Infamy Throws in the Towel

The widest open congressional race in American stays very wide open

On Tuesday, former Mayor Bill de Blasio dropped out of a congressional race he never should have entered. Once the two-term mayor of America’s largest city, he wanted to take a demotion to commute to D.C. and do occasional MSNBC hits. De Blasio, despite everything, seemed earnest about the endeavor and admitted, when dropping out, the support for his bid just wasn’t there. Too many voters didn’t want him to run and he bowed out, avoiding defeat.

The cynical take on this is probably correct: de Blasio ran for Congress in part to retire old debts from campaigns and investigations. He raised about $500,000 and didn’t spend much of it. Maybe he thought he could win for a minute, but now the real action can take place. He’ll start to repay his creditors. There are various ways he can do that.

I’ve shared my views on de Blasio before—my most expansive pieces on the man are here and here—and I won’t bore you too much on a politician who will never get elected to anything ever again. With time, de Blasio will come out as one of New York’s better mayors because he left the city with tangible programs that will long outlive him. New York’s universal pre-K program is a genuine national model and expanding to younger grades. Unlike mayors before and after him, de Blasio cared about working-class tenants, granting them a right to counsel in housing court and freezing rents multiple times on rent-stabilized units. He was the first mayor to guarantee paid sick days to private sector workers. Before it was in vogue, he fought for and eventually won, from the state, a minimum wage hike. There were many failures of the de Blasio years—some, in recent times, were pandemic-driven—but there is an inarguable legacy of accomplishment. His poor politicking will come to overshadow it less.

Now what for NY-10? What I wrote the other day is even more true today than it was then: this is the widest open House race in America. De Blasio’s lousy polling kept him from becoming a true frontrunner, but he was going to win some votes from white liberals and Orthodox Jews, who are packed into Borough Park and awkwardly stitched onto this lower Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn district. With de Blasio gone, it’s all up for grabs.

Every top tier and mid-tier candidate has obvious strengths and glaring flaws. Mondaire Jones is a charismatic young progressive with a huge war chest; he also represented Rockland County in Congress, not New York City, and his district-hopping may prevent him from ever becoming the durable frontrunner he imagined himself to be. Dan Goldman is rich, TV-famous, and has never held elected office before. His stumbles over an abortion question in an Orthodox Jewish newspaper revealed two things: he is not used to traversing the fault lines of religious and ethnic politics in New York, and the rest of the field is willing, a month out, to pile on. Sometimes there’s a danger to getting recognized as a leading candidate long before Election Day. A dozen or so candidates now have a target. Better to rise, phoenix-like, from the back of the pack. Easier said than done.

Can Yuh-Line Niou, proud progressive assemblywoman, thread the needle with the Working Families Party’s backing? Maybe, if she raises more than low six-figures. Is Carlina Rivera, until now an understated Lower East Side councilwoman, coalition-building well enough to finish in first? Possibly. What about Jo Anne Simon, neighborhood assemblywoman? The once very consequential Elizabeth Holtzman? As trite as it is to say, we won’t know until August 23rd. Margins could be razor-thin. Or one of the aforementioned Democrats surges away from the pack. Either way, best not to be on vacation the second to last week of August.