New York City Part II: Everything else

Everybody's running for something

A housekeeping note, again! We’ve made a decision: we will indeed be sticking with Primary School as our new name. Expect us to actually start using it soon. At any rate, New York has a lot going on. In addition to Mayor, there’s a Comptroller race, borough offices, and the City Council. We covered the mayoral race by itself last week, so this issue covers everything below the mayoral race.

Comptroller

The Comptroller position is rooted in the day-to-day financial activity of the city: managing investments and debt, producing fiscal reports, dealing with city contracts, that sort of thing. While the Comptroller generally has significant sway in terms of influence over other politicians, and a public microphone, perhaps the most important enumerated power of the Comptroller is control over the city’s pension funds, which total over $150 billion, a significant amount of money to invest or divest how they choose. Six candidates have stepped up as major contenders for this office so far.

State Sen. Brian Benjamin of Harlem is the choice of the real estate industry. That’s not entirely shocking, considering he’s a real estate developer himself, and former investment banker. He was an employee of Genesis Companies, which doesn’t just develop properties, it rents them out too, and has a reputation as a bad landlord. Benjamin refused to disaffiliate from the group after elected, and stayed on their payroll to the tune of $60,000 for a year. In 2019, as he was planning to run for Comptroller, he backed off supporting a tenants’ rights bill and planned a private fundraiser with a different real estate developer, before details were leaked and he sheepishly canceled it.

His campaign has seen him raise a ton of money and earn support from many politicians from Harlem and the Bronx. But some of that money has gotten him in trouble, for what seems like a blatant straw donor scheme. Because the city gives 8:1 matching funds, but the funds are limited per donor past a certain dollar amount, a candidate can get way more out of a donor if that donor spreads it among a few sources, and that’s exactly what happened with Benjamin and Michael Murphy, who was working under real estate developer Jerry Migdol. The Benjamin campaign reported 23 donations brought in from Murphy, spread across a variety of supposed donors who would later say they hadn’t given any money at all, including a 2-year-old relative of Migdol. After reporting brought this to light, the Benjamin campaign was forced to give back the money, but questions about who set this up—and who else knew what was going on—have yet to be answered. Benjamin has come under further scrutiny for taking a $50,000 salary to sit on the board of a new investment company founded by one of the city’s most notorious subprime mortgage giants.

Michelle Caruso-Cabrera is a Republican CNBC anchor who switched parties to challenge AOC in a primary last year. And we do mean Republican, as in she was literally registered with the party until then. Her Republican beliefs are also evident from her 2010 book, You Know I’m Right, 242 pages of largely indistinct detritus from the early Tea Party era, when respectable media figures thought there was a market for actual right libertarianism. It’s mostly a list of her political opinions, which she neither fleshes out nor justifies, but it does do a great job of demonstrating that she couldn’t be a sincere Democrat: “the government shouldn’t be funding any research at all”, “unions should have died a natural death”, [t]he fact is Americans are overinsured”, “let’s get rid of Social Security and Medicare altogether”, “get rid of the SEC”, “the very act of creating an agency to protect us actually leads to less protection”.

Caruso-Cabrera lost that race by a crushing 74-18, but apparently left with an appetite for more. She’s a late entry to the Comptroller race, jumping in at the end of January. With Comptroller, though, that’s not unusual, most voters don’t pay attention until the last minute. Caruso-Cabrera had apparently been ready to enter the race for a while, and a November poll commissioned by one of her allies in November—the only poll of the race released by anyone so far—actually shows her leading the race…with 11% of the vote. 66% of voters didn’t have a candidate yet, and it’s not a leap to say that her residual name recognition from those ads she ran in the summer for her congressional race are the reason why. Without RCV, there may have been some scenario where she could have won this on a plurality in a 6 person race, but with RCV, she will not be getting a majority.

Zach Iscol is an “outsidery” choice. Iscol, a Marine veteran and nonprofit executive, was originally running for mayor, but dropped down to Comptroller last month after failing to gain any traction in the mayoral race. His campaign has focused mostly on the failures of “career politicians” during the COVID-19 crisis, and, despite running a pretty centrist mayoral campaign, has pitched himself as a progressive alternative, though it’s unclear what he would do in the office that several other candidates in the race wouldn’t. It’s also unclear which voters that he couldn’t appeal to in the mayoral race are going to support him now. Anti-establishment voters who think Caruso-Cabrera is too conservative? 

Council Member Brad Lander wants to be the left’s choice. Lander has represented the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn on the Council since 2009, and has, if anything, had to play catch-up adjusting to the area’s increasingly left-wing politics. His endorsements of Cynthia Nixon in 2018, Bernie Sanders in 2020, and Jamaal Bowman in 2020 weren’t brave so much as they were reflective of his constituents. Lander is termed out now, and while he could be moving to the center for a more moderate citywide electorate, he’s instead running on wielding the city’s budget like a legislating tool of its own. Two major projects he wants to implement are using existing funding mechanisms to build a social housing stock of tens of thousands of units, and investing in green, public energy sources for the city. He’s also pitching himself as the only candidate for Comptroller willing to go after the NYPD’s budget in office. He was indeed one of the few members of the Council to oppose last year’s budget for its meager amount of budget cuts to the NYPD. 

Lander’s campaign is somewhat reminiscent of Stringer’s: a white career politician from a wealthy and progressive part of the city running a campaign that embraces the left’s priorities. But Lander’s campaign is marked by far less caution, as well as being, frankly, less cynical. Importantly, Lander has also been successful with endorsements. He has several progressive politicians, including Rep. Jerry Nadler and three state senators, but also important organizational support: The Working Families Party, Make the Road Action, and NY Communities for Change, which were all instrumental in the high-profile primary wins of the last two cycles. He’s also doing quite well with labor. Unlike in the mayoral race where multiple candidates are attempting to balance a progressive platform with viability as a candidate, Lander is both the most progressive candidate in the race, and the clear choice of progressives.

State Sen. Kevin Parker has a temper.Here is a list of times that Kevin Parker has assaulted, or attempted to assault, someone, that we know of:

• 2004: Primary opponent Wellington Sharpe (alleged by Sharpe)

• 2005: A traffic cop writing him a ticket (he took a plea deal)

• 2005: An aide in his office (alleged by the aide)

• 2008: Another aide in his office (alleged by the aide)

• 2008: An NY Post photographer (he received 3 years probation)

• 2010: Fellow NY Senator Diane Savino (his colleagues managed to pin him down before anything happened)

Even when he doesn’t make things physical, he’s still known for outbursts such as throwing things and telling people to kill themselves. Parker has a dedicated base in his Brooklyn district, which he’s represented for two decades now. In fact, in a 2019 altercation with state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi, he declared himself unbeatable in a primary. That may well be true, but he hasn’t actually had one in a decade, and it’s doubtful his popularity extends much outside of his district borders.

Assemblyman David Weprin is the Queens machine candidate. Weprin comes from a powerful political family that are good friends of the Cuomos. His father spent over 30 years in the state Assembly and served multiple terms as Speaker in the 90s, and his older brother served in the space between Dad and David in the Weprins’ Queens Assembly district, a thin serpent that connects white neighborhoods from Richmond Hill near the Brooklyn border practically all the way to Nassau County. Weprin has always had his political career handed to him on a platter by the Queens machine: he was gifted a Council seat in 2001 and his Assembly district in 2010 in a swap with his brother, as well as a 2011 special election nomination for Congress. 

But he is stunningly incapable when he actually has to fight for anything. He ran for City Comptroller in 2009, and came in last place with just 10% of the vote, barely registering outside his district and a few ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods (Weprin himself is Orthodox). That 2011 congressional election is an infamous failure on behalf of Democrats, a freewheeling shitshow of a campaign that somehow ended up with Weprin fumbling his way to losing a district Obama had just won by double digits. Last year, he went through his first primary since getting into the seat, facing two totally unknown challengers with no money, and only scraped by with 50% of the vote.

In office, Weprin isn’t entirely the moderate you’d expect him to be: he proudly supported gay marraige during the Congressional race despite the political risks, and he authored the original bail and parole reforms that passed in 2019. But those are more exceptions that anything. During his Council days he was openly the conduit for Michael Bloomberg in the Council, and he insisted on austerity politics during the 2008 economic crisis. These days he’s more notable for fighting against tolls, congestion pricing, and any other hint of dealing with NYC’s car problem. Weprin is a caricature of the creaky old-school machines, an investment banker who always makes sure to help out his wealthy donors, who can only seem to win an election when the bosses in a smoke-filled room decided to give it to him, and who backs them up in return, no matter what. His campaign is insubstantial and dully running on themes like experience and competence. He may very well wind up with the Orthodox vote again, and a substantial portion of the white outerborough vote, but that’s nothing close to a majority. It looks like Weprin’s in for another ugly defeat—perhaps not his last, now that he has a target on his back in 2022.

Borough Presidents

If you read the mayoral half of this guide, you’re clear on the fact that Borough Presidents don’t do shit. They issue a significant number of advisory positions, and they tend to get listened to when they have something to say about their borough, but they don’t have any real responsibilities or power. They do have a real tendency to get nominated for powerful offices later on, so it’s important to check on who’s climbing the ladder. 

Brooklyn is New York City’s largest borough, with a population of over 2.5 million, and as such is chock full of ambitious politicians and termed-out Council members. Councilmember Robert Cornegy, representing the historically Black and middle class neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, has taken up a similar rallying cry to Laurie Cumbo, the Council member next door, that the recent leftward movement in the area he represents is the produce of illegitimate interlopers, “political gentrifiers”. Never mind his years of taking all the money he could gobble up from those same developers fueling gentrification. Also, the man literally said at a debate regarding police violence, “punishing bad behavior is not where I’m at.” Kim Council is a local housing nonprofit leader who ran a couple progressive primary challenges in 2013 and 2014, and got relatively close both times. Khari Edwards, an executive at a nonprofit hospital in the borough, is running a longshot campaign on healthcare and affordable housing, two topics that just about every candidate is focused on. Council Member Mathieu Eugene has been on the City Council for longer than anyone else: 3 ½ terms. He’s termed himself the Hatian Sensation for his surprise initial election to the council, but the old-guard moderate found all three of his reelections tougher than the last, culminating in a 2017 campaign dogged by residency questions and campaign finance violations that resulted in him limping his way to 41% of the vote, winning only because of a split field. Eugene is the most moderate candidate in the race, and has been actively courting the business community. 

Shanduke McPhatter spent his 20s in and out of the criminal justice system before founding a nonprofit to help youth in the city avoid going through what he had. The city eventually partnered with the group. A good bio, but his star dimmed considerably last year when a neighbor alleged death threats from McPhatter. While the allegation itself is far from proven (and “I’m going to get my people, the Bloods, to come handle you. I’m going to have you killed," does sound a lot like something a traffic cop would invent to get rid of his neighbor), the spotlight prompted reporting that McPhatter had nearly quadrupled his own salary to almost $300,000 once the group started getting city contracts, which is Not A Good Look. Council Member Antonio Reynoso is a young progressive representing a rapidly gentrifying Hispanic-majority (for now) district in Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Ridgewood. Reyoso has taken gutsy stands, including for Cynthia Nixon in 2018, and against the city budget when it didn’t cut enough of the NYPD budget (only 9 Democrats voted no on the budget for that reason, and 7 are or were running for bigger offices this year). Asm. Jo Anne Simon represents wealthy neighborhoods just across the East River from Lower Manhattan. She has a progressive reputation in the legislature, but as a political actor she has been fastidiously supportive of the establishment.

The conventional wisdom is that this race will probably come down to Cornegy, Reynoso, and Simon. If most of the Black vote comes down in favor of Cornegy after ranking allocation, that could get him quite close to victory, but Black voters in Brooklyn are not known for bloc voting. Simon might benefit from the high turnout of her wealthy white base, and could be a good second ranking for Reynoso voters if he doesn’t do well in the first rounds, but Reynoso looks like he’s in a good position to combine the Hispanic community (nearly a fifth of the borough) with the multi-racial progressive coalition that powered the left-wing wins of 2020.

The Bronx is a lot more of a local race than many of these. Rubén Díaz Jr. practically ran the borough for the last decade, and was expected to run for mayor. But the total implosion of the Bronx political machine in the last two cycles (the Engel/Crowley losses would have been brutal even if they hadn’t been replicated downballot) convinced him he didn’t have the juice, and now control of the Bronx is more decentralized than ever. To replace him are four contenders. Fernando Cabrera comes from a conservative strain of Dominican politics in the Bronx. He opposes abortion, gay rights, socialism, everything really. He’s a version of Rubén Díaz Sr. without the propensity for controversy, though he did spend a couple months challenging AOC in her primary out of boredom. Asm. Nathalia Fernández is a not-entirely-moderate protégé of moderate Council Member Mark Gjonaj, and represents a northern section of the Borough that sits at the confluence of Hispanics and more Republican “white ethnics”. Council Member Vanessa Gibson is a Black politician from some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. Gibson isn’t quite the conservative that Cabrera is, though she still sits to the right of Fernández ideologically, and her attempt to “do you know who I am” her way out of a $50 traffic fine makes her much less of a good-government choice. Sen. Luis Sepúlveda was supposed to be a progressive choice in the race—he certainly had the field lapped as far as records go—but then he got arrested for allegedly choking his ex-wife. This is a complicated situation, as both parties allege that the other assaulted them, but considering his wife called the police, and he’s the one with charges, it doesn’t look good for his account of events. Regardless of the specifics, the news coverage following that event has been catastrophic for him.

Man, what a depressing race, huh? Actual conservative Cabrera would be a disaster, and beyond him it’s either one of two moderates or a potential domestic abuser. The favorite at this point is probably Fernández, given the weaknesses of the other options: Cabrera’s extremely conservative, Gibson doesn’t even know Spanish but is running for a majority-Latino borough, and Sepúlveda might be/probably is a domestic abuser.

Manhattan’s race has been a wild ride. Let’s meet the players. Longtime readers will remember Lindsey Boylan, a former Cuomo staffer who has denounced her old boss and embraced a very online form of leftism, and is best known for challenging Jerry Nadler last year in the congressional primaries. She only got 22% of the vote (20% in the Manhattan part of the district), but it was an uphill battle in some respects, considering her campaign was more about tactics than policy differences with one of Congress’s most progressive members. Elizabeth Caputo works in finance and chaired a community board, a sort of formalized local planning board. State Sen. Brad Holyman, who represents the wealthy-but-not-Wall-Street whiter part of the borough just north of Chinatown, has staked out the most definitely left-leaning platform. While much of it is just things he’s going to advocate for (remember: borough presidents can’t do shit), he is quite dedicated to the Open Streets initiative and school desegregation through rezoning, areas where he actually would have a lot of power. Council Member Ben Kallos, of the Upper East Side, is a mainstream liberal who has rarely made waves before this, but has gotten on just about every Manhattan establishment politician’s good side. Council Member Mark Levine, of Upper Manhattan, similarly has a relatively undistinguished career as a mainstream liberal, but his decades of duking it out in more diverse districts might come in handy in a race with no Hispanic candidates. Finally, Kimberly Watkins is another community board member, and is perhaps best known for her account of gender discrimination while working for Andrew Yang in the mid 2000s. Her platform, complaining about city-wide school initiatives and low rates of home ownership, seems aimed at a certain income bracket (not one of the low ones).

It’s anyone’s guess who’s going to win this one. Kallos has a ton of labor endorsements, and combining that with the kind of rich Manhattan liberals whose turnout numbers are through the roof in every election could be powerful. Levine has some support from Hispanic and Asian political leaders, which, if that translates into votes, will be a big deal in this all-white field. Holyman’s progressive positioning might help him in later ranked choice scenarios. Boylan has name recognition and money, but she’s probably going to need to beat Holyman in first choice votes to have a chance, and that seems difficult. However, as Boylan appears to be the leading female candidate, Democratic voters’ on-again-off-again desire to elect more women in primaries may help her.

Queens is the rematch of a race that never was. After Melinda Katz left the position for the DA’s office, a special election kicked off in her wake. Initially, there were four main candidates, all city council members: Donovan Richards, Elizabeth Crowley (cousin of ex-Congressman Joe), Costa Constantinides, and Jimmy Van Bramer. Richards and Crowley were both establishment choices, while Constantinides and Van Bramer were more progressive candidates. Van Bramer dropped out before filing, and eventually Richards won with 36% of the vote, beating Crowley’s 29% and Constantinides’s 18%. Jimmy Van Bramer is now running instead for the regular election against incumbent Donovan Richards. Last year’s runner-up Elizabeth Crowley is considering running again, but if she wants to get in the race, she better decide soon. 

This race isn’t totally an outsider vs. establishment contest. While Donovan Richards is every bit the machine cog that Melinda Katz was (and still is), Jimmy Van Bramer is a two-term council member who was progressive, but resting comfortably on the Council until recently. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s election changed a lot in New York politics, and a handful of politicians seemingly received total personality transplants after seeing the results and then checking the demographics of their own districts. Van Bramer, to his credit, had less distance to travel on policy than many, and responded to the AOC era mostly by growing more emboldened. Van Bramer has only been in this race for weeks, but upon his entry he was endorsed by Queens Assemblyman Ron Kim, Sen. Jessica Ramos, Cynthia Nixon, and Zephyr Teachout. Richards, an incumbent and the chosen candidate of a machine that can still generally deliver votes borough-wide, is still the favorite, but Richards’s performance in 2020 was not so strong that he seems unbeatable. He won overwhelmingly among Black voters, but struggled elsewhere. Costa Constantinides may have only won 18% of the vote, but Richards was pretty far from 50%, so Van Bramer’s path to victory relies on doing very well with Hispanic and Asian voters.

Manhattan District Attorney

Each borough has its own district attorney, but only two are up this year. Brooklyn’s race is uncontested, which leaves only Manhattan. Important note about this race: for boring historical reasons, District Attorneys are state races, not city races, so the new ranked choice voting program does not apply to them, and this election will be conducted under the old first-past-the-post plurality winner rules. Current DA Cy Vance is an old school tough on crime prosecutor who has special notoriety for ruthlessly pursuing charges against sex workers, but doing his best to let Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein walk. Vance is raising no money and not campaigning, so it sure seems like he’s retiring rather than facing voters again, but he refuses to actually come out and say that, so we’re going to cautiously treat this as an open race. The race to replace Vance has 8 contenders, an especially overcrowded figure for an election with plurality victory rules. Let’s lay them out in tiers:

The Good: Civil rights attorney Tahanie Aboushi, public defender Eliza Orlins and Asm. Dan Quart are all running on fully decarceral platforms, and they seem to be moving to the left as the campaign goes on—though it’s worth noting that Orlins and Quart had better starting points than Aboushi. Aboushi has gotten a lot of attention nationally from reform groups and progressive Muslim polticians such as Rashida Tlaib. She supports ending cash bail, abolishing the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor (a war on drugs relic), and has a well-publicised plan to institute sentencing diversion. That last point is a controversial one among many activists, who point out that she left so many loopholes in her original plan that she might as well have not bothered. She’s moved to the left over the course of the campaign, patching up the diversionary plan and reversing her previous support for gang enhancements. Orlins has been especially vocal about decriminalizing sex work and supporting sex workers, and has taken the bold step of declaring she won’t be prosecuting any misdemenors outside of a short list. She also wants to cut the prosecution budget in half. Quart is a bit more cautious about the crimes he won’t prosecute, and a recent report by the largest groups of public defenders in the city rates him as nearly, but not quite, as committed to reform as Orlins. While Quart may lag in platform somewhat, he brings to the table an electability argument. He’s already a politician, has managed to pull in some endorsements, and was able to bring over three quarters of a million from his Assembly campaign account for this race.

The Okay: Former Chief Deputy Attorney General of New York Alvin Bragg is running reformist campaign which is a clear improvements over Vance, but doesn’t go as far as Orlins, Quart, or Aboushi. (RIP to former candidate Janos Marton’s campaign, which went further than that trio.) He’s taken some good stances like supporting defunding the NYPD by $1 billion, but his stance towards the more decarceral policies activists are pushing for has been lukewarm at best. Bragg was an early entrant into the race, and has focused his campaign on addressing racial discrimination withing the system. He has support from many Harlem politicians, as well as Preet Bharara, his old boss. 

The Bad: It’s all assistant DAs from here on out. Diana Florence and Lucy Lang both have embraced the progressive prosecutor label, and compared to Vance they would be, but that’s a very low bar. They’ve gotten behind many of the reforms of popular activists, but aren’t willing to really transform much about how the office operates, hoping rather to continue many of the strong-arm tactics the office currently uses to get convictions rather than justice. Lang does have some voices within the reform movement behind her: Valerie Castile (mother of Philando Castile) and St. Louis DA Kim Gardner, as well as a healthy fundraising operation. Florence, meanwhile, is relying on labor support (and she has a lot of it) which she cultivated working with unions and workers in her decades prosecuting construction industry crime.

The Ugly: Assistant DAs Elizabeth Crotty and Tali Farhadian Weinstein are career prosecutors, and they act like it. Weinstein, a former member of the Brooklyn DA’s office, is fabulously wealthy thanks to her hedge fund manager husband, has raised hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions from Wall Street sources, who she’s running to be in charge of prosecuting. She has adopted some reform language and would represent the tiniest of improvement from Vance, in the sense that she at least wants to have diversion and conviction fairness programs, as anemic as her proposals are. Crotty, meanwhile, doesn’t even bother pretending. She’s a fanatic about old-school mass incarceration, and proud of it.

This race is wide open, and each candidate has a particular strength that could be enough in a race where the winner could get not much of the vote at all. Aboushi has the sort of big name endorsers to appeal to reform voters, Bragg looks set to get most of the Black vote, and has the money to reach beyond them, Crotty can appeal to the (few) voters who actively oppose the new progressive prosecutor movement, Florence has labor behind her, Orlins has activists, Quart has an established political history and an electability argument for reformers, Weinstein has twice the money anyone else does, and Lang—well, okay, she might not have a natural constituency. There’s been no polling here, and the reality is that criminal justice reform advocates are going to need to pick one candidate and come out in force behind them, because the alternative could very well be Weinstein winning with 19% of the vote.

Council

We are not doing every council race in one issue, because there are 51 of them and the vast majority are at least kind of competitive. This is not a comprehensive list of council races; these are just the ones that have caught our eye so far.

CD-07 (open Levine seat)

This upper Manhattan district is mostly Black and Latino, but the small section of Manhattan Valley, where the district’s white population mostly resides, is quite wealthy, meaning the primaries are a lot more white than you would think. It leads to a very tale-of-two-cities electorate. By far the coolest candidate running is Marti Allen-Cummings, a community activist who would be not just the first nonbinary member of the City Council, but one of the first drag queens elected to public office anywhere in the US (we’re pretty sure they’d be the second, after Los Angeles’s Maebe A. Girl). Allen-Cummings, who has the support of many progressive and leftist Bronx and Manhattan politicians, is running on a quite progressive platform that includes stopping the area’s rapid gentrification, defunding the NYPD, and making transit fare-free. They applied for, but did not receive, the DSA’s endorsement. Tenant attorney and mainstream liberal Shaun Abreu is the establishment choice. He’s managed to grab endorsements from labor and Rep. Ritchie Torres. Housing nonprofit executive Daniel Cohen is running on a more moderate platform and raising a decent amount of money, but no major power players have warmed up to him. Maria Ordoñez is running as a self-identified socialist (rose symbology and everything), but has missed out on the sort of institutional support Cummings has received. City government staffers Corey Ortega and Stacy Lynch are also running.

CD-09 (open Perkins seat)

This Harlem district has its first actually-open primary since the mid 2000s (current incumbent Bill Perkins was a former council member and state senator when he ran for the 2017 special and faced very weak opposition), so just about everyone who wants to get into politics is running, and there’s no clear frontrunner. Political author and poet Kristin Richardson Jordan is running on a very progressive platform and has support from some grassroots groups. She’s also the only candidate to qualify for matching funds so far, which has given her a significant cash advantage over the field, though money isn’t everything. LinkedIn employee and nonprofit exec Mario Rosser is more of a mainstream liberal, and he’s the only one really chasing Jordan in the money race. Perkins staffer and general local political figure District Leader Cordell Cleare has the most establishment support in the race, and generally seems like a moderate. She ran for this district in 2017 and got 17% of the vote, but there’s actually been a poll of potential candidates for this race, and it doesn’t look like she has a dedicated base. Keith Taylor is the cop candidate. (Seriously, he has a whole section on his website about how much he loves being one.) Joshua Clennon was a Bernie Sanders delegate and visible progressive activist.

CD-11 Special

Termed-out Council Member Andrew Cohen resigned to take office as a state judge, setting up a March 23 nonpartisan special election for this seat in the northwestern corner of the Bronx. Progressives, including the Working Families Party, have settled on activist Mino Lora, while the Bronx establishment is backing Eric Dinowitz, the son of prominent Eliot Engel booster and Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz. Tech businesswoman Jessica Haller and real estate lawyer Dan Padernacht are also mounting serious campaigns, but Lora and Dinowitz seem like the top two here. The electorate in the presumably low-turnout March 23 special may advantage Dinowitz; this district is majority-Latino, but includes affluent white neighborhoods like Riverdale and Spuyten Duyvil, which will likely produce a special election electorate much whiter than the district’s population. Lora, the only Latino candidate of the top four, could win a primary by consolidating Black and Latino voters against her three white opponents--but that may not work in the special election, with a smaller, whiter, wealthier, and more conservative electorate.

CD-13 (Gjonaj)

Mark Gjonaj is an ex-assemblyman who, like many primary-losing incumbents, is a white machine politician representing a largely Black and Brown district. In fact, Council District 13 almost perfectly overlaps with the Bronx part of the 14th Congressional District, where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated Joe Crowley in 2018, and neighbors the 16th Congressional District, where Jamaal Bowman defeated Eliot Engel in 2020. But Gjonaj has weaknesses Crowley and Engel didn’t: first, he’s much more conservative than Crowley and Engel ever were. He even endorsed against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2020. Second, he’s the subject of a long-running corruption investigation. Bronx Community Board 10 member Marjorie Velázquez, the runner-up to Gjonaj in 2017, is back for another go, and she has a strong coalition of major labor unions, progressive groups, and local elected officials behind her.

CD-14 (open Cabrera seat)

This district lies in the University Heights neighborhood of the Bronx, and features a plethora of candidates. The most notable is Adolfo Abreu, a socialist political organizer who is running as part of the DSA slate. It’s worth explaining that while many organizations issue endorsements, the NYC-DSA operates a more unified campaign, with shared platform planks and organizational infrastructure. While the NYC-DSA has made startling gains in Brooklyn and Queens, the  Bronx has been a tough nut to crack aside from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory, and Abreu’s victory would be proof of socialism’s viability even in almost totally non-white, poor and working-class University Heights. Abreu’s also been endorsed by WFP, in a nice moment of unity between two left-wing groups which sometimes clash. The candidate of the Bronx establishment is Pierina Sanchez, an urban planner who has worked in both the White House and City Hall. Sanchez is running on a largely progressive platform and would still be a huge upgrade from Cabrera. Fernando Aquino, an immigrant and CUNY professor who has raised a good bit of money, and District Leader Yudelka Tapia, who has respectably lost a few local elections in the past, should also not be counted out.

CD-15 (vacant Torres seat)

Elisa Crespo, a staffer for Bronx BP Rubén Díaz Jr., is one of the two favorites for this seat, and the progressive choice as well. Crespo would be the first out trans member of the city council, and she has an earlier election than most: Torres’s seat will be filled by the winner of a March 23 special election. Crespo, despite being a Díaz staffer, has aligned herself with the city’s activist left and organized labor. Ischia Bravo, a Community Board 7 official, is the leading establishment candidate, and has support from the labor groups which have not endorsed Crespo, as well as from Díaz himself and some local politicians. Also running are Bernie Sanders staffer Latchmi Gopal, Community Board 6 official John Sanchez, and state Senate staffer Kenny Agosto.

CD-18 (open Díaz Sr. seat)

Amanda Farías was set for a rematch with conservative “Democrat” Rubén Díaz Sr. when he announced he would retire after a punishing loss in the 2020 NY-15 primary. Now, she’s the leading candidate to replace him, with strong support from organized labor and elected officials. Community Board member William Rivera is the establishment pick and her biggest competition.

CD-20 (open Koo seat)

Peter Koo, a (barely) ex-Republican, has finally been termed out of this Asian-majority district in Flushing. Rep. Grace Meng staffer Sandra Ung has the support of Meng, and labor. She makes sense as a Meng endorsee, since she’s painfully moderate. Hailing Chen, a union organizer and gig workers’ rights advocate, is running an intriguing campaign that is focused on reaching out to recent immigrants such as himself. Because he has a strong small donor base, he’s managed to unlock matching funds, something only Ung has done so far. John Choe is hard to figure out. He's a storied and often controversial politician who has long worked for the reunification of North and South Korea. Some of his stances on the issue, that the US’s presence in South Korea constitutes imperialism, and that the North should be normalized in order to promote reconciliation, would spark red-baiting today, let alone in the Bush years when he was saying things like that, and at socialist conferences no less. That earned him vile harassment and cost him a 2009 shot at succeeding his boss John Liu in the City Council, after which he left politics. In the intervening time, he founded the local chamber of commerce (something communist agents are not known for doing). Still, he has support from progressive groups and community leaders, including 2020 Meng challenger Mel Gagarin. Finally, there’s Neng Weng, a Taiwanese immigrant and former member of the  Chinese‐American Planning Council, who is, if anything, running as a conservative, focusing on getting rid of “burdensome” regulations on business and “restor[ing] respect for law and order”.

Note: this story initially attributed an insensitive comment made by outgoing Council Member Peter Koo as having been made by candidate John Choe. We apologize for this error.

CD-22 (open Constantinides seat)

Since her narrow, heartbreaking loss to Melinda Katz in the 2019 Democratic primary for Queens DA, Tiffany Cabán’s future has been a big question mark. The left was eager to see her return, and the center was afraid. Now, months before the primary, Cabán’s future seems set: she’s a strong favorite for the Astoria-based city council district being vacated by term-limited Council Member Costa Constantinides. Council District 22 is pretty left-leaning, backing Cynthia Nixon and AOC in 2018, but Cabán outdid them both in 2019, getting a staggering 71% of the vote in the district (thanks to Ben Rosenblatt for the 2019 results data from CD-22.) It’s hard to see her losing, especially in light of the NYC left’s wildly successful 2020; the activist left is backing Cabán again, this time joined by an array of Queens and Brooklyn politicians they helped elect in 2018 and 2020, as well as some establishment politicians smart enough to see which way the wind is blowing. In just a few short years, NYC DSA has already elected its candidates to Congress and both chambers of the state legislature; with Cabán, they will almost certainly get at least one endorsed candidate on the city council as well. Her two competitors are educational nonprofit organizer Evie Hantzopoulos and educator Leonardo Bullaro, who have both raised decent amounts of money.

CD-23 (open Grodenchik seat)

This seat was left open by the retirement of centrist and sexual harasser Barry Grodenchik. Covering suburban neighborhoods in northeastern Queens, this district has a large and growing South Asian population, which DSA-, WFP-, and Communities for Change-backed candidate Jaslin Kaur may hope to turn into a victory over the area’s white-dominated machine. Incidentally, the white population has been fleeing this district, with more than a quarter of it leaving between 2000 and 2010. The population is quite simply very different from its historical composition. City Hall staffer Debra Markell is more or less the white Queens establishment choice, supported by a rogue’s gallery of the usual suspects, including Congressman Tom Suozzi and Asm. Cathy Nolan. Grodenchik is backing his former campaign manager Steve Behar, who will likely lose. Meanwhile, Linda Lee, who is quite involved in the local Korean American community, has lapped the field in fundraising. A Kaur victory would be nothing short of an earthquake; middle-class suburban outer borough neighborhoods are traditionally a bulwark against the left, and the election of a socialist city council member from Glen Oaks would be a potentially fatal blow to that paradigm.

CD-26 (open Van Bramer seat)

This is an insanely wide open race. We’re talking a dozen candidates here. Let’s do a few major ones. Moderate frontrunner Brent O’Leary might seem an odd fit for this ¾ nonwhite, quite left-leaning district in northern Queens, but is very active in the community and has a lot of establishment support. Amit Singh Bagga, who just ran the city’s census campaign, is running a progressive campaign and has the support of Sen. Jessica Ramos, whose district slightly overlaps CD-26. Political activist and longtime Democratic campaign worker Jesse Laymon is also running as a progressive, but is more of a longshot than Bagga. Adjunct Prof. Hailie Kim is another progressive, and while she isn’t raising much money, she does have support from Carlos Menchaca and Sen. James Sanders. Anti-gentrification activist Johnathan Bailey is very involved with DSA, but he doesn’t have their endorsement, or much campaign cash. Government consultant Julie Won has raised a ton of money, and has some good platform planks, like expanding the Open Streets initiative and building co-op housing. Julia Forman put together a progressive platform, but she’s also running on her experience as a former prosecutor... as a positive. Ebony Young is another moderate, but she’s raised some money. Finally, even though she clearly won’t win, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention 2020 AOC opponent Badrun Khan’s campaign.

CD-29 (open Koslowitz seat)

The 29th is an open seat in the neighborhoods of Kew Garden Hills and Richmond Hill of Queens. Like much of central Queens, this area has long been dominated by a moderate white establishment, but the growth of Asian and Hispanic populations mean this district now has a solid nonwhite majority. A small portion of AD-24 is in this district, and while it only cast a few hundred votes, Weprin received less than ⅓ of the vote in it (see Comptroller for more). There’s no real local machine choice in this race, but there is a larger city establishment pick: mainstream liberal Lynn Schulman, a Corey Johnson aide who ran for this district in 2001 and 2009, the latter of which as part of a field that included Mel Gagarin, who ran for Congress against Grace Meng last year, and who is married to the progressive candidate in this race, Aleda Gagarin. (How’s that for a segue?) Aleda is an urban planner and nonprofit leader who has been active in progressive politics for some time now. Her campaign is supported by the WFP, Jimmy Van Bramer, Ron Kim, and some local progressive groups. Meanwhile, Schulman has labor and some LGBT groups behind her. While Gagarin is also a queer candidate in this race, Schulman has national connections going back decades. David Aronov, aide to retiring Councilmember Karen Koslowitz, has raised a significant amount of money and is probably the most moderate candidate in the race. He hails from Kew Gardens’s large Bukharian Jewish population. The most conservative candidate is Donghui Zang, a Trump-supporting activist and pro-police vigilante. Local businessman/nonprofit head Avi Cypersein has support from many Orthodox leaders, and has raised a decent amount of money.

CD-30 (Holden)

Robert Holden had a bizarre election to Council. A NIMBY activist who tried and failed in 2017 to primary incumbent Elizabeth Crowley from the right,Holden received the Republican line for the general election without asking for it, and then campaigned his way to the narrowest of victories, aided by de Blasio tanking in white central Queens. Holden eventually decided to caucus with the Democrats, but was clear about having no affinity for the party. The man made his name literally protesting homeless shelters before this, so it should be no surprise that his reactionary bent has continued in the Council, with a special focus on closing those damn homeless shelters. Holden may have won as a Republican in 2017, but it looks like he’ll be running for reelection as a Democrat, and Biden won this seat by double digits, so it’s more than fair game for a progressive challenger. That challenger is Brad Lander staffer Juan Ardila, who has made building affordable housing a cornerstone of his campaign. Ardila is supported by the Working Families Party, Sen. Jessica Ramos (whose district doesn’t overlap CD-30), and Sen. Mike Gianaris (whose district does). Labor warmed up to Holden somewhat after he won, but the only major union to endorse him this go-around is the UFT. LaborStrong 2021, a political coalition of labor groups, has endorsed in most Council races, but they’re staying out of this one.

CD-32 (open Ulrich seat)

CD-32, a majority-minority Biden+15 district in the Rockaways and central Queens, is actually currently represented by a Republican, the infuriatingly popular Eric Ulrich. Democrats seem to think that they’ll be flipping it this year since Ulrich is termed out, and we cautiously believe them. Teacher Felicia Singh has the support of the Working Families Party, LaborStrong 2021, and many progressive women’s and Muslim groups. In the primary at least, her major competition come from paralegal Shaeleigh Severino, who is also running as a progressive, and 2017 nominee Mike Scala, a moderate who lead the legal effort to keep the city from putting a homeless shelter in their neighborhood, and refused to back Bill de Blasio in 2017. Scala is backed by some moderate elements within the Queens establishment.

CD-35 (open Cumbo seat)

This seat hosted one of the first real fights between the left and establishment in New York City last cycle. Incumbent Laurie Cumbo faced Green Party candidate Jabari Brisport in the general election, and after she won by a less-than-impressive 68-29 margin, a switch flipped for Cumbo, and she turned into the borough’s leading anti-socialist warrior. Brisport may have lost, but in the years following, this district would play host to multiple DSA candidate victories, including Brisport himself winning an overlapping Senate district by a wide margin. This year, Cumbo is termed out and the seat lies open. The DSA is backing tenant organizer Michael Hollingsworth, who is running on a platform of fighting gentrification, making housing more affordable, defunding the police, and making large investments in transportation and education. His main competition is Crystal Hudson, an advertising executive and former Cumbo treasurer, who spent the last couple years as a staffer for the City Council and Public Advocate’s office. This district has moved left in recent years, and no candidate was ever going to succeed as a status quo enthusiast. Hudson would be a better-than-average Council member—she even supports defunding the NYPD—but is not going to be the leftist Hollingsworth would be. Hudson so far has significantly outraised Hollingsworth and has near-universal labor support.

CD-36 (open Cornegy seat)

Even though it’s moving left, Bed-Stuy has long been in the heart of the Brooklyn establishment’s strength, which is why it’s so refreshing to see someone like Chi Ossé, a Black Lives Matter organizer and Bernie supporter, emerging as a top competitor. Ossé is only 22 years old, and therefore relatively new to politics, but he has a clear vision of what needs to be accomplished: taxing the rich, cutting the NYPD budget in half, and passing a Green New Deal for NYCHA. Tahirah Moore, a former Cornegy staffer, is also running on a largely progressive platform, but is politically connected rather than being the insurgent to much of anything. District Leader Henry Butler is the old-school moderate supported by the machine’s allies in labor. One of his big policy pushes so far is repealing building safety regulations, which is just weird. Pastor and teacher Robert Waterman ran for this seat in 2013, on what was at the time a relatively progressive and grassroots campaign, and he’s kept that energy this time around. Jason Walker, an organizer with VOCAL, is competing with Ossé for left-wing support.

CD-37 (Darma Diaz)

Darma Diaz won a 2020 special election in which her main progressive opponent was controversially removed from the ballot (as were, well, all of her opponents.) That progressive opponent, Sandy Nurse, is back for another try, betting that Diaz’s incumbency is easier to overcome than that of her colleagues. Nurse has the support of many local and citywide leaders, including area Rep. Nydia Velázquez and area state Sen. Julia Salazar; she is also the choice of most progressive groups and organized labor. Nurse, a veteran of local mutual aid organizing, and a self-identified “anti-capitalist” (though she and the DSA leadership apparently don’t get along), presents a real threat to Diaz. Also in the race are activist Misba Abdin and former city officials Rick Echevarría and Heriberto Mateo.

CD-38 (open Menchaca seat)

This district has a tendency towards leftist politicians, from Carlos Menchaca, to DSA Asm. Marcela Mitaynes (who unseated an incumbent last year), to Bernie Sanders (who did not lose this district by that much last year, despite being out of the race for months by the time New York voted.) It makes sense, then, that DSA-backed education activist Alexa Avilés would be something of a consensus choice, also supported by pretty much every labor union in the city and Rep. Nydia Velázquez. Her main rivals are teacher Cesar Zuniga, and Sunset Heights community activist Rodrigo Camarena, who is also running on a socialist platform. Thanks to the magic of matching funds, Avilés has raised more than double the rest of the field combined, putting her in a good place.

CD-39 (open Lander seat)

The final candidate on the DSA slate is New Kings Democrats President and City Hall budget staffer Brandon West, running for this Park Slope district on a platform of defunding the police and fighting gentrification - a process the district is in the final stages of. This is a wealthy, heavily-Democratic district in the highest-turnout part of Brooklyn; West is far from alone in this race, even in just the left lane. While Lander will not be making an endorsement in this race, one of his staffers, Shahana Hanif, is running. Hanif is also a socialist running on a leftist platform that differs more in tone than actual policy from his (for instance, her rhetorical focus on supporting full abolition of police and prisons.) Many DSA elected officials were supporting her before she ran, and Asm. Jessica González-Rojas (who is not technically affiliated with DSA) seemingly still is. Two grassroots organizations known for endorsing leftists, NY Communities for Change and CUFFH Action, have issued dual endorsements. There are a fair number of socialists in this district, so hopefully West and Hanif supporters will each be willing to rank the other candidate second.

That’s it for the socialists, but there are plenty more candidates in CD-39. Justin Krebs is the director of campaigns at 90s-email listserv-turned-PAC MoveOn, which means he can get in contact with just about every big-name Democratic donor. So far, the entirety of his campaign platform is demanding the return of in-person schools, so that rich white parents can send their kids to get COVID rather than talk to them. United Federation of Teachers activist Bridget Rein is the choice of labor in this race, and is running on a more moderate (compared to Hanif and West, at least) platform that centers public schools. District Leader Doug Schneider is a civil rights lawyer who has been involved in community and education issues for a while. He’s been part of a reformist faction within the party that has continually fought leadership, and his platform is decently progressive. Still, he, like Rein, has not qualified for matching funds yet, putting him at a significant disadvantage. If neither make the cutoff this month, they're probably finished.

CD-45 (Louis)

Farah Louis is a pretty anonymous moderate establishment Democrat who represents Flatlands and Flatbush, middle class Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn. This race is interesting thanks to the candidacy of Anthony Beckford, a DSA member and president of Black Lives Matter Brooklyn, who is running a grassroots progressive campaign. Beckford received less than 5% of the vote when he ran on a third party line in the 2019 special election for this seat, and he’s raising almost no money, so he’s a distinct longshot, but an intriguing candidate nonetheless.

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News

While we’re doing these special issues, we’re trying to keep the news section geared mostly towards new developments in races we’ve already talked about, but this week saw two big candidate announcements

CT-01

Hartford-area Rep. John Larson hasn’t faced a primary since his initial election in the 90s. That’s set to change this cycle, with Muad Hrezi, a former staffer in the office of US Sen. Chris Murphy, announcing a run. Larson is pretty moderate, but not in any high-profile sort of way; however, for an old white guy in an extremely blue district, his record doesn’t cut it. (Most egregiously, he used his PAC to quietly donate $2000 to anti-gay, anti-abortion conservative Democratic Rep. Dan Lipinski in his 2020 primary. Lipinski ultimately lost to now-Rep. Marie Newman, then a progressive challenger on her second try.)

MD-05

2020 challenger Mckayla Wilkes is back for a rematch, launching her 2022 campaign against House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer—and naming a frustration Wilkes had with coverage of her last campaign: everyone assumed she was straight. To clear the air, Wilkes came out as bisexual shortly after announcing her campaign, making her campaign an opportunity to build on the rapid progress of queer candidates in the past decade. It was only last November, after all, that the first two openly queer Black members of Congress were elected (Mondaire Jones and Ritchie Torres, both of New York); only in 2018 was the first openly queer woman of color elected to Congress (Sharice Davids of Kansas, also one of the first Native American women in Congress); only in 2012 was the first openly queer person of color, period, elected to Congress (Mark Takano of California, the only openly queer person of color before Davids.)

Wilkes’s coming out may open her campaign up to support from the LGBT Victory Fund; while the Victory Fund is very reluctant to challenge House leadership, them refusing to endorse candidates like Wilkes could (and should) result in backlash from donors and activists. Wilkes’s campaign is refreshingly clear-eyed about what went wrong in 2020: time, money, and the pandemic. Wilkes has spent the months since her loss remaining active and visible in Southern Maryland politics, and is entering the race very early in the cycle, solving the first problem; the latter two problems are up to donors and vaccination efforts.

Greenbelt Mayor Colin Byrd is already in the race, but Wilkes seems more progressive and—despite Byrd’s status as a mayor (which in Greenbelt just means he was the city councilor who received the most votes in the last general election)—more viable. We interviewed Wilkes last cycle; she knows her stuff, she’s committed to the national progressive movement, and she’d make a stellar addition to the next Congress, even if she wasn’t running against Steny Hoyer. And she’s promised to spend this week rolling out endorsements; today’s was elected Prince George’s County school board member Raaheela Ahmed.

LA-02: Two more major endorsements in this race, where voting is only weeks away. The AFL-CIO has gotten behind Sen. Troy Carter, while the Louisiana Democratic Party has officially endorsed its former chair, Sen. Karen Carter Peterson. Both Troy Carter and Karen Carter Peterson have gone up with pretty bland intro ads touting their experience.

VA-Gov: Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy had a big week for endorsements: American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents US Department of Education employees; Charlottesville City Councilman Michael Payne, who co-founded the city’s DSA and whose 2019 election was a major project of activists; and three Loudoun County supervisors.

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