It has been a week and a half since the NY primary, in which Gov. Andrew Cuomo scored a landslide win against Cynthia Nixon, winning basically everywhere and every ethnic group. Cuomo’s biggest margin was in my home of the Bronx, which is the most Democratic county in the entire United States and is only 9% non-Hispanic white, where he won 80% of the vote.
Gotham Gazette published this opinion piece that I completely agree with.
www.gothamgazette.com/…
Some excerpts:
New Yorkers like their progressivism, but they like it tempered with fiscal reality, with experience, and the desire and ability to find common ground between Findley Lake and Pelham Bay.
The argument that Cuomo’s support for progressive issues suddenly sprang out of nowhere only after Nixon announced her run is belied by the facts. Marriage equality in 2011, the gun restrictive SAFE Act in 2013, banning fracking in 2014, $15 minimum wage and paid family leave in 2016 — progressive touchstones brought home by Cuomo, all years before a Nixon candidacy was a gleam in the eye of the Working Families Party.
Turnout in the primary was sky-high, shocking political pros from both ends of the party. Nixon, the “pure” progressive, scored a paltry share of that enhanced turnout. According to the Democratic left orthodoxy, those new voters we saw waxing enthusiastically in Brooklyn coffeehouses should have been enough to hand her a nomination. They weren’t, it wasn’t -- and it won’t ever be. Not in a state this diverse in political and cultural make-up.
Cuomo, carrying a results-oriented progressive standard cabined by fiscal restraint, reached Democrats across the board.
New Yorkers made a conscious choice to embrace Cuomo’s realpolitik progressivism and reject Nixon’s ‘progressivism only for progressives.’ Most importantly, you can’t win in New York, or for that matter in the nation, by utterly failing to win over black voters -- Nixon likely got less than one in ten African-American votes, a shameful showing.
Cuomo should win the general election by a landslide whether Nixon stays on the ballot or not. (It actually will not be easy to get her off the WFP line.)
And there was even bigger cheering for the destruction of the Independent Democratic Caucus in the Senate. Six of the eight were defeated, including its leader Jeff Klein (NY-SD-34) who is my Senator until his successor, primary victor Alessandra Biaggi, is sworn in in January. Biaggi won by appealing to centrists and progressives and people who were tired of Klein’s arrogance and support for Republicans. Biaggi worked for Cuomo and Clinton yet she had a huge group of progressive supporters who worked tirelessly for her. She ended the campaign election night at my synagogue which is a big polling place (hence the postponing of the election to Thursday, as Tuesday had been Rosh HaShanah) before heading to the election night party; one of her biggest volunteer coordinators is also a member of my synagogue. Biaggi won despite Klein raising, and probably spending over three million dollars for a state Senate race!
And shortly after the election we saw two examples of why we need Biaggi and not Klein in office. A popular street fair in my Riverdale neighborhood had been scheduled for three days after the election, September 16. It was cancelled the day after the election, and while people are officially refusing to say why, the entire Bronx is full of rumors that Klein pulled the funding as a sore loser action after losing the neighborhood badly to Biaggi. Even if the rumors are false, the fact that everyone in the Bronx believes them shows what people really think of Klein.
:(
And then Biaggi did something that she absolutely did not have to do that showed that she cares about people in the district. On that same Sunday, September 16, a dual US/Israeli citizen, Ari Fuld, was murdered in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Efrat, near Jerusalem, by a Palestinian. The parents of the 17 year old murderer had actually contacted both the PA and Israeli security to warn that their son was up to no good, but they couldn’t act quickly enough. It turns out that Ari Fuld grew up in my neighborhood in the Bronx and everyone who was in this neighborhood in the 70s and 80s knew him; his father was the principal of one of the local Jewish schools. On Yom Kippur the rabbi who had hired his father as principal was so upset that he could barely make it through the memorial prayers. Alessandra Biaggi, who is not Jewish, posted a nice message to her Facebook page acknowledging the death. That is the kind of little thing that means a lot to constituents, that leads to long tenure in office. I wish Alessandra Biaggi a long tenure of fighting for good!
The next goal is to flip New York Senate and US House of Representatives seats in NY!