15 minute read
REDISTRICTING
Party of the decade
With new state Senate and Assembly districts, New York will belong to the Democrats for years to come.
Advertisement
By Zach Williams
DEMOCRATIC DOMINANCE in state politics is about to reach a whole new level as the decennial redistricting process approaches its conclusion.
Albany Democrats are expected to approve new legislative lines for the state Senate and Assembly that benefit their incumbents while making it harder than ever for Republicans to regain any of the electoral ground they have lost in recent years. Call redistricting the latest step in a multiyear process that is now making one-party rule by Democrats a permanent fact of political life three years after the party won control of the state Senate for the first time in a decade. “It’s a generational shift,” said Basil Smikle Jr., a political consultant and former executive director of the state Democratic Party.
Many of the changes included in the proposed map for the 63-seat state Senate appeared to be aimed at helping Democrats keep more than a dozen seats that Republicans have historically controlled. Rochester and Syracuse are being split to help Democratic incumbents. The district gerrymandered a decade ago to help former GOP state Sen. Marty Golden win reelection in southern Brooklyn has been replaced by lines that now stretch into more Democratic areas like Brooklyn Heights. The addition of blue areas to the southern side of the Long Island district held by James Gaughran, one of eight Democrats who flipped GOP state Senate seats in 2018, was another example of changes aimed at helping Democrats avoid tough reelection fights in the future.
The proposed state Senate map could help Democrats expand their 44-seat supermajority in the upper chamber. Republican state Sen. Sue Serino might have to run in a redrawn district whose voters favored President Joe Biden in the 2020 cycle. It also remained unclear which Republican might run in a new district that included upstate Democratic bastions like Saratoga Springs and Troy. Other proposed districts that went big for Biden over Donald Trump in 2020 included a seat based in the Southern Tier and another in Suffolk County. The 2021 election results included some big wins for Republicans, but none of them made any difference in a state Senate where they will have to defend more historical turf later this year.
There are not quite enough Democrats from New York City and its suburbs to maintain Democrats’ longtime supermajority in the Assembly, so they will once again have to defend upstate seats to keep at least 100 seats in the 150-member lower chamber. Assembly Member Jennifer Lunsford could run for reelection in a district that went overwhelmingly for Biden in 2020 while she narrowly beat a Republican incumbent. Democrat Monica Wallace is losing some Republican areas in the outskirts of Buffalo while Democrat Al Stirpe of the Finger Lakes will be getting a few more Democratic enclaves. The Democrats, however, are not making life more difficult for every Republican. The only Re-
Democratic state Sens. Jamaal Bailey, left, Michael Gianaris, center, and Andrea Stewart-Cousins, right
– political consultant Hank Sheinkopf publican to beat an incumbent Democrat in the Assembly in 2020 – Michael Lawler of the Hudson Valley – for example, gets to run for reelection in a district that appears more favorable two years later.
Democrats have been accused of using redistricting to strengthen their position in the state Legislature despite criticizing gerrymandering in the past. “As we unravel the gerrymanders of the past, it doesn’t make it a gerrymander of today,” state Senate Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris, who chaired the legislative task force that oversaw redistricting along with Assembly Member Kenneth Zebrowski from the Hudson Valley, said on “The Brian Lehrer Show.”
“These are districts that are drawn fairly,” Gianaris added. Whether or not Gianaris’ rationale rings true despite the proposed Democratic-friendly lines, Republicans did use methods other than line-drawing to help them maintain their state Senate majority in the past. Packing more people in Democratic districts versus GOP areas was one strategy.
Republicans could defy expectations and somehow win back control of the state Senate despite all the ways that Democrats are making that more difficult through redistricting. The GOP could better mobilize their base or figure out ways to appeal more to voters. The Democrats, after all, won control of a gerrymandered state Senate in 2018, but it won’t be easy for the Republicans to do this time. One-party rule is here to stay in New York thanks to a redistricting process that comes down to which party holds power at just the right time despite highly publicized reforms. “It’s pretty much what the Republicans would have done if they had the pencil,” political consultant Hank Sheinkopf said in an interview of the proposed maps. “But Democrats have the majority, so they have the pencil.” ■
For Black political power, take the A train – to Brooklyn
Last year’s election successes showed the might of the brough’s African American and African Caribbean voters.
By Clem Richardson
THE NOVEMBER elections in New York City made one thing clear: Brooklyn has usurped Harlem as the city’s seat of Black political power.
Mayor Eric Adams and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who each handily won citywide office, are from the “Borough of Churches.” They join a powerful roster of Democratic incumbents from Brooklyn now in city, state and federal offices, including state Attorney General Letitia James, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who is considered a leading candidate to replace House Speaker Nancy Pelosi if she steps down, and Assembly Member Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, who is the first woman and first Black woman to lead the Brooklyn Democratic Party, which is one of the largest party organizations in the country.
Adams, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Williams, who is running against Hochul in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, were there on Dec. 9 as Bichotte Hermelyn
Clockwise from top right: Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, Mayor Eric Adams, state Attorney General Letitia James, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and Assembly Member Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES; ERIC ADAMS CAMPAIGN; KYLE O’LEARY; CELESTE SLOMAN; ASSEMBLY presided over the party’s Democratic Blue holiday fundraiser and toy drive at the Broadway Stages in Williamsburg. James, who announced earlier that day that she was abandoning her run for governor, did not attend.
Adams made note of the party’s citywide election successes. “Look what you have done in Brooklyn,” he said. “You have a public advocate from Brooklyn. You have an AG from Brooklyn. You have a comptroller from Brooklyn. You have the mayor, from Brooklyn.”
“Brooklyn!” the crowd yelled gleefully back.
“Clearly the center of gravity of where the Black electorate is has shifted,” said John Flateau, executive director of the DuBois Bunche Center for Public Policy at Medgar Evers College and author of “Black Brooklyn: The Politics of Ethnicity, Class and Gender.” “We have such a larger base in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx than in Harlem. That’s a fact.”
Flateau, a veteran political strategist, worked on the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson, Michael Dukakis, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. He also worked on the mayoral campaign of David Dinkins, New York’s first African American mayor, helping to map strategy with the legendary operative Bill Lynch.
Harlem’s “Gang of Four,” under the tutelage of patriarch J. Raymond Jones, used their political acumen, organizational skills and the communal need, primed by the ’60s era civil rights struggle then rocking the nation, to bring services to their community to rally voter support. Each of the Gang of Four – Dinkins, Basil Paterson, Charles Rangel and Percy Sutton – would go on to break new political ground for African Americans in the city and state. Dinkins would be an Assembly member, president of the Board of Elections, city clerk and Manhattan borough president before being elected mayor in 1989. Paterson was elected to the state Senate and was a deputy mayor before serving as then-Gov. Hugh Carey’s secretary of state. Rangel was first elected to the Assembly in 1966 and to Congress in 1971, where he served until 2017. Sutton was elected to the Assembly before serving as Manhattan borough president from 1966 to 1977.
The four brought enormous resources and political clout to Harlem and the city, including helping to elect protégé H. Carl McCall as the first Black state comptroller, and selecting Paterson’s son, David, as then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s lieutenant governor, unknowingly placing him in line to become the state’s first Black governor when Spitzer was forced to resign in March 2008. But their long political careers – which spanned from 1966 to 2017 – and their reluctance to step aside or anoint successors have been often cited as reasons for Harlem’s political waning, epitomized by the 2016 loss of the 13th Congressional District seat to then state Sen. Adriano Espaillat after Rangel’s retirement.
Yet, Brooklyn’s ascent has less to do with Harlem’s inability to hold on to power or any organized, long-term political strategy played out through the years, and more to do with an alignment and exploitation of the traditional elements of successful political campaigns everywhere: favorable demographics, organized voter education and turnout, homeownership, activist and progressive “anti-machine” politics, access to money through traditional channels as well as grassroots and independent fundraising, and an informed electorate, Flateau said.
Brooklyn also has a legacy of powerful Black politicians – before there was Rep. Shirley Chisholm there was Bertram Baker, “The Boss of Black Brooklyn,” whose 1948 election made him the first Black person to be elected to the Assembly, and Wesley McDonald “Mac” Holder, who in 1953 got Brooklyn’s first Black municipal court judge elected and was a behind-the-scenes force in the borough until his death in 1993 at 95 years old. Holder, a native of Guyana, had long contended that Black people could control Brooklyn politics if they could get past their differences.
Yet, unlike in Harlem, some pre-
scient longtime Brooklyn officeholders set up dynasties of their own, particularly Rep. Edolphus Towns, in office from 1983 to 2013, and Rep. Major Owens, in office from 1983 to 2017, so that younger politicians, in these cases Jeffries and Yvette Clarke, respectively, could take their places.
Flateau worked as Clarke’s 2016 campaign manager when she succeeded Owens in Congress. Jeffries, with the support of several Black political organizations, won Towns’ vacated seat in 2012.
“People are always talking about empowering the community for the future, but a lot of what happened in Brooklyn is that people had to stop being selfish with their power,” said Ernest Logan, a longtime Brooklyn resident and former president of the Council of School Supervisors & Administrators, the union that represents the city’s public school principals. Logan and his political director Herman Merritt would meet with candidates running for various offices to decide whom the council would support.
Harlem, just north of Manhattan’s pricey Upper East Side and Upper West Side neighborhoods, was an early target of gentrification by young, mostly white professionals looking for affordable homes, and of developers eager to exploit that emerging market. Crime dropped citywide in the early ’90s, increasing Harlem’s salability. Gentrification further eroded Harlem’s vaunted Black electoral base, Flateau said, by driving up prices beyond the reach of many young, Black professionals who might otherwise have bought homes vacated by their parents and other retiring Black baby boomers. Many of Harlem’s older residents sold their homes, using the profits to move to less costly parts of the state and country.
According to statistics from New York University’s Furman Center, Central Harlem was 54.3% Black in 2019, a sharp drop from 77.3% in 2000. The white population in Harlem grew from 2.1% to 15.5% in the same period.
“Watching what gentrification did to Harlem was a real wake-up call for Brooklyn,” said Barbara Bullard, president of the Shirley Chisholm Cultural Institute, which works to keep Chisholm’s legacy alive. “We began to see the same thing in Brooklyn, especially as Spike Lee brought Brooklyn culture to the masses and young, Black and white, educated people started to want to move here.”
Chisholm was the first African American woman elected to Congress in 1968 and the first to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. Many of her Brooklyn political successors see her as a role model.
Brooklyn’s African American politicians have also benefited from a large, politically active Caribbean immigrant population. New York City is home to the largest Caribbean community in the U.S., many of them in Brooklyn and Queens. Immigrants tend to settle near other immigrants and create communities, which led to organizing around political issues affecting them.
Former New York City Council Member Una Clarke, mother of Rep. Yvette Clarke, said long before she ran for office, she and other Caribbean community members would go to Washington, D.C., to lobby members of Congress about issues affecting their native countries. “We had no Caribbean American congressman from New York,” she said. “We would go there and see what our ambassadors were doing and saying in Washington and try to help them to drive a fair-trade agreement with the U.S.”
The Capitol trips also pressed home the need to become U.S. citizens. “The best way to empower one’s community is to run for public office, and that is no different for Blacks, Asians or whites or anyone else,” Clarke said. “When you go to the White House and you’re a citizen, it is different than when you go as a noncitizen because you can’t hurt anybody if you can’t vote.”
Brooklyn also benefited from the slower, still ongoing gentrification that swept through neighborhoods closer to Manhattan – Fort Greene, Cobble Hill, parts of Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Crown Heights –
– former New York City Council Member Una Clarke
From left: Ernest Logan, former president of the Council of School Supervisors & Administrators, former Assembly Member Bertram Baker, former Rep. Shirley Chisholm and Barbara Bullard, president of the Shirley Chisholm Cultural Institute
but has yet to gut homeownership among the working, middle and professional classes of African Americans and African Caribbeans in central Brooklyn neighborhoods like Flatbush and East Flatbush, which are also seeing a racial shift.
According to the Furman Center, Bedford-Stuyvesant was 74% Black in 2000 and 54% Black in 2019; Flatbush and Midwood were 37.4% Black in 2000 and 33.6% Black in 2019; East Flatbush was 88.7% Black in 2000 and 85.8% Black in 2019; and Brownsville was 75.9% Black in 2000 and 68.4% Black in 2019. Black residency increased in Brooklyn neighborhoods further from Manhattan. Flatlands and Canarsie were 51% Black in 2000 and 62.1% Black in 2019, and East New York and Starrett City’s Black residents climbed from 45.7% in 2000 to 55.4% in 2019.
“There are fewer Black homeowners in Harlem than in central Brooklyn, where you have these huge swaths of brownstones, some now owned for two or three generations,” Flateau said. “We’re starting to lose some of that homeownership, but many middle-class, young Black professionals are still in these neighborhoods, and some are even moving back.”
When organized and motivated, this translates to political power. Last year, Brooklyn had eight Black representatives in the Assembly, four state senators and two representatives in Congress, making it one of the largest concentrations of African American elected officials in the country.
“I always knew Brooklyn had the potential (to be the center of Black political power in the city), just based on the population, once people have the desire to offer themselves for public service,” Una Clarke said. “Public service is always desirable for those who are giving and who want to help other people.”
“It’s one thing to have the numbers, but you also have to have the brainpower and strategic voter mobilization,” Flateau said. “Just because you can count heads and have the numbers doesn’t mean that politicians know what to do. The people will choose their leaders in that zeitgeist and their agenda for the promise land.”
“It’s no surprise that our borough is home to so many dynamic Black politicians and will continue to be so,” Bichotte Hermelyn said. “Brooklyn is a gorgeous mosaic of diversity filled with Democrats of all ideologies, from nearly every background, ethnicity, religion and race. Despite their differences, they are all leaders who reflect, understand and are devoted to uplifting and uniting all Brooklynites.”
How long Brooklyn’s Black politicians can wield the crown is anyone’s guess. While political power may have hopped the A train from Harlem to Brooklyn, crowns tend to fit any head with the organization, money and numbers to grab it. And as Bichotte Hermelyn said, some very smart and ambitious people of all races are Brooklyn Democrats.
But those seen as out-of-step with the party can feel its wrath. Bichotte Hermelyn has already clashed with younger Democrats who see her as part of the old party machine.
Adams may have foretold the future as he exhorted the party crowd to continue to work together. “Everyone knows that working with Democrats is like herding cats,” he said. “It is going to take time.” ■ Clem Richardson is a former columnist at the Daily News.
