After publishing my last piece on the NY-12 primary, I sat down with Eli Miller of Ghost Runner to talk about the race, lessons (and false-lessons) from the Mamdani campaign, the old East Side-West Side rivalry, how to assess early polling with measured caution, and the national political moment we find ourselves in.

Eli has written a ton on this race and is an excellent interviewer, so do check out his writing and other episodes. The episode can be found essentially everywhere you listen to podcasts, including:

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

I have a new piece coming out next week. Until then, thank you as always for supporting my work.

The crime of changing my name in the eyes of the Board of Elections has wiped my electoral history clean. I am registered in NY-12, I have voted here on and off since high school, and yet as far as some $9.39 million in Democratic spending is concerned— I do not exist. No mailers. No glossy pitches or digs at this candidate’s employment or that candidate’s voting record. The banks found me. The student loan people found me. Democracy, regrettably, has not.

This has left me in the somewhat absurd position of being a political obsessive in the singularly most educated, fifth highest-income congressional district in the country, and yet receiving essentially no outreach. I do not have cable. I pay for YouTube Premium because I am a pushover and hate advertisements. Instead, I get the race in fragments: clips of candidate forums on Twitter, chatter in Signal chats, City & State pieces, and the drip-drip-drip of New York Playbook.

Which may actually be the right way to encounter New York’s Twelfth. You see, this district is simultaneously the smallest geographically in the country and the least accessible. This is Midtown Manhattan— the de facto capital of America, though it bears little resemblance. Ever tried canvassing a doorman building? I have. The median rent in Manhattan is $5,524— an absurdly unattainable number, though through the three-and-a-half people per bedroom reality of my middle and high school years on the Upper East Side and later Midtown East, to the guest bedroom in Kips Bay I have occupied for the last eighteen months and write from today, I have repeatedly and almost entirely accidentally managed to remain here.

Legibility here instead comes from a convoluted system of mediated cues. Who is up from the Democratic clubs. Who has endorsements from the people who matter— or matter to the people who matter. Who has always been around. Who has the record. Who most clearly has what it takes in this current moment among the healthy stock of very serious people.

Yet here in the land of graduate degrees and bylined opinion, nobody seems entirely sure what kind of Democrat is supposed to come next.

For a very long time, it was Jerry Nadler.

He grew up in Bensonhurst in the ‘50s and ‘60s— except for a stint at his father’s Jersey chicken farm. After Crown Heights Yeshiva, Nadler— long the only member of Congress with a yeshiva background— ended up exactly where the brightest of our city are supposed to: Stuyvesant High. There he rubbed shoulders with a slew of other budding political stars. From there onward to Columbia, Fordham for law, and then in 1976 the State Assembly for the Upper West Side.

Funny thing: before Jerry Nadler was an institution, he was once a member of a very different NYC-DSA.

Not this one (I am on the organizing committee of today’s Lower Manhattan DSA)— not the sprawling machine of spreadsheet tacticians, endorsement fights, and citywide ambition that those three letters immediately call to mind, but its older, stranger ancestor. This was Michael Harrington’s outfit of bookish reformists, labor intellectuals, a holdover of a once vibrant Jewish social democratic tradition that while waning had clear, clubbish fluency in not rupture but a cleaner civic ethic: proving, patiently and procedurally, that good-government was attainable. This was the DSA of Ruth Messinger and a younger Brad Lander.

Nadler was formed in that world, and it never quite left him.

He spent the ‘80s running for higher office against various other known names— David Dinkins for Borough President, Elizabeth Holtzman for Comptroller— and losing each time. His opening came instead through death: Congressman Ted Weiss died one day before the 1992 primary, and Nadler was chosen to inherit a district which would remain more or less his turf until 2022— Manhattan’s West Side, and then a long, improbable snake through Brooklyn to Borough Park and Bensonhurst.

Awkwardly drawn, yes, but one of the last coherent political expressions of Jewish New York. On the northern end sat the Upper West Side: secular, professional, a twinge artsy, crowded with lawyers, professors, reformers, and a center of gravity orbiting all around civic participation. On the other sat southern Brooklyn, Orthodox Jewish exclaves of his youth where political life was less about ideology than communal assurance, institutional relationships, and who knew whom. Nadler’s life almost perfectly straddles both worlds.

Across Central Park would lie a district with a different raison d’être. It was a world of Upper East Side country club stock and outer-borough go-getters, of prep schools and parochial schools, of hospitals and train yards. These patricians and white-ethnics would that same year choose a different representative in Carolyn Maloney, a North Carolina native married to an investment banker who represented Latino East Harlem and would defeat Manhattan’s last Republican congressperson.

Maloney’s district, though seldom less Democratic in the end, ran on a different fuel. From the co-ops and brownstones between the Park and the East River, then over the Queensboro into Long Island City and Astoria before those neighborhoods became shorthand for something younger and more self-conscious. It tethered old money to postwar immigrants, silk-stocking liberalism to the upwardly mobile children of cops, firefighters, and mechanics. It was not a district of fading social democracy and Orthodox institutional barter, but of preservation battles, prestige fundraisers, the unseen hum of industry, and in Maloney a kind of respectable seriousness that could use the word “reform” without ever quite threatening the stark social hierarchy that produced it. It would also become something of a timebomb as western Queens and northern Brooklyn became more professional, more transplanted; a phenomenon coroneted by Maloney being held to 42.7% of the vote against Suraj Patel and a more lefty spoiler candidate in 2020.

The next cycle, both districts would cease to exist.

New York redistricting had long been a grubby exercise in bipartisan self-preservation— Democrats for decades accepted maps that helped keep Republicans afloat in the State Senate, and in the post-IDC, post-Cuomo climate of 2022 attempted a far more aggressive gerrymander. This opened the door to judicial humiliation. The maps were thrown out, a court took over, and in their place emerged something cleaner on paper and stranger in practice: a Twelfth straddling Midtown from 14th Street to 96th. Incumbents be damned: Nadler and Maloney would vie for the same district.

To put it bluntly, not all fights are fair. Much to my shame as an East Sider— and my relief as a progressive East Sider— the West Side turns out, and in Manhattan the West Sider usually wins. Take roll of our Borough Presidents and District Attorneys and you find, with few exceptions, West Siders. Nadler entered the race with that civic muscle at his back: stronger club infrastructure, denser habits of participation, a more vibrant political culture. Maloney, meanwhile, was plainly bruised from Suraj Patel’s near-upset two years prior, and Patel’s decision to run again for this new district only deepened the sense that her coalition was fraying.

And yet to live through it did not feel like watching an inevitability assert itself.

Maloney led the first public poll 31-21. She entered with more money, stacked more endorsements. Even when Nadler passed her in the polls, it was by single digits in all but the final. The structural advantage was real; so was the uncertainty. This was not one of those races where everyone quietly foresaw the result and merely waited for the ballots to affirm it. It felt messier than that, more interpersonally fraught than that: a district that while more homogenous than the ‘90s iteration of Midtown I described did not yet see itself as cohesive.

It was a rout. Nadler 55.4%, Maloney 24.4%, Patel 19.2%.

Nadler, to his credit or merely his instinct for survival, did not spend his final act pretending that nothing had changed. The Gaza war cracked open the old Manhattan liberal Zionist consensus more forcefully than any issue in years, and even he— product of that vanished civic world, steward of its habits and syntax— was forced onto more uncertain ground, calling for a ceasefire in a political language that was no longer entirely his own. With his protégé Scott Stringer reduced to an afterthought and his district split between Cuomo in the first round and Mamdani in the final, the choice before him became difficult to evade.

By the time he endorsed now-Mayor Mamdani in the general election, the gesture, while generous, read less as conversion than concession: an acknowledgement that the kind of Democrat Jerry Nadler had spent a lifetime embodying could no longer, by itself, answer the city emerging around him. Cuomo would carry NY-12 come November.

The field is crowded in a specifically New York manner: over-credentialed, media-literate, faintly ridiculous, full of people whose candidacies seem at once inevitable and strangely precarious. They are institutional heirs, never-Trumpers, a Kennedy scion, and no less than two Michael Cohens, neither of whom ultimately ran.

What makes the field feel so odd is that none of the candidates are really offering a continuation of Nadlerism, but neither are they proposing anything coherent enough to qualify as a clean break. Instead, they offer competing theories of succession. Lasher comes closest to institutional continuity, but the institution itself has thinned out. Bores offers technocratic fluency in an electorate for the first time threatened by the march of technological progress. Schlossberg offers dynastic glamour in a moment where the Kennedys are having their Diana moment. Conway offers anti-Trumpism after anti-Trumpism has decisively lost. What this district is choosing, in other words, is less a political future than the social style in which it would like to receive one. Not only who replaces Nadler, but what kind of elite Democratic legitimacy can still hold this district together.

The nearest thing the race had to an obvious break from all this was Cameron Kasky, who arrived not from the clubs or the legislature or a family of note, but from a more random pipeline: national moral celebrity. A Parkland survivor who moved from March For Our Lives to the Yang Gang and into this race as its clearest progressive and most openly pro-Palestine candidate, he imagined a narrow path: a plurality in an exceptionally split field. The theory for it was elegant; the constituency less clear. After a visit to the West Bank, he dropped out in January.

Kasky’s exit left the field to candidates more fluent in Manhattan’s established forms of legitimacy, perhaps none more so than Micah Lasher. If the district still retains any instinct towards direct continuity, it will largely settle in his direction. Nadler endorsed him. Bloomberg is spending for him. The clubs know him. West Side pols speak in unison: that if there is to be a respectable succession here, it ought to pass through Lasher.

On paper, this may seem strange. Lasher is a first-term assemblymember, but this fact belies a quarter century marinating in New York politics. Another Stuy alumnus, he managed Brad Hoylman’s first council campaign and advised Scott Stringer as a teenager, worked for Nadler, legislative affairs in Bloomberg’s City Hall, a failed bid to succeed Adriano Espaillat in the State Senate, and director of policy under Governor Hochul. He had a Times profile at 28. What can look like precocity is, in fact, something more settled: a life spent moving precisely through the institutions this district still knows to recognize as seriousness.

For those of a certain age— I include myself here— the feeling is less awe than recognition of how early this city teaches its favorites to seem inevitable.

If Lasher can trace his lineage most cleanly to Nadler, Alex Bores is the candidate of the East Side, and trying very hard not to be so. Maloney’s endorsement has only made that old East-West split explicit again. But Bores, while representing the most monied west-of-Third splint of the Upper East Side in the Assembly, has framed himself as something else entirely. A computer scientist with a stint at Palantir behind him, he has spent his time in the Assembly making himself Albany’s AI guy, including through a notable partnership with State Senator Kristen Gonzalez— NYC-DSA’s own former tech worker.

Together they have proposed consumer-protection standards, transparency requirements, and provenance rules meant to place guardrails around the emerging technology rather than simply reject it or pretend it can be ignored. It is a fitting candidacy for the moment: an electorate anxious that the future their own class helped midwife may be coming for them next.

That posture has not gone unanswered. If Lasher’s legitimacy comes through endorsements and West Side clubs, Bores’ has been tested by something more contemporary: a flood of outside money treating a Manhattan congressional primary as a referendum on whether artificial intelligence will answer to democratic politics at all. A pro-AI PAC hit him with $120k in negative ads in December, $326k in January, much of it centered on his time at Palantir; by February, the spending against him had swelled past $1 million. Maloney, in endorsing him, seized on the obvious counterpoint.

But for all Bores’ effort to register as something other than the cursed East Side candidate, he has also assembled the most conspicuously post-local coalition in the race: only 12% of his donations came from inside the district, while Berkeley alone accounted for 17%.

Then there is Jack Schlossberg— government name John Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg— whose candidacy feels old and strangely new at once. He is young, though at 33 not quite young enough to excuse the extent to which he comes prepackaged: Yale, Harvard, Vogue, the only grandson of John F. Kennedy and a card-carrying member of the American Windsors in the time of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s spectacular desecration of their mythology.

What makes Schlossberg especially interesting is not the regality of the thing, but the anxiety that now trails short behind. The Kennedy name is today pockmarked. Decades of producing awe from Carnegie Hill to Bed-Stuy, but now also equally capable of conjuring vaccine skeptical crankery, anti-trans fearmongering, and splintered family denunciation. Schlossberg’s apparition here therefore carries a tension more layered than a simple ‘60s throwback. He is a test of whether Clan Kennedy can still, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Six, produce a politician who feels more like inheritance than dissonance.

That tension is stronger still because Schlossberg does not present as the restoration of some don’t-rock-the-boat, more decorous strain that is most Kennedy’s artform. He presents, rather, as a very contemporary mutation: polished credentials, erratic in medium, trying to defend Camelot through the same algorithmic attention economy that has already marred the family. The fear— seldom stated outright, though New York Magazine gets closest— is not that he might or likely will fail. It is that he might become another kind of Kennedy embarrassment altogether: not the apostasy of RFK Jr., but the crass, self-branding, internet-brained heir who cannot quite square the difference between salvaging the family image and jetting it into the content mill.

For a district like this one, of course, this may not be disqualifying. It wasn’t for Speaker Emerita Pelosi or his own mother Caroline. It may in fact render him more alluring. Schlossberg’s candidacy asks whether, in a field crowded with both Errol Louis and Anderson Cooper regulars, there remains appetite for something at once grander and far rockier: a man whose pitch is less as inheritor to a robust political tradition than an ability to cross-stitch what remains.

Conway, meanwhile, represents a different strain entirely: the never-Trumpers who became liberals, or whatever exactly liberals become in a moment like this. A decade ago, Conway’s profile might have read simply: Republican litigator, Federalist Society alum husband to Kellyanne, fixture of a certain Washington legal world rubbing shoulders with Ann Coulter and Matt Drudge and Brett Kavanaugh during the Clinton impeachment. He belonged to that ilk in its leaner, more self-satisfied phase, when the pedigreed Right cast itself as a meritocratic counter-establishment of clerks, judges, and ultimately legalistic dominance. They won on the last point.

Trump shattered that self-mystique, or at least made it impossible to maintain without apprehension. The splitters were not exactly ideologically reborn, but politically transubstantiated: the conservative power lawyer turned resistance celebrity, the husband of Trump’s campaign manager turned cable-frequenting guard of the Republic. His language is thick with talk of the rule of law, accountability, democratic norms, beating back Trump’s rubber-stamp majority, making his final two years living hell— all of it intelligible, and all of it a 2018 vintage. He is running, in fewer words, not on a theory of what Congress can do in any aspirational sense but on staving the bleeding.

That thinness is not incidental; it is the campaign. Conway is not really offering the district a legislative imagination so much as a battle stance of permanent injunction— he will object loudly, litigiously, and with maximum professional credibility to the immutable presence of Donald J. Trump. He’s vague on his other positions. In another universe, the role might just as easily have gone to the disbarred fixer Michael D. Cohen— a more recent convert, far gaudier, and with vastly more direct complicity, but ultimately auditioning for the same anti-Trump monoculture.

Not a single poll at time of publication has been independent. Lasher and Bores, intuitive frontrunners to analysts from Politico to The Hudson Line, do not yet register that perceived strength. A consistent third of the electorate is clocked undecided, and as fun as it may be to predict the truth of the matter is that there remains little to go on.

Trump’s second presidency has had a curious effect on elite Democratic politics, both clarifying and destabilizing it. The old reactive anti-Trump consensus still structures the emotional life of the Twelfth, but so too does the growing sense that it is no longer enough. Two competing philosophies of how to proceed most recently squared off in the Mayoral race, and few places were more ambivalent. Two and a half months into governance, Mayor Mamdani’s approvals now sit comfortably over 50% in the district, with about a quarter disapproving and a fifth unsure.

And yet the field has been notably slower to absorb this shift than the district itself. If Mamdani’s growing comfort here suggests that even the Twelfth’s most prestige-conscious voters are becoming more receptive to a politics that promises more than procedural resistance and expert containment, little in the race quite reflects it.

This is not a bug so much as the defining feature of this place. The Twelfth is not ever where the next phase of national Democratic politics is discovered in its rawest form. It is where such politics, having already emerged elsewhere and survived its first encounters with fear, ridicule, and institutional avoidance, is wedded to figures who embody a more respectable form of ascent in one way or another.

This district does not invent the future but interrogates it: who has vouched for it, whether it can speak in a more acceptable register, whether its rougher edges can be sanded down into something fit to be accepted as stable continuity. That is not an indictment exactly, just a fact of being not often put to page. What may look, in a cycle like this one, like a failure of imagination is in fact closer to a social function.

That is why none of the candidates really sound like they belong to the phase of Democratic politics this city and perhaps the country at-large seems to be entering. They sound instead like interpreters, mediators, or containment vessels for it. Even the most forward-looking amongst them tend to phrase things not through rupture but effective management; not a new governing instinct so much as assurance that whatever realities are now forcing themselves onto stage, can be handled by the proper people, in the proper institutions, in the proper cadence.

The question that faces the Twelfth, then, is not what current will carry the Midterms or even the next Presidential race. The city has begun to answer that elsewhere. The question is what version of that politics will take hold here.

It is a Friday afternoon in March, the kind of day in the Upper Hudson Valley where the sky is the color of a bone-dry sidewalk and tires crunch battered road salt against stubborn, unplowed snow. In Catskill, or perhaps Schoharie, or one of those Delaware County towns where cell service goes to die and everything of local importance still happens at the wood-paneled VFW hall, Marc Molinaro is shaking a hand. It is likely a firm hand, practiced and warm, the hand of a man who has spent thirty-two of his fifty years searching for in each soul something that is increasingly no longer offered: something unseen behind the eye, some feeling that binds all men in common interest.

This belief now reads not only as old-fashioned, but faintly pathological.

He is back now, or at least he is trying to be back, which in the topography of New York politics is not at all the same thing. He is running for New York State Assembly; specifically, the 102nd district: a rural chunk of Upstate the size of Delaware that is overwhelmingly White, Republican, and pissed off. To the casual observer, it is a retreat, a quiet surrender of the federal billions and the Beltway green rooms for a nothing role in the eternal minority in Albany. To the pundit class it is incomprehensible, written about in an exasperated tone once reserved for the eccentricities of Howard Hughes. I have written about him before, in “Molinaro’s Gambit” and “Molinaro’s Endgame;” with this I now risk a trilogy.

One does not return to the Assembly. The Assembly is a place of beginnings, a cramped room in a Legislative Office Building too bland to be photographed where one taps their feet waiting for seniority or eyes an opportunity to parlay the role into something grander. It is where Mayor Mamdani served two and a half terms. It is twenty years ago, where Marc Molinaro served two and a half terms, his fourth public office of seven.

To go from overseeing the $20.5 billion purse of the FTA— the ability to derail every transit system from the MTA to the Honolulu Skyline at the stroke of a pen— to being one in one-hundred-fifty against a supermajority is to exhibit a very specific kind of madness. The Assembly is not a place where any man who has been County Executive, or nominee for Governor, or Congressman, or Administrator has any sense being.

And yet to describe this as descent is to misunderstand the sort of man Marc Molinaro has always been, and perhaps more pointedly the sort of ecosystem that made him. Ambition, in the way it is ordinarily understood and resented in ourselves, has never quite explained him. He has always wanted higher office, yes, pedal to the floor towards that end since he could vote. But his ambition has never been solely or perhaps even primarily ideological, nor entirely material, nor reducible to the blunt narcotic of prestige. It has a twinge of something older and more provincial than that, rooted in a belief that “public life” is a coherent thing and that to move through it skillfully is in and of itself a virtue.

There was, not so long ago, a type of man (they were always men) one encountered on town boards and in diner booths from Quogue to Canandaigua: men who did not necessarily stand for all that much in the modern sense but who could dance with supernatural fluidity through the local circuitry of power. They remembered names, wives, bypass surgeries, ancient grudges among long dead pols, which fire chief’s son got jammed up in County for drink-driving in 2004 and which widow at the town library still felt slighted by a zoning fight from the Carey years. They could feel the pressure systems of a region in the almost mystical way an old farmer can smell a downpour before it breaks. They were not charismatic in the theatrical way in vogue now. They did not electrify. They absorbed. They circulated. They steeped in politics not as an instrument towards an end but as a habitat.

It is tempting, because the aesthetic of all this is so quaint, to mistake it for innocence. Politics was never innocent, clubhouse politics least of all. It was transactional, hierarchical, frequently suffocating, full of petty tyrants and graft and sexism. But it did at least presume a public. It presumed that politics was about a place and the people within, that governing meant arbitrating among interests one might actually see on line at ShopRite. It presumed continuity. It presumed memory. Most of all, it presumed that politics was made of human beings encountering each other in person rather than cultivated branding colliding in airless national space. These were politicians in the deepest and least glamorous sense: people for whom the management of interpersonal relationships was not a means, but a craft.

Marc Molinaro may be the last one left in New York who still believes that craft alone can be his salvation.

This is not because he is uniquely talented, though he is talented, nor because he is uniquely hollow, though hollowness has long been one of his great adaptive strengths. It is because he emerged from a specific world that is now mostly gone, a time when one tuned into a presidential debate with no idea who they were to vote for. This was a world in which politics was not yet fully nationalized, in which one could plausibly construct a public self out of attentiveness and raw stamina. It was a world in which biography could be fashioned not as a tabloid piece, but as a credential. Youngest mayor in America. Child of instability. Precocity under pressure. Making his way, rung by rung, up the well-trawled local ladder.

And for a long time that was enough. The Hudson Valley and its neighboring Catskills counties produced, rewarded, and in some sense required this type. Places neither wholly rural nor wholly suburban, too close to the city to be absolved of its pull and too far from it to profit much by its glamour, have long favored men who can translate between worlds without ever fully belonging to any of them.

Molinaro’s genius, if that is the word, was that he learned early how to turn his own life story into a civic asset. Not in the confessional mode that politics insufferably demanded until quite recently, where suffering must be narrated as key to policy, but in the older form where hardship functioned as an aura of authenticity. He came from the sort of background that journalists and voters alike knew how to describe to others with respectful compression. It was the kind of story that let every audience hear what it wanted, read a bit of themself into. Resilience. Bootstraps. Grit. A kid who cared too much. A kid who belonged in rooms full of adults. A kid who made himself legible to institutions because institutions— unlike football or morality or money— could at least be mastered.

That last part matters. What animated Marc Molinaro was never merely the desire to win but the desire to become intelligible to social structures larger than himself. He is a man who has spent his entire adult life seeking peer recognition from office. Not celebrity. Not adoration. Office. Title. The place in the chain of command, the stationery, the chief of a traveling entourage. There are people in politics who yearn to be loved and people who yearn to dominate and people who yearn to reorder the world according to a theory. His ambition is less theatrical. He yearns to be valedictorian of the proles.

This is why the office itself almost never mattered in the way outsiders imagined it should. Mayor, Assemblyman, County Executive, Gubernatorial Nominee, Congressman, Federal Administrator— these are far different in scope and prestige, yes, but they are also to a man like Molinaro variations on a single immutable spiritual condition. To hold office is to be where things happen, to be within circulation, to possess not power for power’s sake exactly but a kind of sanctioned relevance. He has always behaved like someone for whom irrelevance would constitute not merely professional failure but ontological collapse.

That last role he held, that almost spectral tenure as FTA Administrator, the one with the most cachet and the most power by far, placed him furthest from that feeling of relevance. And now here he is pursuing placement in a chamber no one pursues unless they have nowhere else to go or still believe, against all available evidence, that going there means something.

To say that Marc Molinaro is the last politician is not to flatter him. It is in some ways the opposite. It is to say that he belongs to an anthropological category that no longer fits the age. There is a deathliness in this type. Politics, as it now exists, rewards different instincts. It rewards those who can become symbols faster than they can register as human. It rewards ferocity, novelty, totalization. One is expected to stand for something unmistakable and preferably polarizing. One is expected to be optimized for clipping, for coalition-branding, for ideological readability at national scale. One is expected to produce emotion on demand.

Molinaro was built for the old test. He can still pass it with unflinching ease. Put him in any room across the five county stretch he seeks to claim and he will move through it with the sleek assurance of a creature evolved for exactly that space. He can make aging widows feel noticed, local reporters feel respected, and skeptical civil nobodies momentarily restored to rightful importance. None of this is fake, which is why it works. The mistake many of his critics and opposition researchers make is to imagine him as a pure opportunist, as though calculation and sincerity are mutually exclusive. They are not. In men like Molinaro, they are fused so completely as to become inseparable. He doesn’t mind. He has spent too long practicing attentiveness for it to be wholly false. The problem is that attentiveness is no longer enough, and the world he learned to operate in no longer exists in the same way.

Marc Molinaro has spent years being dissolved by this change.

This is part of why he fascinates. Not because he is uniquely consequential; he isn’t. Not because he is especially evil; he is less monstrous than many and more compromised than he advertises. Not because he represents the future; he very much does not. He fascinates because he is a remainder. A human leftover from a version of politics that has been stripped for parts without a proper funeral. He is what forms in the in-between, when time keeps cycling offices long after it has stopped generating belief in the forms that animate them.

He is difficult to hate cleanly because he is legible at human scale. He does not possess the sleek carnivorousness of the professional national Republican, the clarity of purpose of the left’s tribunes, or even the synthetic telegenic glow of the newer, focus-grouped New York climber. He is an anachronism.

This is what made his congressional stint feel so curiously weightless. He had spent decades honing a blade for a form of public life based on proximity, and then arrived in a House increasingly organized around distance: distance from district, distance from consequence, distance from any durable relationship between competence and reward. Congress wants you either theatrical or obedient. Preferably both. Congress doesn’t want you calling anyone in such a district that isn’t about to cut a check. It wants you to go on television and flatten your own region and career into two or three sentences.

He will wheel and deal Greene, Delaware, Otsego, Schoharie, and Albany counties until all know his name and then some. In November, he will almost certainly win, and he’ll make the forty-minute drive to represent both the dying breed at the VFW halls and the Brooklyn summer homers whose mail-in ballots booted him from Washington in the first place. He will return to a chamber unworthy of his résumé and perfectly suited to his psyche. He would rather be an institution to 140,000 than a clerical shadow to 350 million.

Climbers, when the ladder gives out, become pundits or consultants or college presidents with embossed business cards. They do not reattach themselves to a chamber with few cameras, little money, and no plausible upward script. This is not a stepping stone, for there is nowhere obvious left to step. It is not martyrdom, he isn’t tragic enough to play at that. It is not strategic by even the most charitable read of the consultant class, though consultants will of course reverse-engineer a way that it is. It is compulsion. Not merely a desire for office but a deep attachment to the practice of officeholding itself.

He wants to be in the bloodstream. He wants to have a district. He wants to spend the next decade attending the sorts of dry events from which ambitious men are supposed to have emancipated themselves. He wants constituents, petitioners, random old men with opinions about bike lanes. He wants the calls. He wants the little crises. He wants to be inexorably tied to a chunk of geography in the anchored, all-encompassing way politicians once did.

And so there he is, on a Friday in March, back among the roads and luncheons and careful handshakes, back in the weather pattern that formed him. Not a visionary. Not a conqueror. Not even, anymore, much of a climber. A politician.

He goes back to Albany because Albany is still, however dimly, a place where a politician can exist.

“…the [concert] was held deliberately to create an incident or breach of the peace.”

-John A. Gaffney, State Police Superintendent

“Our objective was to prevent the Paul Robeson concert and I think our objective was reached. Anything that happened after the organized demonstration was dispersed was entirely up to the individual citizens and should not be blamed on the patriotic organizations.”

-Milton Flynt, Commander of American Legion Post 274

“Each summer the year-round population of this region is augmented by large numbers of summer residents and vacationists. […] A large majority of these people come from New York City. […] There are active minorities of Communists and Communist sympathizers in some of these ‘colonies.’”

“…made the usual Communist attempt to ally the Party with Negroes and Jews as the likely victim ‘if the Fascist-inspired pro-war forces win.’”

“The Grand Jury is convinced that the violence […] was basically neither anti-Semitic nor anti-Negro in character.”

-Presentment of the October 1949 Grand Jury of Westchester County

I hate, I despise your festivals,
⠀and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
⠀I will not accept them,
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
⠀I will not look upon.

Take away from me the noise of your songs;
⠀I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

But let justice roll down like water
⠀and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

-Amos 5:21–24 (NRSVue)

For now, it’s just a traffic jam with inconvenient timing.

The sun’s shining over the Highlands, casting a warm glow over a line of cars and charter buses. State troopers direct traffic north, and in doing so usher them into the kill zone. Ahead and to the side, war heroes stand in partial uniform. A crude effigy of the most famous Black man in America— perhaps only contested by Jackie Robinson— hangs by the neck from the hook of a tow truck.

Housewives have packed for a picnic, not a pogrom. They’ve brought lawn chairs and Thermoses and sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. Children sit on the hoods of Chevys and Fords, legs swinging— half-bored, half-thrilled— watching the neat, single-file line of “outsiders” snake closer.

They’re not here to glare.

In the back seats, other children are still clutching concert pamphlets, stiff paper gone soft at the corners from nervous fingers. They don’t see the first rock leave a wicker basket curbside. They hear it: a sharp, hollow crack as it meets glass, then the explosive bloom of their windshield giving way. Shards spray the front row, breaching skin, muscle, and eye. On the shoulder red, white, and blue banners snap in the evening breeze, bright and emphatic, in case it wasn’t clear which side belongs to God.

All of this was— of course, entirely predictable. In fact, just down the road a week before, it had— we are at the second concert, the one organized in defiance of the riot that prevented the first one. The police will watch. The victims will be blamed.

If you pull the camera back, we are not in Birmingham or Selma, not some sticky Mississippi Delta nightmare we’ve safely tacked to a different region and a different kind of white person. It’s Westchester County, the Empire State Building visible from the crests of hiking trails on a clear day, where you can now buy Paul Robeson’s biography in a cozy indie bookstore and then drive the road where they dragged people from their cars for daring to hear him sing.

There is much more to this story than a small-town concert— there’s the man who performed, the two crowds that converged— twice, and the river town that tried very hard to forget what it did. It’s also a story about what we inherit from that dissonance.

We start with Paul Robeson: the great boogeyman of this story. “Renaissance man” is the phrase you reach for when your brain would rather itemize his talents than face what was done to him: living proof that a Black man could master every field this country claims to revere— football, law, acting, music, politics— and still be denied belonging.

He was born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1898, to the Reverend William Robeson, who had escaped slavery in North Carolina and Louisa Bustill Robeson, from Philadelphia’s Bustill clan— part of the city’s small free Black elite. His mother died in a freak accident when he was five. Princeton at this point was a town of contradiction: one of the larger Black populations in the North, about 18%, and also a mecca of reactionary academia: where architects of poison like Woodrow Wilson would shift public perception of the Civil War decidedly towards the Confederacy. Princeton would not regularly admit Black students until the 1940s.

A pastor’s son, Paul grew up at the mercy of his father’s calling. When the elder Robeson’s sermons on social justice made him unwelcome in a given pulpit, the family packed up and pivoted to another. His formative years would be spent in Somerville. He was not merely a model student at Somerville High: he was in the glee club, drama club, played multiple sports (especially football), and was obsessed with debate and public speaking. He graduated as valedictorian and that combination— grades and that unquantifiable but very perceptible star power— earned him a scholarship to be the third Black student to ever attend Rutgers.

His reception at Rutgers was exactly what you’d expect. White teammates on the football team tried to terrorize him off the team. He was kept out of the glee club because he couldn’t attend the white’s-only functions where they performed. His father became deathly ill and Paul became his primary caretaker. He stayed anyway. By the time he left, he’d piled varsity letters, been named All-American twice on the field, been tapped for both Phi Beta Kappa and Cap and Skull, and was elected class valedictorian. On graduation, he gave a thunderous oration imploring his almost entirely white classmates to “clasp friendly hands” and work towards the goal of equality regardless of race. It’s safe to say he’d made his point.

He lands where you’d expect for a young Black striver with an intellectual knack and something to prove: Harlem. The Harlem Renaissance is in bloom, and Robeson throws himself into it while he grinds through Columbia Law. He steps away from school to start acting— first onstage, then on the silver screen— and earns critical acclaim in The Emperor Jones. When he’s used up all his leave, he somehow manages to juggle reading law with playing in the NFL for two seasons, graduating in 1923. He tours internationally, including appearing in the London productions of Othello and the musical Show Boat, as well as the Swiss experimental film Borderline.

As his fame grew, so did the pressure to not rock the boat— to be outwardly grateful, decorous, apolitical. Robeson refused that façade. Walking home during a Rhondda Valley lockout, he ran into a choir of Welsh miners protesting in London and joined their singing— spontaneous, uncalculated, the polar opposite of the expectations of a Black star. He returned to Wales repeatedly to sing for the miners, and even after the U.S. government revoked his passport, he sang to them decades later by telephone.

His politics also put him on a collision course with the anti-Communist consensus hardening around him. On a visit to Stalin’s Moscow, he famously said “here I am not a Negro but a human being for the first time in my life.” And in a Berlin train station en route, his wife Essie later recalled being confronted by Nazi brownshirts, disturbed by the sight of his lighter-skinned wife beside him. In a world drawing its lines in bolder and bolder ink, Robeson kept stepping over them.

As the common enemy of fascism rose, he threw himself also into that fight. A self-declared “citizen of the world,” he came to Spain to sing to the International Brigades. He turned up in the S.S.’s Sonderfahndungsliste G.B.— the black book of who to arrest if Britain fell.

Back in the United States, he fought on the home front: sang at military bases, headlined war-bond rallies— all while insisting the war against fascism meant nothing without a war against segregation at home. And for a few summers after— 1946, 1947, 1948— he sang in the Peekskill area without incident. Things would change by 1949.

That spring in Paris— with the Berlin Airlift still underway— Robeson took the stage at a Soviet-organized peace conference at the Salle Pleyel. He sang “Joe Hill,” the ballad of a Wobbly labor organizer railroaded into a murder conviction and executed by firing squad in Utah. He spoke off the cuff, as he was often to do, about Black life in America and the lunacy of potentially sleepwalking into another war. Before he spoke however, the Associated Press had somehow already wired his remarks back to Rockefeller Plaza: attributing to him language he hadn’t used, a comparison of American policy to that of Hitler and Goebbels, and a claim that Black Americans would support the Soviet Union in a war against the United States. It was completely false, but that was no matter.

It detonated perfectly with an American public already on edge. It created a firestorm in the press, and soon Congress was doing what Congress does. House Un-American Activities Committee chair John Wood subpoenaed Jackie Robinson to denounce Robeson’s speech— even liberal darling Eleanor Roosevelt used her column to scold him. And by the lead-up to the next summer concert in the vicinity of Peekskill, the editorials in the local nightly preordained what was to come:

It appears that Peekskill is to be “treated” to another concert visit by Paul Robeson, renowned Negro baritone.

Time was when the honor would have been ours— all ours. As things stand today, like most folks who put America first, we’re a little doubtful of that “honor,” finding the luster in the once illustrious name of Paul Robeson now almost hidden by political tarnish.

Paul Robeson rose to preeminence as an American artist on stage and radio, and was applauded by an America that was oblivious to his color. In spite of modest background, he rose with highest academic honors through our college system, and was chosen an all-American football star.

His magnificent voice, which thrilled millions, opened up a brilliant career for him that easily could have led to a place in the halls of American fame. His influence with his people, properly directed, could have won a place for him beside Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, as truly great Negro Americans.

Any possibility of such attainment is now, in the opinion of most Americans, lost to him forever.

The local concert will be held this coming Saturday at the Lakeland Acres Picnic Grounds. The singer is being represented by the People’s Artists “for the benefit of the Harlem Chapter, Civil Rights Congress,” according to posters appearing in the neighborhood.

Inasmuch as the Civil Rights Congress has been cited as “subversive and Communist” by Attorney General Tom Clark, and has been referred to by the Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities as being “dedicated not to the broader issues of civil liberties, but specifically to the defense of individual Communists and the Communist Party,” it becomes evident that every ticket purchased to the Peekskill concert will drop nickels and dimes in the till basket of an Un-American political organization.

If the Robeson “concert” this Saturday follows the pattern of its predecessors, it will consist of an unsavory mixture of song and political talk by one who has described Russia as his “second motherland,” and who has avowed “the greatest contempt for the democratic press,”

The time for tolerant silence that signifies approval is running out. Peekskill wants no rallies that support iron curtains, concentration camps, blockades and NKVD’s, no matter how masterful the decor, nor how sweet the music.

-Unsigned editorial titled “The Discordant Note” written by E. Joe Albertson, editor — The Peekskill Evening Star, August 23rd, 1949

Robeson was a marked man.

The first time I came to Cortlandt for this story was an accident. It was early December. We were driving back from a weekend in Vermont— an escape for a few burned-out Zohran staff and volunteers, huddled into a rental car bound for LaGuardia, I insisted the Taconic would be faster than I-91. That’s where I went to high school. That’s the 110-degree hell-exit onto Mountain Road I had to merge across when I was sixteen. At some point someone had to pee and perfect— there’s a public bathroom where Main Street abuts the Metro-North tracks in Cold Spring.

The GPS recalculates. Bear Mountain Bridge, then the Palisades? Cut across the George Washington Bridge to the Triborough? An excellent way to get fleeced. No— 202 to Route 9 and the soup of parkways in southern Westchester I know exist but can’t describe.

It was a particularly frigid day: snow on the ground, dusk haze— few commonalities with the summer of ‘49. But if you’ve never driven here, it’s a real treat. Coming from Garrison on 9D, you pass thigh-high, crude stone walls that once separated farms— land that reforested generations ago. Carrying on, the road arcs towards the river, teasing you with brief glimpses of what is to come through the tree line.

Then, almost immediately after the Town of Cortlandt sign, the trees fall away and the whole scene appears at once: only feet ahead road transforms into the deck of the Bear Mountain Bridge— for a hot minute in the mid-1920s, the longest suspension bridge in the world— and the ancient Hudson Highlands behind it. Anthony’s Nose is flush against the road; Bear Mountain sits across the river. Only then do you register the height: a 400-foot drop, held back by newer, properly cemented stone walls. A poor man’s Big Sur, climbing as it winds toward Peekskill.

Cortlandt is one of those municipalities that doesn’t read like a cohesive place so much as a rectangle drawn around one: it awkwardly encircles Peekskill— part of Cortlandt until 1940. Keep going south along the old Albany Post Road and Cortlandt reasserts itself— past industrial Buchanan, Verplanck, and Montrose, then through wealthier Croton-on-Hudson. Just shy of 43,000 people live in Cortlandt now— more than in Peekskill— though the number was closer to 18,000 in 1949.

At this point, the illusion created by the state parks of untouched wilderness has imploded into the bedroom communities of Westchester. This was less the case in 1949, though the Peekskill area was changing quite a bit: already 600 weekday commuters to the city (estimates suggest a peak just before COVID of around 7,600).

But the weekday commute was only one version of this relationship. In summer, the population spiked by about 30,000— and that “seasonal” influx wasn’t the tidy commuter class postwar Westchester would later flatter itself with. It was Jewish New Yorkers hardscrabbling their way into the lower middle class: renting bungalows, sharing the lakes and the roads, building little worlds that were— by some affectionately, by some not— called “colonies.”

To the townies, the difference didn’t just exist; it could be policed. They heard it in Yiddish accents and surnames, in their dress and ritual, in their conflicting perspectives on if and how to “Americanize,” in where and how they prayed. And because many were utopian without shame (some colonies were associated with different communist and anarchist movements, and the erstwhile American Labor Party had a local chapter since conception in the 1930s)— these communities became suspect by default in the paranoid vernacular of the time: not just places people went, but places ideas circulated. In their minds, a contagion risk. What started as children’s camps and summer escapes ossified into something more permanent: a presence that locals could not pretend not to see, and could not stop trying to classify. “No Hebrews” began slipping into local business ads and deed covenants.

It also obscured a deeper truth: Jews already lived here— a handful of Sephardi families dating to New Netherland and a larger group steeped in a Conservative congregation anchored enough to bury their dead along Hillside Avenue. But in the townie imagination, Jewishness was increasingly not allowed to coexist with “local.” It meant outsider, and once the Cold War tightened public consciousness, it meant “Red” as well.

Sensing the rising tension leading up to the concert, a local civil rights activist, Victor Sharrow of Crompound, sent a telegram to the state Attorney General Nathaniel Goldstein:

This is an urgent telegram in reference to a lead article on page one, a lead editorial, and a letter to the editor on page four of the Peekskill, N.Y., Evening Star of Tuesday, August 23, 1949, concerning a “Summer Musicale” [sic] sponsored by the “Peoples [sic] Artists,” Paul Robeson, guest artist. The tone of the combined articles are to do “something” to see to it that this affair is disrupted or to see that it’s not carried out in a peaceful manner.

As an individual, and Chairman of the Crompound Branch of the American Labor Party, I am writing to you as Attorney General of the State of New York, to use your office, to see that this affair, contracted for to occur at the Lakeland Picnic Grounds, Hillside Avenue, Peekskill, N.Y., Saturday, August 27th, 1949, 8 P.M. is held, and held peacefully. A letter with the enclosed articles follows.

How is it that we have this correspondence? Seemingly someone at either the telegram office or the Attorney General’s office leaked it to the Evening Star, which published it along with Sharrow’s name and where he lived the next day. When asked for comment, Assistant Attorney General Kent Brown acknowledged it had been received, and that as of then the Attorney General’s office did not intend to take any action to protect the concert.

I get to Peekskill the same way Robeson arrived that August night: by train from Grand Central, though I step off into a very different Peekskill than he did. Peekskill today is 46.2% Hispanic, 31.9% White, and 18.7% Black. In other words, whatever story you inferred about “a small white river town”— the present doesn’t cooperate.

But Peekskill does have many of the small things small river towns all have. A Main Street begging to be walked. Foursquares and big apartment buildings dotting the hills. A municipal instinct to turn a brush with a famous man into a permanent civic asset.

Here, the famous man is Abraham Lincoln.

A brief stop by the president-elect at the local freight depot as his inaugural train made its way to Washington has rendered the place a museum to him, restored as the Lincoln Depot Museum. He pulled in at 2:00 p.m. on February 19th, 1861, stepped onto a baggage cart that would be his impromptu podium, spoke four sentences, and left.

I don’t mean to be too snide. It’s actually kind of sweet. It’s also revealing.

Robeson had called ahead from Grand Central to a friend, Helen Rosen, to relay he had heard there may be trouble at that night’s concert. They decided instead of him taking a taxi to the concert as planned, she would ask some friends in Yorktown (her car was apparently too shoddy for the task) to deliver him to the concert grounds. Apparently, there was no cause for concern by the station that day. That decision may have saved his life. The riot had already started.

I begin my walk to Oregon Road.

There were two concert grounds: the concert on August 27th was at the Lakeland Acres picnic area— now the Hollow Brook Golf Club. The second, rescheduled, defiant concert was on September 4th at confusingly, the overgrown Hollow Brook Country Club, now a small stretch of single-family homes about half a mile further up the road.

Even then, the place was already being rewritten. Westchester’s postwar sprawl was laying its outer ring around Peekskill: new roads, new plats, new setbacks, the slow suburban reflex to pave over anything that didn’t fit the brochure.

The riots landed in a place mid-transition: not yet polished manicured suburbia, no longer the old river town hinterland. Roads were being pushed outward, houses multiplying, and yet even today there remain some stubborn patches of trees along the path.

Cross into Cortlandt and the signage changes: North Division Street becomes Oregon Road, and sidewalks start becoming optional. The riot’s geography is trapped in that aforementioned administrative weirdness— Peekskill’s name is on the tin, but the violence was confined to the Town of Cortlandt.

Shortly after the town border, I deviated to the Cortlandt Town Hall for a bureaucratic errand. I was born here— though like many, I’d long confused the municipality of record with Peekskill itself. I used to resent that.

I grew up across from the shuttered, though not yet demolished Julia L. Butterfield Hospital in Cold Spring, the one that might’ve delivered me if it had held on nine more years. My mother had to choose between two hospitals: Vassar Brothers in Poughkeepsie— the working-class city where she and my grandparents lived, worked, and later, so did I— and Hudson Valley Hospital in “Cortlandt Manor”— Westchesterese for “not Peekskill.” The latter won.

To me, Cortlandt was never anything but distant, tony Westchester: a place where my mother drove, bleary-eyed, at 5:30 a.m., to earn a wage she could raise two children on, a place I only saw from the train between my two worlds or occasionally, where I needed to transfer when I mindlessly boarded an electric train instead of diesel. It never felt like mine, certainly never made narrative sense. Today as I walk the hollowed-out streets of Verplanck and Buchanan, past the skeleton of Indian Point, across the traffic circle on Oregon Road— once Hillside Avenue, renamed after the headlines, as if renaming could erase it— where the sidewalk disappears into snow and ice, where a crime passed for security and silence passed for justice: it feels... closer.

On the same page as “The Discordant Note”— buffered by a letter from Mrs. A.S. Keith denouncing the local school board’s decision to scrap their core curriculum for encouraging “anti-American ideals” in middle schoolers— was a letter to the editor on Robeson’s impending concert, this one signed:

August 18, 1949

Editor,

The Evening Star

Peekskill, N.Y.

Dear Sir,

The present days seem to be crucial ones for the residents of this area with the present epidemic of polio. Now we are being plagued with another, namely the appearance of Paul Robeson and his Communistic followers due to appear here August 27th. It is an epidemic because they are coming here to induce others to join their … [sic] ranks and it is unfortunate that some of the weaker minded are susceptible to their fallacious teachings unless something is done by the loyal Americans of this area.

Quite a few years ago a similar organization, the Klu Klux Klan, [sic] appeared in Verplanck and received their just reward. Needless to say I am not intimidating violence in this case, but I believe that we should give this matter serious consideration and strive to find a remedy that will cope with the situation the same way as Verplanck and with the same result that they will never reappear in this area.

The irony of this meeting is that they intend to appear at Lakeland Acres Picnic Area. If you are familiar with this location you will find that it is located directly across the street from the Hillside and Assumption Cemeteries. Yes, directly across the street from the resting place of those men who paid the supreme sacrifice in order to insure [sic] our democratic form of government.

Are we, as loyal Americans, going to forget these men and the principles they died for or are we going to follow their beliefs and rid ourselves of the subversive organization? America, in general, seems to have forgotten the past war and its sacrifices but if we tolerate organizations such as this we are apt to face a repetition of the past and in the near future.

If we, of this area, have not forgotten the war, then let us cooperate with the American Legion and similar veteran organizations and vehemently oppose their appearance or reappearances. Let us leave no doubt in their minds that they are unwelcome around here either now or in the future.

So far no action has been taken by organizations or individuals in opposition to this rally but I trust that it will be properly acted upon by the proper organizations or authorities.

Sincerely yours,

Vincent Boyle

-Letter to the Editor — The Peekskill Evening Star, August 23rd, 1949

Boyle’s letter in many ways speaks for itself, but also invokes an older memory worth delving into. Peekskill by this point was about one third Catholic, Catholics who along with their Jewish and Black neighbors only two decades ago had been terrorized by another form of “America first:” the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

In the river towns of the Lower Hudson Valley, the Klan is not a distant Southern punchline. It was the Second Klan of the 1920s: a mass fraternal movement that operated locally as a civic institution— something like an Elks Lodge with a racial and religious covenant— fueled by the national popularity of The Birth of a Nation and bound together by whiteness, Protestantism, and the determination to police who belonged in a changing America. These were business owners and shopkeepers, men with social standing and political sway. They lost. They were beaten back by local alliances— churches, veterans, neighbors— deciding, explicitly, that the Klan was not welcome.

That history matters not because Boyle is making an astute comparison— he isn’t— but because he is relying on a shared local shorthand: the Klan as the last time the community had to decide who belonged, who didn’t, and what form of “opposition” counted as legitimate. The record of that earlier fight is still visible in the region’s newspapers, parish life, and political memory: a period when “patriotism” and intimidation also travelled together, and when defeating the Klan required a counter-coalition sturdy enough to deny it oxygen.

The irony is that, with that fight still within living memory, the lines of the next battle were merely drawn to include more in their ranks. Along with the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and Catholic Veterans— the Westchester County Jewish War Veterans were also among the organizations that helped form the anti-Robeson mob.

Coming to the site of the first concert, it is immediately apparent why it was chosen. It’s a hollow: a shallow, bowl-shaped divot in the landscape, one that the novelist Howard Fast— reluctant lead organizer of the first concert, author of the most detailed account of the riot— recalls as a physical trap:

To understand what happened from here on, you must have in your mind a clear picture of Lakeland Picnic Grounds and of the area where the concert was set up. The entrance to the grounds is a left turn off the main road as you drive from Peekskill; the entrance is double, coming together in Y shape to a narrow dirt road. About eighty feet from the entrance the road is embanked, with sharp dirt sides dropping about twenty feet to shallow pools of water.

About forty feet of the road is embanked in this fashion, and then for a quarter of a mile or so it sweeps down into a valley— all of this private road and a part of the picnic grounds. At the end of this road, there is a sheltered hollow with a broad, meadowgrass bottom, a sort of natural arena, hidden by hummocks of low hills from the sight of anyone on the public highway. It was in this hollow that the paraphernalia for the concert had been set up: a large platform, two thousand wooden folding chairs, and a number of spotlights powered by a portable generator.

-Howard Fast, “Peekskill, USA”

Hours before the concert, Hillside Avenue was already claimed. Dozens of cars lined the road— not concertgoers, but counterprotesters. Local veterans’ groups had rallied themselves into something they called a parade. In practice it was a rolling blockade: epithets, jeers, and men positioning cars and bodies to choke off the entrance to the picnic grounds.

When Howard Fast arrived at 6:50— about an hour before the concert— there were roughly 120 people already down in the hollow, mostly women and small children. Another car came in soon after.

It would be the last car to reach the hollow that night.

By then the “counterprotest” had curdled into a siege. At the entrance, men pressed up against the forked roads and the narrow dirt road that dropped toward the hollow, testing it the way a crowd tests a fence: leaning, surging, feeling for the moment it gives. Small knots broke off and tried to force their way down, shoved back only when concertgoers and a handful of organizers met them shoulder to shoulder in the chokepoint. But there were only thirty-so men and teenage boys in the hollow, and increasingly fewer with the strength left to fight. Above, the road was locked with cars and bodies; below, the stage and chairs sat waiting in a pocket of meadow. The trap was sprung.

Now there was a sudden brilliant glare and the hills to our left stood sharp and black against a yellow background. There was a moment of silent cessation, and one of our men leaped up on the truck and cried,

“A cross is burning!”

We could only see the glare, but the symbolic meaning was not lost upon us. In this sweet land the movement had been rounded out; the burning cross, the symbol of all that is rotten and mean and evil in our land had blessed us. Our night was complete, and we would do well to kneel before the new patriots.

-Howard Fast, “Peekskill, USA”

No one seems to know exactly when it happened— only that, at some point in the crush, a Navy veteran named William Secor suddenly doubled over with a hot, blooming pain in his side. He looked down and saw blood: a blade had cut him. The news moved faster than anything else that night. The crowd, already drunk on permission, honed into something sharper, something even more violent. It was certainly not the first blood that night, but it proved a strong alibi.

The next attack would be the most vicious.

For one thing, it was still daylight; later, when night fell, our own sense of organization helped us much more, but this was daylight and they poured down the road and into us, swinging broken fence posts, billies, bottles, and wielding knives. Their leaders had been drinking from pocket flasks and bottles right up to the moment of the attack, and now as they beat and clawed at our lines, they poured out a torrent of obscene words and slogans. They were conscious of Adolf Hitler. He was a god in their ranks and they screamed over and over,

“We’re Hitler’s boys— Hitler’s boys!”

“We’ll finish his job!”

“God bless Hitler and fuck you n⸺ bastards and Jew bastards!”

“Lynch Robeson! Give us Robeson! We’ll string that big n⸺ up! Give him to us, you bastards!”

I remember hoping and praying that Paul Robeson was nowhere near— that he was far away, not on the road, not anywhere near.

“What Medina started, we’ll finish!” they howled. “We’ll kill every commie bastard in America!” Oh, they were conscious, all right, highly conscious.

-Howard Fast, “Peekskill, USA”

Up on Hillside Avenue, the scene had tilted. Tight columns of veterans’ organizations moved through a crowd that had swollen into the thousands— townies drawn out by the weeks of agitation in the press, now standing shoulder to shoulder along the road. Traffic locked up. Engines idled. No one was going anywhere.

This said, even among the “patriotic elements,” lines were being drawn:

Witnesses testify that the Jewish War Veterans were booed, hissed and insulted even while they were participating in the anti-Robeson parade and that members of the crowd standing on the edge of the road shouted at these uniformed Jews, “Dirty K—s,” “Jew bastards,” etc.

Some of these Jewish Veterans of Foreign Wars were threatened with attack when returning to Peekskill after the parade had disbanded. This ceased when they were recognized as Peekskill men.

It has been explained to investigators that “…It’s a Commie trick to put on a uniform and say, “I fought for my country.” Those New York Jews are all Commies.”

-Violence in Peekskill — American Civil Liberties Union

The other lead organizer that night— John Zimmer, the parade’s grand marshal, climbed onto the bed of a truck and ordered the crowd to disperse. The instruction landed as a suggestion. As the parade dissolved and the concert was effectively scuttled, attention shifted: not to leaving, but to the cars— concertgoers trapped in place, suddenly visible, and suddenly vulnerable.

“The roads had been blocked in both directions. As we waited in line, a man wearing a Legionnaire’s cap came over and opened the door of our car, and said to my husband:

“Park your car over here,” pointing to the roadside, “We’re going to get these goddamned Jews.”

He walked down the line of cars, opened some car doors and repeated the same words he had used to us. Then he would skip two or three cars, and after scrutinizing the people inside, would go to the next one.”

-Violence in Peekskill — American Civil Liberties Union

Jammed in traffic was the car carrying Paul Robeson, boxed in a middle seat between two of Helen Rosen’s friends. The closer they crept, the louder it got— screams, whistles, shattering glass. Then the rocks started. The car took hits. In the confusion, they managed to peel out before anyone could positively spot him, slipping away to a friend’s cottage by Still Lake in New Castle.

But the mob wasn’t only hunting Paul Robeson the singer. It was hunting what he represented— anything that looked like spilling across boundaries, and that was exemplified in his son. Paul Jr. had recently married a white woman— widely reported on, including in the Evening Star. Another interracial couple was stopped and held while rioters inspected them, satisfied only once they accepted they hadn’t found the younger Robeson.

When the violence spilled into the hollow itself, it shifted from an attack to a twisted ritual. Three men climbed onto the stage and demanded the few musicians who remained perform “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a forced soundtrack for the spectacle. Others dragged wooden folding chairs into a pile, and fed them and anything else they could find into a fire.

Hours in, state troopers and Westchester County police finally arrived— peculiarly late, and not as rescuers. They began corralling the concertgoers into a clearing and detaining them on the pretext of Secor’s stabbing, sweeping the grounds for attendees still hiding in the dark. Only after word came back that Secor was not dead did they start releasing people. The rest of the night became cleanup and containment: troopers shuttling battered concertgoers home while police gathered up the “subversive materials” trawling the fields seeking evidence of a crime committed by the victims.

Three days later, a crowd assembled at Harlem’s Golden Gate Ballroom. Before the doors even opened, the overflow on Lenox Avenue turned the sidewalk into a second stump— a wider audience not subject to fire code. Benjamin Davis, Harlem’s Black Communist councilman, was out there dispatching the evening’s thesis with a line that landed as both joke and deterrent: “Let them touch a hair of Paul Robeson’s head and they’ll pay a price they never calculated.”

Davis was ensnared in the Smith Act trials— charged, in the language of the state, with conspiring to overthrow the government for the crime of party membership. Inside, he took the microphone first:

“We warn all the flunkies of Wall Street whether they wear white sheets or black robes like Judge Medina, that we are peace-loving people. But we are not pacifists and we’re going to stand up toe to toe and slug it out.”

”We are going to protect ourselves!”

”They talk about us overthrowing the government, but they don’t say anything about the government overthrowing the people.”

When the ballroom hit capacity, Robeson finally spoke— braiding his remarks with song:

“I’m going back to Peekskill with my friends and they’ll know where to find me.”

”This marks the turning point. From now we take the offensive, and that offensive begins tonight at this meeting.”

”The surest way to get protection is to show them from now on we’re going to protect ourselves!”

He closed by singing “No More Auction Block:”

No more pint of salt for me
No more peck of corn for me
No driver’s lash for me

No more, no more!

In four days, he would sing in Cortlandt.

Harlem answered with song; Westchester answered with gunfire. In the dead of night, shots were fired at the home of the owner of the Hollow Brook Country Club— slated to host the next concert. Bumper stickers, lawn signs, banners began being printed:

“WAKE UP AMERICA, PEEKSKILL DID!”

Eugene Bullard’s name should be everywhere.

Born in Columbus, Georgia in 1895 to a former slave— seventh of ten children— he learned early that his world planned to suffocate him. He would later recall being “as trusting as a chickadee and as friendly,” sheltered, briefly, by the small mercies of youth— believing people were basically decent— right up until the one-two punch that snapped the illusion. At age seven, his mother died. At eight, after his father fought with a racist supervisor, a lynch mob came. His father survived— lights off, shotgun pointed at the door— but that’s an experience you can’t shake: the knowledge that your neighborhood can become a noose with a few hours’ notice.

Bullard’s response wasn’t acceptance. It wasn’t patience. It was escape.

He ran away as a boy— accounts vary on his age, eleven maybe, which is itself telling: when you’re a Black kid in the Jim Crow South, your biography doesn’t get kept with particular care. He fell in with the Stanley clan: English Romani horse-racers roaming rural Georgia and absorbed a dangerous idea: that someplace else might treat him like a person.

At sixteen, he did what the United States has always found unforgivable in the people it mistreats: he left. He stowed away on a German steamer out of Norfolk, landed in Scotland, and described it like crossing a membrane— being “born into a new world.” He drifted through England on whatever work would have him, even serving as a carnival target; humiliation paid better than starvation.

Then he reached Paris— the city that, in ten thousand American stories, makes artists and frees women and reinvigorates everyone who touches it. In Bullard’s case, it did something more basic: it gave him space to breathe. He learns French, lived by his wits, and threw himself into boxe anglaise.

He boxed. That mattered— not just because it put money in his pocket, but because it was one of the few professions where a Black man could be publicly exceptional and have a crowd pay to watch it.

Then Europe detonated.

At nineteen, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. He fought at Verdun, was torn up by shrapnel, and earned the croix de guerre— an honor that said, unambiguously: you belong here. He changed his middle name from James to Jacques.

But he wasn’t done yet.

His injuries kept him from returning to the infantry. In recovery he met a pilot, wrangled his way into aviation, and got his license seven months later: the first Black American pilot, no additional qualifiers. When the United States entered the war, he applied to fly for the American Expeditionary Forces and never heard back. He crossed an ocean to escape Jim Crow, and it still found him.

After the war, Bullard stayed in Paris and built yet another life: nightclub impresario, gym owner, fixture of the Black expat scene— Josephine Baker babysitting his kids, a young Langston Hughes washing dishes. When war returned, he volunteered again, first in counterintelligence, later in the defense of Orléans. A German shell threw him into a wall; he hitchhiked to Spain with a damaged spine that would haunt him for life.

And then he came back— to the country of his birth, after twenty-eight years.

His fourteen medals and Paris notoriety did not follow him to Harlem. He took odd jobs: security guard, perfume salesman, interpreter for Louis Armstrong. The story doesn’t resolve into triumph; it resolves into America being America.

And at fifty-one, he was photographed being beaten by state troopers— for the crime of letting a friend talk him into going to a concert upstate.

The second concert didn’t simply change venues. It changed time. The first was an 8 p.m. affair— the kind of darkness that helps a mob pretend it’s anonymous. The second was set for 2 p.m., broad daylight. Press would be there. The authorities would be there. If the first riot could be filed away as whiskey-fueled hooliganism, the second would be harder to launder. That was the point.

And in the hollow, for a couple of hours, it worked.

Robeson arrived under escort. Men fanned out into a loose human ring around the seats. American flags bracketed the stage; veteran’s caps dotted the crowd like punctuation. Around 20,000 people turned out. “The Star-Spangled Banner” opened the program— this time by choice, not by coercion— followed by pianists moving through Bach and Chopin, then-obscure Pete Seeger, and then Robeson fulfilling the promise he made in Harlem.

The daylight seemed to be doing its job. From a vantage point in the hollow, for a few hours, the state managed to perform what it always claims it can do: keep order.

Outside, the violence had already started.

As cars and buses began to thread back out, they had three options—north or south along Hillside Avenue, or east on Red Mill Road— and all three were waiting. Not chaos, not chance: hunting grounds. Sentries with hours of preparation.

A few reporters clocked it in advance— because it wasn’t subtle. One New York Times reporter watched men stacking stones into cairns along the roads as if they were marking a trail. Others saw cars already loaded with basketfuls of rocks. A pickup truck shuttled hecklers from the center of Peekskill out towards the bottlenecks.

And then: state troopers directing traffic.

This is the hinge. A dizzying number of troopers were present that day; they weren’t absent— and the moment they started “managing” the exit, the story stopped being “locals got out of hand” and becomes what it actually was: the state guiding a column of civilians into an ambush it had every reason to anticipate. Call it incompetence if you need the comfort of a neutral word. Call it the primal reflex of looking the other way when the right people are doing the hurting. But from behind the glass it feels like what it is: a trap.

And it didn’t just happen to the hotheads and organizers. Every single person there— drivers, passengers, women, men, kids— had to run that gauntlet. It was indiscriminate.

I tried to walk it. After four miles, snow and a narrow shoulder proved it impossible to reach the kill zones.

So I ducked into a strip mall pizzeria for two slices and enough water bottles to hit the $10 card minimum. A fireplace looped silently on a flatscreen. A guy comes in to riff with the staff— “…es Trump, vamos a tomar Groenlandia, a tomar Colombia, a tomar Dinamarca, dios bendiga a los Estados Unidos…” And then it was an Uber, the station platform, a train closing in from the mountainside: the clean, efficient choreography of getting back.

For the people in the cars, there was no choreography— only endurance:

The rocks began again, and I jockeyed on. We had gone over a mile now. The car ahead pulled over to the side and the driver sat with his head hanging over the wheel. His head was bloody all over.

After a mile and a half there were no more large, organized groups of rock-throwers, but individuals instead. An occasional crashing blow reminded us of the individuals. (But further on, three, four, five and ten miles from Peekskill, organized groups were stationed on every overpass, to pelt the cars below with rocks. In this way, many cars which had never been near the concert that day were badly smashed and their occupants hurt.)

-Howard Fast, “Peekskill, USA”

Hourlong drives felt endless until they turned onto familiar streets. By the time the dust settled, more than 140 people had been injured— windshields cratered, windows blown out, bodies cut and bloodied— an entire crowd made to pay for the crime of showing up in daylight.

As one group reached their destination— they discovered that someone had slapped a sticker onto their bus:

“COMMUNISM IS TREASON. BEHIND COMMUNISM STANDS— THE JEW! THEREFORE, FOR MY COUNTRY— AGAINST THE JEWS”

-Violence in Peekskill — American Civil Liberties Union

An interesting document is found in Robeson’s FBI file called an “Inquiry on Racial Incitations Practiced by Communists.” The author, unnamed, was paid $1,200 by the State of New York to create it for the Westchester Grand Jury. The official memorandum adding it to the file notes that it was also “being made available to American Legion Posts in the United States through the National Americanism Commission and [REDACTED] felt that such information should also be made available to the Bureau.”

“It must be stated to the credit of the American citizens of negro extraction, that all major negro organizations in the United States as well as the negro press, with few exceptions, have repudiated Robeson’s Paris declaration of disloyalty and that less than a fifth of the total numbers of demonstrators were negroes.”

“…the following appear to be the motive for this C.P. [Communist Party] organized demonstrations”

“1. To start a fresh build-up of Paul Robeson as a representative of the Negro Race…”

“2. To take the offensive especially amongst the negroes, for a campaign of disloyalty to the U.S. in case of war with Russia.”

“3. A hostile semi-rural neighborhood within easy reach of New York was deliberately selected with a view of dramatizing alleged disloyalty of the negroes as expressed in the person of Paul Robeson clashing with the loyal white populace of the county.”

“4. The C.P. real organizer of this meeting, fully anticipated the antagonism of the patriotic elements of the county. They sought under the cover of free speech protection from the County authorities for their August 27 disloyal demonstration.”

“5. Having failed to obtain that protection at the first meeting, the C.P. mobilized all communist-controlled organizations in and around New York for the second turnout of September 4, to force the issue of unlimited free speech and to further emphasize the hostility between the loyal whites and Robeson’s disloyal negroes.”

“6. The C.P. strong arm, the socalled [sic] “Security Guard”, was mobilized to intimidate, beat down and disperse the loyal whites in case the authorities failed to furnish protection for the demonstration.”

“7. The hostility of the police authorities protecting the meeting towards the “Security Guard” may have been anticipated by the C.P. high command, but they were willing to risk the mass display of the “Guard” to show its strength as well as to test the “Guard” itself under actual battle conditions.”

“The reason why the C.P. selects a theatrical extrovert type like Paul Robeson to lead off its negro incitation program will be better understood when the program is fully explained. In short a theatrical program requires a theatrical personality.”

“THE JEWS:”

“Second, in importance, in the racial incitation politics of the Communist Party, are the Jews.”

“…because the Jews, more experienced in things of ideology and politics [than Black people], are beginning to see through the trickery of the Communist High Command in Moscow.”

“The Communist have played around with Jewish nationalism off and on also, but their main stalking “horse” amongst the Jews has been the issue of Anti-Semitism which they have exploited to the ‘nth degree.”

“If one were to estimate the racial or national background of the Communist demonstrators at Peekskill in the order of their numerical importance, the following approximately would be the result:

1. Jews: 8,000
2. Slavic Groups: 3,000
3. Negroes: 2,000
4. Latins & Italians: 1,000
5. Anglo-Saxons: 1,000”

On the floor of the House, Jacob Javits rises to speak. A liberal Republican from the Jewish tenements of the Lower East Side— raised helping his mother sell nonperishable goods from a pushcart to morning commuters, a kind of backstory New York loves to romanticize only once it’s safely in the past, not on the 6 train— to night school at Columbia and now the halls of Congress, Javits has learned to speak with tact, even under duress.

He declares plainly that the Constitution must apply equally in North and South. The law, he says, should fall “with equal weight on the hoodlums who participated in the riot as well as on any Communist or Communist sympathizers who incited it.” He connects the blood on Hillside Avenue to the long-fought battle for federal anti-lynching legislation. But it is not enough.

Then comes John Rankin.

Rankin. A progressive Democrat. A New Dealer. Co-author of the Tennessee Valley Authority Act. Chair of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. And a man whose name should long ago have been buried under a thousand censures and a hundred expulsions.

This is the same Rankin who once glared at a House gallery full of Black Washingtonians, shouting that an anti-lynching bill was “a bill to encourage Negroes to think they can rape our white women!”

He now takes the floor to respond:

“Mr. Speaker, it was not surprising to hear the gentleman from New York defend that Communist conclave in New York where Paul Robeson, the negro Communist, sang the praises of Moscow and criticized the patriotic ex-servicemen who protested.

The American people were not in sympathy with that gang of Communists who composed that traitorous gathering. When they now undertake to investigate and persecute those ex-servicemen who made that protest, those brave patriots who wore the uniform, who suffered and bled, and who saw their buddies die in two World Wars, when they begin to investigate them for trying to break up that Communist meeting, the American people are with the ex-servicemen and not with that n⸺ Communist and that bunch of Reds who went up there from New York to put on that demonstration.”

Vito Marcantonio, the only American Labor Party member in Congress, the other warm-up act to Robeson at the Golden Gate Ballroom, another icon of Uptown’s socialist past, renders an objection to the slur and demands it be stricken from the record.

Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas mutters that Rankin had said “Negro.” Rankin, eager to earn his moment, screams over him:

“I said niggra, just as I have said ever since I have been able to talk, and shall continue to say.”

Rayburn shrugs it off and rules from the chair: Rankin had “referred to the Negro race, and they should not be ashamed of that designation.”

The Congressional Record will read “Negro.”

Seventy-six years later, the proceduralism is still with us— the same clerical magic. It didn’t die with Rayburn; it just learned new euphemisms and picked new targets, keeping the confidence trick: the chair’s gentle amnesia. I’m not up-to-date, the chair says, like it’s a neutral fact, like it absolves him. I’ll look into it, as though the problem was terminology and not open contempt.

Robeson left Peekskill alive. That is the only mercy this story offers him.

The mob didn’t finish the job on Hillside Avenue, but it didn’t have to. After Peekskill, the punishment for what he did not say in Paris— and for what he had said and done everywhere else— was far more orderly. He got the kind of slow professional suffocation that leaves enough plausible deniability.

His passport was voided in 1950, and his blacklisting from venues and international touring dropped his income from $150,000 a year to $3,000. His only shows to a foreign audience over next eight years were at the Peace Arch Park— an international park straddling the border of Washington State and British Columbia. He sang from a flatbed truck on the Washington side.

He continued to be outspoken, and not always prudently. He offered explicit, personal praise of Josef Stalin. He was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 1952, and penned his eulogy after Stalin’s death. After Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” he shut the door on the subject— declining to comment on Stalin for the rest of his life.

Hauled in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 after he refused to sign a sworn affidavit denying he was a Communist, he invoked the Fifth and was grilled on a variety of other topics:

Paul Robeson:
“In Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi, no color prejudice like in Washington. It was the first time I felt like a human being. Where I did not feel the pressure of color as I feel in this Committee today.”

Congressman Gordon Scherer:
“Why do you not stay in Russia?”

Paul Robeson:
“Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you. And no Fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear? I am for peace with the Soviet Union, and I am for peace with China, and I am not for peace or friendship with the Fascist Franco, and I am not for peace with Fascist Nazi Germans. I am for peace with decent people.”

Congressman Gordon Scherer:
“You are here because you are promoting the Communist cause.”

Paul Robeson:
“I am here because I am opposing the neo-Fascist cause which I see arising in these committees. You are like the Alien Sedition Act, and Jefferson could be sitting here, and Frederick Douglass could be sitting here, and Eugene Debs could be here.”

Chairman Francis Walter:
“Now, what prejudice are you talking about? You were graduated from Rutgers and you were graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. [sic] I remember seeing you play football at Lehigh.”

Paul Robeson:
“Just a moment. This is something that I challenge very deeply, and very sincerely: that the success of a few Negroes, including myself or Jackie Robinson can make up— and here is a study from Columbia University— for $700 a year for thousands of Negro families in the South. My father was a slave, and I have cousins who are sharecroppers, and I do not see my success in terms of myself. That is the reason my own success has not meant what it should mean: I have sacrificed literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars for what I believe in.”

His passport was returned in 1958 after Kent v. Dulles, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision. He toured again. He attempted suicide in a Moscow hotel room in 1961. He was in and out of treatment in the Soviet Union and later East Germany— including electroconvulsive therapy and heavy medication— until he returned to the United States two years later, where he lived in seclusion. He died in 1976.

Ol’ man river
That ol’ man river
He mus’ know somethin’
But don’t say nothin’
He jus’ keep rollin’
He keeps on rollin’ along

He don’ plant taters
He don’t plant cotton
Them that plants ‘em
Is soon forgotten
But ol’ man river
He jus’ keeps rollin’ along!

-Robeson as Joe in the musical Show Boat (1927) (spelling normalized)

There are many historical markers along Oregon Road, none about the events of that day. The town’s Master Plan Committee does register a note in the Historic Place of Importance list— “Paul Robeson Concert in 1949, Oregon Road” sits between a stone pump house and a 1700s homestead. The golf club that was built on the site of Lakeland Acres mentions the riot and the 50 year commemoration of it on their website— good! Maybe a few good teachers mention it in passing. But if you drive Oregon Road with no prior knowledge, nothing tells you what happened here. The landscape doesn’t.

In some ways, what happened after Peekskill is harder to repeat. There are those bold enough to be quoted, those whose faces are recognized by aging locals in old photographs, but for the vast majority of participants, history has already lost them in the crowd.

In comparison, each of our lives will be gratuitously overdocumented. Even the average person leaves a thick trail that future historians must wade through: every post, every quip on current events, every high-resolution video shot on devices carried in every pocket. The record will not be perfect, but it will be dense.

The best the powers that be can do is tell us to deny what we see with our own lying eyes. That works sometimes— but temporarily. For all the horrors committed today (and there are many), there may not always be a path to legal justice. Headlines move on frustratingly fast and without resolution. But for those who come after us, there will be a record— and names attached from the petty functionary to the highest levers of power.

Time doesn’t make people honest, but it does often blunt the reflex to defend your “side” at all costs. A point is reached where we stop imagining we’d have been them; their actions become alien to both sides of the current fight. New people move in and inherit the community without inheriting the shame, and the oldest alibi in the book— “products of their time”— becomes the town’s way of keeping the past at arm’s length.

Peekskill sits squarely in a horrifying middle zone: so many detailed accounts of what happened, and so few named perpetrators. Most of them went home, slept fine, maybe felt some slight unease decades later about that particular unpleasantness and died peacefully at Hudson Valley Hospital or retirement homes in Florida surrounded by loved ones who scrambled to be by their bedside. There was at best private remorse, hardly a reckoning.

Do we still get to die without one?

Editor’s note: This piece draws on contemporaneous reporting— especially from the Associated Press, New York Times, and the now defunct (and in this piece, pilloried) Peekskill Evening Star. Collections from the New York Public Library and Peekskill’s Field Library were invaluable, supplemented by research and photography trips— to Peekskill and Cortlandt for the riot’s physical geography, to Harlem for the community response, and to Princeton, Somerville, and Philadelphia to trace the life of Paul Robeson. The recent docuseries “The Peekskill Riots” by filmmaker Jon Scott Bennett also deserves due credit for source recovery and contributing to the broader historical context and narrative understanding that informs this piece. I encourage readers to watch it for a more in-depth account than I can provide here.

Scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

I am additionally indebted to my step-grandfather Marc Wiesenberg— who grew up in Peekskill’s small Jewish community in the period in question— for his childhood memories of the atmosphere surrounding the Peekskill riots. His recollections informed the texture of this piece.

The Hudson Line will be on hiatus while I focus on other work. Whether this is the first piece of mine you have read or you’ve been here for all two and a half years, thank you for reading.

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Note: I’m working on my most in-depth project for this Substack yet that I’m excited to share around the holidays, but for now, consider this a palate cleanser.

This is a bit off the usual Hudson Line beat. I just spent 13 months planning my days around a mayoral campaign that may be the most consequential thing I’ll ever participate in, and there’s nothing like that to blur the slow, awful drip of federal news in the background. But not all of it could be tuned out.

Buried in the slurry of executive orders was an instruction to stop recognizing changes to the sex marker on U.S. passports. Passports didn’t even list sex until the late 1970s, and from then on the State Department’s practice, in one form or another, has been to accept updated court orders and medical documentation and change the marker accordingly. It was boring, bureaucratic, and broadly uncontroversial; the details of who qualified and what paperwork they needed shifted over time, always in the direction of making the process easier.

This year, that direction flipped. In addition to cutting off changes going forward, this State Department has, upon renewal, trawled through applicants’ prior passports and reverted them to sex markers from decades earlier. This is not an anti-fraud or security measure, or even a return to a policy from half a century ago; it is a brand-new policy whose function is to humiliate transgender people and assert an ideological understanding of their “real” sex.

If you didn’t clock this, or it failed to hold your attention, I don’t blame you. There was a lot going on. At least twenty other things in that period caused more immediate and visible human suffering. Most coverage at the time narrowed the focus to the elimination of the “X” option.

It has gone how so many of these sorts of things go. There’s a class-action; shocking, I know, but issuing people documents that don’t match their name, photo, and physical presentation causes problems at airports and border security, all the way up to invasive strip searches and being accused of having a fraudulent passport. By the summer there was a nationwide injunction, and the federal government again had to change gender markers on passports.

This was the status quo until two weeks ago.

On November 6th, the Supreme Court stayed the injunction on the shadow docket. The unsigned opinion, excluding citations, is 218 words long. Jackson, Sotomayor, and Kagan dissented. The case continues in the lower court, but the government has its permission slip.

Beyond the obvious— the end of injunctive protection for renewing or changing a passport’s gender marker— the Trump administration has also been quietly rewriting the State Department’s sex marker guidance page in rapid succession:

Is my passport still valid if I have an X marker on it, or if it lists a sex other than my sex at birth?

Yes. Your passport will remain valid until its expiration date.

November 7th, 2025

A passport is valid for travel until its date of expiration, until you replace it, or until we invalidate it under federal regulations.

November 14th, 2025

All passports will remain valid for travel until their expiration date, under International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) policy.

November 17th, 2025

All passports are valid for travel until they expire, are replaced by the applicant, or are invalidated pursuant to federal regulations.

November 18th, 2025

In the space of eleven days, “your passport will remain valid until its expiration date” quietly became “we can declare it invalid under federal regulations whenever we like,” then flickered back and forth between the two. This does not inspire confidence among the hundreds of thousands— perhaps millions— of Americans who have changed their gender marker on their passports. Even officials inside the administration seem to concede that invalidating and replacing even a fraction of those passports would be extremely impractical. There is very little legal precedent for revoking passports at all— mostly for being a tax cheat or Edward Snowden— and even then it runs through a case-by-case appeal process.

It would be hard to argue that a passport issued under the previous policy was “improperly issued.” It’s hard to conjure a serious national security interest here, though some Orr v. Trump filings attempt it with a straight face. It’s hard to imagine any mass measure that doesn’t accidentally sweep up some non-trans people. It’s hard to imagine foreign governments being thrilled about U.S. nationals being stranded in their countries over a domestic culture war. It’s comically unworkable. They’re leaving the door open to it nonetheless. Will my passport be valid tomorrow? I don’t know.

Of more immediate concern is that, in order for a new passport to be issued, an applicant now seems to have to prove their birth sex. This was not the case prior to the injunction, when the State Department would set a passport’s gender marker on the basis of the supporting documents from the oldest passport application on file. This sounds straightforward enough, until you realize that most trans people have no such documentation in the form the government now wants. We already have a case where someone has been effectively denied a passport because they filed amended documentation.

Until recently, in all fifty states, you could file to amend the gender marker on your birth certificate. The criteria varied by state, and a few have outright banned the practice during the current culture war, but especially for people who transitioned some time ago, providing legal documentation of birth sex is simply not possible.

Take me, for example. I was born in New York outside the city, so after transition I filed a gender designation correction with the state. I sent in my only copy of my birth certificate, and I got back an amended one with my post-transition name and gender marker. That document is my birth certificate; it is the one on file in both the town where I was born and with the state of New York. I could not get a copy of the pre-amendment version if I tried, and even if I could, it no longer has any legal standing. Every other document I have has an “F” on it. I genuinely struggle to see how I could renew my passport under this policy even for an “M” marker. I guess I could pray the Catholic church in Fishkill that baptized me kept good records.

My birth certificate also solemnly records under the raised seal of the town clerk the immutable truth that my parents lived on Hy Vue Avenue when I was born. They didn’t; it’s Hy Vue Terrace, and I’ve never bothered to fix it. If I dug up a vintage bank statement and had New York amend it, is that really the metaphysical hill the federal government wants to die on?

It doesn’t take much imagination to think of some very ugly historical examples of what happens when states start playing games with travel documents; I’m just not especially interested in getting dismissed as hysterical by spelling them out. Even if you buy “birth sex” on passports as a principle, what the government is actually demanding is functionally impossible for most trans people to satisfy. In practice, an entire class of people has been stripped of the right to a U.S. passport without even the veneer of due process or a merits argument. That is what a modern, bureaucratic second-class citizenship looks like: one tier of people whose documents are dull and stable, and another whose ability to retain existing documents is an open question.

My risk is somewhat mitigated. Thanks to some ancestors who bet on King George and lost, I have a Canadian passport. My lived experience of this proud second homeland consists of two visits to Montreal— once as a bored seven-year-old, once this summer to get fingerprinted in an office park. I have a stray pile of Canadian coins I found in pocket change and a Blue Jays hat I only wore during the World Series. I didn’t claim it out of sentiment; I claimed it because the one I was born in and have lived my entire life in has started treating my ability to leave as a policy question. Most people I know don’t have this arbitrary luxury.

Gallup ran the numbers in June: 66% of Americans say a person’s “birth sex” should appear on government documents. On a survey instrument, that’s a handsome, latent supermajority. “Birth sex” sounds like common sense, “merely attesting to a historical fact,” as the Supreme Court put it. It has the same antiseptic, focus-grouped feel as all the other well-polling abstractions— “secure borders,” “law and order,” “parental rights.” It’s the sensible, moderate position to take as long as you don’t think about it too long.

In my actual day-to-day life, this whole debate feels deranged. I have not been misgendered by a stranger offline in two years. Bartenders, TSA agents, cashiers, classmates, neighbors, random old ladies asking for directions— everyone just reads what’s in front of them and moves on. The only people who don’t are petty people who knew me as a child and choose to, and the 10% of anonymous Twitter guys who bother checking my bio for the trans flag instead of defaulting to misogyny.

When people talk about “biological reality,” this is the reality I actually live in: in the material world, my gender is unremarkable and uncontested, the most apparent idiosyncrasy being my affinity for chore coats and baseball caps, and only a problem when some institution has an ideological investment in denying it. This is a meltdown of elites, politicians, courts, and reactionary activist groups screaming fire where there is no smoke.

They’re winning.

Media— with the obvious exception of the right-wing press— has made a conscious choice since the election to not really talk about these issues. We do not poll well. Maybe this nets Democrats 1,200 votes in Fairfax County. When these issues are discussed, the articles are peppered with nuance: those Gallup numbers, “single-sex space advocacy groups,” and the subsurface cultural consensus that we are all just a bit too uncomfortable to really pay much mind. The adults in the room understand this lacks salience.

The second Trump administration has, of course, been looking for a wedge to separate transgender Americans from their constitutional rights for a while now. An aborted attempt to bar trans people from owning guns actually drew media coverage and even backlash from the National Rifle Association. A top DOJ official was blunt about the theory of the case: “We’re not playing semantics with words like dysphoria. We’re talking about trannies, and we don’t think they should have guns.”

There isn’t a particularly optimistic note to end on. More eyes should be on this. I worry that writing something like this makes it worse, both for the abstract “community” and more viscerally for me as an individual. I leave out information I feel would help establish contingencies because all it takes is one memo to pass up the chain to cull them. It sounds so very quiet out there. It is boring. It is the machinations of a handful of federal bureaucracies and the courts and the text of websites and the anecdotal reports of a small population of individuals. It does not have the sex appeal of so many of the other horrors going on today. But it has implications.

Marc Molinaro just won a landslide— just not at the ballot box. He was confirmed as Federal Transit Administrator, 71 yeas to 23 nays. There were smiles and side banter as Molinaro’s name was read, a sense of genuine merriment not usually seen in the blasé Senate chamber.

“The question’s on the nomination! You guys want to hang out?”

From the dais, Bernie Moreno chuckles into the mic and pinwheels both hands like a third base coach. It’s the fifteenth and final roll-call vote of a sticky August Saturday; senators are already mentally at the airport. When the vote closes, Moreno reads the tally to mahogany furniture. Molinaro’s latest mandate lands as a collective shrug— another patronage technocrat for Trump’s chainsaw-governance second term.

One year ago, I published Molinaro’s Gambit on the rise and looming fall of the Tivoli wunderkind. I argued that a little-known House freshman, built for small-pond dominance, traded a safe, durable local empire for brittle national theater— and he’d eat pavement for it. Six weeks later, he found himself outside elected office for the first time since he was 18 years old. An update is warranted, though I won’t pad word count.

I hedged he might hold, by election day I didn’t believe it, and he didn’t. Despite an extremely favorable national environment, Molinaro lost by 2.2 points. There was no easy fallback this time, just the usual consolation prize for frontliners: a federal appointment as kudos for being a loyal footsoldier.

It makes for an ironic bookend. Molinaro oversaw the modest Dutchess bus network and appointed a sliver of an MTA board vote. His typo-flecked DOT bio doesn’t bother with either. But it’s a job, with rooms to work and flights comped. If his recent trajectory has a constant, it’s this: trading rock-solid, local power for a brighter, thinner stage. The FTA may be the brightest, thinnest stage of all.

Molinaro now answers to another ex-congressman: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. After leaving the House for a TV punditry gig— first CNN, then Fox— Duffy found himself in the Cabinet. Molinaro hasn’t, which tells you something about what this administration rewards.

His Twitter bio strains to square the drop: “From village mayor, state legislator, county executive to Congress & FTA Administrator. Same mission: make it safe, make it work, make a difference.” Résumé-as-mantra, selling a nadir as a climb. The numbers mutter what the spin won’t: 411 followers on the official account, 43 on the personal.

The @FTAMarcMolinaro feed is small and ravenous— AI-generated banner, repost-heavy, applause-seeking—and it reads like a county legislator baiting engagement: stern “Yes. We. Are.” quote tweets sandwiched between podium shots and old men beaming in front of new buses.

It’s the Trump-era slurry: he boosts TWU when they tee off against MTA brass, juices Fox hits on cashless bail, mainlines subway crime gore videos. Yet he still can’t drop the Dutchess patois: #ThinkDIFFERENTLY nostalgia, upstate ribbon cuttings, and knocks against Hochul keep bleeding through. He’s always wanted an office in DC— preferably Pennsylvania, he’ll take New Jersey Avenue— yet his mind never left home. The personal account slides into the culture war even further, though to an even smaller audience. Every so often, he squeaks an op-ed saber-rattling against America’s cities into print.

The man who once actually ran things now tours things, points at things, and retweets things. Law-and-order swagger, theoretically national microphone— but no one is listening.

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I had a bifurcated childhood after my parents split: schooldays in Poughkeepsie, rotating through whatever rental we could afford that year— my mom’s only constant being her determination to keep me in the same school district. The rest of my time was in Manhattan: MetroNorth ten-trips, apartments with too many people in too few rooms, my air mattress always deflating by morning. I’d walk out the door into Pilates moms and Dalton kids, full-body dissonance. I code-switched easily. I’m from both places and neither. I used to think that made me the right person to tell this story. Now I just know I have to.

I started this column a year and a half ago because I was angry and didn’t know where to put the anger. I was 20, newly out as trans, stuck in bureaucratic limbo— too broke to stay at Northeastern, too proud to call myself a dropout. I was living in North Carolina, a place I felt nothing for beyond survival, after the last member of my extended family had just been priced out of where we were from. By then, the Mid-Hudson had already blurred into something curated, unfamiliar.

Some of what I penned back then holds up. Most of it doesn’t. Those drafts were raw— bitter in places, aimless in others. Less analysis than exorcism. I was still at the mercy of what I was trying to explain. It never quite cohered. I’m hoping this will.

I’m not here to write another screed against transplants. I understand them. I’m friends with them. I’m starting to resemble them. For all my couch-surfing precarity, I am palatable. I speak fluent Park Slope. I hold a position in the internal bureaucracy of New York City’s ascendant socialist left. Our guy is going to be the next mayor, and part of the targeting strategy was a droning whitepaper I wrote. I get invited to panels now. Sometimes, someone comes up to me afterward, visibly moved— reassured by my biography that the system still works, sometimes, for someone, eventually. That I’m going places. I nod, thank them, and go back to a borrowed bedroom.

Next year, CUNY Hunter will hand me a piece of paper that says I can do things. I’ll probably get a job I don’t hate. With Slack. And health benefits. Maybe I’ll straighten the bottom tooth that’s been quietly jabbing my tongue for as long as I can remember. My greatest fear is that in fifteen years I’ll make a grotesque return— resembling what I critique more than where I came from.

The frustrating part is: they’re not villains. They’re well-meaning, community-oriented, unusually self-aware. The world got scary, and work-from-home gave them options. Turns out you can decouple capital from place now. They wanted space. They wanted homeownership. They wanted meaning, and they found it in towns small enough to shape. They know what they’re doing— moral theater in an undead region.

This is a story of economic distortion. Not malice, not scheming— distortion. Of prices unmoored from wages. Of intentions warped by scale. Of towns reshaped by people who mean well but arrive with invisible battering rams in their wallets. They buy homes for what seems reasonable— because they’re not benchmarking against the people who already live there. The money talks, seeking charm and community, and without realizing it, bids up the price of belonging.

And when it arrives in cities like Kingston, Beacon, Newburgh, or Poughkeepsie, it doesn’t shout— it coos. It paints murals. Opens bookstores. Launches co-ops. It doesn’t flinch at bidding fifty grand over asking, all cash. You don’t even hear it until your lease ends and you can’t find another.

When did water stop being wet?

The Strivers

The Mid-Hudson has seen more waves of demographic change than can be done justice here: from the Wappinger people, to the feudal domains of the New Netherland elite, to the Irish refinery workers of the mid-1800s. But all roads in the contemporary Mid-Hudson Valley lead to IBM.

I’ve covered IBM’s economic dominance from the ’40s through the ’90s, especially their 1993 layoffs in “Molinaro’s Gambit.” Their absence is felt constantly, yet their collapse also created an unlikely opening for the working and lower-middle class: a buyer’s market of suburban-style homes, decoupled from the upward cost pressure of urban proximity and high-paying local jobs.

Commuting to the city is possible, but not for the faint of heart. From Poughkeepsie, it’s four hours round-trip on Metro-North or the Taconic Parkway. Most people work locally or brave the long haul for Westchester and Rockland salaries. Before the New York Times started dropping the word “bucolic” into headlines, this was where working families could get a backyard at prices unmatched in the suburbs. We may roll our eyes at the white-picket-fence American dream, but it’s far more legible to those of us who weren’t born into it.

The wealthy have always had their second homes and gated estates here— a housing stock entirely decoupled from, and irrelevant to, the broader market. After 9/11, there was a brief uptick in upper-middle-class relocations from the city, but it faded.

Exurban McMansion development from New York City eventually pushed into Dutchess and Orange counties, raising prices, but the Great Recession stopped it cold. To this day, you can still find streets in aborted subdivisions— empty but for the concrete footprints of homes never completed. The collapse in prices during the Recession created a second window of opportunity for buyers.

Those who came in that period often earned less than the residents already here. Many were on the frayed edge of the middle class in the outer boroughs. Some were resettled refugees from the Kosovo War. Most lacked the credentials they would later drill into their children as essential for survival. They came with little, which meant they asked for nothing. Their wages didn’t rise here, but they owned the house. They blended into communities past their prime, changing nothing except their bedroom count. That was the point— not revitalization, not reinvention— just math that worked. They didn’t shift the region’s center of gravity because they didn’t have the weight to.

I think of my own parents. They met in the city, started out in Yorkville. In 1994— a good year to be a Republican in New York— my father parlayed his activism into a job at the state attorney general’s office. My mother was a public school teacher, newly divorced and far from the Greene and Dutchess counties of her youth. They wanted children without subdividing bedrooms. So they crept upstate, trade by trade: a larger apartment here, fifteen more minutes on the Metro-North there. Eventually, a house with their signatures on the deed. A feel-good story— until it wasn’t. But for many, it was.

The strivers were on the 6:54 into Grand Central before dawn, their houses dark, their children still dreaming. By the time they got home, the bedrooms were dark again, the day lived without them. Absence was the price of stability. Their presence was in the lunch packed at 11 p.m., the check left for the field trip, the groceries lugged in from Walmart on Sunday. Their lives advanced in small increments— a new coat of paint, a paid-off car, the first vacation that didn’t involve sleeping at a relative’s.

Then came 2020.

The year the world locked down, a select few were set free. The average income of people moving from New York City into the Mid-Hudson spiked to over $267,000— triple that of locals. The average mover went from making 16% less than current residents to 37% more. At the same time, the income of those forced to move away began to climb. This wasn’t a gap you could bridge with overtime or frugality; it was the kind that strangles dreams. The old rupture created opportunity. The new rupture eviscerated it.

The buy-in is too high now— not the work of faceless market forces, but of unwitting agents dismantling a way of life. The ladder they climbed without breaking a sweat has been kicked away behind them. They didn’t mean to kick it away— most never noticed it was there— but it’s gone. The life of the Mid-Hudson striver, the one my parents built here, the one chased in pre-dawn hours down the Taconic, headlights carving the dark, is no longer possible.

I hope there are places where it still is.

The Paper of Record

If you work at the intersection of decline and desire long enough, you start to notice that the New York Times “Real Estate” section has a body count. Not literally, but their coverage has a gravitational pull. They have several columns of interest, “The Hunt” is a rather jarring house-hunting series featuring obscene budgets and members of the gentry that is a bit too personal for analysis. Their more interesting column to me is “Living In,” featuring towns I’ve called home, towns I could never afford, towns I wouldn’t be caught dead in. They are charming. They are well-written. They are also a form of soft power, an anointing. Once your town appears in those pages, it’s no longer just where you live— it’s a lifestyle choice.

The point of “Living In” isn’t to help you find a place to live. It’s to sell you a story about what your life could look like if you did. It’s a hallucinogen for the upper-middle class disguised as journalism. They romanticize the main street and sanitize the rough edges. They drop in a local history anecdote to give it texture, but it’s the kind of history that won’t scare off a buyer. The subdivided Victorians you grew up in become boutique Airbnbs, their creaky floors and drafty windows part of the pitch as if poverty were just another design choice.

They write for the kind of person who treats moving as a form of self-expression, who wants to be reassured that they’re not just buying a house, they’re buying meaning. And the moment your town gets that treatment, you can start the clock. Maybe the Times doesn’t cause gentrification in the strict sense, but it makes it aspirational. It says: this place is worth your money, worth your presence, worth betting your future on. By the time the Times has noticed you, so have the people who arrive convinced they’re here to “save” the place— never asking if it wanted saving, or from whom.

You can mouse over or tap this graphic’s key to filter by two year increment, and click on towns to see article headlines and abstracts. I highly suggest doing this.

Prior to 2003, Times profiles stuck to the suburbs. By the mid-2000s they’d gotten more adventurous, publishing “Weekenders” columns about cutesy tourist traps in the Catskills. Those second-home pitches ended with the Great Recession. In the late 2000s also came profile of the cardinal cities of the Mid-Hudson— Poughkeepsie, Newburgh, Kingston, and Beacon— framed as bargains in the wake of poverty and distance from the city. Kingston was “losing its backwater reputation,” Newburgh “very much a frontier,” Beacon “not a natural second-home community, given its rough edges and modest housing stock.” The Times likes to pretend they’re just holding up a mirror, but they’re measuring the drapes.

Amidst the COVID pandemic, their eyes were again upstate, but with a different script. This time, the story wasn’t “hidden gem” or “scrappy bargain.” It was “sanctuary.” The pandemic-era “Living In” profiles didn’t bother with the pretense of discovery— they assumed you were already looking for the exit. No more hedging descriptions of “emerging” towns. Instead: unspoiled, idyllic, community-minded. The towns were no longer framed as fixer-uppers in need of saving, but as salvation itself— complete, ready-to-wear identities for the anxious professional class.

The subtext was naked: your Brooklyn lease isn’t worth dying for. Here, in the land of pastoral hamlets and storybook main streets, you could buy more than a house— you could buy a way of life immune to the chaos you were fleeing. Pandemic logic seeped into the copy: backyards, fresh air, neighbors who wave from a safe distance, no coughing doorman as you walk to the elevator. They were selling a fantasy of immunity— not just from the virus, but from everything you came to believe the city was doing to you. They sold control to people who, for once, felt powerless— though their wire transfers still cleared.

And unlike the post-9/11 migration bump, this one wasn’t a ripple. It was a cascading flood, powered by emergency corporate policies that turned remote work from a perk into a permanent condition. Salaries from the city began colonizing towns where a six-figure income had once been unimaginable, and the math of local life warped almost overnight. What used to be the ceiling for a lifelong resident became the floor for a newcomer. The draw was no longer cheap housing— it was the fantasy of community without compromise, a place where you could have backyard tomatoes and still bill clients in FiDi before lunch.

Catskill for example— 3,815 people, Trump +4, broke as hell, and where my family is from, where my great-grandparents lived and died— went from “despite its rough edges... retain[ing] a grandeur from its days as a busy port” in 2005 to, by 2022, a place where “people are jazzed about making art and invested in creating a culture that isn’t a microcosm of New York City, but its own thing.” Median household income jumped from $33,901 in 2020 to $73,906 in 2023, and I’m pretty sure it’s not because my cousins suddenly started cashing bigger paychecks.

The Winners and Losers

The Times likes to pretend its real estate section is anthropology. They quote buyers while their furniture is still in shrink-wrap; they find the charming local whose job is to make the place feel storied. It’s HGTV for people who’d rather think of themselves as above HGTV.

So let’s cut to the only two questions that matter: Who are the winners? And who are the losers?

The stereotype of the gentrifier is easy to conjure: twenty-something, trust fund IV drip, bangs cut by someone named Kai, “taking art commissions” on Instagram but paying no rent because Mom and Dad want to “guarantee a baseline.” These are the gentrifiers city dwellers like to imagine— bohemian interlopers in vintage denim, all romance and irresponsibility.

The Hudson Valley gentrifier is not that. They’re older. They’ve already cleared the early-career hurdles. They arrive with professions, not jobs; salaries that shrug off high mortgage rates because they buy in cash; and retirement accounts that might outstrip the town budget. They are, almost without exception, wealthier than the people they displace— often by orders of magnitude. They come here to optimize: smaller schools, more space, a “slower pace,” and a “reasonable” cash offer, benchmarked not against Beacon foursquares but Brooklyn brownstones.

Unlike the caricature who parachutes in for cheap rent and borrowed authenticity, these newcomers plant flags. They sit on arts councils, attend town board meetings, and organize library fundraisers. They open cafés with raw wood counters and pour-over stations, “coworking spaces” in abandoned factories, wellness studios where the taqueria used to be. Theirs is gentrification dressed up as civic engagement.

That doesn’t make it less disruptive— it makes it harder to fight. Policymakers take them seriously, so their vision of what a place “should be” gets codified faster. Their money quietly recalibrates the market. And because they present themselves as allies— to the arts, to small business, to “the community”— they are harder to critique without sounding like you oppose progress.

Meanwhile, the displaced rarely appear in these stories. No pull quotes about why they left. No photos beside the U-Haul paid for on credit. Their departure is framed as natural attrition— the silent exhale that makes room for someone else’s dream.

But more numerous than the displaced are the stuck. The empty nesters who can’t downsize because the cheapest condo now costs more than they paid for their four-bedroom. The twenty-something working full-time at the hospital or hardware store, still living with their parents because a one-bedroom rents for more than their take-home pay. The ones who leave for college and never return— not because they’ve outgrown the place, but because there’s nothing to return to except nostalgia.

We don’t talk about them. They don’t show up in out-migration stats because they’re still here, physically. In place but not in motion. Living in houses they don’t own, in childhood bedrooms they’ve already mentally moved out of. Watching their towns evolve without them, priced out of the very lives they’re still living. They can’t cash out like retirees selling to downstate couples, and they can’t buy in like newcomers with email jobs.

Being stuck is a quieter kind of displacement. No boxes to pack, no keys to hand over— just the slow evaporation of options. You go to baby showers for friends who moved to other states, weddings for people who left five years ago, funerals for the ones who stayed and never stopped trying. Your life becomes a holding pattern of “maybe next year” and “once I save enough.”

In the gentrifier’s story, these people don’t exist. It’s easier to frame displacement as a clean swap— one resident for another— than to admit an entire generation can lose their future without ever leaving. And for the lucky few who do leave, there’s something of a Hobson’s choice: live somewhere affordable with real economic mobility, or come back to a “quaint” hometown whose charm guarantees your economic doom.

At this point, the expected move is a pivot to long-winded policy: guardrails to throw up, incentives to offer, imaginary levers to reverse the tide. Build more housing. Opt into Good Cause Eviction. Regulate Airbnbs. Impose vacancy taxes. All necessary. None enough.

Because the mechanics driving this— especially in the Mid-Hudson’s pressure cooker— aren’t easily reversed. As long as there’s a steady stream of people willing to pay these prices, the market isn’t overpriced. The people who leave rarely return. The ones who stay acclimate. Wealth arrives concentrated and stays concentrated. Even the most ambitious policies can only slow the pace of transformation, not stop it.

One of my ongoing frustrations: how long it takes to get the data. IRS county-to-county migration figures— flawed to begin with, since they give averages instead of medians— arrive years late. The latest is from filing year 2021, and even there the shift is obvious. But the truth is, the most profound impacts won’t be quantifiable on any chart, this decade or next. They will slow-bleed entire generations.

We act as if every problem has a legislative hack, as if this were just a matter of finding the right key for the right lock. It’s not. So instead of pretending there’s a fix, let’s just call it what it is: the winners get the view, the losers get the bill, and the stuck get the slow fade.

“Caller, You’re on the Air”

I’m a newly minted Brian Lehrer listener— my quiet surrender to the ecosystem. Last year he did a segment on Hudson Valley gentrification. I listened like someone watching a car hydroplane into a ditch. You already know how it went.

The guest, Professor Richard Ocejo, wrote a book I still need to read. He spoke in specifics, not theory: an archetype of how Hudson Valley gentrifiers differ demographically (which I shamelessly cribbed), how their impact is outsized in small cities. He talked about Newburgh. Said displacement. Said whiteness. Had some policy ideas.

And then the calls started.

Caller after caller, each with some version of the same meandering confessional: their good intentions, their respect for their new neighbors, the fact that they “always shop local.” They freely identified as “gentrifiers.” They vote the right way. They spoke like they were up for parole— not from the people being displaced, but from us, the listening jury of WNYC.

David called first, from Brooklyn. He and his wife moved to Newburgh because it was “the only place affordable for us”— which is unsettling. He refused a realtor’s pitch to evict tenants in a multifamily, and I’m glad he did. He bought instead from an older Italian couple “ready to sell,” and now he’s friends with all his neighbors. That’s liberal exceptionalism: believing you can square a circle when the market is brazen enough that a realtor can pitch eviction with a smile. Refusing the pitch soothes the conscience. It doesn’t change the conditions that made it standard practice.

Then came Emily. She’d lived in Washington Heights, retreated to her small California hometown during the pandemic, and moved to Newburgh less than a year ago “for the smaller community and nature.” She is, she says, “very aware” of gentrification and wants to be sure she’s “not a negative impact.” She still commutes to the city but is “engaging with the community,” making sure to do more than “just sleep in Newburgh.” For many who’ve lived here their whole lives, only sleeping in Newburgh was never a moral lapse— it was the unavoidable result of spending waking hours earning the right to stay. The phrasing is familiar: careful, deliberate, eager to land on the right side of the story. I want to be part of the community. But in towns like this, the community existed long before newcomers arrived. Wanting to join it is not the same as leaving it intact.

It’s a fascinating re-listen. Lehrer had asked to hear from “Hudson Valley gentrifiers,” so naturally it’s a self-selecting group— the ones who believe they can account for themselves. Every caller came armed with caveats, moral footnotes, and rehearsed empathy. You could hear them trying to prove they deserved their houses. They were uncomfortable, yes— but only in the way you’re uncomfortable when the dentist asks if you floss. They confessed just enough to prove their self-awareness, but never enough to feel culpable.

Maybe that’s the most revealing thing about gentrification here: even the socially conscious want to be forgiven for winning a game they pretend they’re not playing.

And that’s the trick of it, isn’t it? Whether on public radio, in think pieces, or in the letters to Hudson Valley One, the conversation always seems to orbit the feelings of the winners. Gentrification gets framed as a moral puzzle for the comfortable, not an existential crisis for the displaced. We measure the “goodness” of the gentrifier by how earnestly they narrate their self-awareness— treating displacement as a matter of intent rather than consequence.

In polite spaces, the story becomes one of awkward dinner party admissions— we know we’re part of the problem, but we love it here as much as anyone else— instead of one about the people quietly packing storage units, doubling up with relatives, or sleeping in cars while scrolling Craigslist for the impossible. It’s a discourse curated for the brunch crowd: soft on the edges, allergic to guilt unless it can be metabolized into virtue.

We’ve built an entire public conversation on the premise that if you’re aware of harm, you’re halfway absolved. That self-awareness is a form of resistance. That good intentions should weigh as much as outcomes. It’s easier to talk about your moral calculus than to face the fact that you’re here now because someone else isn’t.

The victims rarely get the mic. They don’t call in to Brian Lehrer. They live farther away now— if they live anywhere near here at all— busy picking up the pieces of lives they didn’t plan to leave behind. Instead, we hear from the people who replaced them, brushing against discomfort like it might stain.

May the displaced find ground that won’t give way. May they find a place that won’t crumble under the weight of someone else’s dream. May they find home again. And as their absence is glamorized as progress, may they be remembered as more than just collateral.

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Editor’s note: The author serves as co-chair of NYC-DSA’s Electoral Working Group Research & Data Committee. Since NYC-DSA endorsed Zohran Mamdani for mayor in October, she’s been part of a broader volunteer team supporting the campaign’s data, field, and logistical work. The views expressed here are her own and do not reflect her organizational role or the campaign.

After his stunning first-place finish, it’s no longer just a possibility. We wake up in Zohran Kwame Mamdani’s New York— and it feels different. Most of this was written before the polls closed. It’s not a comprehensive analysis, just a snapshot from before the math confirmed what we now know: he wasn’t just viable— he dominated.

A popular narrative is being stitched together by consultants, columnists, and those eager to claim credit using the numbers we have seen. Enough of it will be true. It’ll define the coming days, be the buzz of social media, and then get flattened even further in public memory as time elapses.

Before the story hardens into consensus, I want to name a few things that may otherwise get lost. Not exactly a campaign diary, at least not in the traditional sense. Any campaign detail left in here is either ancient or public. And most of what I want to name didn’t happen in the Zohran campaign. It happened around it, between the lines, in moments that never make the after-action report. But they were real. And they don’t fit neatly into the concise story we tell about a race.

The universe where it could happen

Much ink has been spilled about internal doubts over Mamdani's viability when the idea of a run was discussed last summer. That seems to be a rather strange takeaway. This primary was expected to include— ultimately did include— several high-profile citywide and statewide figures. Despite the idealism often projected onto socialists, we rarely let ourselves believe in miracles, though some of us did anyway.

Even then, I often found myself making the case for a Zohran campaign in terms of energizing political engagement in a relatively sleepy offyear and the bully pulpit of the debates. It was less starry-eyed to talk about shifting the landscape than reaching Gracie Mansion. The phrase I kept using was: we’re still in the universe where it could happen. Turns out, we were in the universe where it did.

A path was relatively clear to second place— but there was also the fear that once there, the moment might slip away. It didn’t. The deeper, structural concern was whether the non-DSA professional left— what Ross Barkan calls the Alphabet Left— would actually break for him, especially with explicit first-rank endorsements. State Senator Gustavo Rivera broke that barrier by endorsing Zohran in April. When Zohran announced, he wasn’t even included in the first poll. In January and February, he was barely registering at 1%. The final independent poll of the race is also the first to show Zohran leading Cuomo in the final round, up by 3.6 points. At time of writing, Zohran has defeated Cuomo in the first round 44-36.

Viability, in the end, is a kind of narrative fiction, a fuzzy construct enforced by poll exclusion, club slates, editorial boards, press silence, and donor lists— designed to tell anyone with too much drive and too little pedigree to stay in their lane. It feels a bit navel-gazing to declare that our city’s politics is becoming a cage match between NYC-DSA and the county boys’ club, but a coalition to win power citywide was nonetheless built and that genie is not going back in the bottle.

Coverage of Zohran paints him as a TikTok genius— understandable, given his campaign’s standout video team. But Zohran caught fire because his policies speak to the demands of this moment. In a greatly disillusioned period in American politics, one does not get 50,000 people to knock over 1.62 million doors for you because you have flashy videos, they come for the alternative vision of democratic socialism and relentless economic populism. Even the most niche policy prescriptions from bringing down halal cart prices to baby baskets for new parents are rooted in that core vision.

Zohran has also notably made a point of coming to various trans rights rallies hosted by NYC-DSA and other organizations, while Andrew Cuomo has hired an alum of last year's anti-Equal Rights Amendment for his campaign, accepted the endorsement of culture warrior PLACE, and bemoaned that Kamala Harris lost because she was talking about bathrooms and “woke” culture. Despite what punditry seems to believe, a bold economic agenda does not require abandoning the marginalized to appeal to voters.

Voting like a human

Ranked choice voting had widely been seen as the only means to defeat Cuomo's first round victory, a universal presumption that has clearly been blown out of the water. There’s been plenty of messaging around it, but beyond the broad strokes of fill your ballot, don’t rank Cuomo, what strategy is actually best?

I suppose the most utilitarian thing would have been to rank the most viable five candidates in your preferred order. At the most extreme end of this is AOC’s slate: Zohran, Adrienne Adams, Brad Lander, Scott Stringer, and Zellnor Myrie line up perfectly with their order in a poll released immediately prior to her endorsement. But voters are not machines, and invariably we will see a lot of ballots that don’t make sense.

Even knowing the math, few of us vote as pure utilitarians. Plenty ranked Blake third prior to cross-endorsement despite it being unlikely he’d outlast Zohran and Lander because it felt right. Plenty bullet voted for Jumaane Williams because parsing which opponent was marginally better wasn’t worth the energy. Much has been made about Wiley voters spoiling it for Garcia in 2021, yet 49,852 votes for Maya Wiley went to Eric Adams in the final round, especially in majority Black neighborhoods. Among these Wiley/Adams voters was Hakeem Jeffries. Ballot rankings reflect far more than cold math; they reflect vibe, identity, gut discomfort. Voters aren’t irrational, but macro narratives come second to the quiet unease of filling a bubble for someone you don’t quite trust.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Let’s talk about the polls for a second. Compared to 2021, there has been an incredible belt tightening at polling firms. This is due to many factors, austerity at the news agencies and academic institutions that sponsor and conduct independent polls, their perceived inaccuracy among the general public and even the pundit class, but the outcome has been staggering: there were 12 polls of the 2021 mayoral race that came out in May. This cycle, there were three.

This had been of great benefit to the Cuomo campaign, which was able to flood the zone with overly favorable Honan polls sponsored by pro-Cuomo Tusk Strategies that showed him with an insurmountable lead, a baseline that was ten points higher than when measured by other pollsters. Other campaigns polled the field with regularity— campaign finance disclosures prove this— but stagnant in the single digits, they had good reason to keep the results in-house. This flooding of the zone created a sense of inevitability that allowed Cuomo to rapidly consolidate endorsements, pushing Eric Adams out of the race entirely and disillusioning much of the splintered opposition.

With that said, this strategy appears to have caused a self inflicted mortal wound: they believed their own hype. They stopped preparing for a serious opponent and instead sat around waiting for their coronation. Andrew Cuomo was the very sun around which the City of New York rotates… until he was not. A major optimism I expressed throughout this race is that ranked choice voting polls, in March showing Cuomo beating Zohran by 40 points, 32 points, and 40 points again, were heavily distorted by name recognition, which was in the teens to twenties for Zohran until incredibly recently.

If I asked a random NYC voter back in March to rank five people in order of how much they want them to be mayor, I would have gotten a list of the most well-known people in the race, probably less than five overall, and unless they knew the names of five of his opponents, almost certainly including Andrew Cuomo, governor from when I was in second grade through my first year of college. In eliminating all undecideds and considering ballots in these polls from voters unaware of Zohran but aware of Cuomo to be Cuomo votes in the final round, Cuomo’s strength in ranked choice voting was wildly overstated.

This was not limited to this cycle either, check out this Data for Progress poll from the same time in 2021. Andrew Yang 59% over Eric Adams 41%, 61-39 against Stringer, 68-32 over Wiley. He ended up peaking at under 15% of the vote in RCV. This is even more absurd in the Comptroller race, which clocked Speaker Corey Johnson getting 71% of the vote to Councilman Brad Lander’s 29%. After an effective advertising blitz, Lander won 52-48. RCV polls are not entirely useless early on, they can and did reveal interesting patterns if you knew where to look and what noise to filter out.

These were not wild swings in voter preferences— these were statistical hallucinations treated as gospel. Zohran is poised to win the final round by double digits over Cuomo.

Frozen in place

Until recently, Cuomo seems to have barely even thought about Zohran. Before announcing, he was mainly telegraphing to future donors that only he could defeat Lander. Even in this month’s debates, many of Cuomo’s attacks were focused on Lander, who is in a distant but fairly consistent third place in the polls. Said attacks— railing against the Adams-Lander Administration for instance— seem more detailed and scripted than his attacks on Zohran, suggesting a degree of rigidness in his strategy and an unpreparedness to land attacks on— or even understand Zohran. When his camp did reference Zohran, it was almost as a punchline, a dream candidate to make it to the final round with. After $35 million in vitriolic spend against him and a first round rout of eight points, I imagine it’s more of a nightmare to Cuomoworld.

One lesson from 2021 is that candidates are incentivized to form alliances, yet I was skeptical any concrete ones beyond the then-abstract WFP slate would materialize. Cross-endorsements make the most sense when two candidates are neck-and-neck for second place, and you’re willing to gamble you’ll be the one slightly ahead. But when you’re further back— like Andrew Yang’s unilateral rank Garcia second messaging in 2021— it’s less about boosting your own chances and more about playing kingmaker. Aside from those who never gained traction (Michael Blake, Jessica Ramos), I wasn’t sure if anyone in the distant second tier would be willing to enter what the media would frame as a junior partnership or worse— stepping aside— especially with Zohran. Brad Lander did.

Plan A

A quick note: I’ve had some incidental social overlap with Brad Lander through someone I’ve come to know this cycle, unrelated to politics. It’s not the lens through which I came to understand him— years of following his political career did that— but it’s part of the context now, and worth naming. Brad’s navigated that overlap with sincere grace and good humor, even knowing I was working to elect someone else.

Brad Lander, founder of the Progressive Caucus of the City Council and sitting Comptroller, was presumed to be the candidate for the left lane of this primary. Long before this race, Brad Lander built real progressive infrastructure— on the Council, he helped make policy expertise and organizing fluency feel like they belonged in the same room. He had shocked before, eeking out a win in his bid for Comptroller after Corey Johnson’s late entry seemed to doom his chances. His was the first name I ever bubbled in on a ballot. He entered early, lining up institutional support— especially from Democratic clubs and a constellation of major elected officials— and seemed poised to absorb both the bold activists of Maya Wiley’s base and the steady-handed technocrats of Kathryn Garcia’s against a greatly diminished Eric Adams and a field of worn-out names and longshots.

Lander’s signature “plan-for-that” progressivism— technocratic, deliberative, soft-spoken— has found itself increasingly squeezed in the Adams era— caught between a nimble, ascendant NYC-DSA and the swagger centrism of the county parties, each highly adaptive in their own way. He’s navigated the shifting terrain cautiously, occasionally endorsing DSA candidates in low-stakes primaries. His early equivocation on a rent freeze— “if the data supports it”— was emblematic: details-oriented, but inaccessible in delivery. By the time he assessed the theory and offered support, few on either flank were moved.

Lander’s effort to balance public opinion with his progressive reputation left one flank wide open— an ideological vacuum the left was initially reluctant to seize— and this cautious strategy failed to move moderates long wary of him. This is a tension Stringer attempted to navigate in his 2021 bid, but with the benefit of a style of governance progressive in messaging, but soft on power. That vaunted Garcia bloc? They seem to have split two-thirds for Zohran’s bold agenda and one-third for Cuomo’s heavy hand.

Although both candidates raised $1.7M, Lander received only a quarter of the $335k raised by donors who contributed to both his and Zohran’s campaigns. And more than half of them gave to Lander before Zohran even entered. Zohran stopped fundraising on March 24th and was matched 8-to-1 up to the legal cap of $8.4 million. Lander’s final payment didn’t arrive until June 20th.

Even here, retail politics mattered: my first donor map showed that the Park Slope faithful came through, and there are blocks in the 11215 where every other brownstone chipped in $250, $500 to Brad— by far the most donors and dollars for any candidate in any ZIP code. Many of those came through while he was still nominally running a noncompetitive re-election bid for Comptroller. But by March, Zohran had pulled ahead in total individual donors there, even as Lander still held a two-to-one edge in dollars raised.

Message meets messenger

Everyone with a cable box remembers the AOC ads from Lander’s 2021 Comptroller race, but the one that stuck with me most was the spot with his daughter Rosa— equal parts sincere and self-effacing, in essence: my dad’s a geek, but that’s kinda the point. It worked not just because it humanized him, but because it made fun of his brand while affirming it: he’s unflashy, policy-driven, and deeply earnest. To include your kid in an ad is to say, this matters to me beyond politics.

Several non-Cuomo candidates misread Zohran’s viral breakout and rushed to replicate it— churning out jump-cut, man-on-the-street style videos and praying for virality. But Zohran’s appeal wasn’t just aesthetic: he’s a fluent communicator with a clear message. His video strategy worked because it was rooted in who he is, not what looked trendy.

This cycle, after a stint of Zohran-style direct-to-camera policy videos that missed the mark, Rosa returned— this time in short-form, lightly-scripted Instagram reels. The vibe hadn’t changed: the earnest, slightly awkward dad who never quite got the memo on being cool, and the daughter who is, effortlessly. It was sweet— not cloying, but genuinely affectionate in a way few political ads ever manage. It worked because it didn’t pretend Brad was someone he wasn’t. It leaned into the self-deprecating sincerity that has always defined his public persona and, in doing so, softened the stiffness that weighed down his more conventional messaging. In a field where many candidates came off as overproduced or overcoached, the Rosa ads stood out for their authenticity.

Leap of faith

Brad Lander took a real risk: the only candidate to forgo re-election to his current job. Zohran’s seat isn’t up until 2026, Adrienne Adams is term-limited, Andrew Cuomo and Scott Stringer are out of office— but there is going to be a new Comptroller on January 1st. There’s always a particular kind of dread that sets in when a politician is staring down the end of their time in office. But it’s sharper still for those who gamble on a promotion and find their reach exceeds their grasp. There have been more extreme cases.

Now that the stakes are clear, it is interesting to note the timely Honan RCV poll released just two days before the cross-endorsement: in the seventh round, Cuomo led with 47%, Zohran trailed at 28%, and Lander sat at 25%. The eighth round showed Cuomo defeating Zohran 56-44. For those arguing behind the scenes that Zohran was playing spoiler in a race Lander could win, this was catnip— a ready-made talking point to blow up the informal non-aggression pact. Back in April, Cuomoworld was already stirring the pot— Bradley Honan, with a touch of schadenfreude, quipped: “I don’t know if Brad Lander … [is] going to like being second fiddle to Mamdani.”

The absence of any comparable polling only deepened the skepticism. A Data for Progress survey showed Cuomo at 46%, Zohran at 39%, and Lander at just 15%, with Cuomo narrowly defeating Zohran in the final round. Cuomo’s internal numbers had Lander even lower, at 10%, with Adrienne Adams in the final three. Lander’s camp seemed to treat the Honan poll with caution— just a little too convenient to be taken at face value.

What Brad Lander knew

Ranked choice, at its core, is about permission structures. Some Lander voters were wary of Zohran. Others, backing Zohran, were wary of Lander. For anyone hoping to stop Cuomo, ensuring as many votes transferred cleanly between these two camps as possible was critical. Explicit rankings— a trusted voice that says this person can do the job— make that more likely to happen. Lander’s co-endorsement— timed after a strong debate performance and aimed at his base of reliably voting, civic-minded liberals in brownstone Brooklyn and Manhattan— is of more significance than the short media cycle it got, particularly given the institutional crosswinds it faced. While he ran an active campaign to the end, he made a point to defend Zohran publicly— and the last slice of his war chest went into anti-Cuomo TV ads that did not say the name “Lander” except in the paid for by disclaimer.

At a time when all campaigns were focused on the GOTV scrum, Lander’s arrest by ICE while accompanying immigrants from court drew widespread solidarity. It was a rare, unscripted moment of moral clarity for our entire city— one where he made a point not to center himself or his campaign. For those familiar with his history— Brad is the rare pol who can appear at a meet-and-greet fundraiser or a JFREJ meeting and seem out of place at neither— it reflected the side of his politics steeped more in personal conviction than institutional habit.

That side of Brad also appeared on the debate stage, but did not carve out a coalition beyond his core base this cycle. As difficult as that was, he knew what mattered most— and acted accordingly. At Zohran’s victory party last night, a candidate has never looked more thrilled to lose.

Roti and roses

This campaign has knocked it out of the park. But what won’t be easily captured is the scale of volunteer commitment: the 50,000 canvassers, over 1.62 million doors knocked, the bedrock of this campaign is people who didn’t have to be here— and showed up anyway.

I think of the data crew. Some were recruited after saying too much about what they did for work over post-canvass drinks. Others stumbled into it— checked a box on a form and got pulled into projects that took over their weeknights. Some chased it down from the start, ready to throw their all into it. Most didn’t have formal experience in campaigns or data science. What they did have was curiosity, commitment, and the willingness to throw blocks of spare time at hard problems until we figured them out. All of them made it matter. They built out more tools than I can count— quietly, efficiently, and well.

From the start, this campaign dared to envision a tent larger than Zohran’s ideological affinity. Special efforts were made to reach out to Muslim and South Asian voters in the far corners of the outer boroughs. Those who did vote in 2021 overwhelmingly did so for Eric Adams, but an even larger contingent stayed home. We carried flyers in Bangla, Urdu, and Arabic to every corner of the city.

Some affectionate Desi slang diffused through the broader volunteer apparatus: uncles. Not literal relatives, but a term for the older men who kept showing up— slightly overdressed, always kind. The ones who handed you water before you asked and smiled at you like family even if you didn’t share a language.

They were cab drivers, corner pharmacists, auto mechanics, restaurant owners. Some hosted us at their mosques or gurdwaras. Others drove boxes of flyers across the five boroughs. They weren’t part of the usual progressive voter universe— not political partisans or even consistent voters. None of them have read Mark Fisher. But they showed up again and again for what this campaign stood for. Not out of ideology, exactly, but belief— in Zohran, in the people around him, in a kind of goodness that didn’t need explaining. That this was something worth fighting for. The uncles and aunties of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens powered Zohran to resounding victories from Brighton Beach to Parkchester and lit up Hillside Avenue in Queens like a Christmas tree.

I wasn’t supposed to be in New York this cycle. My next sublet in Boston fell through last August right before Evan MacKay lost by forty votes in Cambridge, and I closed out that campaign couchsurfing in the suburbs, still trying to hold it together. Some people I barely knew offered me a spare room here and their quiet trust. When I returned to the city, I didn’t have a plan— just a duffel bag and permanent campaign mode. NYC-DSA folks I’d never met in person before slotted me in like I’d always been there. No hesitation, no orientation, no preamble: what do you know how to do, and when can you start? That’s the culture we’ve built— show up, plug in, and start building. That’s what this campaign is fueled by.

A bar in Queens

It is interesting to watch something break containment in the way it has. People I haven’t spoken to since high school were posting Instagram stories saying that they registered to vote for Zohran. I overheard conversations about him on a trip to Boston. A building on my block is wheatpasted with unofficial posters of his face.

It started with group chats, the endorsement vote at the Church of the Village, a field lead training at the Sixth Street Community Center, the office spaces, the rallies at Brooklyn Steel and Terminal 5, and overwhelming victory in Long Island City. Our Zohran is now the third most recognizable socialist in the country— and the Democratic nominee for the 111th Mayor of the City of New York.

Seven months before volunteers packed the debate watch party, Zohran walked into a half-empty bar in Queens, unrecognized by some patrons— most of them his own constituents. He slid into our booth, elbows on the table, as we tried to make sense of the grim numbers trickling in. It wasn’t a campaign moment. No press, no messaging, no titles. Just a few stunned faces lit by laptop screens doomscrolling as precincts swung 30 and 40 points to Trump— trying to explain it all with forced detachment. And someone who cared leaning in, grimacing, nodding along slowly.

It probably won’t ever feel that intimate again. That’s part of the trade. The bigger it gets, the less of it we get to hold.

I’ve gone back to school to finish undergrad at CUNY Hunter and was also elected in November as one of two NYC-DSA Research & Data Committee co-chairs. That means putting in a lot of legwork both in future planning and for our endorsed candidates this cycle— Alexa Avilés in Sunset Park, Tiffany Cabán in Astoria, and of course: the dreadnought mayoral candidacy of Zohran Mamdani. It’s incredibly fulfilling, basically a dream gig for me, but also as you can imagine takes up most of my time and increasingly more with the winds in our sails. I have many, many thoughts, as you can imagine.

I have an unspoken policy of not writing about active campaigns I am involved with, I see fit to make explicit. It’s not really about any sort of ethical dilemma about my ability to give objective analysis, plenty of people actively support a candidate and do so, but more a function of effectiveness. To me, a moment where I am writing about it here is a moment I could be putting directly into our campaigns, so when I try to it tends to sputter out quite quickly.

Except for the occasional vague take on Twitter or BlueSky and public releases like the donor map, my deep analysis specific to the mayoral race will be embargoed until the summer. For the public analysis I do provide, it is important to note I only speak for myself. While several articles are in the works, including data analysis of COVID-era migration on the decisiveness of last year’s NY-19 race and a more narrative and thorough piece on Hudson Valley gentrification, consider this a note that content will be sparse for a while, especially for those on paid subscriptions.

A final note on the current moment. I haven’t been personally involved with national politics since the Bernie campaign in 2020 given basically all notable change comes about through the judiciary or by executive fiat, neither of which are particularly influenceable. But obviously, as a transgender woman, I am not in a position to tune it out.

Ten years ago, the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide. The world didn’t end. People realized it did not affect their lives negatively for gay people to be treated fairly under the law. And so the reactionary right began shopping around for another wedge cultural issue and found it in transgender rights. Early attempts backfired horribly, as they were rightly seen as pure animus. Now, thanks to a toothless interregnum helmed by a senile egotist soaked in blood, jarringly, yet predictably, we have it in the White House. They cannot contain their glee.

In 2017, the military ban was justified on the cost of medical procedures and a necessity of further study, today it is justified on transgender people being fundamentally delusional liars and therefore “conflicts with a soldier's commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one's personal life.” They huddled little girls in the East Room for a photo-op as he signed an executive order banning little kids from playing on their school’s sports teams because they are trans. They have erased all federal references to transgender people, and when forced to restore some by court orders have put a despicable disclaimer at the beginning. They tried to outright criminalize medical care for vulnerable children against the wishes of their parents and doctors. And against federal court orders, they have moved transgender women in federal prison to men’s facilities, where they have been denied further treatment and subjected to state-sanctioned rape.

One of the many problems of contemporary liberalism has been that the argument made on my behalf was one of deference. I don’t really need people to respect my identity because it’s polite, I need the law to protect my ability to access the healthcare that allows me to get out of bed every morning and ensure I don’t get thrown in men’s prison for using the bathroom in the wrong state. When you let reactionaries control the field of “just asking questions” with no pushback or arguments beyond “don’t be a prick,” the blade of public opinion cuts one way. Being polite is not always in vogue and never eclipses economic concerns.

Forgive me if I do not have much time for “compromise” on these fronts, the reaction of a thankfully small minority of ambitious establishment Democrats. There is a concerted effort to criminalize my existence, anything but full-throated opposition is complicity, and what was behind that veneer of “just asking questions” in the late 2010s is laid bare and unrestrained in front of us today. Besides the dehumanizing and conspiratorial language and government policy, it is especially striking just how much of the vitriol is directed specifically at transgender children, to a degree that I struggle to draw historic parallels to. As with gay rights, wedge issues are eventually exhausted, but how many will be irreparably harmed and killed by policymakers before then?

I spent many years of my life trying to be anything but transgender, knowing that I would not be accepted and cognizant of the budding scheme in conservative circles to demonize us to as large a chunk of American society as possible. When I did come out, much of what I feared came true in my personal life, and the Overton window of public policy is in a terrifying place. Despite all of that, my only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner. So as much as I would prefer to speak and write on other issues instead, that’s a Hobson’s choice. For a taste, I have a speech transcript here, and I am quoted on a press release here.

In lieu of quiet wallowing or sending me weird, conciliatory emails as if someone I love has died, the best thing to do at this moment is donating to Lambda Legal and/or the ACLU, and making note of who does, and does not capitulate in a souless attempt to further their personal ambitions. Political life needs a longer and more detailed memory.

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The following is a transcript of a speech I gave yesterday, February 3rd in St. Vartan Park at a protest regarding NYU Langone’s cancellation of appointments for transgender youth in the face of Trump’s executive orders “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” and “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” threatening (without enforceability) to withhold federal funding from hospitals providing gender-affirming care to people under 19, among other things. Given I’ve been… sidetracked with recent events and my scheduled posts are delayed, I’ve decided to make it available here. I always ad hoc a bit, so it is not verbatim what I said. New paragraphs tend to correlate with pauses for crowd response.

Are you fired up tonight New York?

My name is Maeve, and I am a CUNY student, a DSA member, but most importantly of all tonight, a proud transgender woman.

We gather tonight because one man has unilaterally decided he knows better than parents, better than doctors, and the hospital we gather across from is one of few providing this care in the country scared into compliance. This federal administration has unleashed a shock-and-awe assault on the civil liberties of transgender New Yorkers, from nixing every reference to our existence from government resources down to removing the "T" from LGBT.

These policies are nothing short of eradicationist, designed to enforce an extremist worldview that denies our very existence as anything other than some kind of cultural disease, and robs us of our humanity.

But I've got news for Donald Trump: two weeks in, transgender New Yorkers continue to thrive. Transgender kids continue to thrive.

And as terrifying as social death as public policy is, it rests on a fundamentally false premise. Cruelty is the point. Chaos is the point. But the goal of this policy is to demotivate, for transgender folk and our allies to simply roll over and accept these blatantly illegal attempts to force us back into the closet. That is not an option for us. We have no other choice but to fight back.

When I was a trans teenager just two years ago as every trans adult once was a trans teenager, I was hardly in a position to speak as I do today. I lived a life on eggshells. What friend, partner is safe to tell. What moves I had to make so one day I could come out. And how could I rip off the Band-Aid once I was in a financial and interpersonal position to weather the fallout, knowing full well there would be family members and friends that would never speak to me again.

But in that time when it all seemed so daunting, I took a lot of solace in the fact that I was a New Yorker, of a city where queer history and resistance runs deep— as well as resistance to all forms of injustice. What a disgrace to that legacy it is then that in the face of the current moment, less than two miles from where I grew up, stands one of few hospitals to fall at the first hurdle.

My closest friend is a NYU Langone patient who began her care here when she was 16, and while she cannot be with us tonight, she has given me permission to tell snippets of her story. How she went from not having the will to even get out of bed in the morning to optimistic for the future and ready to take on the world in a week.

How the lifting of such an immense weight boosted her self-confidence to a degree where she could succeed in school, and now professionally.

And how her heart grieves for those in the same situation she was in less than five years ago, who today see that light at the end of the tunnel blocked. But are we gonna let them block that light?

No!

All ripping trans kids off their care will do is lead to higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide, as Dr. Zingman said earlier. But these things are not symptoms of being trans— these are symptoms of being trans without healthcare.

The best performing statewide race on the ballot last year was not Kamala Harris, who won by 13 points or even Kirsten Gillibrand who won by 18 points, but Prop 1 which enshrined anti-discrimination protections for transgender New Yorkers and others by 25 points. So we're here tonight demanding the state government do their damn job and act to enforce New York law. In the news last week, the state of Louisiana charged a New York doctor with providing Mifepristone to a woman who needed an abortion. Did New York comply?

No!

That's right, we did not. We refuse to extradite her. When Baton Rouge passes medieval laws against the right to choose, we do not comply. When Donald Trump's White House signs medieval executive orders against our children, what do we do?

We do not comply!

There is some segment of the political world and the general public that has decided to look away at this moment because they for whatever reason don't believe this care is worth fighting for. To those people, I ask you to consider what happens after this opening salvo. The executive order that NYU Langone is kowtowing to doesn't just refer to care for trans kids, it says under the age of 19. 18-year-olds are adults. This order not only goes after transgender youth and their parents seeking care, it lays the groundwork to establish precedent to deny transgender adults care. With Idaho's legislature passing a resolution asking the Supreme Court to reconsider the constitutionality of marriage equality just last week, don't believe for a second that they will stop at trans rights. If we give an inch, they will take a mile.

To every young trans person out there: you are real, no matter who sits in the White House. Your identity is real. Your needs are real. We are here for you. We fight for you. And we will not stand by and let institutions make cold, dehumanized decisions about whether to provide that care to you. To the parents here today, you should be able to make these decisions with the medical workers here today, not politicians. The government has no right to take that away from you. We will not back down. When trans rights are under attack, what do we do?

Stand up, fight back!

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It’s been just over two years now since I moved from the Mid-Hudson Valley, or at least when my mother’s lease on her Poughkeepsie apartment expired and even on paper I could not proclaim residency in the region I was born and spent the vast majority of my life in, my actual exit more like Fall 2021 when I went off to the fancy college I wouldn’t be able to afford to finish. A little under a year after finally leaving by technicality, I started the newsletter you are reading about Mid-Hudson politics and socioeconomics. Which poses a common question: why am I still interested in this?

The Mid-Hudson is where I learned about how our world works— and more often, how it doesn’t. It’s where my mom returned in 2014 after a two-year excursion to Los Angeles, down a marriage and with bank accounts drained, back in the same town where my sister and I were raised. This time instead of owning the hillside gravel driveway home that would one day be the focus of one of my articles, she rented a two-bedroom house wedged between an abandoned hospital and the local heating oil company that owned it. I was the one who got my own room.

But the world hadn’t given her the time or money to dawdle. Every day she would drive an hour, two hours round trip south to the greener pastures of Westchester County to teach other children, the children of the upper 9.9% who American society is designed for. Somers, Mahopac, whoever was hiring that year. She would leave before I woke up, get back around dinner, eat, take enough Benadryl to sleep, and do it all again the next four days. Because that is what needed to be done. That’s what capital demanded of her.

A few years later, her stellar credit and breakneck saving paid off, and she was able to put down a deposit on a house about half a mile away. It too was far from the center of town and also backed up to the abandoned Marathon Battery Plant, one of the Mid-Hudson’s many Superfund sites, but it was ours. Her kids all had their own rooms, even if the floor plan didn’t say so. Mine was a corner of the ‘70s wood paneled basement, with a curtain for privacy by my bed. I remember how much I marveled at having that much space. We’d be there for less than a year.

When things would fall apart again, she beat out more than 40 other applicants to be the one to rent a house. Like hell would her youngest have to change school districts in the chaos of the pandemic. That house had wires hanging from the ceiling, a finicky water heater, shrubs growing out of the rain gutters, and the 30-year abandoned remains of a hair salon in the basement, yet was a barely manageable $2,450 a month. Between that and the number of applicants, the housing market during the time of COVID simply did not make sense. But it would assuredly, all go back to normal soon. I got into college unexpectedly a few months later.

My mother had an incredible degree of resolve, something made more poignant because of her own childhood. She had given us a good deck of cards when I was born, two parents with stable government jobs, a house with decent equity, sure their commutes had to be a bit longer to make the math work, but it was very different from the profound trauma that came along with being raised in poverty. And yet slowly things all came apart, trust was put in the wrong people, poor decisions were made with the best of intentions, and eventually I graduated from the same high school she graduated from, in the same city she was from. She had gone in a circle. And yet there was no option but to continue forward, to survive. There was no pause button, no moment to rest or cry.

I write here because I think a lot about those days. I think of how everyone I keep in touch with from high school either lives with their parents or had to move far away to afford their own place. I think of the Manhattan two bedroom 40 blocks from where I write this now that the custody agreement shuttled me to, occupied by five people, then six, then eight, and the sirens I’d hear every night because 65th cuts across the park and York Avenue has all the hospitals. I think of my mother’s mother, raised daughter of the affluent largest employer in the City of Hudson, who went from teen pregnancy, familial shunning, and impoverished single motherhood in the City of Poughkeepsie to navigating the patchwork corporate ranks of IBM and finally law school. Class of ‘04, just after I was born. To the women who kept moving forward, my mother Kristin and my grandmother Judith, whose economic security was hard-won because there was no other way, thank you for treading a path for me.

I am from a people who climb steeply and then inevitably, are driven back down into the muck. Some may presume they merely drew a bad hand, but that’s pretty inevitable when the deck is missing all the high cards. I grew up when one in three nonresidential buildings were abandoned, enforcing that oppressive consciousness that you are the product of the people who couldn’t leave when the opportunity for economic advancement did, and that in turn the deck is stacked against you. The best hope for our future, it was drilled into us, is that we found a way to leave. I wasn’t really the type expected to. Yet I did.

I left the place behind, but not the pattern of precarity, and it’s not just college. I’ve been housing insecure to varying degrees for varying lengths of time since my early teens. Even now, I live in a combination of sketchy sublets the landlords aren’t aware of and couch-surfing with friends who frankly just feel bad for me. I don’t have a college degree or formal training in anything I do. I’m not a sociologist, or a journalist, or a data scientist, nor do I have much of an interest in being any of these things, but I’ve made a point to read what I can and do my best to apply what I’ve learned to the itch that I can never quite scratch. In being here reading this, I thank you for supporting me in that endeavor.

Upcoming this month:

• Election Model Retrospective - More in-depth explanation of my election model and a general debrief on what worked and what didn’t

• When The World Stopped Making Sense - A quantitative analysis of economic stratification and gentrification in the post-COVID Mid-Hudson, and the most research I’ve done for any piece to date

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[Part I: The Dirty Old Man – 00:00-00:43]

The last time I found myself in this city during election season was 2016. I was 13, old enough to cackle at all the Republican primary debates, click away at the 270toWin interactive map in study hall, and be some nondescript flavor of communist (“have you read the Wikipedia page for Rojava?”). I made the most of being the product of divorce, living my weekends in the center of the known universe. I gawked at demonstrators, even visited Trump Tower once. “Dad, that’s where he says they make the best taco bowls. That’s the escalator. Isn’t it nuts?”

It all got a bit realer when his face was projected on the side of the Empire State Building in the early morning of November 9th. When I went back to Trump Tower the weekend after, it was a remarkably different sight. The NYPD was setting up concrete barriers and a security checkpoint on 5th Avenue of all places. There was a constant crowd of protestors, chanting. There was a feeling of horror but also a willingness to fight. That will to fight would burn bright for the next four years, until he not only lost, but proved to the whole country with his actions afterwards that he was unfit to even gaze over the fence at 1600 Pennsylvania.

Eight years later, the sights have been far less dramatic. I was at a bar in Astoria with some old and new friends, once Fairfax County dropped not wanting to be the harbinger of bad news I quietly focused my attention on looking at local races here in New York City, swings towards Trump that were hardly any more comforting. It’s all something of a blur, but I distinctly remember a Latino man who I saw earlier in the night wearing a Trump hat coming back in with a different Trump hat and someone I know drunkenly trying to remove a wheatpasted Trump bumper sticker from some scaffolding. At 2 am, I took the N train to Lex and for whatever reason insisted on walking 35 blocks back home.

In observing the people I passed in the coming days, you’d not have known Donald Trump had just been re-elected. And why would you? The backlash in 2016 had an underlying tone of injustice. This was a man who 54% of voters did not choose, who was the most unpopular nominee in modern history, who was a lame duck before he even took the oath of office. He was a backlash to something other, something distant, the hatred and bigotry of under 78,000 mouthbreathers in three Midwestern states, empowered by a fluke of the undemocratic Electoral College and vague murmurs of FBI malpractice and Russian meddling. He had gotten a mere 18.1% of the vote in his home city, less than McCain, both Bushes, every Republican nominee since the party was founded but for Romney thanks to Hurricane Sandy goodwill. Last month, Manhattan learned that America is actually not better than this, and the theory of far off, angry white men has been blown to smithereens.

Trump got 30.0% of the vote in the city this time around. While narrower than it looked on election night, he is the first Republican nominee to win the popular vote since 2004, an election characterized by a lust for vengeance and sangre por sangre that makes even this moment look relatively docile by comparison. He won all 7 swing states, including Arizona, where my recently transplanted father who voted for Clinton in Manhattan and ridiculed Trump as much as I had found it in him to pull the lever for The Donald this time. I myself got into the voting booth intending to vote the Working Families line, but balked and ended up scribbling in a write-in (Cornel West, a man who should not be president, but is better than Stein and De la Cruz). I could tell you why I did that, but you’ve had a month of other talking heads telling you (and plenty of my own warnings), so I won’t insult your reading comprehension. If you’re here, you’re a well-read, politically engaged person. You have a college degree, maybe more than one, listen to podcasts, trust the science, wear subtle clothes that fit just right, and can discern in an instant between the very, very obvious path to national salvation and all this Tinseltown nonsense. I started this article the night after, but didn’t have much new to say. But I can look back with clearer eyes.

[Part II: The Junkie – 00:43-01:35]

I graduated from the same Mid-Hudson high school as my mom, Arlington High. It’s a large, sprawling complex centrally located in the hamlet of Freedom Plains, permanent population 438 but growing to about 5,000 people during the day between the thousands of students and hundreds of staff, my graduating class 732 kids before dropouts and arriving in no less than 55 school buses. Those buses come from a 15 by 15 mile area I have always considered a fairly representative sample of the United States, from the gritty Section 8 housing by the City of Poughkeepsie to the trailer parks of Pleasant Valley and the suspiciously cheaper than over the school district line McMansions of Red Oaks Mill. They pass crammed apartment blocks, and they pass front yards filled with rusted-out cars, where land is more plentiful than money and each when times are tough is a several hundred dollar bond ready to be cashed with a call to a scrapper or auto part store. 56% White, 25% Hispanic, 12% Black, 40% receive welfare. Hallways flood when it rains. All students must wear lanyards with photo ID. Ex-NYPD “school security monitors” in crimson windbreakers patrol the halls. Over 60,000 have attended. There are no notable alumni on Wikipedia.

My alma mater is sometimes in the news for not the best reasons, but violence is rarely completely random. So long as one kept to themselves, minded their own business, generally they were fine. If guidance deemed them worthy of our school within a school, the socially insulated handful of AP classes, they may not even have the indignity of interacting with the philistines. Even up there, we had our own Manhattan. A younger, prouder me who wasn’t deemed “that kind of kid” by the oracles was not very good at abiding by these guidelines. But for a frail, bony girl who looked halfway dead randomly slapping me in a hallway sophomore year, all other instances happened because of my failure to heed the principle of talk shit, get hit. One occurred around the 2020 election. I should note upfront, I am now on good terms with the others involved.

Arlington has courtyards, something I am sure the architect was very proud of, but were soon permanently locked when administrators realized they had accidentally created an area where we could smoke without setting off fire alarms. In the hastily planned COVID re-entry of September and October 2020, it was decided these doors would remain permanently open to provide ventilation. Soon after, I saw an odd photo of some young men holding a Trump flag in one of them between classes.

It was mostly as I expected, the camo cap-clad sons of Pleasant Valley and Beekman, but also a few Poughkeepsie kids I did not expect to be in such a photo, including a Black guy who sat at my lunch table. I gave him some shit about it, he reacted strongly, and as these adolescent benders go deescalation was not on any of our minds, other people were pulled in on the basis of vague honor, and things quickly got physical and out of hand. That’s how I ended up being escorted around by our friends, the school security monitors for a few days.

At the time, I figured it was some odd fluke of the environment, a school where at least the lower class of all creeds was fairly integrated. Few I knew back there were interested in politics, and fewer still were public about their allegiances. But we had some— Trump flags on the camo capper’s lifted pickup trucks, devoutly Catholic girls who spoke on abortion as murder in American Government class in as clear terms as “water is wet,” I even was friends with a girl up until she skipped class to attend January 6th. And then you had the intelligentsia, the children of transplant artists, work from homers, Vassar professors, the city plastic surgeon, IBM employees, the kids who had read the studies and come to the rational conclusion of the flavor of the month in the massive Democratic primary field, homogeneously liberal in a school district that voted for Trump all three times. In the months leading up to this election, most of the support for Trump I’ve seen on my Instagram feed has been nonwhite young men from urban Poughkeepsie.

The Democratic Party in the Trump years has made a play for moderate, affluent suburbanites at the conscious cost of working class voters, as I’ve written about before in Carhartt Politics. The hemmoraging of the working class in this election is obvious, but if you want to see the flip side, I point you to red Bucks and Nassau Counties, the spitting image of suburban shelteredness in Pennsylvania and New York respectively, both voting Republican for the first time since 1988.

[Part III: The Gunman – 01:35-02:45]

On December 4th, a man was shot and killed in Manhattan. No one knew it in the hours immediately following, but what would follow was a sensational news story about two previously unknown men with more staying power in the headlines than almost any other. You can look at the comment section on every outlet from the Times to the Post, the near universal public response has not necessarily been cheering on the killing of the insurance executive itself (my friends at the Center for Strategic Politics have shown that doesn’t poll well at all), but can certainly be characterized as carrying an underlying tone of “…well, I get where he was coming from.”

The alleged shooter is hardly an everyman. Steeped in far more wealth than his target, he went to the right schools— Gilman Country Day in Baltimore, Penn for undergrad and grad school— it’s a background that lends itself to a full-page high school yearbook profile, a firm place in the highest strata of American society, and I suspect one hell of a legal defense. In a time where people of backgrounds like that sitting in campaign offices, think tanks, and Zoom calls are taking stabs at the dark in hopes of capturing something that shifts the national conversation, one of their own has no doubt done it.

It is worth note that what is effectively the murder of some guy is at best met with a shrug in the public consciousness. Brian Thompson was not a public figure in any meaningful way, his Wikipedia page was created mere hours after he died. He was one of innumerable nameless people playing in the orchestra of our broken healthcare system, knowing that were they not, someone else would be in their place. Particularly in the wake of the first presidential election in decades that has lacked an aspirational case for dramatic changes to how healthcare works in this country, the collective anger suddenly channeled through an act of violence suggests a complete dereliction of potent opportunity by the Democratic Party. The first concrete policy lead on Harris’ website was making permanent an $800 tax credit for private insurance premiums. Even Donald Trump, whatever else always aware of the direction the wind blows, has kept conspicuously silent on what at surface appears a slam dunk occurence to condemn radicalism and appeal to law and order. Trump is a master at constructing effigies, channeling anxiety at societal ill against institutions, groups, individuals. He can recognize a good one.

While there is media reporting on his health issues, it is difficult to imagine someone of such privilege having their life destroyed by claim denials. That said, his GoodReads account and the etchings on the bullet casings show he’s quite well-read on this subject. There is nothing unique about the insulated class coming to bold, evidence-based conclusions about what must be said or done from their extensive research, though his pitch to the proles is a bit different than the mantra “democracy is on the ballot.”

Donald Trump went to the American public and told them something was deeply wrong. He identified those responsible, the nation’s enemies within, and pledged through gritted teeth to uproot them entirely. We look poised to enact state violence against millions of people and effectively ban my healthcare as a consequence. At least that’s a campaign pledge that isn’t mere nibbling at the edges!

When I was back at Arlington, I put hundreds of hours into the only Democratic presidential campaign that seemed comfortable speaking in an frightfully uncouth manner about the state of things. The greatest lie told since has been that its failure was a plea for normalcy. There remains an intense, raging energy for dramatic change in our society. One party has reaped greatly from this unilateral disarmament. Why is the Democratic Party so afraid to tap into it?

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I know what you’re here for, but if you have the patience to humor me, I do feel it is important to note one thing. Seems a bit late for this, right? There is a reason I did not release a rolling election model months ago to this effect.

I will not go much into the technical details today as I feel it makes more sense in a post-election debrief of “how predictive was this model?”, but when one releases something claiming to predict who the president is months in advance, others tend to put a lot of faith in that. If I was updating it every day as was initially my plan, many people would check it anxiously, as I have since July. In addition, our flawed brains aren’t the best at determining objectively if something like this has “worked.” If I predict one candidate has a 51% chance of winning and the other narrowly wins, that is presumed to be a failure. In contrast, if I predict an extremely narrow race and the candidate I said had 51% odds wins in a landslide, somehow I have succeeded at my job.

I feel most everything I do needs to be put out with a decent amount of context, for instance that this is the first presidential election I have been old enough to participate in (I voted here in Manhattan on the first day, Saturday before last). I don’t have a college degree nor am I presently in school, and in the credits I did attain you won’t find a statistics class, a data science class, or really anything even slightly related where I got a grade above a C.

I don’t say this to self deprecate, but my point is that I am not a savant and this is not magic. Modeling a presidential election is modeling 56 separate but interrelated elections nationwide (the 50 states plus DC, plus the five congressional districts in Nebraska and Maine which assign electors independent of statewide totals) and then stitching them all together. I have created my own proprietary weight of different polling and economic factors and data back to the 1948 election to do that using a lot of complicated sounding techniques: “elastic net regression,” “Monte Carlo simulation,” “polling firm weighing and house effects” and while I am proud of it, I will be far off the mark way more often than I will be on the money.

Every day going back to February 29th, I have simulated 10,000 elections. In these 250 days, that amounts to 2.5 million elections within reasonable error margins from the exact median result implied by my personal factor weights spat into a file on my computer. Chances are one of those results is incredible close to the actual outcome, but given this is not magic, all I can give you for now is the median scenario and the odds each candidate had from these simulations.

But enough of the wait:

Toplines

My model predicts that Kamala Harris has 56.2% odds of winning the presidency, with 43.8% odds for Donald Trump. In the median scenario, the popular vote is 49.9% for Harris to 46.9% for Trump and he flips the states of Arizona and Georgia from Biden, giving an electoral count of 276-262. Only 9 states have below a 90% chance of going for a candidate, and they are labeled in the image.

When I began this model, Trump was dramatically favored for the presidency, oscillating between 70% and 90% for most of his time running against President Biden. His departure from the race precipitated one of the most dramatic comebacks in polling I have ever see, with Harris becoming favored within a matter of days and even reaching the 70% range herself at one point. As the race has gotten closer and undecideds have become easier to read the race has narrowed significantly, but regardless Kamala Harris on this final day remains a moderate favorite for the Presidency, though as I prefaced beforehand that does not mean she is running away with it.

Pennsylvania - 54.2% Harris

A single state, Pennsylvania by an average margin of 0.586% or about 41,000 voters is the tipping point in the vast majority of simulations. It is no wonder then that the chart of the national odds of winning the election track so closely with the odds of winning Pennsylvania as to particularly in recent weeks look nearly identical.

North Carolina - 54.3% Trump

The second-closest state in my model is North Carolina, which initially looked like a rather hopeless prospect for a Democratic pickup but has come well into play due to a Republican gubernatorial candidate in polling freefall in Mark Robinson and continued demographic shifts especially due to snowbirds from more liberal states (my grandparents, mother, and sister all live in North Carolina today).

Georgia - 55.9% Trump

In Georgia we have our first flip of the night, while demographic and political trends are quite favorable to Democrats this cycle Harris has consistently lagged in polling, though not nearly as much as her predecessor. It remains within striking distance, but Trump is a slight favorite. Particularly in recent weeks, Harris has been surging here at Trump’s expense.

Nevada - 57.5% Harris

I don’t herd my model at all because I believe it biases it unduly but sometimes this has strange implications. I am skeptical Harris is doing this well in Nevada. Republicans have a large early vote lead and while Democrats are projecting confidence it can be overcome with Clark County election day vote and even Jon Ralston has taken that position, in terms of the raw number of votes I expect this to be the closest state in the country and I believe the model may overestimate Harris while she may still be a slight favorite. But the math is the math and I have made a point of not intervening when I don’t agree with what my algorithm is saying.

Wisconsin - 63.7% Harris

Earlier in her campaign, Harris managed to even get past 90% odds of winning Wisconsin and while the numbers have come down to earth since then, she remains decently favored to take the state and has had a positive trajectory in her numbers even in the closing weeks.

Michigan - 64.6% Harris

Once far more precarious due to a large Trump polling lead and the Gaza protest vote, Michigan has stabilized into perhaps the most consistent swing state in the Harris column. Trump however has been closing the gap in the final weeks.

Arizona - 66.5% Trump

I pride myself on not herding, but in this state I am certainly not sticking out from the pack. While opening a nice lead in the first few weeks of her campaign, Harris has again lagged behind Trump in Arizona. All this oddly while the Democratic Senate nominee, Ruben Gallego, has consistently been shown leading over well-known former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who rather unexpectedly lost in the Biden midterm to a Democrat. This is again another place where I am softly skeptical of my own model that there is this dramatic a favorite.

Iowa - 82.0% Trump

This is certainly one of the weirder charts in my model. When Biden was running, I attributed his closeness in the vote to one or two low quality polls which as in 2020 greatly overestimated his support. I figured this normalized once Harris was in the race, though her peak in late August still seemed a bit unlikely. Then a week ago arguably the most well-respected pollster in the country J. Ann Selzer came out with her final poll that shockingly showed Harris in front by three points. As you can see her polls weigh very heavily into my model for Iowa and even are factored into some surrounding states, but immediately after every pollster in the country seems to have polled Iowa to see if they could replicate it which they could not, normalizing my average a bit more. That said, I don’t know if I’d ever bet money on Selzer being wrong about Iowa…

Kansas - 83.9% Trump

Finishing out the states under 90% odds, Kansas is something of an oddity and not a state I have heard mentioned much if at all this cycle, and yet my model has placed it in front of Texas in terms of likelihood to flip. There have been several strangely favorable polls showing Democrats performing well here, yet too few and not enough reputation in the polling world for me to discern if there is something going on or not. Since the Selzer poll just next door however, I have looked at it with a bit less skepticism. I don’t modify my model based off my biases, and this is what the math says. It also makes for a funny psephology paper town because I don’t know who would willingly claim Kansas is a plausible flip but me.

Others

It is a busy day in the world, and so I’m posting these states charts that were competitive at various points of the year but are no longer that some may find interesting from my model without commentary. Just after them though, I have an addendum with my final NY Congressional race ratings if you are interested!

New York Congressional Lightning Round

This is still a newsletter fundamentally about New York politics, so I figure I may as well get on record with my final opinions of the NYS Congressional races.

NY-01:

I have long ago thrown in the towel trying to understand Long Island. No one I know lives there, so I’ve actually never been east of the Queens-Nassau border, and the more I hear, the less interest I have. Incumbent Republican Nick LaLota faces challenging former CNN reporter John Avlon in Suffolk County. Leading in the polls and with partisan trends on his side, I expect LaLota to dispatch Avlon with ease. Safe LaLota.

NY-03:

Incumbent Democrat Tom Suozzi faces former Republican Assemblyman Mike LiPetri in northern Nassau County. I see the results of 2022 as a traumatic fluke for this district and expect Suozzi to win with even more ease than LaLota. Safe Suozzi.

NY-04:

In southern Nassau County, we have a rematch between now Republican Congressman Anthony D’Esposito and 2022 opponent Laura Gillen. With D’Esposito plagued by scandal in relatively blue turf against Gillen’s boring but steady campaign, I expect he’s in trouble. Likely Gillen.

NY-17:

Former Democratic Congressman Mondaire Jones has alienated his constituents by carpetbagging to Brooklyn, his progressive allies by endorsing George Latimer, and otherwise seemed to have done all in his power to render himself as unlikeable as possible. Republican incumbent Mike Lawler meanwhile has run a pretty effective constituent services system and built a lot of connections with the Orthodox Jewish communities in Rockland County which largely backed his opponent last cycle, even seeing the Rockland buchurim of course coincidentally back a Republican operative in the Working Families Party primary over Jones. Lawler has proven himself an effective operator in unfavorable terrain. Lean to Likely Lawler.

NY-18:

Despite winning this district as lieutenant governor to Lee Zeldin’s gubernatorial run, Alison Esposito has failed to coalese an operation which can generate much of anything besides campaign finance scandals. The rebbes of Kiryas Joel have also both backed her opponent, even though they split between Ryan and his opponent in 2022. He has assembled a coalition that spans from the ultraorthodox Jewish community to AOC. In my Molinaro piece, I doubted Pat Ryan was above a replacement level Democrat. I may be proven wrong this cycle. Safe Ryan.

NY-19:

My previous article and my most successful one to date was a long-winded profile piece on incumbent Republican Marc Molinaro, so as you can imagine I have thoughts. My thoughts have evolved since September though, while I have been and remain a doubter of challenger Josh Riley’s skill as a politician and I am skeptical of his personal motive for running, Molinaro has really dropped the ball. He lags in the polls (though he did last cycle too) and continues to get in strange Twitter squabbles about whether pets are actually being eaten by the legal migrant community in Springfield, OH and other fringe issues. I’ve heard from a lot of people who were with him in 2022 that are turned off by it. So I recant my position in my article. Tilt Riley.

NY-22:

After being carried to victory by less than a percentage point in the Zeldin wave of 2022, Brandon Williams faces down popular State Senator John Mannion and a former schoolteacher of the NYSUT, which has not been frugal with their mailers across the district. Williams has responded by being in frame as a Congressman from Upstate New York while Mike Johnson said into a camera he’d like to overturn the CHIPS Act and also… submitting petitions to be the Republican, Conservative, and… Libertarian nominee for Congress? Likely Mannion.

I hope you all have as enjoyable an Election Night as you reasonably can. I’ll be back when the dust settles.

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NOTE: This is the free version of yesterday’s article, which as always was pre-released early for paid subscribers.

I can’t tell you when exactly I met Marc Molinaro. My best guess would be either when the Walkway over the Hudson opened when I was 6 or the annual Dutchess County Fair around the same time. I couldn’t tell you if I knew he was a politician or just an unusually gregarious man, but what I do know is I cannot remember a time when I was not at least vaguely aware of him. I’d wager this is the case for most who like me grew up in Dutchess County in the 2010s.

Everywhere in the country has politicians who engross themselves in that hyperlocal circuit, but Molinaro was a whole different beast. Every time there was a spare block of time and a new shop opened, a class graduated, or a stretch of rail trail was opening, he was there. When he couldn’t be, he found alternatives. The thumbnail for this article is a letter I and every other Dutchess County senior graduating from high school in 2021 got, a Comic Sans kudos to us for making it through COVID and beginning our adult lives. Not photocopied or auto-penned, hand signed.

Molinaro won his first election at age 18, became mayor of his hometown at 19, defrocked a decade-long incumbent assemblyman at 30, and was county executive at 36. In that last role, he routinely overperformed Democrats by double digits. In 2018, Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand won Dutchess County by 14.8%. As an at the time popular Andrew Cuomo cruised to victory on the same ballot against Molinaro’s doomed, underfunded gubernatorial run, Molinaro won Dutchess by 7.0%. While Molinaro lost to Cuomo by 24 points statewide, he actually overperformed Lee Zeldin’s 2022 gubernatorial run in 23 upstate counties, including being the last Republican to win now solidly blue Schenectady and Columbia counties.

Molinaro today is a first-term backbencher in the GOP’s razor-thin House majority. He lost his first competitive race ever in a special election for Congress, only winning the district’s portion of Dutchess which excluded the most blue cities of Poughkeepsie and Beacon by a mere 3 points. He won the general election by an even slimmer 1.56% in the most favorable electoral environment for the New York GOP since the 1990s. His new district contains none of Dutchess County, where he cut his teeth as a politician for over half his life, including numerous electoral overperformances deep into the Trump era. The congressman who proudly stated he did not vote for Trump only 6 years prior has endorsed him this cycle, and with less than two months to go rapidly careens towards what looks more likely by the day: at age 48, Marc Molinaro may soon be out of office for the first time since he was a teenager.

All this begs the question: what happened?

Molinaro’s story, like that of many in the Mid-Hudson (though most will not admit it), begins much further downstate. Born in Yonkers in 1975, his parent’s divorce and single mother’s financial hardship found him in a far rougher Beacon than exists today and even further up the river in 1989.

Tivoli, population 1,035 in 1990 and 23 people smaller now, is a prototypically Hudson Valley village. Nestled in the northwest of Dutchess County between Route 9G and the Hudson River, Tivoli isn’t a one traffic light town— it’s a zero traffic light town, unless one is semantic enough to count the blinking yellow lights at the corner of 9G and Broadway installed just a few years ago. It is postage stamp sized at 1.55mi², most residents live along either Broadway or Montgomery Street unless they live in a small development behind Tivoli Park.

An older Victorian brick building sits along Broadway. A historic marker coins it the “Watts De Peyster Fireman's Hall.” It has always held dual purposes, initially it doubled as a firehouse and the village government’s offices, but with a new firehouse being built in 1986 the other half is now the village library. These village offices are where Molinaro found himself between his election to the Board of Trustees at age 18 and his resignation as mayor to become an Assemblyman at age 32.

There is I think something of a horseshoe shaped curve to the difficulty of being an elected official. One end is obvious, where decisions of great global consequence rest on the shoulders of just a few powerful people. At the other end, it is much less obvious, and I think few offices exemplify it as well as mayor of a small town. Every local gripe from noise complaints to bear sightings to boundary disputes isn’t just listened to and resolved by some underling, but you yourself. To be a leader in a community so small is to nearly guarantee you will be personally known to them. If said gripe is not solved, you are individually to blame and word of your failing spreads quick. It is an environment dominated by individual personalities.

This is of course nothing new. John Watts de Peyster, as in “Watts De Peyster Fireman's Hall,” was like the namesakes of most buildings of that era a wealthy New Yorker with a summer home nearby. He was elected village president and did the community a service by bankrolling its construction… and then approving the contract to lease the building for the village from himself. At various points he evicted the village government from those quarters at his own whim, such as when they raised taxes in 1900. A few years later, when his estranged son was elected village president, the village was only permitted to use the space if he was barred entry. Money is as effective a carrot as it is a stick.

There is a reason village government in the Hudson Valley has such high turnover: it is a very interpersonally demanding job. The decisions you make reverberate through the community in ways that invariably will make some section of the population despise you. In communities as small as Tivoli, your ability to hang on despite that will be dependent on your ability to greet hundreds by name at community events, shake hands, plant trees, run towards every fire alarm, and otherwise execute perfect retail politics lest the scion of some other hyperlocal family challenge you. Few are cut out for this role. But few 19-year-olds are elected the youngest mayor in America. Between community college classes (Molinaro, whose first victory scuttled his attendance of SUNY Cortland, is one of five congresspeople whose highest educational attainment is an associate’s degree) and village board meetings, Molinaro found his way.

Molinaro engrossed himself in this role, a formative period very indicative of his later philosophy in campaigning. His eyes however, clearly laid beyond. In 1999, he sought and won a seat in the Dutchess County Legislature, giving him the additional monthly drive to Poughkeepsie on top of his responsibilities as mayor. His constituency expanded to the rest of the town of Red Hook (which Tivoli is part of) as well as Milan and Clinton. However, two simultaneous elected offices would fail to satisfy him.

Molinaro was 30 years old and in his sixth term as mayor when an opportunity for further advancement beyond the Gilded Age building on Broadway presented itself. Facing polling armageddon against popular Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, third term Republican governor George Pataki opted against seeking re-election in 2006. This kicked off a mad scramble for the opportunity to succeed him. Amongst the candidates were current Secretary of State Randy Daniels, Assemblyman and future Congressman John Faso, the former governor of Massachusetts Bill Weld, and of greatest relevance to us Assemblyman Pat Manning.

Manning’s career has a surprisingly similar streak to Molinaro’s. Elected to the Dutchess County Legislature at age 26, he became the youngest assemblyman in New York history in 1994. And like Molinaro, his eyes clearly always looked towards higher office. The seat he would be vacating spread from East Fishkill, the farthest ring of pre-Recession exurban NYC development, to the town of Canaan in the northeastern corner of Columbia County, a quicker drive to Boston than New York City. Also included of course was Molinaro’s own Tivoli, and so Molinaro quickly cleared the field.

There was a problem though. Only a few months before the primary that would coronate Molinaro, Manning’s gubernatorial campaign was floundering. Failing to coalesce support amongst conservatives and rocked by allegations of an extramarital affair, Manning dropped out of the race and announced he would seek re-election to the Assembly. Molinaro decided to stay in, overnight transformed from shoo-in to challenger.

I have thought a fair bit about how to present this election, as while I have been aware of it for many years, it has gone practically unmentioned since Molinaro’s rise to Congress. This is a race far more primed for the medium of a Jon Bois video than a Substack. So in the spirit of an experience I had lately and will soon write about, let’s look under the hood.

These are the town-by-town results of the 2006 NY-103rd Republican primary, sorted by population and with one town’s figures conspicuously missing. It should be rather self-explanatory, but one thing that may not be is the eligible voter and turnout numbers. The Dutchess County Board of Elections was kind enough to provide me with their party registration figures from 2006, so we can get accurate numbers for what share of eligible voters (registered Republicans) actually voted. Columbia County meanwhile does not have this data readily available, and so their towns have no data for those fields.

Molinaro has done quite good for a challenger, but with only one town outstanding is still down to the incumbent Manning by 289 votes, about 6.20%. Manning has really run up the score in his hometown of East Fishkill, one of the aforementioned McMansion filled towns in the outermost exurban ring of New York City. He netted 283 votes there, just shy of his entire lead. Molinaro has done quite impressively near his home turf, the town of Milan in his legislative district and neighboring Pine Plains just outside of it (the town of Clinton while in his county legislative district was not in this state assembly district). They are amongst the smallest towns in the district though, and so those decisive wins only net Molinaro 92 votes.

As I’ve said though, I have left a town out. Red Hook, which contains the village of Tivoli, is a larger town relative to most in the district but still has just over a third the number of registered Republicans as Pat Manning’s hometown. Still, it can be expected to go favorably for him and turnout might even be spiked by the presence of a known face. As a hypothetical, let’s crunch some numbers where turnout is about 5% higher than in the highest turnout town, and where Molinaro does 5% better than in his best town, his 72% with the 74-person electorate of Milan.

In this scenario where Red Hook has the highest turnout in the district by far and Molinaro holds Manning to an almost inconceivably low for a long time incumbent 23%, Manning would still eeke it out by 5 votes. With that said, these are not the actual results of the primary, and I suspect you understand where I am going with this:

Marc Molinaro, age 30, got 89.85% of the vote in Red Hook against an incumbent assemblyman who had been in office since he was in high school. Turnout among registered Republicans in Red Hook was 1.7 times higher than the next highest town, cracking 30% in a sleepy Bush midterm primary where the only other race on the ballot was to determine who got to lose to Hillary Clinton by 36 points in November. With 584 votes to Manning’s 66, Molinaro netted 518 votes in Red Hook to win by a margin of 229 votes. Who ever said retail politics was dead?

Molinaro at this point encountered something he up to this point had not: his ceiling. He was a Republican in New York. While his first foray into politics was as a high school intern to Democratic Assemblywoman Eileen Hickey and he initially registered in increasingly blue Tivoli as a Democrat, by his tenure in the county legislature his colors were firm. Molinaro was a rank-and-file member of the eternal minority party in the Assembly.

The Democratic Party has held a majority in that body since the 1974 elections, though the State Senate had a Republican majority that was increasingly shaky. Molinaro continued to overperform in general elections, re-elected in 2008 by 23 points in a district Obama carried by 4, but the lack of opportunity for further advancement was palpable. But where could he go?

Tivoli’s State Senate seat was reliably Republican, last held by a Democrat for less than two terms in the 1910s, (he went on to do other things) but incumbent Stephen Saland showed no sign of retiring anytime soon. Tivoli’s Congressional district, a ten-county sideways-T stretching from central Dutchess through the Capital Region into the Adirondacks, was quite swingy, but Blue Dog incumbent Kirsten Gillibrand was also a habitual overperformer.

When she was appointed to succeed Hillary Clinton in the Senate, her successor Scott Murphy narrowly won the 2009 special election to replace her, narrowly enough for Molinaro to openly flirt with a run in 2010, a run he did not end up making. That year’s Republican nominee Scott Gibson would go on to defeat Murphy by 10 points.

Why did Molinaro pass up the opportunity? His publicly stated reasons at the time were simple enough, that he was raising a young family and that he was “very happy focused on my work in the Assembly.” One of these I believe far more than the other.

The unspoken elephant in the room however is one Molinaro is intimately familiar with: money. Raised in poverty, Molinaro often tells a story of how a county food stamp administrator was rude to his single mother over the mere state of needing welfare. I have heard it many times in debates, at events, in interviews, and I don’t believe he has ever gotten more specific than that. “She must have had a bad day and made my mother feel small, and made her feel so worthless,” he said in one such interview with the Times. “I saw at that moment what a person with a degree of power could have.”

What teenager would have the audacity to seek to lead their community? Off-the-charts self-righteousness and ego are the most obvious, and the scale model of the White House in the Tivoli mayor’s office hardly absolve him of this. But by the time he had that office in the old firehouse, he was used to putting out fires. The cable and electric bill, the foreclosure notices, the repossession of his mother’s car, and the cold tightening fist of the Clinton-Gingrich safety net which saw families like his, unemployed mothers like his, as freeloaders. Those raised under the gun of poverty grow up quickly, a buoy forced by the tides of public policy that may as well hurry up and try to have a scrap of that power for themselves, to wield it for some good. It does not cost a dime to knock on your neighbor’s door.

While competitive at other levels of government, a safe Republican Assembly seat does not make for great fundraising. Where money does exist in Dutchess and Columbia counties, it is not in the hands of the historically Republican townies, but those of the New York City intelligentsia, the liberal, less affable than they believe weekenders and country home owners who do things like run Gore Vidal or Sean Eldridge for Congress from the stoops of their mansions without a lick of self awareness over half a century apart. Money is with the well-born, the Roosevelts, Watts de Peysters, and in the rare case a family of means hold less-than-liberal politics, chances are high it is their progeny seeking office. On the southern fringe of the 20th Congressional, raising his 8-month and 5-year-old children between long commutes to Albany, Molinaro could not make up for this lack of money with his time.

Molinaro won his biggest victory yet on that year’s ballot, steadily upping his margin from 11 points in 2006, 22 in 2008, and 33 in 2010. Redistricting next cycle however presented great uncertainty. The unspoken bargain in Albany was that the State Senate would be gerrymandered to maintain the Republican majority, and the Assembly the same for the Democrats. Molinaro’s 103rd was very obviously on the chopping block, with one clear way to neutralize it being to transfer Molinaro’s own Red Hook to Kevin Cahill’s safe blue district and have the Dutchess-Columbia district take in the Town of Poughkeepsie. This would be exactly what ended up happening, though Molinaro would avoid it. In early 2011, longtime Dutchess County Executive Bill Steinhaus announced his retirement.

March 30th, 1993 is a day just over ten years before I was born that may as well be tattooed on every child of the Mid-Hudson’s palm. On that day, 60,000 employees of IBM, thousands of which were manufacturing and administrative workers in their factories in Poughkeepsie, Kingston, and East Fishkill, were designated “surplus.” The company that had kept their entire payroll through the Great Depression, the company that all four of my grandparents and three generations of my family were employed by, the company whose presence not only kept this area afloat through the rust belt decline of manufacturing and agriculture, but spurred the development of entire towns and ensured upward mobility for decades, was now laying off over 55% of their staff in the region. From peak employment in the 1980s, IBM’s staff in the Mid-Hudson is now 89.7% smaller.

While few families had prepared for this day, IBM certainly did. Private security stood watch outside each manager’s office, police cars idled in the parking lots, town officials even requested that nearby gun stores to shutter for the day. IBM, long placated by every incentive and tax subsidy they ever asked county government for, had finally cut off their right hand and condemned us to damnation. IBM held a near monopoly over the rapidly expanding computer business and lost that same monopoly at a pace only matched by companies met with successful antitrust action. In the communities that bent over backwards to accommodate them, IBM would no longer be holding up their end of the bargain.

This article may not be about IBM, but no full accounting of Mid-Hudson Valley politics from the Second World War to today is complete without some mention of the economic armageddon this brought. One cannot grow up walking by those abandoned factories and the boarded up shops, churches, and hospitals hit by the aftershock and ever hear “surplus” as a neutral word. One learns at a very early age in the Mid-Hudson that they exist in the after times, occupy a world sapped of economic mobility, filled with monuments and relics of when opportunity was plentiful. And on that day when the hand that fed us for 40 years disappeared, at the helm of county government was Bill Steinhaus.

Steinhaus, like many of us, was raised by IBM employees (“IBMers,” as connected families refer to themselves) in a town IBM built, exurban Wappinger, taking the warm corporate paternalism that defined generations as a simple given. Steinhaus also started in politics young, winning the 1978 Dutchess County Clerk race at age 28. By his 1991 run for executive, the writing was on the wall that the economy would soon be forced to diversify. He would not even finish his first term in office without finding himself holding the bag.

Dutchess County was suddenly on the verge of insolvency. Property values were falling off a cliff, sales tax fell by $6.5 million, and under threat of even more layoffs, the Town of Poughkeepsie lowered the tax assessment of IBM’s Poughkeepsie campus by $93 million. The Kingston and East Fishkill plants were soliciting reductions to a similar magnitude, eventually shuttering entirely. Steinhaus responded by raising property taxes dramatically and laying off over 20% of county employees, closing entire county agencies. The fifth Republican of six county executives in the reliably red county, the third prong of his strategy was to turn again to the private sector, providing steep tax cuts to corporations and developers to redevelop some former IBM sites and attempt to create some portion of work for the newly unemployed, a plan met with muddied results but an occasional success. The election of another fiscal conservative George Pataki to the governor’s office in 1994 was another boon to Steinhaus, implementing “business-friendly” tax policy at a level outside his control.

Under Steinhaus’ 20-year tenure as executive, what were thought to be the end times ended up ever so slightly better than expectations, and the county Republicans reaped the credit. Even property values came to rebound as the southern portion of the county was re-developed into gaudy NYC exurbs, until the money faucet turned off with the Great Recession. There was also in this period another critical pivot, by some miracle (and a lot of public-private partnerships) tourists were being convinced to spend their weekends in the notoriously seedy cities of Beacon and Poughkeepsie with the opening of several new museums and attractions, including the Walkway Over the Hudson mentioned in the opening to this article.

Steinhaus remains a controversial figure, both due to his merciless cuts to government and privatization but also on a personal level, often picking incredibly petty political fights or calling legislators into his office solely to berate them. With that said, in a moment of profound crisis he undeniably defined the role of the county executive, a position which in many peer counties is effectively relegated to rubber-stamping legislation and cutting ribbons. When he chose to retire after 20 years in office, Molinaro had the backing of all notable local Republicans before he even officially announced.

It is somewhat implied when I describe his level of overperformance, but let’s make it explicit: people really like Marc Molinaro. Or at least, once did. This is a result both of his personability (particularly compared to Steinhaus, who won his narrowest victory of 3.3 points in his final 2007 race) and a legitimate track record of ideological moderation, particularly as he got deeper into his tenure as executive. He would win that office by 23.1 points in 2011, 26.5 in 2015, and 17.0 in 2019, a consequence of decreased ticket splitting in the Trump era. All this while Dutchess County narrowly backed Clinton in 2016 and delivered results 10 or more points worse for other Republicans seeking county office. In soliciting more bohemian audiences through tax breaks and other subsidies to art museums and other attractions, ironically the business-friendly Republicans who dominated Poughkeepsie and Beacon since the late 1800s very quickly rendered themselves extinct in the same timespan where Molinaro managed to stay comfortably above water.

In his time in the Assembly, Molinaro voted against charter schools and to end fracking. He emphasized addiction treatment, mental health, and disability rights in his time as executive, candidly speaking about his mother’s struggle with depression and his daughter’s special needs. While attending a Trump rally in Poughkeepsie before the New York primary (Molinaro made clear he was there in his capacity as executive, something I believe given he was at the Bernie rally in Poughkeepsie the week prior), he publicly announced he would not be voting for Donald Trump in 2016, instead writing in then-retiring Congressman Chris Gibson.

2018 saw Andrew Cuomo seeking his third term as governor. Son of another longtime governor, then Attorney General Cuomo won a decisive 30.5 point victory in a 2010 cycle otherwise filled with woe across the country for Democrats. He put down Zephyr Teachout’s Working Families Party backed challenge in 2014 as well as Westchester County Executive Astorino in the general election, and looked in pole position to do the same to Cynthia Nixon and the chosen Republican sacrificial lamb. The scandals that would undo him, long rumored and freely spoken of even in this period, would not come to a head for three more years. Expected challengers, John DeFrancisco, Joel Giambra, Brian Kolb, Joe Holland, all announced campaigns only to quietly withdraw. All but one. Marc Molinaro announced his campaign in Tivoli. Pinned to his lapel was the ‘60s cartoon character Underdog.

People liked Marc Molinaro, as I have said. But in order to like Molinaro, you have to know Molinaro. Dutchess is the 15th most populous county in New York State with a population of about 295,000. Columbia County, which Molinaro represented portions of in the Assembly, is 40th at just over 60,000 residents. Outside of Dutchess County and state Republican circles, few knew who Marc Molinaro even was.

As the presumptive nominee well before the election, Molinaro was able to raise the largest haul of his career by far, $2.41 million dollars in the course of the campaign. Andrew Cuomo in the same period raised $37 million, actually down from his 2014 campaign’s $48 million as donors found more interesting attractions in the House and Senate. Molinaro’s longstanding discomfort with fundraising persisted into this higher echelon, with him even calling it “unseemly.” “I’ve always had that feeling that I’m on the outside. I just have,” he said in a Times interview. “I know a lot of people who feel that way. But when I’m in a room with exceptionally wealthy people, I feel like I’m the poor kid.”

Molinaro’s strategy is a bit novel today, as he actually seemed to run a fairly nonpartisan, reform-minded race against Cuomo. He backchanneled to try and get SDNY U.S. Attorney and Cuomo critic Preet Bharara to run as a Democrat and Republican for Attorney General, creating something of an anti-corruption fusion ticket between the two. There is no indication anyone but Molinaro took this seriously. He ran on instituting campaign finance reforms, chided Cuomo for the dysfunction of the MTA, criticized the Trump tax cuts, frankly his lines of attack were not much different from what was being said by Cynthia Nixon or the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins.

Cuomo for his part mostly ignored Molinaro, banking on the environment of the first Trump midterm and in their one debate calling Molinaro a “Trump mini-me,” backing it up with Molinaro’s vote against gay marriage in the Assembly and pro-life views. Molinaro challenged Cuomo to more debates, even attending an undercard debate with only third party candidates, but simply was not given any further oxygen. Andrew Cuomo was re-elected by 23.4 points.

In 2022, the next Republican nominee, Lee Zeldin only lost by 6.4 points. This alone would seem to indict Molinaro’s run, not only did he lose by a large margin, but it was proven the very next cycle that a Republican could come far closer in New York State. Let’s not be so hasty for a moment.

This is a swing map I made of those two governor’s races about a year ago. In red are areas where Lee Zeldin performed better than Marc Molinaro. In blue are areas where Marc Molinaro proved stronger. Despite an 18 point difference, there remains a lot of blue on this map upstate.

In the Mid-Hudson and the Capital District, Zeldin at best pulled about even with Molinaro. In fact in his home turf of northern Dutchess and Columbia counties, Molinaro did anywhere from 5-15 points better than Zeldin. In the scope of a midterm with an unpopular president of your own party, against an entrenched popular incumbent with a war chest about 15x larger, this is fairly impressive.

Zeldin was able to dramatically improve on Molinaro’s margin in 2022 in New York City, the most expensive media market in the country where Governor Cuomo was raised, but was relatively alien to Governor Hochul. This was as much a function of genuine swing in the vote as it was depressed Democratic turnout.

Between 2018, the midterm of an unpopular Republican president, and 2022, the midterm of an unpopular Democratic President, turnout fell dramatically in more Democratic areas of the state and rose accordingly in more Republican areas of the state. This happened so linearly that despite turnout being near in each election, 48.0% in 2018 and 47.7% in 2022, most precincts in New York City experienced double-digit fluctuations in turnout, almost exclusively to Zeldin’s benefit.

To compare these two races is quite apples to oranges, given how profoundly different the national and statewide environment was in each. What we can say confidently though is that Molinaro gave a rather strong performance on his home turf, in some counties the best for a statewide Republican since George Pataki. It would also however be the apparent peak of his electoral prowess. Under the future lines of his congressional seat where he eeked out a 1.6 point win in November 2022, he beat Cuomo by 4.5.

If we judge Marc Molinaro’s gubernatorial run at its most basic, how close he came to winning, he failed entirely. If we ask if he increased his profile in the Mid-Hudson Valley and the Southern Tier for further career advances, we may come to a different conclusion.

Molinaro took his loss in stride, perhaps because of the fact it was obvious the tiny window for an upset victory was completely sealed months before votes were cast. Marc Molinaro would not be a Governor, or a Senator, or otherwise hold statewide office. Despite this, he came out the other end of this race a rising star in Republican circles statewide and talk that had persisted for years of the next, most obvious direction for career advancement quickly hit a boiling point.

While Molinaro carried New York’s 19th Congressional District against Cuomo by a commanding 11.1 points, John Faso, the incumbent Republican in that seat handpicked by Chris Gibson to succeed him, fell to his challenger Antonio Delgado by 5.3 points. For the first time in his career, there were no rings to kiss, no clear line of succession for the congressional seat he had no doubt eyed since he was a teenager. 2020 however would see an unpopular Trump at the top of the ticket, so Molinaro would quietly inform the local GOP he wasn’t interested.

If there was a “surplus moment” for Molinaro in his time as executive, some tenure-defining crisis, it was likely the COVID-19 pandemic. When cases began being reported in New York State, Molinaro declared a state of emergency and instituted a lockdown on March 13th. Andrew Cuomo, Bill de Blasio, and the vast majority of New York counties would not issue similar orders for another three days.

In a time of surface-level national unity, when people acted calmed by Andrew Cuomo and the unprecedented state of lockdown was not yet met by public backlash, Molinaro joined the ranks of those affected in the worst of ways. His father Anthony, a sometimes distant figure in his life who was put on a ventilator at Westchester Medical Center only two days earlier, succumbed to the disease. Like the sons of others hospitalized in that period, he was not permitted to visit his bedside as he laid dying. Molinaro ended an interview shortly after with a note of caution and a plea to the public. "We all have a role in this. If we all hunker down just a little longer, if we engage in the distancing just a little bit longer, we'll slow the spread.”

Trump lost, Cuomo’s scandals were finally at the front of public discourse, and Biden’s approval rating was nosediving by the fall of 2021. From a farm in Rhinebeck, Marc Molinaro announced a campaign decades in the making: he would run for Congress against Antonio Delgado. From that very press conference he was striking several very Molinaro chords, insistence his opponent was a good guy and that said good guy was a puppet of monied Democratic donors who was distracted from doing better, as vague as that “better” is:

“The truth is, I don’t dislike our member of Congress, I don’t. I just don’t think he’s interested in taking up this most historic challenge, he’s more interested in mastering the Washington two-step, the dance with the donors, the PACs, the billionaires and the special interests, raising millions of dollars— just as Andrew Cuomo did— than engaging in the heavy lifting, the courageous advocacy and the day-to-day work of skillfully making a difference at home.”

It was fairly obvious foreshadowing that this race would be a continuation of how Molinaro ran all his races, (though in 2018 his sincere scorn of Cuomo was palpable) as the folksy, kid mayor who wasn’t born into privilege and didn’t have D.C. political consultants focus grouping what color shirt he should wear. This race however would not come to fruition.

In the chaos of the first few months post-Cuomo, Kathy Hochul’s first lieutenant governor found himself in a predicament four of his last seven predecessors (and recently another alum of the infamous 2009 State Senate) also experienced: federal indictment. It would be unfair to say that Delgado, an electoral overperformer in his own right, accepted the job because he was destined to lose to Molinaro, but no doubt daydreaming in the State Capitol was a safer bet.

This set up an August 2022 special election for the old bounds of the seat, with Ulster County Executive Pat Ryan chosen as his opponent. Ryan is something of an anti-Molinaro, a figure who besides the shared ambition and growing up just across the Hudson in Kingston is different in just about every way.

Son of the CEO of a local insurance company, Ryan was an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army during the Iraq War. Returning from duty, he became an executive in several data analytics firms, most recently one hilariously called “Dataminr.” While not living in the Hudson Valley since West Point, Ryan nonetheless found his way back from Brooklyn Heights (as many a pol has done) in time to participate in the swing seat’s congressional primary in the Trump midterm, already expected to be a wave year for Democrats. Ryan would get 17.9% in the crowded field, a second place finish bested by Delgado’s 22.1% in a deeply divided field. Afterward he mulled around til he was chosen to be the nominee for Ulster County Executive at a party convention, and now would have his second shot to fall upwards without any input from primary voters.

From the jump in this race, it was fairly obvious who had the advantage. Molinaro was a well-known figure in the district’s most populous county, had won it by a vast margin in his gubernatorial race, and had apparently scared Delgado (who won the district by an even larger 11.6 points in the 2020 election) out of the race. Polling quickly confirmed this, while no nonpartisan polling was conducted of the race, Molinaro held commanding leads in both Democratic and Republican-sponsored polls.

Pat Ryan however did have one thing on his side: the Supreme Court. About a month after Delgado’s resignation, the Supreme Court officially overturned Roe vs Wade, one of the effects of which was dramatic Democratic overperformance in a series of special elections. Though not yet winning any of them, (while the Alaska special election had occurred, the results of the final ballot were not tabulated until August 31st) there was certainly sound evidence behind the theory that Ryan may overperform in the post-Roe national environment, even as Molinaro’s campaign cruised into the special election saving money for the general, spending only $994k of $1.54 million dollars raised compared to Ryan’s war chest which was practically depleted by election day, $1.26M out of $1.58M raised spent on just the special election.

It is worth backtracking at this moment to examine that 2018 governor’s race under these same bounds. It is mapped below:

Molinaro did not just win, it was a true rout. He carried the district by 11.11 points. Even if one was to assume all third party voters preferred Cuomo to him (an unlikely prospect given they were all basically anti-Cuomo protest votes), he wins by 6.02 points. He carried every county but increasingly blue Ulster, and even there Cuomo was held to barely over 50% of the vote. Even Columbia County, home to a plethora of NYC country homes and the tourist traps of Hudson, went narrowly to Molinaro, the last time a Republican would win this county.

This is a sizable mandate, one that lead to many observers (including me, just outside the district in Poughkeepsie) writing it off entirely. Molinaro would be elected to Congress, find himself in a tougher but still manageable fight in November, and would hopefully be swept from office in the coming presidential year or a second Trump midterm. This is not what happened.

Marc Molinaro lost, and he lost in rather spectacular fashion. Compared to his 2018 run, the floor fell out practically everywhere, with his few areas of substantial improvement being stray fragments of exurban southern Dutchess and the one seasonal, now increasingly permanent presences of the Satmar and Vizhnitz Hasidic dynasties in Sullivan County.

Perhaps nowhere was his collapse in regional goodwill more gruelling than in his own Tivoli and Red Hook. Increasingly blue Tivoli and the larger town of Red Hook, which Molinaro by now had moved just outside village limits to, did not back him in 2018, but it was kept admirable for a Republican in the environment of the Trump midterm. Cuomo took 60.56% of the vote in Tivoli to Molinaro’s 34.34%, and the larger town of Red Hook went 51.35%-44.92% for Cuomo. While town-by-town data is not available, Molinaro likely proceeded to win Red Hook decisively in his final 2019 race for county executive, as he had in every previous election of his career. In this special election, Pat Ryan got 71.39% of the vote in Tivoli to Molinaro’s 28.61%. In wider Red Hook, Ryan got 60.99% to Molinaro’s 38.93%. The town that birthed his career and granted him an improbable ticket to the State Assembly had utterly excoriated him.

Ryan’s victory has been described as an upset, and in many ways it is, but I do think it is worth some differentiation from other special elections in this period that went favorably for Democrats. Of all special elections between the Supreme Court overturning Roe and the general election, this was the only race to show a significant swing towards the Republican. Delgado was a significant overperformer in his own right as already mentioned, and got a far more decisive victory against his previous opponent.

Molinaro flipped the most populous county of Dutchess from blue to red, as well as Sullivan, Otsego, and Rensselaer. Ryan meanwhile only kept the counties of Ulster and Columbia in the Democratic column, though kept the floor from falling out in them enough to eeke out a victory. A narrative has been formed since of Ryan’s electoral prowess, particularly as the only Democrat to keep control of a swing seat through the Zeldin wave (a feat which as I will document in a future article, is far less substantial than it initially seems). The evidence to me does not indicate Ryan is any better than a replacement-level generic Democrat. This race was only an upset in the context of Molinaro’s presumed electoral prowess, electoral prowess which at the federal level all but evaporated.

Molinaro played it very safe in his special election campaign, not just financially but politically. He stuck to the familiar playbook he had been true to since the beginning of his career. Stick to what everyone can agree on, the economy must grow, crime must be brought down, mental health is important, corruption is bad. When your opponent tries to bring it to more lightning rod issues like abortion or Trump, dodge or hedge everything through a lens of “I understand everyone has very strong opinions on this subject.”

This is fine as an executive, not really as a legislator. There is a reason prior to his tenure in Congress, what haunted Molinaro most was his vote against gay marriage in the State Assembly. To be a legislator is to make binary yes or no votes (and the occasional abstention) on the most hot-button of issues. One may be able to vote their district at times, but these times are fewer and far between the smaller their party’s majority in that body is. People voted for Ryan because they knew what Ryan stood for on those decisive issues.

When I listen to left-of-center people in my life who were vaguely supportive of Molinaro as executive speak of him now, it is as if he made a heel turn like a WWE wrestler. That the longtime respectable moderate just flipped on a dime to take up a flurry of right wing culture war issues. Only Marc Molinaro knows if his views cynically changed, or if he always held such beliefs and kept them out of the limelight.

But what I suspect became clear to Molinaro in this period is that he could not climb any higher while avoiding these issues. As executive, he was a figure of consensus whose main responsibility was promoting economic development, hardly controversial as a generality. This role and his personability gave him a lot of cross-party supporters, which he thought would carry over to the Congressional level. But if what he wanted was a swing seat with an R next to his name, those same voters who supported him for office since he was a teenager would never tolerate him. Molinaro would have to appeal to a much smaller, more ideologically stratified base than he ever had in the past. As his rhetoric evolved, his fundraising rose accordingly.

Molinaro’s opponent in the general election due to a chaotic redistricting process would not be now incumbent Congressman Pat Ryan, but instead a nice set of teeth with a Harvard Law degree named Josh Riley. The bounds of the district too would change dramatically with a last minute court order to redraw lines that once included Red Hook, now excluding all of his native Dutchess County and stretching all the way to Ithaca. Riley, who moved back to the district from Washington D.C. for the first time since high school to run for the seat, was quick to decry Molinaro as a carpetbagger. Molinaro meanwhile quietly moved his family to Catskill, about a 15-minute drive from his previous home.

You may be getting the impression I do not see Riley as a particularly impressive opponent to Molinaro, and I can’t really deny that. I’ve written about him before in a previous piece that I prefer to not parrot, though someone else has. Every part of a multimillionaire D.C. lawyer moving back to dress like a lumberjack and run a folksy, everyman campaign against a “do-nothing career politician” who at least had the grace to stick around is at best farcical, at worst deeply offensive. That said, for some bizarre reason it seems to be the playbook the DCCC’s consultants feel most confident in. Should he lose this cycle, there are several far more honest and experienced candidates testing the waters.

The fact he was running against such a caricature however makes Molinaro’s narrow victory that November even more staggering.

Molinaro won by a mere 1.56 points in a district he carried by 4.59 in the 2018 gubernatorial race. In an even larger rebuke, Molinaro significantly underperformed Lee Zeldin on the same ballot who won by 6.73 points, a whole 5.14 points better than Molinaro. This was most apparent in the western end of the district, where Molinaro did in many cities and towns as much as 10-20 points worse than Zeldin.

The special election proved to not be a fluke. Molinaro’s days of overperformance are over. Narrow or not, Molinaro was going to be a frontline member of the smallest Republican majority in congressional history.

I feel a certain kinship with Marc Molinaro. We were both raised in Dutchess County by single mothers, both attended the same community college, both Pell Grant recipients, and both became deeply involved in politics as teenagers because of formative, dare I say traumatic memories of the precarity of our early lives and how public policy intersected. It instills a certain drive in understanding how those realities hold us back to persevere despite them, though we came to very different ideological conclusions, and I’m taking a bit longer to find my footing.

I always figured Molinaro would run for Congress at some point, probably win, but even I have to admit I expected him to be something more of New York’s Brian Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican in a swing or even generally Democratic seat. This has not been how he has legislated. Molinaro was pivotal to the ascention of Mike Johnson to the speakership, giving an impassioned speech in a caucus meeting, imploring his colleagues to end the chaos by empowering one of the most right-wing members of their conference. As much as I had always rolled my eyes at this idea Molinaro just governed by consensus and was one of the good Republicans, even to me his time in the House so far has been quite jarring.

Molinaro has at times lightly bucked the general party line, such as on certain appropriation bills and labor issues. But in general, he has been a reliable vote for Mike Johnson. Molinaro, who publicly boasted he did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016, endorsed Trump this March. While Molinaro did not travel to Nassau County this week for his second Trump rally, he did get a mention. Sandwiched in a 30-second tranche of other brief quips which amounted to the totality of Trump’s discussion of the many swing races on the ballot in November, Trump threw in “Marc Molinaro— great.”

District lines were humbly adjusted by the state legislature, something which has been a boon to Molinaro who has lost the dark blue vote sink of Woodstock in exchange for some red parts of metro Albany and other more favorable areas. From Molinaro’s 1.56 point victory in 2022, he will find himself now running in a district which voted for congressional Republicans by 5.25 points that same cycle.

We are very far into this piece for what may seem the most obvious question. Will he win? Perhaps I have clickbaited a bit at the beginning because I believe the most likely answer is yes. Molinaro’s new district voted very narrowly for Biden in 2020, 49.64% to Trump’s 48.22%. A certain amount of energy has been injected into the race with Kamala Harris’ nomination and as always affluent left-wingers have bought country homes, but with Riley as the nominee against the now-incumbent, it seems to me an uphill battle. With that said, I would still handicap the race at 1 in 3 odds Riley wins. If he doesn’t, Molinaro is intensely vulnerable to being swept out of office in a wave year, particularly against a candidate who also has some time in lower elected office under her belt. The man who has spent over his entire adult life in elected office will likely find himself out of a job this decade.

Marc Molinaro has chosen his path. Last year, Molinaro’s anointed successor for Dutchess County Executive, Sue Serino, won by 13.28 points, a smaller margin than Molinaro’s last win but decisive evidence that even conscious of changing political tides in Dutchess County, he likely could have held onto his post for several more terms, maybe even decades, outdoing that 20 year record set by Bill Steinhaus. In being a local position only elected on off years, Molinaro had plenty of opportunities to raise his profile by running in other statewide contests as his 2018 governor’s run without risk of losing that dependable post. Should he lose his seat he will find himself a resident not of Dutchess but Greene County, a much smaller, unfamiliar pond with under 50,000 residents (though among them, dozens of my second and third cousins who will reliably vote for him in November and beyond). Even if he returned to Dutchess, another longtime popular pol now holds the highest office attainable and shows no signs of wanting to part with it. But Molinaro did not want to be a mere county executive for life, he wanted to be Governor, Senator, President— but would settle for Congressman. An office in Washington is what the kid mayor always desired, not one in Poughkeepsie, though said Washington office may be slightly less opulent than he once dreamed.

This is Molinaro’s gambit. In November 2024, and perhaps November 2026 or 2028, Marc Molinaro will not only be fighting for his congressional seat: he will be fighting for the storied career that has been the only one he has known since he was a teenager. A candle which has had a reliable slow burn, but to all conscious observers looks about to run out of wick.

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NOTE: Paid subscribers to the Hudson Line usually get articles 48 hours in advance, but given I have been upstaged in the realm of New York politics by other news, I am keeping release of this confined to the weekend. 24 hours from this article’s release, (9am Saturday, September 28th) it will be unlocked for all to read free of charge.

I can’t tell you when exactly I met Marc Molinaro. My best guess would be either when the Walkway over the Hudson opened when I was 6 or the annual Dutchess County Fair around the same time. I couldn’t tell you if I knew he was a politician or just an unusually gregarious man, but what I do know is I cannot remember a time when I was not at least vaguely aware of him. I’d wager this is the case for most who like me grew up in Dutchess County in the 2010s.

Everywhere in the country has politicians who engross themselves in that hyperlocal circuit, but Molinaro was a whole different beast. Every time there was a spare block of time and a new shop opened, a class graduated, or a stretch of rail trail was opening, he was there. When he couldn’t be, he found alternatives. The thumbnail for this article is a letter I and every other Dutchess County senior graduating from high school in 2021 got, a Comic Sans kudos to us for making it through COVID and beginning our adult lives. Not photocopied or auto-penned, hand signed.

Molinaro won his first election at age 18, became mayor of his hometown at 19, defrocked a decade-long incumbent assemblyman at 30, and was county executive at 36. In that last role, he routinely overperformed Democrats by double digits. In 2018, Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand won Dutchess County by 14.8%. As an at the time popular Andrew Cuomo cruised to victory on the same ballot against Molinaro’s doomed, underfunded gubernatorial run, Molinaro won Dutchess by 7.0%. While Molinaro lost to Cuomo by 24 points statewide, he actually overperformed Lee Zeldin’s 2022 gubernatorial run in 23 upstate counties, including being the last Republican to win now solidly blue Schenectady and Columbia counties.

Molinaro today is a first-term backbencher in the GOP’s razor-thin House majority. He lost his first competitive race ever in a special election for Congress, only winning the district’s portion of Dutchess which excluded the most blue cities of Poughkeepsie and Beacon by a mere 3 points. He won the general election by an even slimmer 1.56% in the most favorable electoral environment for the New York GOP since the 1990s. His new district contains none of Dutchess County, where he cut his teeth as a politician for over half his life, including numerous electoral overperformances deep into the Trump era. The congressman who proudly stated he did not vote for Trump only 6 years prior has endorsed him this cycle, and with less than two months to go rapidly careens towards what looks more likely by the day: at age 48, Marc Molinaro may soon be out of office for the first time since he was a teenager.

All this begs the question: what happened?

Molinaro’s story, like that of many in the Mid-Hudson (though most will not admit it), begins much further downstate. Born in Yonkers in 1975, his parent’s divorce and single mother’s financial hardship found him in a far rougher Beacon than exists today and even further up the river in 1989.

Tivoli, population 1,035 in 1990 and 23 people smaller now, is a prototypically Hudson Valley village. Nestled in the northwest of Dutchess County between Route 9G and the Hudson River, Tivoli isn’t a one traffic light town— it’s a zero traffic light town, unless one is semantic enough to count the blinking yellow lights at the corner of 9G and Broadway installed just a few years ago. It is postage stamp sized at 1.55mi², most residents live along either Broadway or Montgomery Street unless they live in a small development behind Tivoli Park.

An older Victorian brick building sits along Broadway. A historic marker coins it the “Watts De Peyster Fireman's Hall.” It has always held dual purposes, initially it doubled as a firehouse and the village government’s offices, but with a new firehouse being built in 1986 the other half is now the village library. These village offices are where Molinaro found himself between his election to the Board of Trustees at age 18 and his resignation as mayor to become an Assemblyman at age 32.

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We’ve had a bit of a drought of content lately that will be coming to an end soon, but in the meantime I was interviewed by the wonderful folks on the Left on Red podcast. Most of it was about my work here, particularly the LeftScale formula I have created, but we also had some interesting conversations about Gen Z cynicism in regard to getting organized in politics instead of “doomscrolling,” the state of the presidential election, and NYC politics more generally.

The episode can be found almost anywhere you listen to podcasts, including:

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

Castbox

Podcast Addict

Podbean

My next article will be coming out in the next week or so. Until then, thank you as always for supporting my work.

NOTE: As it is more opinion and less data analysis, as well as the rapidly changing nature of events discussed within, there will not be an early release version of this article, it does however have a preview of something to come: my model for the 2024 presidential election that will be released in the coming weeks once we have certainty of the Democratic candidate. I have not yet decided on if or how I will go about paywalling it, but as always I am open to suggestions. This will be the first for-release model I have made of an election, but derivative of a far more barebones personal model I made for the 2020 cycle that performed admirably. This will not be a deep-dive into my methodology nor should my model be viewed as anything but an educated guess subject to my own biases as the designer, the designer in this case being a 21-year-old who delivers food on a bicycle for a living.

It’s been a while since I’ve written something. By this point granular NYS primary results from last month are certified and readily available. I moved back to Boston at the beginning of this month, and between my regular slog of UberEats and getting unpacked have gradually been writing several articles on the results since. I have been conflicted though on whether to write one a bit off topic, specific to the “will he won’t he” of whether or not Joe Biden will drop out of the race in the 11th hour after a disastrous debate performance. That question was answered for me when another unbelievable moment in this race occurred, that Donald Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, PA.

It is hard not to feel a bit fatalistic in its wake, and I think we’ve seen that in both the media and the speeches at the Republican Convention. The imagery of the former president turning ever so slightly, the loud burst, Trump feeling his ear, seeing blood in his hand, the calls of “get down! get down!” When he comes up from the ground stunned, something new comes over his face. I think it is recognition of the significance of the moment. Donald Trump is a showman, and I don’t find it crass to admit that has helped him here. We do not get Reagan being slammed haphazardly into the limousine, we get the former president actively pushing back a bit against the attempts of the Secret Service to move him. He sees a crowd presuming him dead and be it to reassure or to project strength or some mix of both, he pumps his fist in the air and mouths “fight! fight!” The crowd erupts, rising to their feet and cheering. It is almost surreal, something we’d see in a WWE match or a bad movie. Instantly part of a wider mythos. “Give me liberty or give me death.” “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose.” And yet it isn’t some tall tale in a history book or a glamorized historical account, it played out in front of countless cameras and instantaneously was shown across the country.

We know what I do here, but I hesitate to make hasty claims about how this influences the race and they go well beyond a mere bad taste in my mouth about declaring a quantitative edge gained by a candidate being shot and a supporter killed. There have been polls since I have dragged my heels putting this out for, but they are too scarce and noisy in my opinion to take much away from. This is a tremendously divisive race with plenty of moving parts, and we just cannot know these things. What I can say however is that the attempt on his life and the debate have brought an uncomfortable truth to the front of liberal psyche: Donald Trump is a heavy favorite to win the 2024 presidential race. This was the case long before the assassination attempt, or even the debate, but has been out of mind for many people on the mere basis of its seeming improbability. How after all that happened during the Trump admin could he possible resurge? Polls were wrong about the 2022 midterms, surely they are wrong now? (more on this later)

Our brains have a tremendous evolutionary ability to assign symbolism to events. We seek patterns in the world to construct narratives and process what occurs around us. I think part of why Trump’s resurgence has been so unbelieveable is the fact that there seemingly has not been a moment like that. He did well in his primary, he has been polling well, but these are very unapproachable obtuse quantifications of the actual situation. Our brains crave something more than that, we crave Trump getting COVID or Hillary Clinton fainting at the 9/11 Memorial. An almost superstitious belief that there must be some moment where we can all (at least in retrospect) see which way the wind was blowing. If Biden’s inability to push back against Trump at the debate wasn’t it, an assassin’s bullet missing his brain by an inch certainly was. For the first time this cycle, what much of media and punditry has handwaved as a slim prospect is at the forefront of everyone’s minds: a seeming inevitability of Donald Trump.

The far more active matter at the moment is the question of if Joe Biden will, or will not withdraw, and if he does who replaces him. I have had more or less the same opinion on this since the debates, and it essentially goes as such: how exactly does one put this genie back in the bottle? It has been clear since the day after the debate that there is widespread discontent among donors, among media figures, and among elected Democrats that this is the nominee. A wrinkle is thrown into this on the basis that there was a Democratic Primary nominally, technically Biden got 87.1% of the vote against a backbencher congressman from Minnesota, perennial candidate Marianne Williamson, a guy that fluked into victory in American Samoa under the radar which only I seemed to pick up on, and an Uncommitted vote that was a muddied mix of Trump supporters who forgot to change their party registration to Republican and people like me protesting Biden’s Gaza policy. We can regret that a truly open process did not occur, but that doesn’t change that it didn’t.

For this reason and various allocation thresholds, a whopping 98.9% of delegates are bound to Joe Biden. This does not include the uncommitted delegates in several states where party hacks supportive of Joe Biden were manouvered into those slots, another under-the-radar story. There is some ambiguity between state law and DNC rules, but what I can say pretty unambiguously is that despite pro-Biden statements to the contrary if Biden willingly unbinds his delegates, a vast majority of them are free to vote for whoever they wish without concern of serious legal challenge. There was concern around an Ohio law that said candidates needed to be nominated before the date of the DNC convention, a law was passed in Ohio to change that. Before the law was changed, the DNC has scheduled a “virtual vote” to nominate Biden weeks early, one which would also serve the role of avoiding floor protests by the couple dozen pro-Gaza delegates that did manage to secure slots to the convention. In the face of expository reporting that this law had changed and the DNC no longer had a reason to do this, the vote has since been scuttled.

The true hangup here is simple: Joe Biden, a man who has wanted to be president his entire life and now has it, must consciously and unambigously withdraw from the race in humiliation. We are witnessing a standoff between the party apparatus and a singular ego.

I listened to the audiobook of “What it Takes” by Richard Ben-Cramer in high school. It’s a tome, a 1,072 page, 55 hour in audiobook format account of the 1988 presidential race and more specifically the background and interpersonal history of various candidates. What interests me in mentioning it now is that one of the candidate it focuses on is a young Joe Biden. In this being an account of his first disastrous presidential campaign and also many of the interviews conducted for it being after he had several severe brain aneurysms, it offers a candid window into how Joe Biden operates with the baked in presumption of the interviewees being that he would never again seek the office. I would encourage anyone interested to pick through the Biden chapters, I have told many people this since the 2020 campaign but looking at the wait times at the Brooklyn and NY Public Libraries, you may have to splurge on a paper or audio copy. The Boston Globe also has a pretty good outline which in lack of a physical copy myself I will refer to.

Biden thinks very highly of his abilities. It is a cliche thing to say, but it is true everyone that seeks the office has to be. I think the most revealing part of it all to me is that when he met his future wife Nelia at Syracuse Law, Biden told her he would be a senator by age 30, and then president. His inner circle politically was and by all accounts remains his immediate family and a handful of long term advisors, Ted Kaufman comes to mind.

Biden has a comeback complex. Born wealthy to a family that proceeded to lose it all, he overcame a severe stutter and landed at Syracuse Law. He was caught plagiarizing a paper and managed to not be expelled. He ran against a longtime Republican incumbent for the Senate on the same ballot as the 1972 Nixon tsunami and managed to defrock him, very soon after losing his wife and young daughter in great tragedy. He dropped out of the ‘88 presidential race in disgrace after another plagiarism scandal, was very nearly killed by a brain aneurysm, yet made a complete recovery. He became chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and traded this credibility in 2008 for the VP slot after another also-ran bid for office. He lost his son and protege Beau in 2014 and let his grief and a seeming inevitability of Hillary Clinton’s victory keep him out of the 2016 race, one he believes he would have won. He came back from the dead in the 2020 primary when all had counted him out and you better believe he expects he is underestimated in the current race too and like clockwork will win in November. He is stubbornly persistent, and that persistence has often driven him ever higher.

Is this all Biden’s personal doing? No. Biden wasn’t chosen to be Obama’s VP out of some personal exceptionalism, he was chosen because Obama needed a moderate white guy and a Republican governor would have appointed Evan Bayh’s successor in the Senate if he was chosen. Biden was not illegitimately counted out of the 2020 race, he had dismal performances in the first three contests and there was an 11th hour consensus to coalesce around him. There is no evidence that Biden was the only candidate who can beat Trump, only that he was in the strongest position to win the primary head-to-head with Bernie Sanders. And yet our brains recognize patterns, Biden’s no different, and this all reinforces a certain cockiness and stubbornness in him.

I’d like to go back to the inner circle thing. I think one of the reasons we are seeing so much opposition within the party is that there are not really Biden people. There is his family, longtime friends like Kaufman, and an infinite number of Obama alums and Clintonworld people who were in the woods for four years until there was a Democratic White House to work in. No one is getting frozen out of a Democratic administration in ten years because now they went against the grandiose Biden political infrastructure, for it does not actually exist. There is zero sustained base of power that will outlast his time in the big chair. I see it as a losing game to speculate on if a man with the self-assurance and ego of Biden will willingly drop the reins of the party, but it is clear the pressure for him to do so has not reduced. Past a point when you have no cashflow, lack the confidence of the powers that be, and lack the confidence of your own base: the writing is already on the wall. The question is if he ever acknowledges that.

If not him, it will be Harris purely on the basis of the institutional line of succeession. There has been speculation mostly among the media and donors of some Sorkin-esque open convention, where the usual suspects will all pull their sleeves up to cajole delegates as it went before the 1970s but for various reasons I see that as highly improbable. This process and its extension has been chaotic enough, there is great incentive to quickly have someone to rally around and passing over the VP would be a disastrous narrative. Additionally as bizarre as it is to say, it is not clear the usual suspects want it!

There is some reporting that Newsom and Whitmer have requested to not be considered as Harris’ running mate, and of course a few weeks ago they all publicly stated confidence in Biden. The prospective candidates besides Harris are threading a narrow needle, should it be Harris and she wins that effectively puts 2028 off the table for them. Hence, expressing confidence in Biden was to their advantage. Now though with the national climate as it is and Biden appearing more likely to get out than stay in, they may be making the calculus that it is preferable to wait until 2028 than be the vice presidential or even presidential nominee on a Democratic ticket that seems highly likely to lose this year.

Let’s get into that now: can we quantifiably determine if Harris is doing better? Not really. Polling is scarce particularly at the state level, and as far as the fundamentals go it is much harder to determine exactly how much the baggage of the current administration should be factored against her. With that said, I’ve been creating a model over the past few months of the election. It is hardly ready for prime-time and I will be vague on the methodology, but could be fairly illustrative of the state of play. I should note right off the bat as of this date my model as about a 75/25 weighing of fundamentals over polling. “Fundamentals” are a variety of economic indicators I will explain at a later date, and these are far more favorable to Biden and Harris than polling is. It is not ready for prime-time, but I still have some faith in it for these purposes. These are the results of a little over 1,000 simulations I ran last night. Ready to see it?

As of yesterday July 18th, Trump has a 71.5% chance of winning the White House. Biden meanwhile has a 26.7% chance, with the remaining 1.8% chance being ties which effectively would elect Trump given the expected composition of 2025 House delegations. Trump wins the popular vote 62.8% of the time, and Biden 37.2% of the time. In the median scenario, Trump flips from most to least likely Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada, Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, Pennsylvania, and just barely Minnesota to finish with 308 electoral votes to Biden’s 230. Trump is also projected to win the popular vote with 46.4%, with Biden coming in at 45.2%, Kennedy Jr. at 6.0%, and other third parties filling out the remaining 2.4%.

For Harris meanwhile, my model has Trump at a 65.0% chance of winning the White House, with Harris at a 35.0% chance and no ties in this sample of 1,000 simulations, though for technical reasons I will discuss in a moment don’t read much into the lack of them. That is for the record 8.3% better odds of Harris winning than Biden. In the popular vote there is a bigger differential, Harris actually wins it the majority of the time at 55.2% of simulations to Trump’s 44.8%, 18.0% better odds of Harris winning the popular vote than Biden. Harris manages to keep Minnesota in the Democratic column and keeps Michigan which Biden only had slim advantage in more decisively blue. She is projected to win 45.6% of the popular vote to Trump’s 45.1%, with 6.9% going to Kennedy Jr. and 2.4% going to other third parties.

For those more interested in the granular level, here are state-by-state odds as well as some other statistics of interest for each candidate as percentage odds (100 is 100%, 0.5 is 0.5%). Additionally note that the popular vote is an average, hence Biden leading slimly in the popular vote average in Minnesota but Trump having slightly higher odds. Trump won it in more of my simulations than Biden, but when Biden won it was by a larger margin on average:

What do we gleam from this? Well first I need to discuss those technical issues. My model considers both national and state polling, and there are fewer polls of each that measure Harris. That means individual national polls weigh higher in the aggregate, and other factors such as previous vote totals and general partisanship weigh heavier for states that do not have state polls measuring Harris period. This leads to what I think is easiest to describe as a higher variance with the Harris model, you can see this for instance in 19.0% of scenarios in the Harris model being landslides (defined as >350 EVs for either candidate) vs 14.7% in the Biden model. This gap should close as more data comes out, but for that reason I wouldn’t put much stake into one candidate or another doing marginally better in an individual state. The significant thing I will say is that at least in how my model calculates it, the fundamentals are better for Harris.

Why am I weighing fundamentals so highly? Well I am of what may be a shocking belief given the content of this article that polling is legitimately a bit borked right now and likely to Trump’s favor. I’ll save getting into the details for when I do a writeup on my model, but the distinction I would draw between my position and what I find to be a deeply myopic one is that that should not be taken as a saving grace. Generally if a campaign is casting doubt in the polling even if there are legitimate crosstabs that make little sense and banking on dramatic polling error, you’re looking at a losing campaign. As stated my model already dramatically overweighs fundamentals in a 3:1 ratio with polling and yet both Harris and Biden are deeply underwater. There is no get-out-of-jail-free card, any Democrat is an underdog against Trump right now.

The theory of a Harris nomination as I see it is really not about some quantititative edge readily seen in polling or data modeling, we simply do not have compelling evidence there is one. It is about an ability to change the field of play. The Biden campaign pitched the debate as their moment to change the narrative, to make this a referendum on Trump. Instead, his performance made the race a referendum on Biden’s worst issue, his basic ability to conduct the business of the presidency. Besides the failure of this one opportunity, it is difficult to imagine an aging Biden managing to change the dynamic of the race positively and that is what Democrats need. My model presumes as in past campaigns that each candidate is able to run a normal-ish campaign, one which accounts for likely boosts to their odds after good performances in debates and media cycles. Biden seems to have proven himself incapable of pushing back against his opponent face-to-face, Harris meanwhile should have a greater ability to generate positive moments.

I think there is some utility to thinking about the consequence of a second Trump term and planning for how it may affect our lives. I figure state governments will be more relevant in regard to antidiscrimination law and other protections. In my case, I anticipate that as long as my Pell Grant remains maxed out over the next two years and I’m able to work more hours I should be able to stay in Massachusetts to finish my degree and eventually go back to New York. I operate on the assumption large chunks of the country beyond that will not be entirely safe depending how much federal policy is deferred to state governments and I’ve been candid with family and friends that live in such places. These are not fun things to consider, but I think we tend to feel better having anticipated and planned for these things than either banking on them not happening or drowning in fear.

I will have one, perhaps two articles out next week.

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Update 29 June 2024: The version of this article sent out by email neglected to properly attribute the district maps used within. They are from the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Redistricting and You site.

Note: I had hoped to write some more extended piece on these races, but due to some medical things and a move consuming a fair bit of my time these past weeks, I’m going to condense them down into a single article. Don’t take that as less content though, normally I would stagger the release date of several smaller articles throughout the past week dealing with individual races, but this will instead be one large article. Additionally there will be no early access this week for paid members due to the late release and no accompanying materials. This said, expect a treasure trove of data from this election in the coming weeks.

We are coming to the end of what may be the most exciting set of primary contests in the state since 2018, the year which brought us candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Julia Salazar, and the downfall of the State Senate IDC. Unlike that year however, this does not merely cut one way. In addition to the usual progressive insurgent campaigns and scrums for open seats, we have also witnessed a well-funded moderate backlash against progressive incumbents throughout the state, bolstered in fair part by pro-Israel backlash against their statements regarding the current war in Gaza.

At the level of the state legislature, this effort has been spearheaded by a group new to this cycle, the “AIPAC of New York” Solidarity PAC. They have as of the latest financial filings raised over $300,000 spent on a variety of different campaigns, all opposed to Democratic Socialists of America and Working Families Party endorsed candidates incumbent and otherwise. Advertising on their ActBlue page a recommended one-time donation of $36,000, they’re not exactly going for grassroots donors here.

While the stated reason for these group’s positions as well as those of some different groups opposing Congressman Bowman we’ll discuss later in this article, they aren’t even spending on advertisements opposing the DSA/WFP position on the war in Gaza! Instead, most of their advertising focuses on a vague misalignment with the Democratic mainstream. It is an interesting tactic for these groups without precedent and something I mention upfront as to where I can reference them by name for the (many, many, many) primaries they are presently spending in.

Additionally, I will be referencing my proprietary “LeftScore” from this article. If you have not read it, essentially it is my methodology to rank how left wing a district in New York State is comparative to other districts. 1.0000 is the most progressive district in the state, and 0.0000 is the least. To further your understanding of this number, I have included next to each district the order of each district in parenthesis. For instance, “(14/150)” would mean a district is the 14th most progressive out of 150 districts in the state by my methodology. This will be standard shorthand for my future articles. With one notable exception, I am covering races from the most progressive LeftScores to least.

Do note there are so many races that while I usually try to cover as much as I can, I am mostly going to cover races with viable progressives. This should not be taken as a complete overview of all races today, but I hope in exchange you find my coverage of the following races quite thorough.

What you came for: Bowman/Latimer

NY-16 (Congressional)

Hudson Line LeftScore: 0.2533 (12/26)

Alright, we may as well start off with the highlight of the night: the challenge to Congressman Jamaal Bowman by Westchester County Executive George Latimer. If you’d like to see a long quantitative analysis of that race, I’d suggest this piece in Split Ticket. To be frank, it is what I had attempted to do about a month ago but executed far better. I would wager most people taking the time to read a long newsletter on New York politics have had even the finer points of this race beaten down their throats, so I’d like to take it from a bit of a different angle.

The most notable thing about this race has of course been the dramatic super PAC spending on behalf of George Latimer, the most of any Democratic primary in history. This includes $14.5M from the “United Democracy Project," a front group of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) which like the Solidarity PAC is mostly running ads opposing Bowman’s vague extremism without mention of the Gaza war. That is not to say there are not ads chiding Bowman’s position on the war running in the district however, a PAC called Fairshake has spent about $2M to that effect. Fairshake in turn is a PAC advocating for cryptocurrency deregulation that I suppose sees the Israel-Gaza War as a less fraught issue to run ads on than their own scandal plagued industry. Also in the mix with an indeterminant amount of money spent given they are nominally not supporting a specific candidate and thus don’t have to make particularly transparent financial reports on their activities is Westchester Unites, which aims to turn out Jewish voters which would benefit Latimer. Given they’ve had a physical office for months, I’d wager it is not an insignificant amount of money.

There has of course been spending on behalf of Bowman too, but nowhere near as much, mostly from the Working Families Party and what is left of the Justice Democrats. It is not 2018 anymore, the money faucet that was grassroots progressive fundraising back then has dried up to a great extent and this has lead to the organizations spearheading that push cutting staff and costs. Bowman has sought to make up for this by attracting volunteers, including what even I as a member can admit was a hail mary pass to seek the NYC-DSA endorsement relatively last minute.

Bowman stopped paying his dues to DSA after an internal controversy regarding him participating in a J Street sponsored trip to Israel and voting to provide Israel with military aid. Technically he has remained a member as members not in good standing are not immediately removed from the rolls, but consensus within DSA seems to view his positions as closer now to those expected by at least the New York City and Lower Hudson Valley chapers of the organization, though he has not sought the endorsement of the national organization and is not expected to.

This gambit appears to have paid off. On Sunday, NYC-DSA made 150,000 calls in a single day into the district, one of regular phonebanks ongoing. They have also sponsored large canvasses in the Co-Op City neighborhood of the district which has given a dual opportunity to canvass for DSA-endorsed Assembly challenger Jonathan Soto, a race we will discuss later.

There was some question early this year about how redistricting would affect the race (if only someone wrote about this…) to which Bowman was very marginally advantaged, gaining back the neighborhood of Co-Op City while losing parts of Wakefield. While this does not change the number of people in the district living in the Bronx, there is a notable turnout differential between Co-Op City and Wakefield in that Co-Op City has generally higher voter turnout in primary. My math shows that netting Bowman a few thousand votes, not much compared to Westchester but in a close race enough for an edge he did not have in 2022.

Gun to my head? There has been a lot of shifting wisdom over the month in political prognostication circles, but I’ve been fairly consistent. This race will come down near entirely to turnout differentials: which parts of Westchester vote more disproportionately? In a seldom changed district in a higher profile vote my thought has always been Latimer is advantaged but only slimly, Westchester is far more diverse than many seem to give it credit for and both candidates have very high floors. I say this race leans towards Latimer, and I’d guess on a final margin in the high single digits. A good bellwether for the night would be if Bowman is getting in the mid 80s or higher in the Bronx, he stands a chance. I’d be skeptical of early Westchester results as we won’t know where exactly in the district it is from until after it is all counted. Given the stratification of this district, that means it will likely be dramatically one way or another for a while which may not reflect the final result.

Regardless of the outcome here there will be plenty of discourse on what exactly caused it, so I’d like to get ahead of it by proposing my own if Bowman does lose. As I mentioned in my redistricting article, New York lost seats in the 2020 Census which had the effect of shifting most districts in New York State north. In Bowman’s case this meant his district at the “choke point” of the state lost very favorable portions of the northern Bronx and gained more hostile portions of suburban Westchester. In which case I would like to propose a prospective Bowman loss is a result of the state undercounting the census by a mere 89 people. Could Latimer win a district like that? Only if he wins in a blowout which I do not anticipate, but even if he could it is doubtful the same financial resources would be pouring in to support him. Three years after its announcement, this census undercount may claim another victim.

The Old College Try: Gallagher/Simpkins

NY-50 (State Assembly)

Hudson Line LeftScore: 0.7771 (4/150)

This… is a weird one. Best as I can understand it the stated impotus for all this was the city proposing a redesign of McGuinness Blvd that would turn a lane of car traffic into a bike lane which got businessowners and select residents in uproar. One of these residents Anathea Simpkins launched her campaign against DSA incumbent Emily Gallagher, and now you’ve got all kinds of money flowing in. Pro-charter schools, real estate developers, and of course our good friends at the Solidarity PAC. Simpkins has outspent Gallagher $191k to $86k.

All this would be quite damning were this not Williamsburg and Greenpoint against an incumbent who beat long time Assemblyman Joe Lentol and won with nearly 80% of the vote against a challenger in 2022. I will be curious to see if Hasidic South Williamsburg votes for Simpkins this election given in 2022 they quite hilariously voted for Gallagher but even that hardly moves the needle here. Safe Gallagher. The batter has barely stepped off home plate and the ball is already at first base. What are we doing here? My only guess is that there was an attempt here to spread the city’s progressive community thin defending multiple seats but they did not take the bait.

The Banality of Primaries: Simon/Budow

NY-52 (State Assembly)

Hudson Line LeftScore: 0.7366 (6/150)

I heard about this one shocking late given a lack of reporting and extremely low profile but my formula and the appearance it is not totally perennial makes me feel I should mention it.

Jo Anne Simon is a fairly uncontroversial incumbent Assemblywoman. She has run several times for higher office, narrowly losing the borough presidency in 2021 and not even coming close in the clown car that was the NY-10th Congressional primary in 2022. Budow to the best of my grasp is running a primarily “YIMBY” campaign, arguing the incumbent has not been favorable to further development. On other issues, he seems to be running marginally to the right of what is already a milquetoast incumbent for this seat. He has the endorsement of the NYC New Liberals (imagine if DSA’s structure was copied and used to far less success towards electing young centrists who have wanted to be president since childhood and still think it will happen) and as far as I can tell no one else. I only mention his race as he’s outspent Simon $144k to $66k. Just to save my reputation in case this has truly flown under the radar, likely Simon.

Scratch one Flattop: Ardila/Valdez/Carmona

NY-37 (State Assembly)

Hudson Line LeftScore: 0.7054 (7/150)

Incumbent Assemblyman Juan Ardila is screwed. I don’t say that to mean he is an underdog, no he has a subzero chance of being re-elected after sexual assault allegations dating back to his time in college emerged. For utterly incomprehensible reasons he has stayed in as the Democratic Socialists of America coalesed around Claire Valdez and the Meeks Queens County Democratic Party coalesed around Johanna Carmona, rendering her something of a quasi-incumbent. The circumstances of this race have lead to the rare case where a DSA primary challenger has not just the backing of the usual suspect organizations and progressive officials but some more established ones too, such as State Senator Mike Gianaris. Carmona in turn has consolidated a more moderate base of support, including our friends at the Solidarity PAC.

Carmona’s campaign has spent $150k to Valdez’s $145k. That said while her backers have held great historic sway, we saw how little influence the county party has in this part of western Queens with the Gonzalez/Crowley race in 2022, and this is the DSA’s most probable pickup of the year. Likely Valdez.

Battle of Bed-Stuy: Zinerman/Huntley

NY-56 (State Assembly)

Hudson Line LeftScore: 0.6292 (9/150)

Another play is being made by NYC-DSA to expand their turf further into Brooklyn, this time in a majority-Black seat in eastern Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights currently held by Stefani Zinerman. This is in turn a bitter battle between various progressive organizations backing challenger Eon Huntley, and the notorious Kings County Democratic Party. Additionally, word on the street is House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries is particularly interested in keeping this seat in his congressional district out of DSA hands. Our friends the Solidarity PAC are as usual also heavily invested in this race. It is also worth noting a few of the usual politicans to endorse in this kind of race have not perhaps in an effort to save favor with Jeffries, though I won’t name names.

This race has been particularly nasty in a year with many notably nasty races, with a lot of allusion that the gentrification of Bed-Stuy. Huntley has also been perhaps the most vocal advocate of a ceasefire among all DSA candidates, even sending mailers highlighting his support for such a measure. Huntley has actually outspent the incumbent here, $146k to $127k. This is a difficult race to even begin to anticipate the outcome in but a source told Jewish Insider internal polls have Zinerman up a few points and “not going in the right direction.” Based off of that and what I know about Huntley’s GOTV effort, I am saying this race tilts marginally in Huntley’s favor.

The Line of Succession: Shrestha/Madden

NY-103 (State Assembly)

Hudson Line LeftScore: 0.5099 (13/150)

DSA incumbent Sarahana Shrestha’s win in 2022 was the reason I began this newsletter. I was a canvasser on her campaign, mostly to try to involve my high school friends with local DSA activities while I was back from school. It was not really until the last week that I thought she would loosen a hair on 30 year incumbent Kevin Cahill’s head, scion of a family so entrenched in Kingston politics that my great-grandparents knew them. Campaigning on her support for the Build Public Renewables Act, she won slimly, expanding the map of DSA viability to this rural and exurban stretch of Ulster and Dutchess Counties. The bill would go on to pass with her support.

What follows is admittedly a bit of speculation admittedly but it’s something I think is going a bit unsaid in this race. In 1992, the incumbent of this district Maurice Hinchey (father of the present state senator Michelle Hinchey and the first Democrat to flip this once safe Republican assembly seat in the 1970s) ran for Congress. He endorsed to succeed him for this Assembly seat a staffer of his, one Kevin Cahill. 32 years later, the townie powers that be of Kingston are all behind a former Cahill staffer, Gabi Madden (Cahill himself is barred by his state job from making endorsements in political races, but the subtext is obvious). When you see yourself as the rightful heir of a 49 year chain of patronage and control, you may become a bit dare I say entitled? Particularly if your path to power is unceremoniously lost in an instant.

Some people would move on with their lives, Madden has chosen to run a divisive and negative campaign I will not even pretend to hide my contempt for. The daughter of local restaurant owners has sent out mailers touting her “local values” and that she was raised here, the subtext of her opponent being a Nepali immigrant to this country hardly being lost on anyone. These mailers in turn have ironically mostly been paid for New York City real estate interests and of course who can forget our friends at Solidarity PAC, people whose only connection to our region is perhaps a summer home in the Catskills. She has outspent Shrestha $187k to $91k. That same Jewish Insider source by the way stated they were avoiding this district as it was a “super socialist area,” a farcical thing to have read about it about ten years ago. Electing Republicans to off the board for even moderate Democrats in a matter of two or three cycles? You may be able to see why I was compelled to start this newsletter.

Shrestha in turn overwhelmingly won the endorsement of the Ulster and Dutchess Democratic Parties, a remarkable feat given all the inside club history I allude to and will no doubt in the future write of. She has been among the most proactive elected officials I have ever seen at holding town halls and constituent meeting in her district, and even working with our more moderate state senator the aforementioned Michelle Hinchey to draft legislation to replace our deeply unpopular utility company Central Hudson with a publicly owned authority. Madden campaign banks on the proposition that this was all some kind of fluke, that some radical city folk have taken what is hers and that surely, certainly it will be corrected. As someone whose family has been up here for many generations now, I’d encourage her to look out the windows for once. Likely Shrestha.

Albany Scrum: Anane/Farrell/Joyce/Flynn/Reidy/Romero

NY-109 (State Assembly)

Hudson Line LeftScore: 0.3934 (19/150)

With the incumbent seeking a spot in the State Senate, a wide open field has emerged for this Albany-based seat with various legislators from the city of Albany and the surrounding suburbs making a play. Topping expenditures are County Legislator Dustin Reidy at $157k, Albany Council Majority Leader Ginnie Farrell at $101k, Albany Councilor Owusu Anane at $96k, Albany Councilor Gabriella Romero at $94k, and County Legislator Andrew Joyce at $87k.

It is always difficult to gauge races with no public polling, but it is worth noting Gabriella Romero has the Working Families Party endorsement and has consolidated the progressive lane to a fair degree. This said, I’d give a slight edge to moderate Dustin Reidy who has most union endorsements.

Strange Bedfellows: Lasher/Northrup/Rosenberg/Quinones/Kellner

NY-69 (State Assembly)

Hudson Line LeftScore: 0.3745 (20/150)

While there are five candidates here, the two frontrunners have very much emerged in former Hochul staffer Michal Lasher and public defender Eli Northrup. Leading the pack in expenditures is Lasher at a whopping $390k, followed by Northup at $193k. What sticks out to me here is a very odd set of endorsements, Lasher has been endorsed by Congressman Jerry Nadler, City Comptroller Brad Lander, State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, and City Councilor Gale Brewer, politicians from moderate to pretty progressive. Also supporting his campaign is Solidarity PAC. Northup meanwhile has picked up the endorsement of the Working Families Party and critically that of retiring incumbent Assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell. My prognosis based on the money and endorsement edge is that this race leans towards Lasher.

Blood in the Water: Wright/Ordonez/Harmongoff/Schley

NY-70 (State Assembly)

Hudson Line LeftScore: 0.3378

After a fairly embarassing loss to Yusuf Salaam for City Council, many smelled blood in the water against Inez Dickens this year for her Harlem-based Assembly district. Enough so that she has actually chosen against seeking re-election. At the front of the pack is Salaam’s former campaign manager Jordan Wright, son of Keith Wright the prominent Manhattan Democratic Party leader. His most compelling rival is likely Maria Ordonez, who has run for City Council in the area. While a DSA member, she is not endorsed by the organization. Without much institutional backing and outspending Ordonez $188k to $89k, I rate this as likely Wright.

Springwood: Barrett/Cousin

NY-106 (State Assembly)

Hudson Line LeftScore: 0.1820 (42/150)

This is an interesting race, one between a Working Families Party endorsed challenger Claire Cousin against Didi Barrett, a 12-year quite moderate incumbent who to say the least is not used to this (I lived in this district briefly in 2022, the only sign of her campaign was an envelope with a long-winded letter “vote for me” letter inside she mailed to every registered Democrat). Cousin is herself an elected official, a Supervisor in Hudson County. The campaign has focused particularly on housing and environmental issues, with Barrett having a large war chest due to you guessed it, Solidarity PAC! She has spent a whopping $301k to Cousin’s $191k.

This race’s largest municipality is the Town of Poughkeepsie, an urban to suburban stretch encircling the City of Poughkeepsie and including Vassar and Marist Colleges. With this much of a financial edge and aggressive advertising, I would say this race tilts marginally towards Barrett.

Side Effects: Benedetto/Soto

NY-82 (State Assembly)

Hudson Line LeftScore: 0.0921 (61/150)

This race is a rematch between 20 year incumbent Michael Benedetto and progressive insurgent Jonathan Soto. While Soto lost by a large margin in 2022, he is back this time with DSA support. What makes this race particularly interesting is that since the Bowman endorsement, a lot of DSA canvassers have been drawn to canvass for both Bowman and Soto simultaneously in vote-rich Co-Op City. This is additionally ironic as Bowman himself has not endorsed Soto. With the help of Solidarity PAC and others, Benedetto has spent $143k to Soto’s $100k. Frankly I had not considered this district remotely on the map for DSA until the Bowman endorsement and a source in Jewish Insider stating private polling of the race is close. Regardless, I think the race tilts towards Benedetto.

Conclusion

There’s a bit less boiler plate to this piece as I wanted to get as much information out there as possible. I’ll be livetweeting results as they come in on my Twitter if you are interested. I’ll write on the results more formally once we have some data to analyze. Until then!

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Forward: What follows is something of an opinion piece. It’s different from what I usually do, but I feel relevant, particularly as it has now spread to area colleges. Due to its nature however, there is not a pre-release version for paid subscribers.

I make a point to bring up my age pretty often as I feel it decently establishes the grain of salt I want everything I say to be taken with. I am freshly 21 and write this as a hobby, I have no professional background in what I do here and don’t even have much of an interest in doing it professionally. Recently however I have found my age to be an asset, as in recent conversations with Democratic operatives and reading recent news on the ongoing pro-Palestine protests on college campuses and the crackdowns against them I have grown increasingly concerned something very obvious to me is being brushed aside.

On April 17th, 2024, Columbia’s president Minouche Shafik testified in front of the House Education and Workforce Committee, a body headlined by Virgina Foxx (R-NC) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY) I can best describe as a partisan chop shop desperately trying to make the case alleged campus antisemitism is a natural inevitability of vague social progressivism. Some may take issue with that characterization, particularly with how it was presented in even liberal cable news media, but I’d look no further than their own press release the first time they brought college administrators in front of them as evidence. Have some quotes:

“which charged academia’s radical Left ideologies with fomenting antisemitism.”

“equated antisemitism with less pervasive anti-Palestinian sentiments”

“the reputation of universities being that they promote complete ideological convergence”

“raised concerns over the ethics of Harvard’s black-only, Hispanic-only, and gay-only graduation ceremonies”

“connected the rise of campus DEI practices with emerging antisemitism”

“Reps. Bob Good (R-VA) and Brandon Williams (R-NY) both contemplated this question aloud. They recognized that the billions in grants, contacts, research investments, student loan guarantees, and other sweetheart deals are all privileges the federal government bestows upon universities—not an unconditional blank check. Maybe it’s time we rethink what those conditions should be.”

Republicans have for many years been champing at the bit to find a way to destroy what they see as America’s “woke” higher education system. It appears in this issue they have found a compelling casus belli, given that the majority of House Democrats voted yesterday for the “Antisemitism Awareness Act,” a bill Mike Lawler (R-NY) drafted to force the Department of Education to use the overly broad IHRA definition of antisemitism in Civil Rights Act Title VI cases, effectively incentivizing schools to prevent pro-Palestinian protests lest they risk the loss of federal funding on the grounds certain criticisms of the State of Israel under that definition are considered antisemitic. This usage has not only been condemned by groups like the ACLU, but even authors of the definition itself.

After seeing the disastrous fallout of the hearing for other college presidents in December, Shafik came far more prepared to kowtow to the committee than her peers. As she spoke to the committee, several student groups created the first encampment on Columbia’s campus. They demanded negotiations with the university over divesting from Israel, both in terms of research relationships and financially as was the demand 40 years ago with the last wave of anti-Apartheid protests against South Africa. There was a screening of a movie, a teach-in, and the next day mass arrests and injury as Shafik invited the NYPD-SRG to disburse the encampment.

The next day, there was an encampment much bigger. A little over a week later, in the midst of 142 similar campus protests nationwide, NYPD-SRG went in again to end an occupation of Hamilton Hall, a building which has seen many similar occupations throughout Columbia’s history. Press was disallowed access, making the only reporting that of campus radio, ran mostly by students younger than me. To hear it live was unbelievable, though to hear the recording also is. During that raid, students were recorded being manhandled by police, and an officer fired a gun. By pure luck, we narrowly avoided another Kent State.

College administrators, politicians, and law enforcement frankly have been flailing in their responses to these protests. Of course these actions are technically trespass at the school’s discretion, but the nastiness of the college president actually requesting local police sic their own students tends to only inflame things. There is a reason none of us are talking of Brown, Northwestern, Harvard, and other schools that either negotiated in good faith with protesters or simply ignore it.

The justification most of these schools use is that the rhetoric at the protests is antisemitic, or more recently that naive but good faith protests have been infiltrated by antisemitic “outside agitators.” I suppose it’s all anecdotal but from my personal observations and those of friends at other schools that just really hasn’t been the case. Without litigating the meaning of various slogans or chants, I feel it goes without saying I’d not be participating in something so clearly foul nor would the many Jewish students involved with these encampments.

I have no doubt that since October 7th antisemitism in America has increased. I’ve heard such from my Jewish family members and that’s part of what makes its use as a blanket cudgel against student protesters so harmful. It is somewhat ludicrous that the discourse around these protests requires me to qualify that I want no harm done to my distant cousins in Israel or other Jewish people. No doubt bad actors have showed up at some of these protests, but again in my personal experience these encampments have done a pretty good job ignoring them and making it clear they are not welcome to spread hate.

There is a reason the rhetoric right now is not so much focused on the acts of individual protesters but on a vague “discriminatory learning environment.” It’s because such is a Title VI claim, and thus puts the federal funding of these schools in jeopardy. That in turn incentivizes these schools to clamp down on that kind of speech, and that’s exactly why we are seeing these kinds of police crackdowns. I have no doubts there are students who truly buy into that narrative. When I see these counterprotesters with Israeli flags, I have to wonder if the fact they are just ignored and certainly not ganged up upon triggers any self inquiry into whether that narrative is accurate.

Before clearing Columbia’s campus, Eric Adams gave a bizarre press conference insisting outside agitators were present, his evidence mostly being the “black bloc” style of clothes they were wearing. The NYPD reported about a quarter of protesters arrested at Columbia and the same night over half of those arrested at CUNY’s City College were non-students. That said, these numbers included protesters adjacent to those campuses, such as out on the public sidewalks or blocking prisoner vans. To date, the NYPD has provided no evidence nonstudents were involved in the Hamilton Hall occupation.

Particularly on more open campuses outside groups have showed up, but in my school’s case most of those were just kids and clubs from other local colleges. It was flashy to report about two thirds of those arrested were not Northeastern students, but many of those two thirds were kids from Berklee, Emerson, Wentworth, Simmons, Boston University, and other area colleges that did not have encampments. Ours was located immediately next to a subway station along a public road. It just was not the case that people were jumping fences or being snuck in.

As for more general nonstudent “outside agitators,” they numbered much smaller, mostly members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Palestinian Youth Movement. I have been concerned in the past about co-option of protests by other groups, particularly by the former, but by all accounts that’s just not what occured. They simply did not steer things off course. The highest form of co-option was them leading chants. Northeastern handled this in an interesting way where only nonstudents were legally charged and all student and faculty cases are being handled by our internal Office of Student Conduct and Conflict Resolution. I should probably not say much beyond in one of these bodies, the evidentiary burdens are much lower and the will to prosecute much higher.

One thing we are seeing however is more and more aggressive counterprotesters. My school is a good example of this. Our encampment was shut down about two days in with a police raid that made about 100 arrests, with the university making a statement that part of the reason was because a chant of “kill the Jews” was heard. This chant did in fact occur, but was by pro-Israel counterprotesters, who marched to the center of the encampment with an Israeli flag attempting to goad protesters into some kind of fight no one was interested in having. They were so disruptive and clearly agitational in fact that campus police actually physically removed them from the demonstration.

Despite a highly credible tipoff of an impending police raid coming in hours before this incident, our school used this incident as justification for why it had to be shut down. Even since NPR and other outlets corroborated that it was the pro-Israel agitators, the school refuses to in any way acknowledge this, including a particularly bizarre comment to said NPR reporter to the effect of “well, doesn’t matter who it was it still happened!” Most media sources have at this point corrected the record, but simply ran with the school’s statement on face at the peak of their article’s visibility. A week later, the space where the encampment was is still being eyed cautiously by multiple police officers.

This is far from the only instance of counterprotest agitation. At UCLA, pro-Israel counterprotesters physically attacked their encampment in a clearly coordinated manner. Teenagers were pulled out of the encampment and beaten over the head with blunt objects, sprayed with chemicals, and had lit fireworks thrown at them. At the time of writing, zero arrests have been made in regard to that attack, but around 200 were made the next day when LAPD decided to raid the encampment, including firing rubber bullets and seemingly just for the cameras physically removing student’s masks as they were arrested. Many injuries were reported from both attacks.

As this spreads to more schools and as more police raids and mass arrests are made, it is touching just about everyone in my agegroup. There is some truth to elite universities being something of a bubble, anyone who knows my background is aware that’s hardly the culture I was steeped in. Most kids I grew up around were working class, few attended college. Those who did went to our local community college, and maybe now are at a SUNY. Of my core friends, me and an ex of mine are the only two that went straight to four-year institutions. The people I grew up around are not generally political, and yet talking to them before and after police crackdowns on their campuses has been incredibly telling of the generational mood. There is great shock and anger on the minds of young people.

It was one thing at Columbia, a school of course whose population skews the most upper of the upper class. But now it’s spread to plenty of public colleges, the CUNY system, and nationwide. Every person I know at an impacted college is at most two degrees removed from an arrestee. The raw number of arrests, around 2,300 at time of writing may be small comparative to the total student population, but few people are very far removed from the carnage. Perhaps they know someone arrested. Perhaps they watched arrests take place. Perhaps they were forced to hold in place by police. It will be no doubt be formative that this kind of state violence came to their campuses because other students chose to protest this ongoing genocide.

The g-word may give some people pause. It will be a historical question of course, but I use the term for a reason. I am really not qualified to litigate it, but I’d refer to this piece by Hebrew University professor Amos Goldberg. Even if one thinks we are not there, reports that the impending invasion of Rafah will involve intentionally trapping older boys and men in the warzone through sophisticated military checkpoints gives a horrific parallel to the Srebrenica massacre, one of the more recent acts formally ruled genocide. Few but those most ideologically committed to Israel recognize the present situation as at all justified, with even the Biden administration being harsher in rhetoric though not action. It is the nature of our economically stratified society that those at Columbia and other schools having their views shaped by these events will lead this country one day, and when the history of this moment is written it will not look kindly upon the actions of this government.

But don’t just take it from me that students are up in arms. Look out the windows. Perhaps the most stunning development showing this has been the College Democrat’s pointed statement about the party’s response to this movement and the subsequent police crackdowns, in particular this tweet:

Have you ever been to a College Democrats meeting? I went to one freshman year and kids wore suits to it. Not quite my scene, to say the least. These are hardly the kind of people I imagine to be in open revolt with the party establishment and yet, here we are. As it turns out, brutalizing teenagers for protesting on their campuses is a pretty sure-fire way to anger even the most milquetost.

The Biden campaign in turn appears to be operating from a perspective of pure delusion. There seems to be a general sense from their statements that this will all blow over. The issue with that belief is this is not a normal political issue. It is one thing to come home to the party after your chosen, more progressive primary preference loses. It is a complete other matter to come home to a candidate who appears to not only be abetting some of the greatest crimes of the 21st century, but actively, enthusiastically, nonsensically, not only immorally but potentially criminally opting into that support over the recommendations of the State Department and the overwhelming opinion of the Democratic base. You and I are complicit in it by virtue of merely being citizens of this country and paying taxes. There was at least an argument once that he kept the peace domestically, it is hard to feel that way when you are watching your classmate’s blood powerwashed off the sidewalk.

What has been the Biden administration’s response? Telling hundreds of millions of people us students are antisemites, physical threats to our Jewish peers, bickering about the linguistic meaning of the term “intifada,” and not a single specific word against the police brutality we have witnessed. Is it all that shocking then that with this picture painted by the media and the president himself, pro-Israel counterprotesters showed up prepared to fight? All the while, our Congress chose to send send $13.1 billion more in arms to Israel and is set to invite Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before them, despite an impending arrest warrant against him by the International Criminal Court, something the Biden Administration is apparently desperately trying to prevent behind the scenes.

I’m not much of a protest vote person. I’ve cast exactly one, in the Boston DA’s race two years ago where both options were going through intense political scandals. My mother moved to North Carolina in 2023 where I am presently registered and voted Uncommitted in the primary, so I suppose I will have to agonize over the prospect of such a general election vote actually having some relevance. In Massachusetts or New York though, I have no doubt I would not vote for him. But if they allow me to vote by mail (big if given new laws passed by the state’s Republican supermajority), the only motivator to vote for him is the intense duress of what a second Trump presidency would mean for someone like me.

That is the overwhelming perspective of every classmate I have talked to on the issue who isn’t in a swing state, and even a few that are. It is not some proclamation that Cornel West or Jill Stein, etc would make a great president. Few people have a candidate in mind, some are thinking of blanking the ballot. But no one has any desire to throw themselves on Biden’s funeral pyre as he careens towards what is at time of writing quite likely to be his defeat. The president had an unbelievable number of offramps since October 7th, and he has taken none of them even as the horrifying prospect of a second Trump presidency remains on the horizon. Without a dramatic change of course, it is ensured. Every drop of blood is on his hands not for his inaction, but for his willing, despicable actions.

Youth voters have low turnout, it is true. But we still are the demographic that pushed Biden over the edge in 2020 and lead to a Democratic overperformance after the Dobbs decision in 2022. You depress youth turnout at your own peril, and the Biden campaign already seems to be pivoting to the vague block of “swayable moderate Republicans” that is every contemporary Democratic campaign’s golden goose. It is hard for me to imagine a significant bloc of people voting for Trump twice and then Biden, but that’s just me. All I know is that if Biden wins, the claim will be that Biden never needed us anyways and if Biden loses, we will be blamed for it. This is what I see, the canary in the coal mine, and I sincerely hope it is recognized before it is too late.

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NOTE: This is the free version of a paid article I released 48 hours prior. If you are a paid subscriber, you should read that version here. In addition to getting the article early, it contains Google Drive links to all the maps and spreadsheets I created for this article.

Today I am going to be doing something I promised in my first post: attempt to write a formula for calculating how left-wing a given political district in the state of New York is relative to all other districts. If you are a baseball fan, you can think of this as a kind of political rate stat. It has taken a while, but I hope it will have been worth the wait. This formula is going to do a few key things:

• The “leftmost” district in the state according to our formula will have a value of 1.0000, the least will have a value of 0.0000

• All other districts will have a value somewhere between 0.0000 and 1.0000 which can be used to sort and compare districts

• It will be relatively simple and easy-to-explain, while it won’t look like that is the case in formal notation, this article will explain exactly what every element of the formula does

An aside on math education

At this point in this newsletter’s existence, no doubt you have noticed I sometimes go on spuriously related tangents. I am afraid this is one of them, but due to the nature of this topic, I am rather insistent on starting with it so it is clear you won’t need a PhD to understand what I’m doing here. Skip past this section if you’d prefer to get right into the meat of this.

I learned math as I am sure many of you did, in a large underfunded public high school with 40-person class sizes and an eye towards one thing: making sure as many warm bodies as possible passed the NYS Regents Exam in June. This did not work very well for me. I outright failed a semester of high school geometry. I’ve never so much as taken a formal calculus class. Five years later, I am writing this.

To be clear, I do not blame my teachers. But I cannot help but wonder how many people had similar experiences, and how few of them also accidentally fell backwards into finding a way to enjoy math as I have.

Some of you are going to see bizarre symbols and syntax below, I’m gonna do as best as I can to explain what is going on without losing detail. On the flip side, some of you may expect this to have the format and language of an academic paper, it won’t because that is simply not my background.

So if you hated math but for some reason are reading this, perhaps consider learning how it can be applied to things you are interested in. You may be surprised as I am and find out that you actually enjoy it. Believe it or not, I loved the trial-and-error that went into making this, and I encourage you to experiment around and perfect it even further.

With that said, I’ll show you the formula if you promise not to stop reading. Deal? Deal:

This is a case of something being very syntactically dense but not actually that complex in content. By the end of this article, you’re going to understand exactly what it all means. We’re going to pretend you didn’t even see that formula and get into motivating what we’re doing today.

In search of an indicator

To get a sense of how we are going to accomplish this, we first need to understand how candidates are elected in the first place. In order to be elected, candidates must:

• Enter and win a closed Democratic Party primary

• Win the general election campaign

This may seem rather barebones but I explicitly state it as it will be quite important to in our exploration of metric which may be indicative of vague progressivism. Candidates have to win two elections, and while we don’t usually think of them this way, even under the exact same district lines the dynamics in those two races may be dramatically different.

While I think this is such an intuitive idea it is often taken for granted, the partisan lean of a district has a shockingly insignificant influence on the ideology of candidates their primary voters will nominate. There are very liberal districts that nominate very moderate candidates for the legislature and very conservative districts where the Democratic primary voters are extremely progressive, though obviously without a chance of actually electing the candidate they nominate. For these reasons, the partisan makeup of a district alone is not particularly relevant to the ideologies of Democratic primary voters there. What it is extremely relevant to is the chances of that candidate winning the general election. Remember this, we’re gonna get back to it later.

With the rejection of partisan lean as a good indicator of ideology, let’s get into the reasons why I won’t use several other apparent metrics.

Renter percent

One metric that is often used to get a sense of where progressives likely live is the share of renters in that area. This makes a lot of sense in most parts of the country as urban voters with few assets correlate stronger with the success of progressive candidates than other relevant metrics like age and education. With that said, New York is rather unusual in that rates of home ownership are the 50th in the nation at 53.6% compared to 65.7% nationally while also being the 12th wealthiest state by median family income, $74,314 vs $69,717 for the nation at-large. Renting simply is not as indicative of economic class, age, and with it voting tenancies as it is in other places. It is not a complete irrelevancy particularly upstate and in the suburbs, but it cannot unto itself isolate progressives statewide.

Individual primaries

Another commonly used metric for this kind of analysis is the result of an individual primary, for example how well Bernie did in 2016 or specific to NYS how well Cynthia Nixon or Jumaane Williams did in 2018. To begin, the Bernie 2016 vote seems more apparently an anti-Hillary vote than a pro-Bernie vote. Amongst Bernie’s best neighborhoods in 2016 were famously conservative Howard Beach and Breezy Point. It certainly gets us closer to what we are trying to track, but there are clearly other factors at play.

Another interesting conduit would be the 2018 governor and lieutenant governor primaries. In that cycle, Cynthia Nixon and Jumaane Williams ran a high-profile campaign against incumbents Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul. What resulted were two pretty fascinating though losing coalitions. While Nixon carried 13 upstate counties against Cuomo and Williams only two plus the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn, Nixon lost her primary by 31 points while Williams came within 7 points of unseating Kathy Hochul on the same ballot.

This difference gets even more impressive if you abstract their coalitions out to an exact two point win, as I have done below:

For Cynthia Nixon to have won, she would have needed to win upstate New York by some 25 points, every county in the state. In exchange, she could lost the suburbs by a similar margin and even lose the city itself, though keeping it close enough to remain viable.

For ostensible running mates in a race on the same ballot, the differences in this coalition are unbelievable. For Jumaane Williams to win by the exact same margin, he could have lost upstate and the suburbs by about 20 points while winning the city by 18 point, the only changes in outright county wins being the borough of Queens, mostly Republican Greene County, and Ulster County.

One thing worth noting about these coalitions is while there are multifaceted reasons for the differences, they show an interesting regionalism. While Nixon is from Manhattan, Queens-bred Cuomo was a chronic underperformer upstate for most of his tenure as governor. Though in part because of a strong Green Party performance, he outright lost the solid blue counties of Monroe and Ulster in 2014 and would lose Columbia County twice, both in 2014 and later in the 2018 cycle.

The Hochul-Williams race meanwhile is a bit more complicated. Kathy Hochul was at this point running for her second term as Lieutenant Governor, a position with much historical turnover and far less of a profile than her former role as a congresswoman. Being a Buffalo area pol, this is why she performed so well in Western New York. Jumaane Williams meanwhile was fairly well-known as a City Councilor in Brooklyn and most notably unlike Nixon got the endorsement of the New York Times, which carries tremendous sway in the metro area and I would argue is probably a prerequisite for a successful progressive campaign at this level of play.

These notes are interesting to make when thinking about statewide campaigns and I will likely go further into them in the future, but they also for our purposes today reveal their flaws. When we look at individual primaries there are always going to be factors far more complicated and difficult to isolate than mere ideology. So, we have to keep looking.

Presidential primary blank ballot

An interesting candidate for these purposes has emerged recently in the form of a campaign mirroring “uncommitted” campaigns in other states by blanking the presidential primary ballot in opposition to Biden’s policy regarding the present war in Gaza. It got 12% statewide but as of time of writing given there is no uncommitted option in New York and blank votes have only been tabulated at the congressional level, there is no precinct level data to utilize. If such is compiled, I may revisit this.

Enter the WFP

As you probably know, Governor Hochul faced an unexpectedly competitive race for re-election in 2022, winning in the end by a mere 6.4 points in the face of dramatic downstate swings towards Republican Lee Zeldin. What you may not remember is that the Working Families Party made a significant GOTV effort to turn out progressives for Hochul, of course on their separate Working Families Party line.

New York is one of few states in the country to allow ballot fusion, that is the crossnomination of candidates of another party while maintaining their own ballot line. This practice began as a reform against political machines, maybe one would vote for a “Reform Democratic” ticket which had different names for local officials but the standard Democratic nominees for higher offices such as Governor or President. One can think of a vote on the Working Families Party line as “Democratic, but I’m not happy about it.”

Because of this concerted campaign and the specific efforts to reach progressives, this means that for every precinct in the state we can get a pretty good idea of how many dedicated progressives are there relative to more general Democratic voters. It is not perfect, but it is a good jumping off point for our purposes.

Beyond what I have already stated and the recency of the election, it is also worth noting that because of Hochul’s dramatic under-performance, there is an added benefit in giving us about the absolute floor of how a Democrat can do in a particular area of New York. This will become important later as we get into weighing in odds of winning the general election.

Into the math

To begin, it may help to see an example of what these numbers all look like in practice.

Here are county level results for the 2022 governor’s race, pulled straight from Wikipedia. For each county, we can see how many people voted for Hochul for the two parties she was on the ballot for, the Democratic Party and the Working Families Party. The next column is a sum of those two vote totals, the “fusion” in fusion voting. All votes for a single candidate are summed together regardless of the party affiliation. This continues for Zeldin’s two parties.

Let’s go back to our ridiculous formula:

Remember when I said this was a lot more syntactically complex than it actually was? The first two lines are emblematic of this. The D in this case stands for the Democratic party’s share of the vote in a given district, and the W in turn the Working Families Party’s share. In the curly braces, this should be thought of as a list of numbers. The subscript of each variable simply refers to the number of the item in the list. There are k districts, an equal number for both the Democratic and Working Families Party vote. Take for example our congressional districts, there are 28 of them. That means k = 28 in that case and each list contains 28 items, in this case decimals corresponding to the percentage share of the vote for a political party.

Take for example NY-01, a congressional district on Long Island. Within that district, 39.98% of people voted for Hochul on the Democratic line and 2.10% of people voted for her on the Working Families line. Expressed as a decimal, that would mean d₁ would be .3998 and w₁ would be .0210. This continues for all districts until our list is full.

Now onto the second part. All this is doing is calculating the “ratio” between the percentage of the vote for Hochul on the Working Families line against Hochul’s total vote share. For example back to NY-01, the value for r₁ would be as follows:

.0210/(.3998+.0210) = .0210/.4208 = .0499

That is to say of voters who voted for Kathy Hochul in NY-01, 4.99% of them voted for her on the Working Families Party line. We will be using this r value in the following part of our formula to give us an idea of how progressive primary voters may be in a specific district.

The next part has two giant fractions multiplied by each other. We’re going to look at the first fraction first, and then the second. You will shortly understand why.

What this part of the formula does is normalizes our ratios from their current form to a number between 0 and 1 where 0 is the district with the lowest ratio and 1 is the one with the maximum ratio.

The “min” and “max” each find the minimum or maximum value for a district respectively. In finding those, for the numerator we subtract the minimum from the ratio of our current district, and for the denominator we subtract the minimum from the maximum ratio for all our districts (this can be thought of as the “range” of our values).

For an example, let’s say we have three districts where the WFP relative to the Democratic Party got 30%, 18%, and 4% of the vote. We already know which of these would be our minimum and maximum, but let’s run the calculation for our middle district.

(.18-.04)/(.30-.04) = .14/.26 = 0.5385…

So for our 18% district, assuming the 30% district is 1.0000 and the 4% district is 0.0000, this formula would spit out a value of 0.5385. But not so fast…

That 0 to 1 value that we calculated gets multiplied by the output of this very confusing looking formula. It gets quite simple though when I explain the motivation for it.

As we’ve discussed earlier, progressive candidates need to effectively win two elections: first the primary election, and then the general. The electorate of primary voters tends to be pretty fairly represented by our ratio, i.e. what share of voters for the Democratic candidate are likely to be progressive in a given district. But that number alone cannot account for their viability in the general election.

This is where our formula comes in. I won’t touch much on the math as it is a bit beyond the scope of this article, but it is what is known as a sigmoid function. Basically, it creates something of an s-shaped curve. Below is the curve created by this function.

As you can see, this curve dramatically increases between 0.4 and 0.6, from a practical flatline at 0 to steady at 1. Why is this useful to us? Take those decimals on the x axis and imagine them as percentages. Values increasing dramatically between 40% and 60%? That sounds like the range of results for a candidate in the general election that would determine their viability.

So the reason we multiply it along this curve is to determine general election viability. If Hochul got 45% of the vote in a district, we can probably surmise that the district is shaky for the Democratic Party and thus should be lower on our scale. For a further idea of the effect of this, here are some Democratic Party percentages and what the viability factor this formula spits out. Keep in mind being multiplied by 1.0000 would be the original value, being multiplied by 0.5000 would be half the original value, etc.

65.0% = 1.0000

60.0% = 0.9999

57.9% = 0.9990

55.6% = 0.9900

53.2% = 0.9000

51.0% = 0.5000

50.0% = 0.2689

48.8% = 0.1000

Now on to the fun part. What do these numbers actually show us in relation to real political districts?

Precincts

Precincts can be thought of as the building blocks of larger political districts. They are the most granular level at which we can get this kind of election data and for that reason while of little practical use on its own, it may make sense for us to begin by taking a look at the map of our formula applied to individual precincts— all 13,963 of them. It is at this point I have to think Benjamin J. Rosenblatt for compiling the precinct-level data for the 2022 governor’s race that makes this all possible. It’s a very tedious process that involves wrangling with every county’s individual Board of Elections so his collection and release of that data is incredibly admirable.

Here is a precinct-level heatmap for the state of New York. Darker reds signify a value closer to 1.0000, the “most progressive” parts of the state by our formula.

In the city, the most progressive areas are heavily concentrated in western Brooklyn and Queens. This is no doubt where our most progressive districts will generally be at all levels, though smaller areas statewide do match these levels in much smaller areas such as Inwood also in this photo.

In the Mid-Hudson, parts of Kingston get quite close to matching Brooklyn levels but several of the area’s small cities and much of Ulster County registers at significant levels.

Metro Albany is also quite apparent in this data, including the city of Troy.

Tompkins County, not just in Ithaca where Cornell is located but also in the surrounding towns is also quite apparent on this map in even brighter shades of red than most of the Mid-Hudson.

Buffalo also had an impressive share of the WFP vote, particularly in the north of the city.

The South Wedge of Rochester is most apparent on this map, but much of metro Rochester has a relatively high share of the Working Families vote comparative to other metro areas in the state.

State Assembly

Now that we have an idea of where the hotspots are at a more granular level, let’s get into the real meat of this article. What does this formula tell us when we apply it to more practical political jurisdictions. We will begin with New York State Assembly districts.

As far as upstate is concerned, we’re seeing a lot of what we would expect. The reddest districts contain Kingston and Ithaca respectively, but other districts for bigger metro areas also show respectable values.

In the city, we’re also seeing much as we expect with a very distinctly dark red for the districts along the East River in Brooklyn and Queens.

The maps are interesting, but what does the actual raw data look like? I’ve put it in a spreadsheet below, and as with the maps it will be accessible at the end of the paid version of this article.

Few notes before I begin. “LeftScale” is our full formula including with the scaling to the general election, “WFScale” is our formula without any scaling to the general election. The other columns should be pretty self explanatory but just in case “WFShare%” is the WFP share of the combined Democratic and Working Families vote, “WF%” is the raw percentage the Working Families Party got, and “D/WF%” is the combined share Kathy Hochul got in that given district.

Another thing: I have highlighted these districts according to if a DSA candidate has won it before (green), is currently running for it (yellow), or lost a race for it (red). I do this in part because I am a DSA member but also because I didn’t want to be making individual case-by-case determinations of what races have had progressive candidates and whether the most progressive candidate won. Highlighting only DSA candidates offers a small sample of the very most progressive candidates. With that said, I will mention interesting races with non-DSA candidates from time to time.

I don’t think I could have fabricated better data if I tried. Of 150 members of the New York State Assembly, every DSA elected fits into the top 13 values, with no losses in that range and two ongoing races. This includes Sarahana Shrestha of the Mid-Hudson Valley, with a value of 0.5099. This should not be thought of as “DSA candidates can only win in districts with a value above 0.5000,” but it’s interesting how cleanly the data here worked out.

Not pictured amongst DSA candidacies is Jonathan Soto’s current race in the Bronx’s AD-82 with a LeftScale of 0.0921, 61/150 assembly districts and which he lost last cycle under similar lines. Additional mentions for DSA losses are AD-95 around Peekskill and Philipstown (LeftScale of 0.2299, #37/150), East New York centered AD-60 (LeftScale of 0.0005, #97/150), and a primary endorsement in deep red Dutchess County AD-105 (LeftScale of 0.0000, #110/150).

Additionally it is worth mentioning Claire Cousin’s present primary against Didi Barrett in Dutchess and Columbia Counties. AD-106 gets a LeftScale of 0.1820 and is the 42nd most progressive assembly district in the state.

State Senate

In the State Senate, a very similar pattern is playing out with the Brooklyn-Queens belt having the most progressive districts in the state and the Mid-Hudson and Ithaca having similarly impressive numbers.

As far as the spreadsheet goes, we’ve got a similar clustering at the top, this time a top six of districts where DSA candidates have won every race they’ve run. Not pictured is a failed Long Island DSA race for SD-07, a district in Nassau County with a LeftScale of 0.0006, the 43rd most progressive of the state’s 63 State Senate districts.

Congress

We for the record are using the new maps from the 2024 election onwards for this section. At the congressional level, Hochul’s margins were poor enough in the Mid-Hudson and Ithaca as to where they barely register on the map.

There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of correlation between where DSA candidates have won and where the WFP does well, though the dynamics of federal races are arguably quite different. Velazquez and Goldman’s districts encompass much of that prime East River Brooklyn/Queens belt and there is a dramatic dropoff to other districts. You can really see how our curving based on general election results dramatically influences these races, with Mid-Hudson/Ithaca’s NY-19 going from a relatively impressive 0.2054 before scaling to 0.0008. It is also worth noting while Jamaal Bowman was endorsed by DSA for his first victory in 2020, he no longer is a DSA endorsee.

City Council

All DSA held NYC City Council districts are as with state-level districts clustered towards the top of our results (this time the top 6/51) but unlike the State Assembly and Senate, DSA candidates have actually lost districts in that range. There were relatively unique dynamics at play (Hanif in CD-39 had most progressive institutional support besides DSA, CD-35 was an incredibly close race) but it is interesting to note regardless.

Conclusion

As mentioned earlier, the paid version of this article is going to include a Google Drive folder with all my maps and the spreadsheet below this paragraph. The maps can be opened with a program called QGIS, download QGIS and these folders and open the .qgz extension file with the program. The spreadsheet is a simple Google Sheet and as such can be viewed either online or downloaded, you can navigate between different district types with the tabs on the bottom.

This article took much longer than I anticipated so I apologize for the wait, though I should be able to get articles out quicker as we approach the summer. As always if you enjoyed this, feel free to subscribe for free or share this article with a friend. The vast majority of subscribers to this newsletter are referred by friends. If you would like to go above and beyond and get these articles two days early plus some extra data goodies, consider becoming a paid subscriber. With that said, I shall be out with another article in a few weeks.

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