Congressman Bill de Blasio?
Congressman Bill de Blasio?
Maybe it will happen
The new 10th Congressional District in Manhattan seems engineered entirely for ambition. A compact splotch of land drawn by the court-appointed special master, it ranges from the bottom of Union Square to the top of the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, taking in some of the most exclusive and storied real estate in the United States. Tribeca, SoHo, Chinatown, DUMBO, Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, and Carroll Gardens all belong to the 10th, as does the socialist hotbed of Sunset Park. The district has no incumbent after Jerry Nadler, who could have easily run in it and won, elected to challenge Carolyn Maloney in a new Midtown Manhattan district that fuses, for the first time in many decades, the Upper West and East Sides. Naturally, the August 23rd Democratic primary is going to be like few others in modern memory.
There may be no district anywhere with more individuals per capita who desperately want to ascend in politics. The neighborhoods are diverse and, with a few exceptions, very wealthy or filling with the affluent. The Democratic voters there are those who might need politics least—they’re too well-wired to ever earnestly call a member of Congress and ask them to resolve a constituent issue—but care about it the most. Ladder-climbers abound. The only outlier in the district is the heavily Orthodox Jewish Borough Park, where the voters are far more conservative and share almost nothing in common with their neighbors to the north and west.