separate incidents, with two separate senators)—he is, simply put, unfit for public office, or most other jobs.
David Alexis is a rideshare driver who cofounded the Drivers’ Cooperative, a driver-owned rideshare co-op that offers an alternative to the rideshare industry’s notoriously exploitative big names like Uber and Lyft. He’s also an organizer with NYC-DSA, running with the organization’s support. Progressive groups, WFP, and leftist elected officials are also backing him. (Some liberal groups are behind former prosecutor Kaegan Mays-Williams, but she’ll play spoiler at best.)
This is difficult turf for DSA, even with the backup they have from New York’s constellation of progressive groups. Their strength in Brooklyn is concentrated in the borough’s northern and waterfront neighborhoods, not here. Against a normal incumbent, we’d be very skeptical of Alexis’s chances, and we still think Parker is strongly favored to win. However, this is somehow Parker’s first contested primary since 2010; Parker’s been getting into public altercations since the mid-2000s, but for anyone who became a voting-eligible constituent of Kevin Parker after September 2010, this is the first chance they’ve ever had to vote against Parker in a primary.
SD-23 (North Shore of Staten Island; Coney Island, Brooklyn)
Sarah Blas vs. Rajiv Gowda vs. Bianca Rajpersaud vs. Jessica Scarcella-Spanton
Diane Savino is the last member of the IDC left in the state Senate, and she’s retiring. That means the bar here is “will never caucus with Republicans,” which is a moot point now that the state Senate map isn’t gerrymandered within an inch of its life; if Republicans have a chance at a majority in the New York State Senate, we have bigger problems than potential Democratic defectors. The candidate closest to Savino is Jessica Scarcella-Spanton, who has the backing of Savino, Eric Adams, the Staten Island Democratic Party, and organized labor. Scarcella-Spanton is an overwhelming favorite. District Leader Bianca Rajpersaud is backed by Assemb. Charles Fall, who represents a large part of SD-23; like Scarcella-Spanton, Rajpersaud is a moderate. Union organizer Rajiv Gowda, who challenged Savino in 2020, and community activist Sarah Blas round out the field; both are running as progressives, in stark contrast to their opponents.
SD-25 (Navy Yard, Bed-Stuy, and Brownsville)
Jabari Brisport (i) vs. Renee Holmes vs. Conrad Tillard
Jabari Brisport was elected to the state Senate in 2020 in an expensive, ugly race that wasn’t all that close. Brisport, a DSA-backed democratic socialist who ran for city council as a Green in 2017, won by more than twenty points, and even carried the Assembly district represented by his opponent, Tremaine Wright. This would normally teach a chastened machine to focus their efforts elsewhere, and take on a softer target next time, but this isn’t any old machine—it’s the Brooklyn Democratic machine, and no amount of humiliating losses can dissuade them from attempting to settle scores with everyone who’s ever beaten them. The Rev. Conrad Tillard is a changed man, in his own telling and according to his supporters. Of course, if you had spent the 90s and 2000s spewing vicious antisemitism, homophobia, and misogyny, and you were seeking elected office as a Democrat in 2022 Brooklyn, you’d claim to be a changed man too. Tillard has the support of Eric Adams and Jay Jacobs, which will only make it sweeter when he loses to Brisport anyway.
SD-26 (Brooklyn waterfront from Bay Ridge to DUMBO)
Andrew Gounardes (i) vs. David Yassky
Blech. David Yassky has been hanging around Brooklyn politics, waiting for a chance to get back in the game, ever since he lost his last campaign in 2009. He’s stepped on plenty of toes throughout his career, dating back to his days as an ambitious member of the city council; he’s generally been on the right flank of NYC Democratic politics, and even more so on the white flank—in both of his campaigns for higher office (Congress in 2006, City Comptroller in 2009) he lost to candidates of color as a result of failing to expand his base beyond white voters. Now, facing a white opponent in a mostly white district where the white Democrats don’t vote as a bloc, he’s refashioned himself as a well-funded conservative backlash candidate, but with the edges sanded off to appeal to more mainstream liberals in brownstone Brooklyn. State Sen. Andrew Gounardes is, thankfully, a poor target for a conservative backlash campaign; his track record is generally progressive(-ish), but he has plenty of experience soothing conservative voters because his old district was a Trump-voting swing seat. If he’s at risk, it’s because a lot of this district is new to him, and the parts that are new to him overlap with Yassky’s old council district. However, we’re skeptical of Yassky’s chances, to put it lightly. This isn’t a district where a Yassky-style campaign should be strong.
SD-27 (Lower Manhattan)
Brian Kavanagh (i) vs. Vittoria Fariello vs. Danyela Souza Egorov
Brian Kavanagh was facing a primary from Yuh-Line Niou before the final redistricting do-over created the congressional district Niou ended up running in. Kavanagh was vulnerable in that primary not so much because of any real problem in his record—sure, he was a moderate, but not outlandishly so, and this is Manhattan, where voters are wealthier and far less friendly to DSA types—but because of Niou’s strength as a popular third-term assemblywoman. District Leader Vittoria Fariello was running before Niou switched over to the congressional race, and with Niou out of the picture, some progressives sort of defaulted to her, because she’s definitely to Kavanagh’s left and Kavanagh is pretty underwhelming for a guy in such a Democratic district. The real engine of Fariello’s campaign is opposition to development, and while NIMBYism is a potent force in Lower Manhattan, we’re skeptical it’s enough to bring down Kavanagh on its own.
SD-30 (Harlem and Morningside Heights)
Cordell Cleare (i) vs. Shana Harmongoff
Cordell Cleare was approaching perennial candidate status when she was chosen by a party committee as the Democratic nominee in the special election to fill the Harlem state Senate seat vacated by Brian Benjamin upon his appointment as Kathy Hochul’s first lieutenant governor. A former staffer for state Sen. Bill Perkins, she ran against him when he moved from the Senate to the City Council, losing in 2017 to Perkins and in 2021 to Kristin Richardson Jordan, who defeated Perkins after thirteen rounds of ranked-choice voting tabulations. But as an incumbent, Cleare won’t be an easy out, especially considering her issue positions are reliably progressive. Former state Senate staffer Shana Harmongoff got 5% of the vote on a third-party ballot line in the 2021 special election, almost tying the Republican; while Harmongoff has Richardson Jordan’s support, Cleare is very likely to coast, because Harmongoff doesn’t have much else going for her in this race.
SD-31 (Washington Heights & north in Manhattan, University Heights; parts of West Bronx)
Robert Jackson (i) vs. Francesca Castellanos vs. Ruben D. Vargas vs. Angel Vasquez
Adriano Espaillat isn’t on the ballot, technically. But in a way, he still is. State Sen. Robert Jackson, then recently retired from the city council, challenged Espaillat for this seat back in 2014. Espaillat won, but the bad blood between the two never went away. When Espaillat first won the Democratic nomination in 2016 for the congressional seat he now holds, Marisol Alcántara ran to replace him in the state Senate. Alcántara explicitly promised to join the IDC, a group of renegade conservative Democrats who caucused with Republicans; Espaillat backed her anyway, and his support helped her defeat Jackson. That alone should’ve been grounds, frankly, for the Congressional Progressive Caucus to deny him membership, and perhaps realizing he fucked up in 2016, Espaillat decided to save face and publicly ditch Alcántara in 2018, when a wave of anti-IDC anger ended up washing her out of office and putting Espaillat’s nemesis Robert Jackson in her place. Jackson, like most of the ostensibly progressive congressman’s foes, is a reliable progressive; Angel Vasquez, Espaillat’s choice here, worked for Alcántara in the state Senate—and she was caucusing with Republicans the entire time until the IDC dissolved itself, so any claim by Vasquez or others that he’s a progressive or even a Democrat should be met with pure contempt. Espaillat is an indisputably skilled machine boss who’s spent the past six years methodically installing a network of allied politicians, largely Dominican-American like him, in districts overlapping with his Manhattan-and-the-Bronx congressional constituency. Unfortunately for Robert Jackson (and unfortunately for New York), Espaillat has set his sights on his old state Senate seat. Jackson is no pushover, but this is a largely Hispanic and heavily Dominican district where Espaillat’s imprimatur carries immense weight; we think this one could go either way.
SD-33 (Northwest and Central Bronx)
Gustavo Rivera (i) vs. Miguelina Camilo
State Sen. Gustavo Rivera has always rankled the Bronx establishment. He’s an outspoken progressive in Albany—and, worse, he doesn’t answer to the machine. The machine (with an assist from Adriano Espaillat) is striking back with the campaign of Miguelina Camilo, an attorney running as a moderate. Rivera has the edge in fundraising and spending, and organized labor is mostly (mostly) sticking with him, but the Bronx machine is strong, and Rivera was weakened by redistricting significantly altering his district. Those less tangible factors are powerful in Bronx politics, and they’re working in Camilo’s favor.
SD-34 (East Bronx, suburbs of Pelham and New Rochelle)
Christian Amato vs. Nathalia Fernández vs. John Perez
This is the seat Alessandra Biaggi is leaving behind to run for Congress. It’s Assemb. Nathalia Fernández’s race to lose; she leads theater worker and Bronx Community Board 11 member Christian Amato, Biaggi’s former deputy chief of staff, in fundraising and endorsements (including the endorsement of Amato’s old boss.) Amato is running somewhat to Fernández’s left, but progressive groups don’t have a problem with Fernández—his real path is probably to run up the score in the suburbs and in the whiter, more suburban Bronx neighborhoods.
SD-47 (Upper West Side of Manhattan, Chelsea, and Meatpacking District)
Brad Hoylman (i) vs. Maria Danzilo
Maria Danzilo ran an extremely unsuccessful campaign for the Upper West Side’s City Council seat in 2021; her state Senate campaign, which like her 2021 campaign is defined by right-wing posturing on crime and housing, is all but certain to meet the same fate.
SD-52 (Ithaca and Binghamton)
Leslie Danks Burke vs. Lea Webb
The last decade’s state Senate map was an aggressive Republican gerrymander, signed into law by a Democratic governor (Andrew Cuomo) who desperately wanted a Republican-controlled state Senate so progressive policy could be blocked without Cuomo using his veto pen. Democrats’ original redistricting plan for the state Senate was struck down by the same court that threw out the congressional map, but the special master’s remedial map left the basic form of this district intact: a new, solidly Democratic district combining Ithaca and Binghamton. Cornell Law professor Leslie Danks Burke, a former Planned Parenthood official who repeatedly ran for this seat back when it was gerrymandered to elect a Republican, is the candidate preferred by the more moderate side of New York Democratic politics; she also has a significant financial advantage. Former Binghamton City Councilwoman Lea Webb is the progressive favorite here, and she also has a fair amount of local establishment support because of her time on the city council in Binghamton and the leftward lean of Ithaca, a quintessentially liberal college town.
SD-59 (Midtown Manhattan; Astoria and Long Island City, Queens; and Greenpoint, Brooklyn)
Michael Corbett vs. Elizabeth Crowley vs. Kristen Gonzalez
Maybe you’ve heard this one before: a Latina organizer backed by NYC-DSA is taking on the Crowley dynasty in Queens. The organizer isn’t AOC, and the Crowley isn’t Joe, but it’s hard not to notice the parallels—which might be why big business and other assorted right-wing monied interests are sparing no expense to shore up New York’s most famous family of electoral losers.
New York City was robbed of fair representation under the last decade’s map, which deliberately overpopulated NYC districts so that more districts could be drawn upstate. That’s why SD-59, which currently takes in disparate chunks of the Buffalo and Rochester metro areas and extremely Republican rural Western New York, is being relocated entirely. The new district combines the parts of Manhattan which didn’t fit in neighboring districts with Astoria, Queens and Greenpoint, Brooklyn; aside from the Manhattan parts, it’s a dream district for the NYC left. On Democrats’ previous map, this district had been numbered the 17th, and swapped Manhattan and Astoria for more of Queens, but that proposed district was about as good for the left as the new one is—which is why Kristen Gonzalez, who had been running for the proposed SD-17, decided to run for SD-59 after the redistricting ruling came down.
Gonzalez, a tech worker and DSA organizer, is the unanimous choice of progressive organizations and politicians, and has also won over some major labor unions, chief among them 1199 SEIU, one of the most powerful unions in NYC politics. DSA has also made electing Gonzalez a top priority. Normally, all of that would combine to make Gonzalez unbeatable in a district like this. But the Crowleys are back for what we really, really hope is their last hurrah, and they have functionally limitless money at their disposal.
Elizabeth Crowley is a former New York City Council Member, and the cousin of Joe Crowley. She has a truly impressive record of electoral flops, beginning with her first run for office in June 2008, when she narrowly lost a special election for a vacant city council seat; she went on to defeat the Republican who won the June election by a sizable margin in November, beginning her career in elected office. She won two more terms on the city council in 2009 and 2013; she ran for a third and final full term in 2017, and scraped past conservative Democrat Bob Holden in the primary—only to lose to him in the general election, where he ran on the Republican, Conservative Party, Reform Party, and “Dump de Blasio” ballot lines. Managing to lose a central Queens district to a Republican would end most careers out of shame, but not Liz Crowley’s. She ran twice for Queens Borough President, narrowly losing a 2020 special election and then a 2021 regular election to Donovan Richards. Now, having been rejected boroughwide, she’s setting her sights…higher, somehow, running for SD-59 (which has no overlap with her old Council district whatsoever.) Sure, Astoria is the only part of Queens where even white voters were skeptical of Crowley’s BP campaign; sure, Greenpoint and Midtown Manhattan are completely new to Crowley; sure, Greenpoint is even leftier than Astoria; sure, even if Crowley manages to win Manhattan (essential to any moderate hopes of winning this district), it’s still not going to cast a majority of the primary votes. None of that was enough to discourage Crowley, and since Crowley is the main alternative to a DSA candidate, the usual suspects have lined up behind her, devoting ungodly sums of money to her campaign to make up for all those disadvantages we just rattled off. To be clear, the money might work because there’s so damn much of it, and the Crowleys (plus DSA’s most dedicated detractors) have called in every favor imaginable to boost Elizabeth’s campaign.
Mike Corbett is a problem for Elizabeth Crowley. He’s not going to win, but he’s the only Manhattanite in the field, and he’s a generally well-respected community leader and Democratic activist. He has the potential to get a significant share of the vote in Manhattan, where Crowley needs to win and win big. Podcaster and professional political influencer Nomiki Konst looked like she might balance things out, hurting Gonzalez by being another leftist Queens candidate, but Konst dropped out and endorsed Gonzalez at the last minute.
SD-61 (Amherst, Tonawanda, Grand Island, and chunk of Buffalo)
Sean Ryan (i) vs. Benjamin Carlisle
Sean Ryan is a normal Democrat who doesn’t stand out as particularly progressive, but he can be counted on not to screw the party over when it counts. That’s why Ben Carlisle is challenging him. Carlisle, an attorney and all-around weirdo, ran a write-in campaign for mayor of Buffalo in 2021 because “radical socialist” (his words) India Walton won the Democratic nomination; never mind that Byron Brown, the sitting mayor who Walton defeated in the primary, was running a right-wing write-in campaign of his own. Ryan, a loyal Democrat, endorsed Walton over Brown in the November election because Walton was the Democratic nominee, and Carlisle is running a bizarre grievance campaign in response. He’s going to lose.