Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Bill de Blasio was having lunch at Caffè Reggio in the West Village on the third Monday in May, sinking in to what he assumed would be a post-mayoral life of writing and commentary, when his phone started blowing up. State lawmakers were at a silent vigil for the Buffalo shooting victims when their phones started pinging.
And it meant that what was expected to be a slow political season in New York City was immediately transformed into a 90-day sprint, a battle royale of all against all that will likely cost tens of millions of dollars and feature some of the most vicious Democrat-on-Democrat primaries New York has ever seen at a time when Republicans are set to make big gains in the November elections and the stakes for American democracy couldn’t be greater.
Mondaire Jones surprised pretty much everyone by running in a newly created district spanning lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images In 2014, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo pushed a ballot measure over the objections of Democratic lawmakers that would create a commission evenly divided among Republicans and Democrats to produce congressional and state legislative maps.
Republicans quickly sued, accusing the Democrats of violating the state constitution by drawing up a map that politically benefited one side. Democrats, though, were generally delighted. Hillary Clinton privately told Albany Democrats that they had saved American democracy. Democrats were usually allied with good-government groups.
“It was a mess by design,” said Susan Lerner, head of Common Cause New York, which broke from some of its good-government peers by opposing the 2014 bill. “The original constitutional amendment was drafted by Senate Republicans who understood the ins and outs of redistricting and placed land mines in the provision.
The original map from Cervas showed that what he valued was having compact districts, never mind the actual realities of life in New York. Asian voters in the outer boroughs were tossed into several districts. Historic Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx were split into two or three districts. The most Jewish district in the country, represented by Nadler and snaking down the West Side into the orthodox neighborhoods of Brooklyn, would be split up.
Congressional campaign aides say that, in fact, Jones had been considering running against Bowman all along, and that he was prodded on by senior House Democrats, members of the Congressional Black Caucus, and forces aligned with Eliot Engel , all of whom wanted to get rid of the ultra-progressive Bowman.
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