Bowman, Latimer court votes and tout support in Mount Vernon in last-day campaign stops

MOUNT VERNON — Westchester County Executive George Latimer stood with a line of Black ministers in a second-story meeting room on Monday to present one final piece of his hard-fought campaign for Congress: the announcement of their full-throated support for him.

"George is our guy," said Bishop Troy DeCohen, senior pastor of Mount Vernon Heights Congregational Church. "And this is not a Black-and-white issue for us. This is an issue about who's right, and who's better for the job and the position."

A few hours later and just three blocks away, the incumbent made his own Mount Vernon stop one day before the election. Rep. Jamaal Bowman stood with two fellow "squad" members — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York City and Ayanna Pressley of Boston — at Hartley Park to speak to the media and a group of his supporters before the House trio was set to knock on voters' doors in the neighborhood.

"This race is going to come down to buildings like these," Ocasio-Cortez said, gesturing to the apartment buildings surrounding the park. "This race is going to coming down to people behind each and every one of those windows believing that they matter, believing that their votes matter, that their decisions matter."

Related: What to know about primary elections in 2024 in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam

A last stand in Mount Vernon

After six months of campaigning, four TV debates and wall-to-wall ads, the second-term House member and the longtime elected official looking to unseat him each chose as one of their last spots before Tuesday's primary a working-class, majority-Black city of 71,000 at the southern edge of Westchester, bordering the Bronx.

Both Democrats clearly coveted its voters. For Bowman, the first Black congressman to represent New York's 16th Congressional District, the stop was a chance to stoke turnout in one of the communities of color he invokes as the focus of his work in Washington. For Latimer, who grew up in Mount Vernon and was endorsed by its Democratic Party leaders, it was an opportunity to show the relationships and support he has built during his long political career in Westchester, regardless of color.

Nine days of early voting in the race ended on Sunday, leaving the main event on Tuesday and the remaining mail-in votes. More than 28,000 votes already had been cast by Monday morning in the Westchester portion of the district — the southern half, from White Plains to New York City. How many had been cast in the district's sliver of the north Bronx was unclear; the Bronx-wide early-voting total was 6,445, excluding mailed ballots.

‘A man of integrity’

Latimer's Mount Vernon stop was held at the headquarters of the Mount Vernon Democratic Party, whose members unanimously endorsed him in March. Joining him there were eight clergy members from the 16th District who had endorsed Latimer, some of whom extolled him for interactions that began when he was a state lawmaker before becoming county executive in 2018.

Some went back even further with him. Suffragan Bishop Judith O'Savio, executive pastor of Mt. Olivet Apostolic Faith Church in Mount Vernon, went to high school with him more than 50 years ago — and even worked on the school newspaper with him, she said after the press conference.

Even as a Mount Vernon teen, O'Savio said, Latimer showed a sense of civic-mindedness that she saw later in life through his attentiveness to her congregation as an elected official.

"He is a man of integrity," she said. "I believe that he will do what he says he wants to do for the cities of our communities. And I know that he's concerned about women issues, youth, the gun violence and things that are so prevalent and pressing us down in every one of communities."

Latimer, in his own remarks, rejected what he said was a skewed perception about his competition with Bowman: that race — or "demographics," as he put it — was "the only thing you need to assess."

"What you really need to assess is record, what people have actually done in office," he said.

‘A human rights approach’

At the rival campaign gathering that took place nearby later, Bowman sounded buoyant, despite trailing by 17 points in an Emerson College poll this month. He said his campaign had been relentlessly contacting voters to mobilize them for months, not just the final days of the campaign, and had spoken with 22,000 of them.

"And the vast majority of them are with Team Bowman," he said. "Because they believe in not just a human rights approach to foreign policy, where every life is precious and every life is sacred, but they believe in a human rights approach to how we govern right here in this district and across our country."

Pressley spoke passionately in support of Bowman, whom she described as "this unapologetic Black man, this truth teller, this disrupter of the status quo."

"He is pro-peace, pro-humanity and pro-justice," she told cheering supporters. "And exactly who we need in this moment."

Chris McKenna covers government and politics for The Journal News and USA Today Network. Reach him at cmckenna@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Bowman, Latimer tout support in Mount Vernon in final push to primary