Former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has announced his interest in running for Congress and has formed an exploratory committee.
In a tweet on Wednesday afternoon, de Blasio said he’s interested in running for the Democratic nomination in New York’s 10th congressional district. He wrote that he is “ready to serve to continue the fight against inequality,” and that “our neighborhoods need help as we recover from Covid.” The tweet included a link to the website of his exploratory committee, a legal entity that allows him to raise money before formally announcing his candidacy.
De Blasio’s announcement comes after months-long speculation that he’d run for Congress in the upcoming midterm elections — in New York’s 11th District, which covers Battery Park in Lower Manhattan and all of Staten Island. That seat is represented by Nicole Malliotakis, a first-term Republican and ally of former president Donald Trump. Malliotakis challenged de Blasio in the 2017 mayoral election. On February 15, however, de Blasio announced by tweet that he wouldn’t run against Malliotakis, though he claimed that he was “certain a progressive can win this seat,” which has a Cook Partisan Voting Index score of “R+3”.
Recent legal disputes over redistricting, however, seem to have prompted de Blasio’s reversal. Last month, the New York State Court of Appeals threw out the Democratic-controlled state legislature’s congressional-district maps — newly drawn after the 2020 census — for partisan gerrymandering. In her majority opinion, Chief Judge Janet DiFiore wrote that the maps were “drawn with impermissible partisan purpose,” and ordered them redrawn by a new, judicially supervised process.
A draft of the new maps, released on Monday, dramatically changes congressional-district boundaries in the city, with five Democratic incumbents having major portions of their former districts in each other’s new constituencies. They prompted longtime congressman Jerry Nadler — who represents the 10th district and has gained a national profile as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee — to vacate his seat. In an unprecedented move, he is now challenging longtime congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, for the Democratic nomination in the 12th district.
Nadler’s move has created an opening for de Blasio to run for the new seat, which covers all of Lower Manhattan below 14th Street, and the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Dumbo, Park Slope, Prospect Park, and Parkville. He had previously represented those Brooklyn neighborhoods on the New York City Council, where he served for six years until 2009.
De Blasio’s two terms as mayor, from 2014 to 2021, were highly controversial, especially regarding crime and policing. Relations with the New York City Police Department declined as he was accused of stoking “anti-police sentiment” after the death of Eric Garner, a black man, following a police encounter. His opposition to the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policy and decision to shift $1 billion away from its budget in 2020 were seen by some as leading to a rise in crime in the city. It earned criticism from conservatives and progressives, the latter claiming he wasn’t going far enough. He was also widely panned for his leadership style and was accused of arrogance, sanctimony, tardiness, and laziness by former staff members.
De Blasio ran for president in the 2020 Democratic primaries but frequently polled at zero percent among voters nationwide and dropped out months before the Iowa caucuses. He also reportedly considered running for governor of New York in this November’s election but declined to after straw polls showed him ranked last in the Democratic primary, with 3 percent support. Upon his leaving office, de Blasio’s approval rating as mayor was 26 percent, among the lowest in the city’s history.