Now that New York’s highest court surprised everyone by tossing out the state’s blatant Democratic gerrymander of its congressional districts, voters can look forward to real competitive races in many of the districts.
A new congressional district that includes Lower Manhattan and the “woke” Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn won’t be competitive in November, but the wide-open Democratic primary will provide a fascinating look at every crazy form of leftism ever catalogued.
The most well-known candidate is former NYC mayor Bill DeBlasio, who left office loathed by even most Democrats, but who’s banking on some people forgetting his two failed terms.
Yuh-Line Niou represents Manhattan’s Chinatown in the state assembly, but is best known for embracing the Black Lives Matter campaign, as when she liked a tweet that contained a photo comparing the attendees at a recent police funeral to Nazi storm troopers.
Attorney Daniel Goldman was chief Democratic counsel for Donald Trump’s first impeachment. That’s the one centered on the fake Steele dossier that was the basis of the anti-Trump Russia hoax of the last few years.
Former representative Elizabeth Holtzman is another candidate obsessed with Trump. She was a major player in the impeachment of Richard Nixon in 1974 as a 32-year-old freshman representative from Brooklyn. Now 80 years old, she says, “Why am I running? I took on Richard Nixon, and I can take on Donald Trump.”
Should Holtzman succeed in her comeback,, her 42-year gap between periods of service in Congress would be the longest in history.
Representative Mondaire Jones, an AOC ally whose Hudson Valley district is 39 miles north of the tenth, will have one of the shortest tenures if he fails to win the primary since he was only elected in 2020. He claims he’s running in the new district because it’s been a beacon of hope for gay refugees for decades. In reality, he was pushed out of his old district by Representative Sean Maloney, who runs the House-election effort this year for the Democrats and wanted Jones’s seat as his own after the new lines were drawn.
The primary field tilts so far to the left that it’s just possible the primary could be won by state senator Simcha Felder, the son of a conservative rabbi who spent many years in the senate caucusing with its Republican members — even though he was a Democrat.
As depressing as politics is, we need to look for any entertainment available. It looks like the Democratic primary in New York’s tenth congressional district will provide as many laughs, groans, pratfalls and surprises as a world-class circus when it comes to town.