More Democratic primary candidates for State Legislature in Red Hook

On October 5th, Prospect Heights resident Jabari Brisport launched a campaign for State Senate in District 25, which stretches from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Sunset Park and includes Red Hook. A math teacher at Medgar Evers College Preparatory School, Brisport ran for City Council on the Green Party line in 2017, earning 29 percent of the vote, but will now vie for the Democratic Party’s nomination. Brisport’s anticapitalist platform advocates for the expropriation of energy utilities, public investments in housing, and the decriminalization of sex work.

Five days after Brisport’s entry, rumors that incumbent State Senator Velmanette Montgomery would retire in 2020 gained credence when her former aide, Jason Salmon, announced his candidacy in the Democratic primary, as Salmon has indicated that he would not challenge Montgomery for the seat. By his account, Salmon will fight for police reform and an end to mass incarceration. 

Jason Salmon

Meanwhile, Red Hook’s State Assemblyman, Félix Ortiz, will face at least three challengers in District 51. Marcela Mitaynes, who works for the affordable housing nonprofit Neighbors Helping Neighbors, began her campaign in September, and last month, tenant organizer Genesis Aquino and Community Board 7 member Katherine Walsh also joined the race. 

Genesis Aquino

According to the Brooklyn Eagle, Aquino hopes to strengthen protections for workers and immigrants and provide additional funding for NYCHA. Walsh’s platform focuses on environmental issues and facilitating cooperative home ownership for low-income New Yorkers through a reactivation of the Mitchell-Lama Program. 

Mitaynes and Brisport belong to a slate of four Brooklyn candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), alongside Boris Santos in Assembly District 54 and Phara Souffrant Forrest in Assembly District 57. Last year, the DSA sent Julia Salazar of District 18 to the State Senate, where her long-shot Good Cause Eviction bill earned the support of tenant activists before falling short in the Assembly. All four DSA candidates consider the bill a major priority. 

The 2020 primary for the New York State Legislature will take place on June 23. 

Share:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Comments are closed.

READ OUR FULL PRINT EDITION

Our Sister Publication

a word from our sponsors!

Latest Media Guide!

Where to find the Star-Revue

Instagram

How many have visited our site?

wordpress hit counter

Social Media

Most Popular

On Key

Related Posts

An ode to the bar at the edge of the world, review by Oscar Fock

It smells like harbor, I thought as I walked out to the end of the pier to which the barge now known as the Waterfront Museum was docked. Unmistakable were they, even for someone like me — maybe particularly for someone like me, who’s always lived far enough from the ocean to never get used to its sensory impressions, but

Quinn on Books: In Search of Lost Time

Review of “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance,” by Kevin Brown Review by Michael Quinn “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” – Countée Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel” Come Thanksgiving, thoughts naturally turn to family and the communities that shape us. Kevin Brown’s “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance” is a collection

MUSIC: Wiggly Air, by Kurt Gottschalk

Mothers of reinvention. “It’s never too late to be what you might have been,” according to writer George Eliot, who spoke from experience. Born in the UK in 1819, Mary Ann Evans found her audience using the masculine pen name in order to avoid the scrutiny of the patriarchal literati. Reinvention, of style if not self, is in the air

Film: “Union” documents SI union organizers vs. Amazon, by Dante A. Ciampaglia

Our tech-dominated society is generous with its glimpses of dystopia. But there’s something especially chilling about the captive audience meetings in the documentary Union, which screened at the New York Film Festival and is currently playing at IFC Center. Chronicling the fight of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), led by Chris Smalls, to organize the Amazon fulfillment warehouse in Staten