24 minute read
10TH DISTRICT
TALK OF THE TOWN
By Sara Dorn
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Experts give their early leans in this year’s hottest primary: the 10th Congressional District.
JUST DAYS AFTER New York’s congressional districts were finalized, the 10th District race in Manhattan and Brooklyn has emerged as one of the most interesting in the state.
Drawn by an independent redistricting expert, the district is no longer a gerrymandered mess stretching from the Upper West Side down to lower Manhattan through a thin stretch of Red Hook back up to the New York City Transit Museum and then down through Prospect Park into Borough Park.
The district is basically all of lower Manhattan below 14th Street and a big swath of Brooklyn from Dumbo down through Red Hook and Park Slope and into Sunset Park and Borough Park. The new district is very liberal, voting 77% for President Joe Biden, and it is 49% white, 22% Asian, 19% Hispanic and 6% Black.
Following the release of special master Jonathan Cervas’ draft maps on May 16, current Rep. Jerry Nadler announced he planned to run for the 12th District instead, creating an open seat. A flurry of candidates with name recognition have since jumped in to compete for the Democratic primary, including former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou and Rep. Mondaire Jones, who currently represents the 17th District in Rockland and Westchester counties. New York City Council Member Carlina Rivera, state Sen. Simcha Felder, former New York City Council Member David Yassky, former New York City public advocate candidate Dawn Smalls, former New York City Comptroller Elizabeth Holtzman, former impeachment lawyer Dan Goldman, Elizabeth Kim and Assembly Member Jo Anne Simon, have also reportedly expressed interest.
TAYLOR HILL/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES; BRUCE GLIKAS/GETTY IMAGES EUGENE GOLOGURSKY/GETTY IMAGES FOR EAST HAMPTON; LEAH HERMAN/HOUSE CREATIVE SERVICES; ADRIAN LETECHIPIA
Clockwise from top left, candidates Bill de Blasio, Elizabeth Holtzman, Mondaire Jones, Yuh-Line Niou and Carlina Rivera
City & State reached out to a range of experts to ask for their early thoughts on the city’s hottest race. Their responses have been edited for length and clarity.
GEORGE ARZT, president and CEO of George Arzt Communications
De Blasio’s strength is his name recognition. His weakness is that he’s got name recognition. People had de Blasio fatigue after eight years. I think that’s going to impact him. Mondaire Jones, a lot of people like him, but he’s coming way south from his old district. However, this is a brand-new district. YuhLine is a progressive, like Mondaire and like de Blasio, so they’ll split some of that vote ideologically.
Crime is the No. 1 issue. Homelessness is an issue, so is the need for affordable housing. Part of the district is a transportation desert, and there’s a need for more buses and trains.
De Blasio has had eight years of trying to do something and all he can point to really is universal pre-K, so on the critical issues of crime, homelessness, and housing – he’ll say he made progress, but progress is in the eyes of the beholder, and people in that part of Brooklyn and parts of lower Manhattan will not see that.
CHRISTINA GREER, associate professor of political science at Fordham University and cohost of “FAQ NYC” podcast
Anytime someone’s a sitting elected, they’ve got a bit of an advantage, largely because they have this built-in base. So Mondaire and Yuh-Line are already in the game, because their fundraising and organizational campaign efforts are still fresh.
The last time Bill de Blasio ran in New York City was 2017. We’re not going to talk about all the other runs that he had. Even though he ran citywide and was successful in a very crowded race, we still have to recognize that the city has changed quite substantially since he last mobilized a real campaign. Bill de Blasio still has a fundraising apparatus. Obviously the real estate world still believes in Bill de Blasio.
I still don’t know who his base is and who would be interested in having Bill de Blasio as a member of Congress, but then again, we know that the big donor class oftentimes has other reasons as to why they are interested in someone being elected. So I wouldn’t discount someone who’s been the 109th mayor of New York City for two terms. I would not turn my back on him. He’s also a white male, and I know that a lot of folks are saying, “We’re not necessarily in the moment where we’re interested in this kind of cis white male leadership.” However, we do know that still has a cachet and is still pretty powerful when it comes to fundraising and the polls.
Mondaire has been progressive – a pragmatic progressive. The way the district is redrawn and cut up, even though it doesn’t necessarily have a very large African American population, it has a population that is interested in what he’s selling.
Yuh-Line, she too has progressive bona fides. She has shown that she can lose a race and then come back and fundraise to win a race. She’s got her New York squad equivalent that can do a lot of heavy lifting and groundwork for her.
Those are the three that I’m paying attention to, but I’m still keeping my eye on Carlina and Dawn, especially as women of color.
Carlina Rivera is a sitting elected, so she has a base. And also, we keep having conversations in New York about the lack of Latinx representation on local, state and federal levels. So that could be of interest to quite a few people who want to see more Latina representation.
There’s also Dawn Smalls, who’s run before and wasn’t successful, but if you look at the numbers, she knows how to raise money. She’s also a Black woman, and when you look at where she was able to get money from, I think that makes her someone who’s of interest in this race.
TONY MELONE, New Kings Democrats communications director
We’re not going to say anything in support of any candidate at this point in this race.
In terms of what happened in the redistricting process, there are a cascade of failures that got us to this point. First of all, it was the Cuomo administration’s flawed redistricting plan. And then our own state party’s failure to support and pass ballot measures last November that would have fixed some of the problems with the law. And then, the conservative Cuomo appointees on the Court of Appeals threw out the maps the Legislature drew. So we’re left with a situation that is very confusing for voters.
And the way the party is behaving on all levels – it’s not what we’re looking for from our party. We’re looking for a party that is transparent and accountable, and that is more interested in serving the voters than in protecting incumbents. It looks like there’s a lot of incumbent protection going on. I don’t want to criticize any particular candidate, but it feels like, in many cases, incumbents are more interested in making sure they win reelection than making sure the principles voters are concerned about are being carried out. Sean Patrick Maloney, the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, wanting to run in a safer district
– former Brooklyn Democratic Party boss Frank Seddio
caused another candidate to run for a district far from where he’s represented.
HUNTER RABINOWITZ, Brooklyn Young Democrats president
This is going to be a really exciting race. The way that Manhattan and Brooklyn are split this time around are really important and really interesting. A large majority is in the 52nd Assembly District, which is the highest turnout voting district in all of New York state, and that is a really significant fact about the way this race is going to shape up.
Obviously you have Bill de Blasio who appears to be the only official Brooklyn candidate to announce and you have Yuh-Line Niou, who is the only official Manhattan candidate to announce. So I think what you’re really going to see is a play out between Brooklyn and Manhattan candidates.
When push comes to shove, Mondaire Jones obviously has a lot of money in his bank, and it’s going to help him, but I think what you’re seeing here is a matter of disconnect between party politics and actual, on-the-ground politics here. What I mean by that is, obviously a lot of this has come from Sean Patrick Maloney announcing he is going to continue to run in what is now Mondaire Jones’ district. Given his status in the larger Democratic Party, it’s clear that this is a shift that was done, whether officially or unofficially, by larger party politics. As much as I understand that plan, I do think that Mondaire Jones has been quite a great legislator. He definitely has a lot of money, but he’s also not even from New York City.
There are still more players to come out here, but I do think that you’re going to see how strong party politics is compared to community politics in this race.
FRANK SEDDIO, former Brooklyn Democratic Party chair
Anyone can run. I hear Mickey Mouse is coming up from Orlando to run in District 10. To be honest with you, I’m giving some consideration to running myself.
Mondaire Jones, the interloper, have the balls to run where your home is. I think what happened is, he decided, because “I’m God’s gift to Congress, I should be able to run any place I want.” We have enough candidates in Brooklyn. We have the whole world in Brooklyn. We don’t need him. Stay where you are. Even the guys at the Alamo knew they were going to lose, but they stayed.
Democrats eat their own. That’s what we’re doing here. The only good thing here is it will be a Democrat, whichever one survives this whole mess.
ERIC SOUFER, Tusk Strategies Crypto + FinTech practice group leader
It’s pretty much a toss-up right now. I’m not someone who’s going to totally discount Bill de Blasio. I don’t think he’s as popular as he wants people to think he is with the voters
New York City Council Member Carlina Rivera is a lifelong resident of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which is now part of the 10th Congressional District.
that he’s been representing since he was in the City Council. I think a lot of those voters are some of the people who are most sick of him, according to polls. At the same time, you can’t beat someone with no one, and it’s not that there’s nobody running against him, but there are people who haven’t spent much time in the Brooklyn part of the district at all.
Mondaire Jones has a great personal story, and he’s got a record to pull from as an incumbent member of Congress, albeit from a different district. But he’s likely to be seen as what the facts tell you, which is that he is a suburban member of Congress going into a very civically engaged, city-proud district that he will now have to move into in order to represent long-term. I think Mondaire could build a positive profile very fast, he’s just got to get to doing it. And he’s going to have to become highly adept in the New York City media market, which is something that’s really hard to learn really fast. He’s fortunate he’s going against Bill de Blasio, who was probably the most disliked person in the New York City political press.
A fair share of Yuh-Line’s Assembly district is in District 10. So that gives her an immediate base of support. The challenge there is, can she really go beyond her base? And has she alienated parts of her base over time because she represents a district that can be rather conservative on some major issues like crime? Yuh-Line has staked out much more progressive positions on those hot-button issues, like bail reform and crime reduction. I think she could be a fit for hardcore progressives and brownstone Brooklyn. But as we saw with the mayor’s race, a lot of these same voters didn’t choose the most quote-unquote, progressive or leftist candidate. They chose Kathryn Garcia. There was definitely Maya Wiley support as well, so that is reason for optimism for Yuh-Line.
JOE VITERITTI, professor of public policy at Hunter College, and author of “The Pragmatist: Bill de Blasio’s Quest to Save the Soul of New York”
With no incumbent, theoretically, the race is wide open. However, with no incumbent, it really turns on name recognition. And de Blasio delivers that. He’s not really just a Brooklyn candidate. He was mayor. People in Manhattan voted for him. I think Bill de Blasio kind of has a natural advantage here as a more progressive type who could appeal to lower Manhattan in that whole corridor of brownstone Brooklyn. ■
COMMENTARY
WHY IS THE LATINO POLITICAL MOVEMENT IN NEW YORK SO WEAK?
Disjointed leadership and politicians with ‘Bill de Blasio syndrome’ have left a void for Latinos in the highest levels of state government.
By Felipe De La Hoz
AS BLACK New Yorkers have crossed milestone after milestone in political representation, longtime allies in the Latino community – who had often worked to help build the Black political movement – rejoiced alongside them.
For the first time since David Dinkins’ single term ended in 1993 after a defeat at the hands of Rudy Giuliani’s campaign of barely concealed racial resentments, New York City has a Black mayor in Eric Adams. Already in office were state Attorney General Letitia James, state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie. Adrienne Adams would follow the mayor to become the speaker of the City Council, and then came former Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin, whose brief stint in office ended with his resignation in April on federal charges for wire fraud and bribery. His replacement, former Rep. Antonio Delgado, who was sworn in as the new lieutenant governor last week, identifies as Afro Latino.
There has been cause for celebration, and yet, Latino advocates and politicians across the state have celebrated with some unease. Some observers pointed to the lack of Latinas among Eric Adams’ deputy mayor appointments, breaking an unofficial tradition upheld by several of his predecessors. The council speakership had seemed like it might go to a Latino member, but Adrienne Adams was elected to the position. And there remains the fact that a Latino has never been elected to citywide or statewide office. No matter the steady population gains over the past few de-
Mayor Eric Adams hired several high-ranking Latino officials like Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez
cades – with a population that has now eclipsed the Black population statewide – Hispanic political power seemed stunted.
Even with Gov. Kathy Hochul’s selection of Delgado to succeed Benjamin, activists were quick to question whether he actually had Latino heritage. Things had clearly gone wrong at some point, but where? And what can be done about it?
A PROPPED UP, JOINT IDENTITY SHOWS ITS CRACKS
There are a number of lessons that the political communications and media apparatuses seem to have to learn periodically, and one of the simplest is that Latinos are not a monolith – and never have been. Not only from the obvious standpoint of national origin, but not culturally and certainly not ideologically, with communities having migrated at different times and for different reasons. Finding themselves generally disregarded and excluded in the same ways by a power structure that certainly didn’t bother to make those distinctions, a sense of convenience and mutual benefit led them to prop up a joint identity. It’s not that there aren’t clear commonalities – there are, among them an immigration experience often in search of economic opportunity and a number of cultural throughlines – but the rifts go almost unacknowledged.
Bringing up the brittle nature of a unified Latino identity is a touchy subject within the community itself, which fears that any crack in the façade will just further kneecap its political and civic power, yet it’s also true that a refusal to acknowledge the underlying fractures keeps them fixed in place rather than give civic and political leaders a chance to address them.
“No one likes to talk about (the brittle nature of Latino identity) because people want to romanticize about ‘Latinos,’ but I don’t think that you can do that really when people’s identities are really primarily through nationality as opposed to some pan-Latin identity, although that’s certainly reality as well,” said Laird Bergad, founder of the CUNY Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies and director of its Latino Data Project. “I have a lot of people saying ‘this guy’s a gringo with an attitude, what does he know, blah blah blah.’ Well, I just read the numbers,” which to him indicate that Dominicans, the largest Latino demographic in the city, will be mainly energized to vote in favor of other Dominicans, and Mexicans for Mexicans, and so on.
YOUNG, DISILLUSIONED LATINOS CONTRIBUTE TO LOW LATINO VOTER REGISTRATION AND TURNOUT
This dynamic still only partially explains one of the primary obstacles to Latino political power, which is relatively low voter registration and turnout. According to data provided by Bergad, Latinos in New York state had significantly lower rates of both registration and voting than non-Hispanic white and Black voters, continuing a historical trend. Bergad attributed some of this to Latinos’ relative youth, with the community skewing younger nationally, and younger voters having lower turnout across the board. It might also be a manifestation of what Assembly Member Catalina Cruz, a Colombian immigrant who represents Corona, Elmhurst and Jackson Heights, termed as a kind of immigrant community disillusionment. “Many of these people end up immigrating to another country, and you have this sense of ‘screw politics. Back home, it didn’t work for me, why would I engage in it here?’ Add to that the sentiment that many immigrants have of, ‘I’m going back home anyways.’”
One wild card is the incoming arrival of noncitizen municipal voting in New York. The policy, passed late last year, would in theory allow some 900,000 noncitizens with work authorization – mostly legal permanent residents but also some work visa holders and students – to vote in elections for mayor, comptroller, public advocate and City Council. Many of them would be Dominican immigrants, who make up a large percentage of the city’s
permanent resident population and could, if properly energized, become a very significant political bloc. That’s far from guaranteed, though. If parties have failed to activate citizen voters of a particular demographic, there’s no reason to think there’ll be a difference with noncitizen ones. As George Leventhal, the Maryland legislator who led a campaign to pass one of the nation’s first noncitizen voting bills in Takoma Park in 1991, memorably told me: “I would love to romanticize it and say it led to some utopia of inclusivity, but no.”
SOME CAREERISTS LATINO LEADERS SUFFER FROM ‘BILL DE BLASIO SYNDROME’
So where does that leave us? Many a consultant might be licking their chops at the prospect of providing convoluted advice to cash-rich state and local Democratic establishments floundering and desperate to animate Latino voters ahead of what are already expected to be tough midterms, but some proven Hispanic electoral victors contend that the formula isn’t as complicated as some might want to make it. “Republicans, they show up to the opening up of a refrigerator door,” Cruz said. “I follow some of my Republican colleagues on social media and you see them show up to everything. A 90-yearold lady in their senior center had a birthday? They showed up. The renaming of a street? They showed up. There was a blood drive? They showed up.”
Cruz criticized what she viewed as a careerist approach by some Latinos who do make it to electoral office coasting in part on their community ties only to concern themselves mainly with their own ascent. “They’re much more interested in having their own name in the headline, creating a splash, but not in creating real change,” she said. “It’s what I would call the ‘Bill de Blasio syndrome.’ The amazing headline with zero follow-through.” Not that she viewed the somewhat stunted New York Latino political movement as a purely self-inflicted phenomenon. “Jay Jacobs, and you can quote me on this, has not prioritized the Latino vote in the way that he should be. It is embarrassing. And I think that he has been given plenty of opportunities to prioritize the Latino vote, and we haven’t felt it,” she said, in reference to the longtime state Democratic Party chair.
In particular, she highlighted a tendency to see the community as essentially single-issue voters on immigration, with officials forgetting that Latino voters are immensely concerned with housing affordability, community policing, garbage pickup and all the other issues that make up long-term quality of life. While ignoring the fissures between different groups of Latino voters allows them to persist, acknowledging them and coalition-building could create a true bloc that would wield outsized power. The alternative is to keep ceding ground: “If you want to continue to lose more Latino votes to the Republicans, you can keep doing exactly what you’re doing,” Cruz said.
The state Democratic Party didn’t respond directly to these criticisms of Jacobs, but instead a spokesperson pointed to a newly announced plan known as the Nueva York Initiative, a project helmed by former Democratic National Committee Finance Chair Henry R. Muñoz III, which will be dedicated to Latino coalition-building, registration and mobilization via a “ multi-year, six-figure investment.” The initiative is billed as “the largest ever investment in Latino voter outreach in New York State history.”
GOP’S ‘BOOTS ON THE GROUND’ APPROACH TO VOTER ENGAGEMENT AND THE ALLURE OF DONALD TRUMP
The Republicans are certainly listening, and see an opportunity for inroads as Democrats chase their tails. “I think that there are individuals that are really taking public service and making it about the public, and to do that, you need to have boots on the ground, you need to be in the community, and you need to understand the needs and realize that our communities are changing,” said Anthony D’Esposito, a former New York City Police Department detective and Republican member of the Hempstead Town Council, who’s now running for Congress. The son of a Puerto Rican mother, D’Esposito was enthusiastic both about the state GOP’s embrace of changing demographics (an enthusiasm not quite shared by the party’s contemporaries in other states), such as the recent election of Ethiopian Israeli Nassau County Legislator Mazi Melesa Pilip, and what he viewed as the community’s focus on bread-and-butter issues.
“Island Park is not the Island Park that it was 50 years ago, and that’s not bad, it’s good. But we need to recognize that. So I think we have the ability to recognize that and understand that many of the Latino voters have the same concerns, the same interests and they want exactly the same things for their family,” he said. Latinos around New York do and have historically voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, but it’s a mistake to think this is some inviolable rule of politics. As the political discourse writ large becomes more and more about adherence to ideological social tenets and contesting cultural grievances, Democrats often seem to either forget or willfully disregard the fact that large swaths of Latino voters are at least culturally Catholic and often socially conservative.
Much ado was made about the uptick in vote share for Donald Trump in 2020 versus
Latinos lost out on the New York City Council speakership to Adrienne Adams, above, but now have Afro-Latino Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado, right, in office
2016 among Latino-heavy precincts in New York City. He still lost, but Republicans won huge in Long Island in 2021, where the Latino population has been skyrocketing, partly on the strength of an intense focus on the supposed failures of state Democratic lawmakers’ 2019 bail reform. “Let’s be honest, that entire race was about public safety, whether it’s the actual act of public safety, or the way people felt about public safety,” D’Esposito said. Republicans have figured out a winning strategy of seizing on emotional issues not necessarily related to the community’s own identity to drive turnout.
GOING OUTSIDE THE POLITICAL BOX TO BUILDING A LATINO POLITICAL PIPELINE
Still, it’s difficult to imagine the New York GOP making such significant gains that they will be electing statewide leaders or retaking legislative chambers anytime soon, which leaves the Democrats as the best hope for Latino political representation. On that front, Cruz’s diagnosis – an indifferent and unresponsive political power structure paired with Latino elected officials failing to assert their community’s needs out of timidity, self-interest or apathy – was echoed by former New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, one of the city’s most successful Latina elected officials.
“(Party officials) come around to our communities during election time. They don’t build a consistent relationship with the community,” she said. “At the same time, we do have Latino electeds that need to utilize the platform to not allow some actions to go unchallenged or unchecked.” In her estimation, these actions included the failure to include Hispanic speakers in February’s state Democratic nominating convention and the fact that former City Council Member Laurie Cumbo, who claimed that the noncitizen voting proposal would dilute Black voting power before voting against it, was appointed as Mayor Eric Adams’ commissioner for cultural affairs.
In response to Mark-Viverito’s criticism, Adams said in a statement, “Laurie Cumbo brings a breadth of experience in the arts, community advocacy, and city government to her role as commissioner.”
On the broader point of Latino representation and the lack of a Hispanic deputy mayor, City Hall spokesperson Fabien Levy wrote that the mayor “committed to building a team that looks like New York City, and that’s exactly what he’s doing,” pointing to Latino appointments to lead various municipal departments and offices, including Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez, Department of Correction Commissioner Louis Molina, Consumer and Workforce Protection Commissioner Vilda Vera Mayuga and Sheriff Anthony Miranda. “(Mayor Adams) looks forward to ensuring all New Yorkers are represented in the administration as he continues to build out his team, and will have more to announce in the days and weeks ahead.”
Among the ways to build a political pipeline is to understand that it doesn’t have to be wholly contained within politics and in fact is tied to a cyclical failure to include Latinos in the types of institutions that can cross-pollinate with and build power outside of standard electoral politics: prominent nonprofits, consultancies, academia and the arts. “Public, private, academic and cultural sectors feel that it is OK to run institutions without recognizing that Latinos make 27% of the New York City population, and that it should be reflected in their leaderships,” said an official within the Adams administration who was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly.
Mark-Viverito has now been on two sides of this equation, as a popular elected official herself and as a strategist for Latino political participation during her post-speakership stint as president of Latino Victory, a national organization dedicated to increasing Latino political representation and civic participation. Yet, when asked what exactly has gone wrong, her tone is one of sharp exasperation. “I don’t know what it is. I’m hoping that we can overcome it. I think at some point, it has to be some sort of a convening, where we come together and have this conversation,” she said. In the meantime, the political representative future of a disjointed community of millions seems rather adrift. ■
– former New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito
Felipe De La Hoz is a lecturer at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and an investigative journalist focusing on immigration.
