The Mike Gravel presidential campaign, which shut down last week, will probably be remembered as a curiosity singular to the late 2010s, when American politics spun out of orbit for good, and the solemn, useless rules of the spectacle were discarded.
As a new generation of activists, electrified by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Tiffany Cabán, come of age, local lawmakers are already gearing up for 2020 primary challenges from the left.
On the night of June 25th, the Queens County Democratic Party appeared to suffer not one, but two, grievous blows. Tiffany Cabán, the democratic socialist upstart, led Melinda Katz, the Queens borough president, by more than 1,100 votes in the historic primary for district attorney.
After losing the Queens district attorney primary race in a recount by a minuscule margin, Tiffany Cabán delivered one of the more defiant concession speeches in recent memory. “Trust me, we terrified the Democratic establishment,” Cabán said Tuesday night in the backyard of a chic Astoria pub as she formally conceded the race to her top rival, Queens Borough President Melinda Katz.
In November, though, it will be an unlikely battleground in the ongoing movement to reform America’s criminal justice system: Republican Monroe County District Attorney Sandra Doorley will face Shani Curry Mitchell, a Democrat who would be the second African American woman ever elected to a district attorney’s office in New York State.
On Monday night, Melinda Katz waded into the same steamy bar in Forest Hills where, just a month ago, her political career appeared to be crashing to an end. “Welcome to election night two,” Katz, the Queens borough president, said from the stage, her blue-and-gold campaign signs pasted behind her. “We were having a difficult time in the papers. We weren’t sure if we won or lost.”
The tragedy of Hector Figueroa’s untimely death will be felt in New York’s political firmament for years to come. Figueroa, who died of a heart attack on July 11th, was not just the president of a major labor union, 32BJ SEIU, and a power broker, whom various players in the political ecosystem hunted out for advice and favors. Union leaders come and go, and many are forgotten. Figueroa, however, stood apart because he harkened back to a radical labor tradition that has been all but lost today.
As lawyers for Melinda Katz and Tiffany Cabán sift through the 91,000-odd ballots in the unprecedented, bitter recount for Queens district attorney, Katz has one built-in advantage: She is getting pro bono legal services from two attorneys connected with the Queens Democratic Party, under a loophole in campaign finance law.
On Tuesday afternoon, a newly emboldened Gregory Meeks stood outside the Queens Board of Elections, a coterie of politicians, activists, and hangers-on flanking him. He was there to rail against Tiffany Cabán’s campaign, to accuse her backers of trafficking in Trumpian falsehoods.
When Kamala Harris spoke in front of the Commonwealth Club of California in the winter of 2010, the presidency wasn’t yet on her mind. Or, if it was—as it usually is for any ladder-climbing politician with a pulse and a dream—she wasn’t going to talk about it.