Get To Know City Hall's 'Crazy Aunt Vickie'

Despite The MAGA Pol's Radical Politics, Progressives Can Learn From Her Rise

I expect New York City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino (R-Whitestone) will become a local household name over the next four years.

The second-term councilwoman from Northeast Queens, known for her bombastic personality and far-right views, has become something of a local social media sensation. If Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani (D-Astoria), the democratic socialist who won the Democratic primary for mayor last month, wins in November, Paladino, who has called for Mamdani to be arrested, denaturalized, and deported, is uniquely positioned to become his foil in a city where the media ecosystem loves conflict, hates socialists, and pines for the days of Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg.

A staunch Trump supporter, Paladino first came on the scene in the Summer of 2017 when, as a private citizen, she approached and berated former Mayor Bill de Blasio on a Queens street for going on an official trip to Germany immediately after the assassination of Police Officer Miosotis Familia in the Bronx. Calling the trip disrespectful and blaming de Blasio, who won in 2013 running against policing policies like Stop & Frisk, for anti-cop sentiment that led to Familia’s murder, Paladino caught the attention of local CBS reporter Marcia Kramer, a longtime de Blasio critic. Kramer interviewed Paladino, giving her a platform. The latter caught the eye of the flailing Queens Republican Party, which had been rife with intraparty conflict for years.

Paladino ran for the New York State Senate in 2018 against Democrat John Liu, who had defeated incumbent Tony Avella, whom Paladino later defeated to win her Council seat, in the primary that year. She lost in a Democratic year, but gained the favor of local Republicans who were desperate to rebuild their Northeast Queens base.¹

Paladino is a personification of “old New York,” referring to the culturally conservative, working-class, second- or third-generation New Yorker of European descent, whose last gasp of power in city politics occurred during the Giuliani and Bloomberg eras. Described to me by a constituent and supporter as “your crazy aunt,” Paladino dons a poofy silver hairdo and a loud, brash New YAWKer accent like something out of Mob Wives. She has been unapologetic in her views and won support for a spirit of defiance against the dominant liberal ethos in New York.

In 2020, she and other Queens Republicans danced the conga at a maskless holiday party during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite an indoor dining ban. She refused to get vaccinated for COVID, a move that prevented her from entering City Hall for Council meetings after her election. Paladino has made controversial comments about drag queens and LGBTQ people, calling drag queens “child groomers.” She called pro-Palestinian protestors on college campuses “monsters” who should be “slayed.” She suggested that people use lasers to disable speed cameras. After StreetsBlog reporter David Meyer did a video report about police illegally parking private cars on sidewalks, Paladino suggested that Meyer should be “punched in the face.” This week, she attacked Claudia Morales, an activist whose partner, Ryan Carson, was murdered in front of her on a Bedford-Stuyvesant street in October 2023. In response to a photo Morales took of her with Mamdani in Bushwick earlier this month, Paladino falsely accused Morales of being uncooperative with police in the investigation into Carson’s murder due to her left-wing views on policing and incarceration, and because Carson’s killer is black. Morales cooperated with police, and her testimony helped land Carson’s murderer in prison for a 20-year-to-life sentence. Morales is threatening to sue Paladino for defamation and has called for her expulsion from the Council.

However, despite her radical views, Paladino has developed close friendships with many Democrats on the Council and her own constituents, even ones who once were staunch Democrats.

Her predecessor in the 19th Council District, which is based in the Queens neighborhoods of Whitestone and Bayside, was a mild-mannered Democrat: Paul Vallone. The son of former City Council Speaker and 2018 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Peter Vallone, the younger Vallone won a tough primary race in 2013 that he likely would not have won if ranked-choice voting had been in place at the time. He was often dismissed as a “nepo-baby” by Northeast Queens voters². Later in his term, he was criticized for lackluster constituent services and a lack of attention toward “quality of life” issues. One constituent, a Democrat who supported Vallone and did not support Paladino, admitted that the latter immediately brought attention to a section of his neighborhood where litter had been a problem after she took office in 2022. He said Vallone’s office had ignored it for several years.

That attention to quality of life issues, which progressives often dismiss as unimportant, is what won Paladino her initial election and has kept her in power. Northeast Queens is a largely suburban area of older homeowners and families where voters have very different priorities compared to those in more urban and younger Brooklyn and Manhattan. In 2022, Paladino drew attention to a squatter living in a home in her district, going so far as to visit the house and publicly confront the squatter on video. This month, Paladino promised to help residents in her district apply for gun permits and arm themselves after a handful of home invasions. While progressives dismissed concerns about crime, noting the area she represents has some of the lowest crime rates in the city, Paladino helped secure a satellite police precinct, acknowledging constituent concerns that response times are slow because police responding to calls in her district are often slowed by traffic and density near the 109th Precinct’s location in Downtown Flushing.

Paladino confronting a squatter in her district in 2022

Paladino’s success is a textbook example of how important “showing up” is in politics. Her district voted for Trump, but has never truly been a Republican district. It voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and Andrew Cuomo, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton before that. Council District 19’s transition to a MAGA district has a lot to do with Paladino’s attention to constituent services, validating the Far Right in the minds of the non-ideological majority of voters over the dismissive Left. It’s also a lesson for progressives. Voters will forgive most radical politics if you deliver on their basic, rudimentary needs. You can’t just dismiss them because you disagree with their priorities.

For years, I have complained, often here, about the reputation that New York's progressive elected officials have for constituent services. In 2021, a staffer for democratic socialist Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher of Brooklyn told a client of mine her office wouldn’t do anything about a homeless encampment near her apartment where she was sexually harassed because “they’re her constituents too.” The next year, Mayor Eric Adams had the encampment cleared, which Gallagher protested. In 2024, a friend of mine found City Councilwoman Tiffany Caban’s Astoria office closed several days in a row because the entire staff was either working from home or “doing activism³.” A year earlier, Councilwoman Shahana Hanif of Park Slope got some unwanted press when a staffer suggested a woman who was attacked and her dog killed by a mentally disturbed homeless person in Prospect Park not involve the police because “we don’t believe the NYPD is the vehicle to bring safety to our community,” while failing to offer another solution. The incident created a firestorm that conservative and law-and-order-minded New Yorkers used as an example of why progressives are not only wrong but also dangerous. When a progressive won the Democratic nomination in my City Council District in 2021 – the same year Paladino was elected – her supporters dismissed concerns from voters about quality of life issues, such as loud music, garbage, and homeless encampments on local sidewalks. She lost in a landslide in a district Biden won by double digits a year earlier.

Progressives don’t want to hear that the concerns progressives believe are racist, classist, or the rantings of “bored Karens” are also key to being a successful politician and expanding a successful movement. Paladino’s Northeast Queens district swung away from the Republicans in the 2000s and 2010s largely because white Italian- and Irish-American voters, a demographic Paladino is a part of and who were the base of Queens Republicans, moved out or died, and were replaced by a growing Chinese and Korean demographic. Paladino aligned herself with conservatives who often engaged in blatantly xenophobic anti-Asian tropes.

Nevertheless, Asian-American voters are a primary reason she won and keeps winning, because despite her association with MAGA and support for a president who engaged in anti-Asian rhetoric, she responds to their concerns in a way that progressives dismiss. The Asian-American community has felt under attack from progressive policies like getting rid of the test-only admissions policies of specialized high schools, and progressives’ dismissive attitudes toward public safety in the wake of numerous attacks on Asian-Americans. Paladino engages them. Progressives fail to realize that people will vote for politicians who engage in hateful rhetoric against them or associate with others who do if those politicians make them feel heard and seen.

Ironically, there is only one progressive who I’ve been told does good constituent services - Mamdani. Constituents of his have often said to me that his office steps in where those of Caban’s and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s do not. The three represent districts that overlap each other and cover the same constituencies.

If Mamdani wins, Paladino’s stock will rise, and despite being in her seventies, she may even be a candidate for mayor in 2029 when she will be term-limited. At the very least, she will be a major player in an anti-Mamdani coalition.

However, if Mamdani can bring good constituent services to City Hall as mayor, and implore progressive allies across the city to do the same, it would go far to negate the strengths Paladino and other Republicans in the outer boroughs bring and prove that you don’t need to elect a bombastic silver-haired radical Boomer who engages in dangerous rhetoric to ensure the streets get cleaned up and bad faith neighbors get dealt with.

1. The State Senate district Paladino ran for in 2018 was the last state legislative district in Queens to elect a Republican, Frank Padavan, who held the seat until Avella defeated him in 2010.

2. The Vallone family's base of power was in Astoria, on the opposite side of the borough from where Paul Vallone represented, and now where Zohran Mamdani’s State Assembly district is located.

3. They were attending a pro-Palestine protest.