Voters in Queens, New York City’s second-largest borough, went to the polls Tuesday, and public defender Tiffany Cabán appears to have pulled off an upset victory in the Democratic primary for district attorney. Cabán leads Queens Borough President Melinda Katz, the establishment favorite, 39.6-38.3, a margin of 1,090 votes.
City officials say there are still 3,400 absentee ballots to be counted, and they may not be done tabulating until July 3. However, the math is quite daunting for Katz. If the absentee ballots broke for Katz by a massive 60-30 margin, with the remaining 10% going to the other five candidates, she would still trail by 70 votes. Cabán declared victory Tuesday evening, but Katz has not conceded. Whoever takes the Democratic nomination should have very little to worry about in the November general election in this very blue borough.
Cabán and Katz were competing to succeed longtime District Attorney Richard Brown, who announced he would retire in January and died in office last month. The New York Times wrote in January that Brown’s office still used “a number of hard-nosed policies aimed at compelling people to plead guilty,” and nearly all of the seven Democratic candidates pledged to adopt a considerably more progressive approach. Katz had the most money and a number of prominent endorsements, including from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the city’s four major unions, and the once-powerful Queens Democratic Party.
However, it was Cabán, who described herself as “a proud queer Latina” and said she was running “because I am frustrated and infuriated by the system within which we operate,” who attracted the most national attention. Cabán works as an attorney for the New York County Defender Services, and ran on a platform of prosecuting Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “who exceed their authority” to detain undocumented immigrants residing in Queens.
Cabán, who at 31 is over a decade younger than any of her six rivals, stood out with her call to decriminalize sex work. She also pledged not to prosecute marijuana cases and turnstile-jumping and declared, “As D.A., my position would be to end cash bail.”
Cabán had the support of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents part of Queens, as well as that of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, who has made a name for himself nationally for pursuing criminal justice reform. In the final week of the race, she also picked up endorsements from The New York Times and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
Cabán’s likely win is another blow to the once-dominant Queens Democratic Party. The local Democratic machine took a serious one last year when Rep. Joe Crowley, the party’s chairman, lost renomination to Ocasio-Cortez in a shocker. Crowley was succeeded as chair by another local congressman, Gregory Meeks, but the party still took its lumps on Tuesday, including in another race that it’s not at all used to losing.
In addition to the district attorney race, the local Democratic Party’s chosen candidate also failed to win the first contested primary for a seat on the Queens Civil Court in decades. For a generation, the party would name its candidate whenever a spot opened up on the 11-member court, and that person would win the primary without any opposition whatsoever. That changed this year, though, when Lumarie Maldonado-Cruz decided to run against Wyatt Gibbons, a fellow attorney who had the local machine’s endorsement. Maldonado-Cruz, who said that this was the first contested primary for this office in almost 40 years, ended up winning with 62% of the vote.
Turnout was low on Tuesday, with the district attorney race attracting only about 85,000 voters in a borough with a population of 2.3 million. In past cycles, this would have been good news for the local Democratic establishment, which thrived in low-turnout races where it alone could turn out its voters. However, as City & State’s Ben Adler noted, both Cabán and Ocasio-Cortez showed that low turnout “can be weaponized in insurgents’ favor.”
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