How do you win an election without leaving the house? Local politicians – their sights set on Albany – hope to figure out the answer.
With seven major Democratic candidates vying for New York State Legislature seats in Senate District 25 and Assembly District 51, which overlap in Red Hook and Sunset Park, this spring would – under normal circumstances – mark a busy campaign season on Brooklyn’s waterfront. But just over three months before the June 23 primary, the coronavirus put an end to in-person canvasses and speeches, changing the nature of what was, before the shutdown, a highly active pair of races.
Three potential senators
Due to State Senator Velmanette Montgomery’s upcoming retirement, Tremaine Wright (who currently represents Bedford-Stuyvesant in the Assembly), Jason Salmon (who previously worked as a community liaison in Montgomery’s office), and Jabari Brisport (a public school teacher and previous City Council candidate) are competing for an open seat in District 25. Wright announced her candidacy at Montgomery’s well-attended retirement party in January, showcasing her broad support within the Democratic Party establishment, as she drew warm remarks from state legislators like Jo Anne Simon, Diana Richardson, Kevin Parker, and Montgomery herself.
Wright quickly garnered endorsements from the Vanguard Independent Democratic Association and the Independent Neighborhood Democrats – plus U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries (among other politicos) and District Council 37, New York City’s union for public employees. But her opponents, running to Wright’s left, made inroads with other significant political clubs. Salmon won the support of the Lambda Independent Democrats, the Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats, the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, Equality New York, Citizen Action of New York, the Stonewall Democratic Club of NYC, and the Jewish Vote, as well as that of Red Hook councilman Carlos Menchaca and the United Automobile Workers (UAW Region 9A).
Brisport also has a considerable collection of endorsements: the Working Families Party, New York Communities for Change, Indivisible Nation BK, Our Progressive Future, the LGBTQ Victory Fund, the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, the New York Progressive Action Network, Voters for Animal Rights, State Senator Julia Salazar, and former gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon. Most importantly, he is the candidate of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which, since his campaign launched in October, has marshaled its large corps of volunteers on Brisport’s behalf.
According to Brisport’s communications director, before the coronavirus outbreak, more than 300 of his supporters had knocked on a total of 24,000 doors in Senate District 25, which has a population of 351,552. The volunteers have since turned to phone banking to get the word out.
As the leading organization for radical activism, especially among young people, in New York City, the DSA also has a reputation – fair or not – as a haven for transplants and gentrifiers. Brisport and Salmon share a number of progressive priorities, such as as tenant rights and decarceration, but while Brisport has, on his website, assembled a detailed policy platform with a number of ambitious demands (such as expanding New York City’s sanctuary protections statewide, implementing single-payer healthcare, and canceling rent for the duration of the COVID-19 crisis), Salmon has framed his candidacy in less starkly ideological terms, positioning himself as a voice not so much of the broad anticapitalist left as of Clinton Hill-Fort Greene in particular, where he grew up in a diverse family that, by his account, came to the area 70 years ago.
Salmon’s first digital ad – a video called “My Community” – broadcasts his longstanding relationships with his neighbors and his commitment to “bringing them to the table” in Albany, where he aims to fight gentrification and police violence. “I am Brooklyn through and through,” he underlines.
Among his several endorsements, he has particularly publicized that of Reverend Anthony L. Trufant, the senior pastor at Emmanuel Baptist Church on Lafayette Avenue. “First and foremost, having a campaign that represents the entire community is what we need,” Salmon said.
Brisport, for his part, is a third-generation Prospect Heights resident. His communications director emphasized that the “race isn’t just about left vs. center – it’s about a movement of working-class people fighting to be heard in a political system that was built to protect the establishment and their mega-donors.”
Wright, according to her official biography, “still lives on the same block where her grandparents raised their family” in Bed-Stuy. Eschewing an “Issues” or “Platform” tab, Wright’s website makes no policy pledges, highlighting instead her prior achievements in Albany (including the CROWN Act, which she authored to prohibit discrimination based on “natural hairstyles” such as as Afros, braids, and cornrows) and operating as an informational hub for her constituents in Assembly District 56.
Salmon’s campaign began training phone bank volunteers on April 11. On April 17, he hosted a digital “Speak-Out” on Zoom with the certified-platinum rapper Maino to address the problem of coronavirus infections in New York’s overcrowded prisons.
Brisport has taken part in similar events: on March 22, a “virtual fireside chat” with Marcela Mitaynes, the DSA’s candidate in Assembly District 51, and on April 5, a livestream with Julia Salazar of Senate District 18 about the inadequacies of the new state budget. Wright has sponsored a weekly online series of breathing meditations, led by a yoga teacher in her district.
With 11,600 Twitter followers, Brisport is roughly ten times more popular on the social media platform than his closest competitor. (Then again, Velmanette Montgomery never signed up for Twitter at all.) Financial disclosures provided to the Board of Elections (BOE) showed Salmon leading the fundraising race with $87,730.34 as of the first reporting deadline in January. The next deadline is in May.
The coronavirus may not affect all campaigns equally. While Wright, with a list of 21 elected officials who have endorsed her (including State Senator Zellnor Myrie and City Councilmembers Robert Cornegy and Alicka Ampry-Samuel), appears to have inherited the reliable institutional power that sent Montgomery to the State Senate 18 consecutive times, a candidate like Brisport, in all likelihood, will have to locate and mobilize voters outside established networks of loyal Democrats. In 2018, energetic DSA volunteers did the necessary legwork to secure Salazar’s victory in Bushwick over an entrenched establishmentarian, but in 2020, they’re stuck at home. All three candidates, in their own ways, will soon discover how effective phone calls can really be.
The incumbent and the challengers
In Assembly District 51, Felix Ortiz has held office since 1995, rising in the ranks of the Assembly to the position of Assistant Speaker. Three women from Sunset Park, all of them political newcomers, hope to use grassroots organizing and small-dollar donations to unseat him, following a scandal last year that saw Ortiz’s former chief of staff plead guilty to stealing campaign funds. (Another candidate, Wally Alvarado, has filed paperwork with the BOE to appear on the ballot but has not mounted a visible campaign.)
Katherine Walsh, an urban planner, wants to raise taxes on the wealthy, reduce air pollution, and increase home ownership among New Yorkers of modest means. Genesis Aquino, a tenant organizer, has said she’ll fight for immigrants and NYCHA residents. Marcela Mitaynes is a housing activist whose platform also prioritizes climate justice and police reform.
Like Brisport, Mitaynes has had loyal DSAers on her side as canvassers since last fall. She’s racked up many of the same endorsements, including that of the Working Families Party, as well as those of TenantsPAC, the Jewish Vote, the Peruvian American Coalition of New York, and the activist Linda Sarsour. Aquino, meanwhile, has won the support of the New Kings Democrats, the Lambda Independent Democrats of Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Young Democrats, and the Union of Arab Women. Walsh is the preferred candidate of the Sunset Park Latino Democrats, the Stonewall Democratic Club of NYC, and Take Back 20 for Real Dems.
Walsh – for whom the coronavirus interrupted a busy schedule of meet-and-greets and public happy hours – had amassed more financial contributions than any of her competitors as of the January disclosure deadline, raising $58,448. She pointed out that Ortiz’s campaign had not received a single contribution from a district resident by that time. Even so, Ortiz has more resources on his side, owing to his campaign committee’s opening balance of $158,174, a holdover from earlier fundraising.
Some progressives in District 51 worry that the three insurgent candidates may split the vote among residents of Red Hook and Sunset Park who believe that Ortiz – despite some noteworthy accomplishments – doesn’t have enough to show for his quarter-century in Albany. Ortiz, who has chaired the Assembly’s Mental Health, Alcohol and Substance Abuse, Cities, and Veterans Affairs committees, has spent much of his career authoring bills that, in the eyes of critics, might fall under the category of “nanny state” legislation – cracking down on unsafe cell phone usage, reckless driving, and pernicious dietary trends.
The coronavirus pandemic, however, has given Ortiz an opportunity to call for bolder measures. Since March, he has advocated publicly or the passage of the New York Health Act (a single-payer proposal that Ortiz co-sponsored), rebuked Governor Cuomo’s cuts to Medicaid and rollbacks on bail reform, and introduced legislation to suspend payments on student loans, mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, and utility bills for 90 days.
Conspicuously, the bill leaves out rent payments. Ortiz’s opponents have lambasted him for continuing to accept donations from the real estate industry.
Hoping to increase voter turnout in June, Walsh and Mitaynes – along with Salmon and Brisport – signed on to a letter in late March to pressure Governor Cuomo to mail absentee ballots with prepaid postage to all registered voters in anticipation of unsafe polling stations in June. On April 8, Cuomo moved to make absentee voting accessible to all voters – not just those who would be out of town on election day – but, under the new rules, voters would still have to print an application form (or request one from the BOE), fill it out, and return it by mail or email in order to receive an absentee ballot.
Criticism persisted, and on April 26, the governor announced an executive order that would send absentee ballot applications with prepaid postage – but not the ballots themselves – directly to all registered voters, a compromise measure (endorsed by Ortiz in a public statement) that by the Cuomo administration’s account reflected the limits of gubernatorial power to change electoral procedure. It followed several other recent executive orders aimed at the BOE, whereby Cuomo canceled all but one of the spring’s special elections and reduced ballot petition requirements for state office, allowing any candidate who had collected 30 percent of the necessary signatures prior to the coronavirus shutdown to appear on the primary ballot.
Walsh suspended real-world campaigning on March 12 and, on Facebook, started to recruit phone bankers two days later. Alongside Julio Peña III, a candidate for District Leader (an executive position within the Brooklyn Democratic Party, held, in the case of Assembly District 51, by Ortiz), she began to broadcast a virtual “town hall” every Thursday, and the tradition continued through April. On April 23, she introduced her text banking platform, TextOut, in her email newsletter.
Much of her energy, however, has gone into the South Brooklyn Mutual Aid Network, a pandemic relief effort that she initiated to help affected neighbors get groceries. Having raised $10,000, it has expanded to offer a range of services in several parts of Brooklyn and, according to Walsh, has assisted 550 households, with more than 300 volunteers and 20 managers fielding 30 to 40 requests per day.
Mitaynes, unfortunately, came down with a case of COVID-19 herself. “She is doing much better and will be back in action very soon!” her campaign manager, Alex Pellitteri, affirmed on April 9.
Mitaynes’s phone bank volunteers hoped to pick up the slack. “In addition to talking about our campaign, we are calling people in the district, checking up on them and making sure they’re okay,” Pellitteri said. Like Aquino, Walsh, and Ortiz, Mitaynes continued to maintain an active Twitter presence. On April 29, Mitaynes hosted a Rent Strike Town Hall on Zoom with Andrea Shapiro from the Met Council on Housing.
Ortiz, whose campaign has the support of the SEIU 32BJ service employees union and District Council 37, last faced a primary challenger in 2014. Walsh, who pointed out that above-average asthma rates in District 51 mean that Sunset Park and Red Hook residents face increased risk from COVID-19, believes that the coronavirus has made the political establishment vulnerable by making clearer its failures.
“In a lot of ways, coronavirus is revealing a lack of state leadership that we’ve had for a long time,” Walsh said. “We’re calling this out.”
Fundraising during an economic lockdown
William Deegan is a partner at North Shore Strategies, a Queens-based consultancy firm that has organized campaigns for Democratic candidates on the local, state, and federal level. In March, he saw clients switch abruptly to “mail, digital, and phone services.”
Consultants help candidates put together these operations. “We work with a couple of different services to set up call centers. It’s been a product that various companies have offered for a few years now, where we can set up a system where your volunteers can log in and dial from the comfort of their own homes to automatically connect with voters around the district,” Deegan explained. “That’s an incredibly easy thing to do in 2020.”
The real trouble, right now, is fundraising, which has slowed dramatically on account of the economic crisis. “We’ve heard it across the board that people are facing fundraising challenges, from Congress down to district leader, but the bigger candidates that have an infrastructure in place are better able to weather this than smaller ones,” Deegan observed, emphasizing the “big difference between a Congressional candidate who’s been fundraising for two years” and “an Assembly candidate who decided three or four months ago to toss their hat in.”
Candidates who rely on small-dollar contributors, instead of wealthy donors, may be in especially hot water. “We have a huge chunk of Americans who don’t have jobs, and the people who could contribute $50 or $100 to their favorite local candidate need to save that because they don’t know when their next paycheck is coming in,” Deegan pointed out.
Fewer campaign contributions also means less money for consultancy firms, which typically hire canvass directors and doorknockers to serve their political clients. “We, as a firm, last year were employing about 150 people during the month of April. Right now, we’ve got, I think, eight on staff,” Deegan acknowledged.
In Deegan’s view, quickness, flexibility, and inventiveness will be the key this spring as candidates scramble to adjust to the new reality. Before Cuomo decided to mail absentee ballot applications to all registered voters automatically, several campaigns, for instance, had already begun to send the forms directly to targeted voters.
“It’s a hard situation for everybody,” Deegan summarized, “and I think that insurgent candidates are definitely going to be hit harder than incumbents. But I think it’s an opportunity for the right insurgent candidates who manage to adapt and manage to change around their campaign plans in time to make a difference.”
