Class, age and one big bite of challah: How redistricting broke New York politics

NEW YORK — If politics is theater, then Tuesday’s congressional primary elections in New York City are ready for Broadway. In recent weeks, two House races encompassing Manhattan and broad swaths of Brooklyn have become colorful symbols of political mayhem, featuring accusations of elitism, ageism, antisemitism, opportunism, hypocrisy and dishonesty.

This summertime play’s central crisis emerged from the state’s chaotic redistricting process, which completely redrew the district maps in late spring while pushing the primary into dog-days-of-summer territory.

The new maps paid little (if any) attention to incumbent politicians’ timeworn expectations, which were based on familiar district lines that had emerged from Albany decade after decade. Now, suddenly, established lawmakers were pitted against each other, with some opting to seek out new districts to call home.

“I think it looks bad. I think we’ve got egg on our face,” Rep. Kathleen Rice of Long Island told Politico in April. And that was before things got really ugly in this city that, during Donald Trump’s presidency, regarded itself as a counterweight to Washington’s descent into bitter tribalism. The fact that Trump surprisingly endorsed candidates in both of the city’s Democratic primaries — despite still being a Republican — only added to the uneasy feeling that something has gone deeply amiss.

It has been a late-summer vacation full of discord and confusion, one that many Democrats would already like to forget.

Thoughtful redistricting is supposed to be the answer to gerrymandering, the process of drawing congressional districts by a political party to concentrate its own power while disenfranchising the opposition. Partisan gerrymandering is a time-honored political tradition, if not exactly a reputable one; in recent years, it has been honed through complex computer models into a Machiavellian science.

Using the results of the 2010 decennial census, a GOP motivated by anti-Obama sentiment used its clout in state legislatures to ruthlessly, and effectively, redraw congressional districts across the country. Two years later, Republicans were able to hold on to their House majority despite attracting fewer votes nationwide than Democrats. That was in part because Democratic votes had been shunted into already-Democratic districts, while Republican votes had been shifted strategically to render swing districts red.

Democrats gerrymander, too, though they’ve had fewer recent opportunities to do so. They also tend to be more sympathetic to the pleas of good-government groups to implement nonpartisan redistricting.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who resigned last year in the face of sexual misconduct allegations, threw his support behind a bipartisan redistricting plan in 2014. Cuomo vowed to “end self-interested partisan gerrymandering.” But Republicans and Democrats on the independent commission deadlocked, and the poorly designed effort collapsed. It was a “train wreck of Democrats’ own creation,” Brennan Center expert Michael Li told the New Republic.

Democrats in the state Legislature seized the opportunity to create gerrymandered maps that strongly favored their party. Critics (and even many supporters) say they overreached.

Republicans went to the courts. A state judge, Patrick McAllister, himself a Republican, ruled the map invalid. "The enacted congressional map shows virtually zero competitive districts," McAllister wrote. He charged Jonathan Cervas, a Carnegie Mellon professor, with drawing the fair maps that Democrats had failed to produce.

For one thing, Cervas scotched a plan to oust New York City’s lone Republican representative in Washington, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, by appending a deep blue swath of Brooklyn to her mostly red Staten Island district. The bid launched by former Rep. Max Rose, a moderate Democrat, to regain the seat now suddenly looked like a much longer challenge.

Even more consequentially, Cervas created two districts — the 10th and the 12th — that pitted Brooklyn against Manhattan, Upper East Side against Upper West Side, youth against experience, unapologetic progressivism against incremental pragmatism. These tensions have always been present in New York. But they have grown especially vivid in the last several weeks, which have seen the candidates engage in plenty of sharpening but little clarifying.

“All the candidates hate Trump, Trumpism and the Republican political agenda,” says CUNY Graduate Center political scientist John Mollenkopf. The same is true of national Democrats. What they stand for, other than opposition to Republicans, is more difficult to say, especially in this city where all politics is local and national at the same time.

Walking through a Lower East Side “family day” party — bounce houses, burgers, music echoing throughout the concrete courtyard — at an affordable-housing development called Campos Plaza, City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera mused on how ignored its Black and Latino voters often were by the elected officials who routinely sought their votes and invoked their supposed causes.

Rivera wants, naturally enough, to focus on cities, where climate change, income inequality and gun violence are creating untenable realities, especially for poor people. Cities have also been Democratic redoubts, but concerns about crime and pandemic policies could challenge Democrats' grip on urban centers and vote-rich inner-ring suburbs, like the ones in northern Virginia that helped unlikely Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin win that state’s governorship last year.

“I want to set the urban agenda,” Rivera said. Campos Plaza is removed by a gulf of institutional neglect from the neighborhood’s celebrated restaurants and cocktail bars. Public transit is sorely lacking here, she noted, a sign of broader disinvestment in communities short on political clout.

“I know these neighborhoods. I've seen them change over time,” Rivera told Yahoo News, in what seemed like a jab at several of her fellow NY-10 candidates. Rep. Mondaire Jones currently represents the Hudson Valley suburbs, where he lost a game of redistricting musical chairs with the new map and dropped a bid to potentially challenge Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney. But if that decision earned him praise from national Democrats (and an endorsement from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi), it irritated local officials like Rivera who saw Jones as intruding on their turf.

Also competing in NY-10 is Yuh-Line Niou, a state legislator who represents Asian-American voters’ rising political clout in a district that includes huge populations of East Asian immigrants. She has the endorsement of Bowen Yang, the “Saturday Night Live” comedian. But her outspoken progressivism has also caused controversy: She countered charges of anti-Israel bias by posting a picture of herself eating challah. (The district also contains Borough Park, an epicenter of the city’s Orthodox Jewish community.)

Polls say the frontrunner is Daniel Goldman, a Yale-educated scion of the Levi Strauss jeans fortune who has spent millions of his own money on the campaign. A former federal prosecutor, Goldman was an attorney on the first Trump impeachment, a role that elevated his national profile. It was Goldman who was one of Trump’s two primary endorsements.

“While it was my honor to beat him, and beat him badly, Dan Goldman has a wonderful future ahead,” Trump said sarcastically.

Goldman also earned the more valuable endorsement of the New York Times, only to face accusations that family connections may have influenced the paper’s decision to back him (his campaign told Yahoo News the accusations have no merit).

As he has broken out of the field, Goldman has faced the criticism that comes with being a frontrunner. Some people who worked on the Trump impeachment say Goldman overstates his role, with one attorney comparing him to Ron Burgundy, the fictional newscaster played by Will Ferrell in the comedy "Anchorman." He described Goldman as arrogant but ill prepared, eager for media attention above all else.

Others say that such views of Goldman are unfair, and that he does not deserve blame for an impeachment process rife with intellectual rivalry and political ambition. “I’m a Dan fan,” says Norm Eisen, another top attorney who worked on impeachment. “I think he’s terrific.”

“You can have ice cream,” Suraj Patel told prospective voters on Broadway as early voting concluded and primary day neared. This was not a policy proposal but, rather, a statement of material reality. In his third bid for Congress, Patel has deployed an ice cream truck, which was then parked at 86th Street and Broadway and was on its way down to 77th.

The ice cream is free; a conversation about Patel’s plans for NY-12 with either the candidate himself or one of his enthusiastic campaign staffers is practically inevitable.

“Change the vibes,” his campaign literature says, showing a crisply dressed Patel emerging from a field of wildflowers, a sun rising behind his signature bouffant. Plastered to the empty storefronts that now dot nearly every block of Broadway, his stickers and placards remind voters that on nearly every level of government, New Yorkers are unsatisfied with how their elected leaders have responded to the pandemic and the dormant challenges it revived.

If the question in NY-10 is of belonging, of who gets to speak for New Yorkers, then the question of NY-12 is just how long someone gets to occupy the bully pulpit. The class tensions evident between candidates like Rivera and Goldman are less evident here. In the new NY-12, home to some of the most prestigious urban neighborhoods in the nation, the central topics are longevity and age.

The district was created by forging the Upper East Side and Upper West Side portions of Reps. Jerry Nadler’s and Carolyn Maloney’s districts. Nadler, an influential Democrat with considerable Washington influence, declined the opportunity to chase his former district, which had been reimagined by Cervas, deeper into lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Instead, he opted to stay put and challenge Maloney, who saw her district shed its Brooklyn and Queens sections with the new map. Nadler and Maloney are decades-old political institutions of uptown politics, and while they aren’t exactly friends, their newfound rivalry is shocking to New York political hands. Patel is less surprising: He ran against Maloney twice, in 2020 and 2018, and lost each time. Nadler’s arrival seemed to help Patel’s case, though, accentuating the difference between Patel, a 38-year-old Stanford graduate, with the 75-year-old Nadler and 76-year-old Maloney.

“The challenges we face today are very different than the challenges we faced in 1982,” says Patel about both his rivals.

The race is playing out at a time when some are decrying Democrats’ reliance on older white leaders — President Biden (79), Pelosi (82) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (71) — while its future seems to be with a younger, more diverse coalition. Nadler and Maloney don’t generate much excitement. But they also know how Capitol Hill works.

Nadler, like Goldman, was instrumental in Trump's first impeachment; Maloney played an important role in creating a compensation fund for first responders sickened from working in the ruins of the World Trade Center after it was brought down by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001.

Redistricting has been nobody’s idea of fun, but it has been especially tough on Maloney. She has seemed exasperated through the campaign, irritated at having to not only fend off Patel for a third time but also unexpectedly contend with a formidable Nadler.

There were only 32 women in the House when Maloney arrived on Capitol Hill in 1993. She has been a steadfast supporter of feminist priorities like the Equal Rights Amendment; feminist icon Gloria Steinem is probably her most prominent supporter.

But she is running in a city that has progressed in some ways and devolved in others, making her long political career a liability.

She has faced criticism for comments suggesting that autism is caused by childhood vaccination. The comments are from years ago, but they have taken on a new significance in a world of coronavirus and monkeypox.

Seemingly aware of the age issue, Nadler and Maloney fumbled an easy question during their first debate about whether Biden should seek a second term. Patel answered forthrightly (“Yes”) and Nadler punted, while Maloney confidently offered that Biden would not run again. A firestorm over her comments ensued, and she went on CNN to apologize, only to end up repeating the claim that got her in trouble to begin with.

Mystifyingly, she did it once again, bringing up the contentious prediction in an interview with the New York Times.

“Off the record, he’s not running again,” Maloney said of Biden. (He has said he is running, for what that’s worth.)

“Not off the record,” a member of the newspaper’s editorial board explained. “On the record.”

“On the record? No, he should not run again,” Maloney maintained.

The election was supposed to have been in June, but redistricting takes time, so the primary was pushed back to late August. The date has proved particularly vexing to wealthier voters across both districts. “I’m not coming in to vote. That’s the problem: Nobody here is going to come in just to vote,” an Upper East Sider complained to the New York Times from the Hamptons.

Maloney and Nadler are both counting on mailed-in absentee votes, provided the ballots actually make it back to the city.

The Times, which is particularly influential in this district, ended up endorsing Nadler. Trump, a former Upper East Side resident, gave a sarcastic endorsement to Maloney, his former congresswoman, who “has always said terrific things about me, and will support me no matter what I do.” Meanwhile, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an Upper East Sider, gave Patel a boost. “At least you got one vote,” Bloomberg told a Patel staffer. Trailing both Maloney and frontrunner Nadler, Patel will need several more votes than just Bloomberg’s.

Given the dearth of registered Republicans in the city, the primary winners in both NY-10 and NY-12 are almost certain to prevail in November, thus earning a trip to Washington. Come the commencement of the 118th Congress on Jan. 3, 2023, Republicans are expected to assume control of the House, relegating Democrats in the chamber to protest votes on many major issues.

“They’re not likely to make much of an impact,” political strategist Neal Kwatra, who worked on former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s short-lived NY-10 campaign, told Yahoo News.

That hardly matters to the candidates, for whom the lure of representing New York City in Washington is understandably irresistible, even if doing so will probably involve sitting through hearings about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

“I know there’s some stray monsters in Congress,” Rivera told Yahoo News. She did not say who the monsters were. But she wants to go and fight them.

Cover thumbnail photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Seth Wenig/AP, Kena Betancur/Getty Images, NY State Legislature