New York Primary

This week I advocated strongly that everybody I know vote in the primary elections.  For most of my friends in New York, and especially those in their twenties and thirties, that meant a vote for Bernie Sanders.  Many of them did, in fact, vote by going to the polls, not just by clicking "like" on Facebook.  So what were they to think when Hillary Clinton routed Bernie Sanders by twenty-seven percentage points here in New York City?  How are they supposed to retain their enthusiasm when they were defeated so handily in a contest where nobody they knew voted the other way.  I don't have a precise data-based answer but I have some thoughts.

On the New York Times website the editors posted a really interesting interactive map of the voting in NYC, precinct by precinct.  In my election district, for example, I can see that 253 people came out to vote: 172 for Clinton and 81 (including me!) for Bernie Sanders.  That is a higher percentage for Clinton than city-wide (68% here in Spuyten Duyvil versus 63% in NYC)  And that is no particular surprise.  The entire northwest Bronx is reliably club-driven, so much so that our state senator, the execrable Jeff Klein (who began caucusing with the Senate Republicans when the Democrats gained a numerical majority!) has easily won both primaries and general elections since demonstrating this grotesque opportunism.  My neighborhood is dominated by white people over 60 (including me!) and enough of them turn out and do what the club leaders say that they are able to swamp dissenting votes from other parts of the district.  In order to get rid of Jeff Klein and his ilk we will have to mobilize an enthusiastic primary turnout in other parts of the district, and then follow that up in the general election, where NY pols hedge their bets with multiple parties all of whom support the same machine-selected candidates.  

For example, in 2012, Jeff Klein ran unopposed in both the Democratic and Republican primaries! In that general election he won with 94% of the vote. (Does this sound like a two-party system to you?)  In 2014 he actually had to run for re-election.  G. Oliver Koppell, a former NY State Attorney General (and a member of the same Democratic club as Klein!) ran against him in the Democratic primary on the grounds that Klein was caucusing with the Republicans and was, therefore, not a Democrat at all. (Koppell's actual reason had more to do with the fact that term limits were ending his tenure on the NY City Council and he hadn't been out of public life for most of the previous forty years.)  But the club selected Klein, so Klein won, albeit with "only" 65% of the primary vote.  This seemed to embolden the Republicans, because they actually ran a candidate against Klein that year, one who got all of 14% of the general election vote.  

Here is the additional rub, though.  In 2014 the Conservative Party ran still another candidate, who was probably put there to divide the Republican vote.  And in both these recent elections, Klein was also present on the ballot for the "Working Families Party" and the "Independence Party."  For those of you unfamiliar with the New York State ballot, we have all these parties that cross-endorse candidates from the Democrats and Republicans.  They can remain on the ballot as long as they garner sufficient votes and they can hold up elected officials for patronage by providing their endorsement.  Yes, this is just as sleazy as it sounds.  They can also pretend to actually be independent, for people who don't like Democrats or Republicans: allowing "protest votes" without the downside of benefiting your opponents by splitting votes.  Or as in the example of the Conservative Party above, they can intentionally split votes to support the professional politician with whom they have a deal.

Let's look at a district that isn't populated by superannuated white people, though.  I have a lot of close friends in the Longwood area of the South Bronx.  The area is overwhelmingly Latino (75%) and African American (22%) and the median age is 30, compared to 50 in Spuyten Duyvil.  Median income is $25,000, compared to $80,000 in Spuyten Duyvil.  Every single person I know in the 41st and 42nd election districts (from Leggett to Longwood Avenues, between Beck Street and Bruckner Boulevard) voted for Bernie Sanders.  What were the numbers for the neighborhood? Hillary Clinton won 291 of 397 votes cast, or 73%.  That means that in my neighborhood, where I knew people on both sides, Hillary got 68% but in Longwood, where everybody I know voted for Bernie, she got even more!  What is going on there?

Actually, what's going on in the South Bronx is very similar to what's going on in Riverdale.  Longwood, Hunt's Point, Soundview and Clason Point are represented in the State Assembly by Marcus Crespo, a protege of State Senator Rubén Díaz, Sr.  And, yes, Díaz, Sr. is another Senate "Democrat" who allied himself with the Republicans in order to prevent the Democrats from running the Senate when they won a majority.  The last time Díaz, Sr. faced a significant primary challenge (2010) his opponent's poll watchers were expelled from the polling sites and there were multiple reports of voter intimidation.  In 2014 Díaz, Sr. ran for State Senate on the Democratic and Republican tickets and won with 89% of the vote.  In 2012 he was unopposed in both Democratic and Republican primaries (!) and won the general election with 97% of the vote.  Assemblyman Crespo won those two elections equally easily: 96% in 2012 and 94% in 2014.  

We are thus looking at the same phenomenon in both sections of the Bronx.  It is prohibitively difficult to mount an opposition to these incumbents, whether from within the Democratic or Republican parties, because the Democratic clubs can count on sufficient regular voters to swamp the low-turn-out primaries and drown any insurgency in any given year.  That, and the threat of violence when necessary.  People remember how little their votes mattered and they are less likely to try again the next time.  They shake their heads at the naïveté of the new generation of voters and stay home.  Is it any wonder that the leaders of the State Senate and Assembly are each awaiting sentencing for their federal corruption convictions at this very minute?

The outside world saw this week how our election board purged 126,000 names from the voter rolls in Brooklyn.  We saw tweets and comment posts in all corners about people who vote in every election, and who have lived at the same address for years, arrived at Brooklyn polling sites to discover they "weren't registered" or "weren't Democrats."  This was a clumsy way the party bosses found to suppress the vote, not only in this primary, but in future elections when people will be discouraged by this bad experience.

But it is the year-in year-out boss control that we should be fighting.

I am not a Bernie fan.  I have opposed his brand of "socialism" -- the kind that argues that "economic justice" will solve all the problems of racism and imperialism -- for my entire adult life.  A few months ago I asked in this space whether anybody seriously thinks that Bernie Sanders (who has scrupulously avoided civil rights issues for decades by moving to one of the whitest states in the country) is a champion of African Americans, Latinos or Native Americans?  In January, when Ta-Nehisi Coates critiqued Senator Sanders for his failure to support reparations to African Americans,  I observed on Facebook that Sanders's supporters denounced Coates for a "probably-paid hatchet job in support of Hillary."  Because why -- they apparently wondered -- would anybody criticize Bernie except in service of his opponent?  I added:

It seems not to have occurred to them to see it as a critique of their OWN views, a critique of the idea that "economic justice" will automatically erase racism. The New Deal didn't do that. European social democracy doesn't do that.

We speak of the late forties and early fifties as a time of progressive taxes, strong regulatory agencies, good Social Security, GI housing and education benefits.  How exactly did any of this benefit racial minorities in this country?  

None of this makes me a supporter of Hillary Clinton.  She was an outspoken supporter of the policies that led to this era of mass incarceration in which the US outstrips every country in per capita imprisonment rate.  As Secretary of State she forcefully advocated for a coup in Honduras, which led immediately to the current lawlessness, and then argued against our admitting the children who come here fleeing that violence!  She was largely responsible for our supporting armed groups in Libya, leading to the present absence of any government there.  And every word out of her mouth is carefully vetted to position herself near some theoretical center relative to both Bernie Sanders and her imagined opponents in the fall.

All of which is to say, I think we need to start thinking outside the Democratic Party.  I think we need to select neighborhoods where we think we can make a difference and start working to send our own representatives to the City Council and to Albany.  And I think we have to find a way to support the enthusiasm we saw for this year's primary in New York City instead of allowing it to be a memory of disappointment.