Seth Wenig/AP Photo
Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou meets with supporters and volunteers before canvassing a neighborhood in the Brooklyn borough of New York, August 14, 2022.
New York, thanks to its congressional redistricting debacle and late election date, has featured some of the most muddled and acrimonious Democratic primary races anywhere in the country. On Tuesday, finally, the state’s voters will provide much-needed clarity.
Among the returns most closely and wincingly watched will be New York’s Tenth District, a deep-blue carve-out that includes Lower Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn, a majority-minority district that is now New York City’s most diverse. An extremely crowded field, which includes ex-prosecutor and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune Dan Goldman, state assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, sitting congressman Mondaire Jones, city councilwoman Carlina Rivera, former congresswoman Liz Holtzman, and assemblywoman Jo Anne Simon, will be decided with the likely winner netting far from a majority of votes.
The race has featured a notable lack of consolidation, with not a single of the mentioned candidates willing to drop out and endorse an ideological ally. A press conference on Friday was expected to feature Holtzman dropping out and endorsing Rivera, but ended up just being a mutual lovefest with vague statements about the need to elect a woman.
The result of that quagmire is that Goldman, the most conservative option of the front-runners, is now the expected victor. He has leaned on his $250 million personal fortune ($4 million of which has been spent on his race so far) and powerful, dubiously invoked connections to put himself in the pole position. Goldman, who opposes court reform, student debt cancellation, and Medicare for All, and even sports a wobbly record on abortion, would be a disaster for progressives in a district Joe Biden carried by over 50 points.
But if Goldman is able to buy his way into a first-place finish, progressives need not take that result lying down. A Goldman triumph would only secure him the Democratic nomination; it wouldn’t necessarily secure him a seat in Congress. Yuh-Line Niou, one of (if not the) leading progressive in the race, has already qualified for the general election on the Working Families Party ballot line.
New York has a fusion voting system where multiple parties get ballot lines. They can endorse a common candidate, as the Working Families Party and the Democratic Party often do, but they can also run their own candidates instead. The WFP endorsed Niou in June, and if she fails to win the crowded primary tomorrow, the party could easily put her on the ballot again in November, if she and the party want to pursue it.
A spokesperson for the New York Working Families Party declined to comment on their willingness to pursue this option. But the Working Families Party owns its own ballot line—something that organizers fought hard to protect from then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s campaign to rescind it via ballot measure in 2020—for exactly these sorts of situations. It’s hard to envision a clearer case for its application. You have a super-wealthy scion, far to the right of his district, with a substantial investment in News Corp (parent company of Fox News). He is poised to secure the Democratic nomination, likely with less than 30 percent of the vote, in an all-time low-turnout election, while a relatively sizable progressive base and various unions scatter their votes across numerous progressive candidates.
The Working Families Party owns its own ballot line for exactly these sorts of situations.
In that sense, the Democratic primary could be used simply to accomplish what the candidates have been unwilling to do themselves, clearing and consolidating the field. Given that Republicans are a total nonentity in the district, the real race come November would be between two Democrats, one moderate and one progressive, a two-person contest that much more accurately reflects the makeup of the district. It’s a matchup that, given the political climate of New York City, would be eminently winnable for the WFP. It would also be a sorely needed victory for the city’s left flank, which has lately suffered from a countersurge from machine-friendly moderates, with a mayor and city council speaker hostile to progressive priorities of all types.
Beyond the opportunity to flex some activist muscle, forcing a de facto runoff between Niou and Goldman come November would represent a much more successful exercise of the democratic process than what we’ve seen to this point. November will see much higher turnout for the election than late August, when many New York City dwellers skip town to beat the heat. Goldman would have much more difficulty buying the race with one challenger than with five, while the difference between Goldman and Niou on policy would be much more consequential. Goldman hasn’t gone it alone financially—he’s also raised big money from Wall Street and the real estate lobby—but it would be a lot more difficult to overwhelm the field from a spending perspective in a two-person race, if the WFP and like-minded unions and donors step up.
A number of progressive candidates still think they have a shot to eke out a first-place finish. But if Carlina Rivera, backed by New York City local electeds, and Mondaire Jones, who features the most national Democratic support, fail to beat Goldman, it would make plenty of sense for them to line up behind Niou on the WFP line. At that point, she would be the only candidate with a path to victory. To make matters simpler, Niou has polled the highest of any of them, if only by a handful of percentage points. Obviously we’ll get a better reading on this on Tuesday.
The stakes are high enough for the progressive groups backing these candidates to force this sort of post-August realignment. And if the WFP does put up Niou on their third-party line in November, it would be the highest-profile instance of this since 2003, when Letitia James, now New York’s attorney general, ran against Democratic nominee Geoffrey Davis in Brooklyn’s 35th City Council District, and won.
There are understandable reasons why this course of action by the WFP has been used sparingly. But if that option isn’t pursued in this case, it would be hard to see why the party fought so hard to keep its ballot line in the first place.
And speaking of Cuomo, it’s worth noting that none of these New York election debacles, brought on by a catastrophic redistricting process, would be taking place if it were not for Cuomo’s appointment of a number of conservative judges, including Janet DiFiore, who cast a critical vote in the New York Court of Appeals’ 4-3 decision that threw out the original redistricted maps in favor of a more “neutral” rewrite. The subsequent version cost national Democrats a competitive advantage and set off a mad dash in the New York congressional delegation, which resulted in more incumbent-on-incumbent Democratic primaries than in any other state.
In congressional races across the country, more-conservative candidates have defeated progressives out in open primaries, riding a cascade of big money from conservative super PACs and very rich, self-funded individuals. In most cases, those outspent progressives have had little recourse to fight back. But in New York’s Tenth, there are options. The question is whether progressives will circle the wagons and choose to pursue them, or quietly admit defeat.
