Interview with Suraj Patel Suraj Patel, an attorney and adjunct professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, unsuccessfully ran for election to the US House of Representatives to represent New York’s 12th Congressional District in 2018 and 2020. Patel’s June 2020 primary election was marred by extensive delays and errors, with one in five ballots disqualified and results not certified until August 4, six weeks after the election. In July, Patel filed a federal lawsuit against Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Board of Elections over the invalidation of the uncounted ballots, before conceding the race on August 27.
by Neil Sehgal ’21 illustrator Nicholas Edwards ’23 Neil Sehgal: More than one in five ballots were discarded in your district. The few votes that you were able to get counted through your lawsuit saw you leading by a wide margin. And the federal judge in your case explicitly welcomed campaigns to petition for additional votes to be counted. Why concede? Suraj Patel: Honestly, we realized that the finality of the election and proximity to the November election put us in a really bad position to keep fighting. It’s really disappointing that democracy didn’t work in our district, but this was always bigger than one campaign and one candidate. Donald Trump is an existential threat to our democracy. Thousands of New Yorkers didn’t have their voices heard. I think they’re angry and they will continue to be, and they know who sided with them. President Trump had suggested that there be a do-over for your primary. Had more actors been on board, would a fresh election have been a solution? I honestly can’t speculate. Obviously there’s no way my opponent was going to be on board with anything like that. And I didn’t want to share common cause with Donald Trump and give him a precedent in November. You participated in the Black Lives Matter protests this summer. What is the role of inside work (e.g. electoral politics) as opposed to outside work (e.g. street protests) in creating positive change? I am a massive proponent of the Black Lives Matter movement and of the street protests because they are a catalyst for legislative change. One thing I always said during this race was this time had to be different. This time the aspirations of the millions of people that are marching across the streets had to be turned into laws through new legislation. At the end of the day, that’s the ultimate goal of the movement: legislation. And the folks who had their hand in making the laws that we are now protesting cannot be trusted to undo them with new ones. During your campaign you branded
yourself as a progressive anti-establishment candidate and an Obama Democrat. Many on the left would claim that Obama represents the establishment. How do you resolve the conflicting labels? When I joined the Obama campaign in 2008, we were in a primary against the establishment. Hillary Clinton at that point had locked up the entire party machinery. So when I say anti-establishment, it is running against a status quo that isn’t delivering. When we ran that campaign and when we governed the country with President Obama, there was a unifying element. And that’s the kind of positive campaign we ran, with a message of bringing more people in and building a big tent. So that puts me in that sort of Obama lens. At the same time, I’m running against the establishment and am significantly more progressive than the current office holder in the district. How do you explain the dissonance between Obama’s startlingly high popularity among Democrats and the fact that the majority of 2020 presidential candidates, including Biden, ran far to his left? Obama governed where he could at the time. Let’s not forget Obamacare was a massive expansion of the healthcare system, and let’s not forget that he pushed hard for a public option that was torpedoed by Joe Lieberman. I think that the idea that Obama wasn’t progressive enough has to be viewed through the lens of the times. As an Asian American, do you think you faced unique challenges in running for Congress? One hundred percent. I think that there’s a significant problem in the establishment party apparatus specifically in New York, and in media coverage of Asian American and South Asian candidates. There are a lot of assumptions made about the type of background and candidacy you have. The proof is very simply put in the fact that there are no South Asians in office in the entire city of New York. Not a single one—not in city council, not in any state, local or federally
elected position. For a city that is as diverse as it is, its political machinery is anything but. There is no home base and that’s a problem we’re going to have to keep fighting head-on. Before choosing Harris, Biden had already made a public promise to choose a woman as his vice president. When does representation become tokenism? I don’t think that Biden’s promise amounts to tokenism. It amounts to recognizing that it’s 2020. It’s essential for the Democratic Party, if it really wants to be the party of diversity, to elevate voices that aren’t the historical ones that have been. You’ve had a pretty successful professional career, but after Trump’s election in 2016, you became a full-time organizer. Does the careerist culture in today’s universities worry you? People should be entitled to do what they want. I don’t have umbrage at young 22-year-olds graduating and entering professions that will allow them to pay their debt back. We have an astronomical student debt load and astronomical tuition rates in this country. But you are seeing that even within those professions, they are entering these big firms with a pretty different mindset that looks at the world, the community, and the stakeholders as parts of business. We can’t abandon business if we’re progressives because commerce happens to be 85 percent of our economy. If we leave that to a certain set of folks, then I think we’re doing ourselves a major disservice. What advice would you give to young people who want to get involved in politics? I honestly can tell you that the best decision I made in my life was to leave law school in 2008 to join the Obama campaign because I was inspired by it. Find a cause, find a campaign, and at some point in your young life fully dedicate yourself to it. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. THE HOME ISSUE
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