Bowman Goes Down, The Left Reels
Progressive Has A Pretty Bad Primary Night, Not Just In Westchester County
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Nearly two years after he defeated a longtime incumbent in a Democratic primary, Jamaal Bowman has faced the same fate.
Bowman, the controversial two-term incumbent in New York’s 16th Congressional District, which covers about a third of Westchester County and a small part of The Bronx, has had a target on his back from day one. Moderates recruited popular Westchester County Executive George Latimer and groups like the pro-Israel AIPAC funneled millions of dollars into the district.
Bowman, who only won 54 percent in his non-competitive 2022 primary, lost in a rout. With 90 percent of precincts in the district reporting, Latimer is up by about 18 points over Bowman, 59 percent to 41 percent, a massive defeat for an incumbent.
Bowman did win the Bronx portion of the district, which includes Co-op City, a cooperative housing development home to 45,000 people, nearly two-thirds of whom are African-American. However, he lost the Westchester portion, about 90 percent of the district, by 28 points.
Bowman lost across the board in Westchester, with Latimer winning in every town and city in the district except for Bowman’s base in Yonkers, which he narrowly won, and Mount Vernon, which has a large Black population. Yet both those towns saw close to 20-point swings from his 2022 result, and Bowman performed several points worse in both than in his first campaign in 2020.
Where he collapsed were in towns he won in 2022, like New Rochelle and Port Chester, both with large Latino populations, and in Greenburg. This mostly suburban township includes Hastings-on-Hudson, Dobbs Ferry, Elmsford, and Ardsley, relatively wealthy liberal enclaves that Bowman won in 2022 but lost handily this time. While progressives have argued Bowman lost due to redistricting – before 2022, his district included more of the Bronx and less of Westchester –the portions of the Bronx he had in 2020 included Riverdale and Fieldston. These areas are wealthy, predominantly Jewish enclaves currently represented by Rep. Ritchie Torres, whose pro-Zionist views on Israel have angered progressives enough that there have been calls for Bowman to run against him in 2026. Also, the portions of Westchester that were moved into the district in redistricting include White Plains, a diverse area where Bowman did well in 2022, Irvington, a wealthy liberal area he did well in that year as well, and the campus of SUNY Purchase, where he got over 80 percent of the vote in 2022. These areas were before redistricting in the 17th Congressional District, won in 2020 by former Congressman Mondaire Jones, who ran as a progressive and whose recent pro-Israel views and endorsement of Latimer made him a newfound villain to leftists. Jones is running in the new 17th District, which includes the northern two-thirds of Westchester County.
Progressives have been trying to focus on their wins at the state level to cope with Bowman's losses. All of the progressive incumbents won reelection, though only a few were genuinely given a challenge. Leftist groups like DSA spin those wins as evidence that their recent activism, especially around Palestine, hasn’t negatively impacted them. Despite the Left's demeanor since Tuesday, the state legislative primaries against incumbents, not just defense of their seats, were a lynchpin in progressive political strategy in New York. Groups like DSA punted on crucial New York City Council races last year to focus on the state legislature this year. Yet, they got almost wholly blown out except for one race in which the incumbent has been embattled in a sexual misconduct scandal for over a year.
The State Legislatures
Of the three DSA-backed challengers, only one, Claire Valdez, won. She defeated embattled incumbent Juan Ardila, who has been shaken by allegations of sexual misconduct, in the 37th Assembly District in Western Queens. This district includes progressive strongholds like Ridgewood and Long Island City, as well as the neighborhoods of Sunnyside and Maspeth. Two other DSA-backed challengers, Eon Huntley in Brooklyn and Jonathan Soto In the Bronx, were unsuccesful. Soto lost by about 25 points, only doing marginally better than he did when he ran for the same seat in 2022 without the amount of support he had this time.
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Soto’s loss was especially painful, but his entire campaign was quite puzzling. Soto was running in the 82nd Assembly District in the East Bronx, which includes communities like Pelham Bay, Throggs Neck, Country Club, and Westchester Square. The district also included Co-op City, which overlapped with the 16th Congressional District.
For my life, I cannot understand why DSA focused on his race at all. DSA and progressives have had very little luck in the Bronx recently. Even though progressive icon Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez represents the Bronx and lives there, her support base has always been in Northwest Queens, around Astoria and Jackson Heights. Further, the East Bronx has grown more conservative in recent years. Last November, Democrat Marjorie Velazquez, an ally of AOC who represented much of the same part of the borough that the 82nd Assembly District covers, lost her seat to a Republican, the first time since 2002 that a Republican won an election in the Bronx. In 2022, AOC actually lost the section of this Assembly district that overlaps her House district to her Republican opponent, Tina Forte.
There were two leading suggestions for why Soto got DSA support over other progressive candidates. One is that he sought their endorsement, and many other progressives didn’t necessarily feel they needed their backing. Another is that since the war in Gaza has become the most salient issue for progressive groups like DSA, progressives saw the East Bronx, with its significant and growing population of Albanian Muslims and Arab-Americans, as fertile territory for them. If so, that was a massive misreading of the political dynamics in this population. Albanians in the district lean conservative, much like the Italian-Americans who dominated here decades ago. (My mother was from this part of the Bronx, and my mom attended high school here). The Albanian population tends to be pro-law enforcement and anti-socialist, mainly because, like Cubans, Venezuelans, and Vietnamese, they descend from refugees from Communism/Socialism. Albania was part of the Soviet sphere of influence during the Cold War.
Co-op City was a third rationale I’ve found surrounding DSA endorsing Soto’s campaign. Since the voter-rich development spans both the Assembly District and the 16th Congressional District, the assumption was that if DSA and progressives could link the two campaigns, they could get a massive turnout for Bowman and Soto and help them win districtwide. If that was a strategy, it was a colossal failure. Bowman did win Co-op City big, but turnout was much lower than his campaign had hoped. Only about 5,000 people in the development voted, and campaign sources before the race were hoping for nearly double that.
Worse, DSA’s attempt to link the two campaigns face-planted big time in Co-op City. While Bowman did win Co-op City, Soto did not, losing it by over 20 points. Soto lost Co-op City to incumbent Assemblyman Michael Benedetto by 20 points despite Bowman winning by well over 40 points.
The other race where DSA endorsed and lost was in the 56th Assembly District in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Local activist Eon Huntley challenged two-term incumbent Stefani Zinerman. Progressives were highly upbeat about this race. Bed-Stuy is a growing base for them, and DSA-aligned electeds represent the area in the State Senate (Jabari Brisport) and City Council (Chi Ossé).
Zinerman won on Tuesday by about six points, or 500 votes, a reasonably decisive win considering the territory. Observers saw the race as a proxy battle between progressives and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who represents the area in Congress.
The key to Zinerman's success was her performance in the district's public housing projects. She won over 70 percent of the vote in Marcy Houses, Kingsborough Houses, Tompkins Houses, and Sumner Houses and cleared 80 percent in Breevort Houses, the projects with the biggest bloc of voters in the district.
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A similar situation happened in the 68th Assembly District in the Upper West Side and Morningside Heights. Progressives got behind Eli Northup, who had the endorsement of the Working Families Party, and outgoing Assemblyman Danny O’Donnell. Four other candidates, including Micah Lasher, who ran for the State Senate in 2016 and once worked for former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, were also in the race. Lasher won considerably, but the two main housing projects in the District, Frederick Douglass Houses on the Upper West Side and Grant Houses in Manhattanville, went to third-place finisher Carmen Quinones. The Frederick Douglass Residents Association president, Quinones, ran as a pro-law enforcement candidate with the support of 2021 Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa. While Quinones won Frederick Douglass Houses, Northup won the precincts surrounding it; some of the most expensive real estate in the city and home to some of Manhattan’s wealthiest residents. Across from Grant Houses, Northup also won the Morningside Gardens co-op, a complex with some of the most expensive co-ops in the city.
This has been an ongoing problem with progressives going back years. In the 2021 mayoral primary, Eric Adams won nearly every housing project in the city, notably winning projects like Queensbridge, Bushwick Houses, Astoria Houses, and Marcy Houses, which were surrounded on all sides by gentrified communities that went for progressive candidate Maya Wiley.
It’s striking that progressives keep getting blown out in the projects even though these are where the poorest and most working-class voters of color all are, a demographic they claim to represent. Much of this is due to progressive groups ignoring public housing projects because of their reputation as being dangerous places to go. Outreach to those voters would be a top priority if DSA were a serious political organization, not a yuppie social club dominated by young, mostly white, people who are too petrified to set foot in a public housing project. Their strategy of trying to run up the vote outside the projects in these districts is not likely to succeed because the Democratic establishment has long had a robust turnout organization in these projects.
Progressives had only slightly better luck Upstate. Like in Brooklyn, DSA defended its lone Upstate member, Assemblywoman Sarahana Shrestha of Ulster County. She won renomination by a fairly wide margin, but across the river in the 106th District, which includes Hyde Park and Hudson, Assemblywoman Didi Barrett won renomination against Claire Cousins, a Columbia County supervisor who had the support of progressive groups and actress Cynthia Nixon.
The progressive choices in the 107th District and 109th Districts in the Capitol Region emerged as victorious. In the 107th, which includes most of Rensselaer County and Bethlehem outside Albany, Democratic nominee Claire Pierce will have to face off against Republican incumbent Scott Bendett in November, but in the 109th, which includes the city of Albany, progressive Gabriella Romeo, who defeated five other candidates including establishment favorite Ginnie Farrell, will likely cruise to victory in November.
Outside New York State, the only other place where there were several Democratic primaries was Colorado. There, progressives had a disaster of a night. Two DSA-aligned Colorado House of Representatives members, Tim Hernandez and Elizabeth Epps, both of Denver, were defeated by more moderate candidates.
Despite Colorado shifting pretty far to the left in recent elections, progressives have been on the defense in Denver since an embarrassing spectacle last year where progressive groups, including Denver’s chapter of DSA opposed the redevelopment of a defunct golf course into affordable housing. Progressives opposed the plan, which was later voted down in a low turnout referendum, because the local councilwoman, a DSA member later defeated, wanted the golf course to be turned solely into a park. DSA and other progressive groups explained their opposition through statements of nonsensical gobbledygook about how they wanted new housing development not to be "free market” but “democratic,” while also arguing they didn’t want public housing built there either. Nothing about it made sense. Since then, Denver’s housing situation is worse and homelessness also grew worse. Now progressives are taking it on the chin there.
The Cope
Predictably, progressives haven’t been handling Bowman’s loss well. Some have called for him to run on the Working Families Party line in November and split the vote to help the Republican candidate win, though Bowman rejected that. Others have threatened to stay home in November and allow Republicans to win. Assemblywoman Phara Souffant Forrest of Brooklyn, a DSA member, suggested Bowman’s loss would make it hard to get young people out to vote, even though Bowman himself appears to have failed to do that in his race.
Some accept the loss as a sign that progressives’ political relevance may have peaked. Matt Karp all but said so in a Jacobin article this week, acknowledging that affluent suburbanites, like the ones in the 16th Congressional District and some of the state legislative districts targeted by progressives, are never going to embrace their vision of socialism.
Karp also acknowledged it is unlikely the working-class whites, who are fans of Donald Trump, will come around either – an argument that the modern American Left’s defacto leader, Bernie Sanders, made as recently as January. Karp explained:
Any real challenge to corporate Democrats or the pro-Israel lobby will have to come from somewhere else. Scarsdale is what we thought it was — a tiny, eccentric sliver of an enormous, diverse, and largely working-class country.
The bad news is that the American left has not managed to make many inroads into that giant country, either. Perhaps the brand of politics that gave us the Squad in the first place — nine members in a Congress of four hundred and thirty-five — has run its course.
Karp is almost certainly correct, for reasons I’ll probably get into in another article. The modern-day Left is cooked for now; the question is how they respond.
Having been obsessed with the rise and fall of Fascism as a political science student in college, it struck me how so often – in Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Philippines, and Latin America – Communists and socialists often punted on directly fighting ascendant fascism because they believed fascism would be a short-lived painful experience that would bring the general public to their side. I think we’re seeing it again.
Leftists do not see Trump’s fascism as a threat, but rather as an opportunity. It is an opportunity to “heighten the contradictions” and force liberals to bend their knees to them – which is what they think happened in the 2017-2020 timeframe – and an opportunity to punish the society that rejected their worldview. Bowman’s defeat sparked that need for vengeance.
There’s another clear explanation for why DSA candidates don’t do well in NYCHA projects: It’s because they are completely out of touch with how public housing residents feel and what public housing residents actually want. You ask people living there what they’re worried about, what they want their local lawmakers to act on, and it’s public safety. They’re sick of feeling like prisoners in their own homes because of gangs, drugs, and violence. They want police there, going after the people who make life hell for the majority of residents who just want to raise their families and live their lives in peace. “Defund the police?” OK, and then what happens to the people in the projects when the gangs know they can act with impunity? DSA can’t admit to themselves that, hey, Black people don’t all see the cops as roving fascist death squads out to kill them. They come in with luxury beliefs and then can’t understand why someone people can’t afford them.
Oh, and I think “Scarsdale” is a dog-whistle. It means Jews who have worked hard and risen up the professional ranks to the upper-middle-class. Jacobin can take the mask off now; we’ve already seen it slip enough times.
Really not so many people want to buy what GND pro Hamas so called progressives are selling. Because it’s garbage.