Morning Along the Hudson
The Hudson Valley, left politics, and where we go from here
The month after I was born, a few miles from my house, something rather unremarkable happened. An art museum opened. A piece in the Times was optimistic on what exactly it could mean:
“And Beacon, until recently just another city on the river with a faded industrial past, is poised to become a prime destination for art connoisseurs.”
The New York Times, “Renaissance by the River” — 18 May 2003
When the Dia Arts Foundation bought the abandoned Nabisco box factory in Beacon, this premise was as ludicrous to locals as it sounds. Like an endless slew of other cities in the Hudson Valley and beyond, Beacon was emblematic of rust belt decline. Much of Main Street was boarded up, and one could see addicts sucking pacifiers in the alleys to keep their teeth from grinding. Endless stories were ingrained in me and anyone else who grew up around Beacon about what streets to avoid, what time to be home by, what chain to lock your bike up with, and a general sense that one had to be vigilant at all times. One of my earliest memories is of being in the city library on Main Street and watching a fistfight just outside the window. Greenwich Village types in berets were expected to sit on a train for an hour each way and come to Beacon?!
When after high school I moved into a classic Old Beacon living arrangement (the basement apartment of a boarding school turned hat factory turned apartment building slash cell tower over on Rombout Avenue), I found a remarkably different place. If one walks along Main Street today, they’ll find an assortment of coffeehouses, southwestern grills, and restaurants with accented names and the prices to match. Bicycle sharrows mark the street and with perhaps the exception of the two beat-up gas stations, few signs of that “Old Beacon” remain. Advertisements for new developments with highly stylized wordmarks like Beacon Knoll, the Lofts at Beacon Falls, and River Ridge at Beacon can be found online. The city council includes a member of the local Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapter. An aged brick building along Fishkill Creek has been converted into a four-star hotel with a chic restaurant, leaning into the rustic industrial aesthetic that has become exactly that: an aesthetic. The year my parents married at St. John the Evangelist’s on Willow Street, there were 173 violent crimes in Beacon. Last year, that number was 14.
That 2,100 square foot first childhood house of mine mentioned earlier a few miles away from Dia:Beacon was sold by my parents in 2012 for a cool $299k, a loss compared to inflation. It would go on to be bought again, have the entire interior gutted, and be remodeled with a kind helping of millennial gray paint, cobblestone exterior walls, a hot tub, a sunken living room, a “custom eat-in gourmet kitchen,” a “primary suite with sitting room” (I don’t actually know what those last two even mean), and a paved driveway over my childhood gravel. It was sold last year by Sotheby’s for $870,000 in a listing that misspells the name of the town it was in. Zillow currently has its Zestimate at $919,000.
This all begs an obvious question: what the hell is happening?
“Brooklyn North”
The Hudson Valley is changing. Everyone who lives up here knows this whether they’ve been here their whole life or a few weeks. What I wish to posit in this project is not that those changes are a universal bad or a universal good. They are happening, and they will continue to happen. In-migration is also not new, many of the biggest detractors of the new arrivals to the Hudson Valley seem to be strangely amnesic about where exactly they were born. Too much of the conversation is centered around this dichotomy of the townies and the transplants.
Instead, I wish to analyze the effects, predominantly in the realm of electoral politics as that is what I know best but not exclusively through such. The Hudson Valley has historically been one of the most conservative parts of the country. FDR, who was from Dutchess County, lost it overwhelmingly in all four of his landslide runs for President. Of the past 36 races for Governor, Dutchess has chosen the Republican 29 times. Even titanium blue Ulster and Columbia Counties pulled the lever for the Republican candidate as recently as 2014 and 2018 respectively.
For residents of the Hudson Valley, be they transplants or natives, I hope to present current societal trends in ways you may not have seen before. For people in the city, I hope to make you aware of what is happening up the river. For everyone else, I hope you’ll join me as I cover something pretty unique in this time: the success of the American left in a relatively rural region. Perhaps it may serve as a blueprint for similar action in other parts of the country.
In the Mid-Hudson Valley, we are witnessing a sea change without precedent and beyond prediction. Last year the DSA, generally regarded as a phenomenon exclusive to urban areas, successfully unseated Assemblyman Kevin Cahill, a member of a Kingston political dynasty that had been in continuous public office since 1986. On the same day every DSA challenger to an incumbent lost downstate, NY-103 elected one in a district so rural/exurban that it’s actually the largest district by land area any DSA elected has represented in the country, beating out urban congressional districts with 6x as many people.
This is not an isolated example, either. Since 2021, MHV-DSA is 7-1 in wins to losses for endorsees in Democratic primaries. Their electeds sit on city councils in Poughkeepsie, Newburgh, and Beacon, in the Ulster County Legislature, and of course as already mentioned in the New York State Assembly. The once race they lost in that period, a city council race in Kingston, had a 23 vote margin of victory for the opponent.
The successes on the left are not limited to the local DSA chapter. For The Many, a post-Occupy progressive nonprofit that often cross-endorses DSA candidates but also runs their own has notched similar victories. They have especially focused on tenant’s rights and even in the races where their endorsees have lost, they’ve successfully moved housing justice to the forefront of the conversation. For The Many, the Mid-Hudson Valley DSA, and the local Ulster-Dutchess chapter of the Working Families Party (many of which have overlap in membership) have made clear in their success that they will continue to define races throughout the Mid-Hudson Valley far into the future.
During the bloodbath that was this last cycle in New York, this region managed to not only re-elect the only swing district Democrat in the state, but had two counties, Columbia and Ulster, vote to the left of the rest of the state for the first time in New York history, against the grain of a cycle that swung 10 points towards the Republican Party and what until the past twenty years was electoral stagnation around 15-40 points to the right of the state at-large.
A Tale of Four Cities
I wish to not tremendously limit myself with what I will cover here, but for the sake of introduction there are four broad “zones” I’d like to introduce. They are pictured below:
In green are four cities that are undeniably going to be the most regularly mentioned and covered here. They are Beacon, Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, and Kingston. These small cities all range from 10-35k people and sit along the Hudson River. They’ve all experienced an influx of migration in the past few years and both a leftward shifts in municipal politics and an intensification of the local housing crisis.
In cyan are other municipalities that are on my radar. They are generally experiencing in-migration from NYC, relatively left-wing compared to the area around them, and in many cases have had a notable left-wing candidacy in the past few cycles, though less than the principal four cities. For example the extension south through my native Cold Spring and Cortlandt reflects LHV-DSA candidate Vanessa Agudelo’s performance there. Likewise towns like Catskill and Millbrook are hardly bastions of the left-wing but are rapidly trending towards Democrats and experiencing notable migration. I will go further into how I made these selections in a future article.
The darker colors refer to counties, specifically whether they’re a primary county of interest (blue) or a secondary county of interest (red) for this project. This is not to say that nothing interesting is happening in areas colored these darker colors but only that they are not currently on my radar beyond being within the scope of the counties I am generally looking at. Whether a county is primary or secondary depends more on their population size and general partisan lean than much else.
These aren’t the strict boundaries of what I will cover. Rather, they’re more a guideline for what to expect the vast majority of what I write and analyze to be about. In general, this area is characterized as relatively exurban to rural with few “bedroom communities” unlike Westchester or the inner suburbs of Albany. There is cultural influence from NYC, but not the dominance in Westchester, Rockland, and Long Island. The further south you go, the less true that statement is.
Another determination used to come to this map was share of ballot fusion vote for the Working Families Party, an imperfect but correlative way to visualize support for progressivism in the Mid-Hudson. Here’s that data mapped for Dutchess and Ulster Counties in 2.5% increments, up to a precinct with an unbelievable 25% in Kingston:
Why me?
In selling this project, there’s an expectation I present the information about myself that qualifies me to be the one to tell this story. In light of me really not having anything persuasive in terms of credentials, I’ll instead present why I’m interested in all this.
I’m a native of Cold Spring, where I lived for the first nine years of my life and sporatically a few times afterwards. My mother’s family is emblematic of the Hudson Valley hyperlocal. Her paternal grandfather was the agricultural extension agent for Columbia and Greene Counties, a sort of vocational role teaching other farmers the latest farming techniques and serving as a public advocate for them more broadly. His wife my great-grandmother was a teacher at the elementary school in Catskill. My mom’s maternal grandfather designed loading docks for W. B. Mcguire Co., once the largest employer in Hudson. Both of my mom’s parents worked for IBM, as did both their future spouses and at least one person in every generation of my family since, including mine. Needless to say, we’ve been around a while. Since the place was Dutch.
My father’s family not so much, he was born in Chicago, bounced around the nation for most of his childhood, eventually ended up in Queens, and met my mother. He moved up to the Hudson Valley to marry her, and the locals never let him forget it. Eventually my parents split, and my father move back to the city, I used to take the train as a kid from Beacon and later Poughkeepsie when he had visitation. Hence the name of this project: “The Hudson Line.” The areas at each end of that MetroNorth line are where I have lived the vast majority of my life, and I like to think this background has given me a rather unique ability to be fluent in both languages: townie and transplant.
My family moved around a lot after my father departed, we’ve owned, we’ve rented, we were housing insecure at various times. We’ve lived in Poughkeepsie, Beacon, Cold Spring, Philipstown, Lagrangeville, Poughquag, and Pleasant Valley sometimes more than once nonconsecutively as she tried her best to find housing, sometimes with no hot water or exposed wires hanging from the ceiling. I’ve gone to more area public schools than I can name. Those experiences have to state the obvious influenced my perspective considerably. I graduated from my mom’s alma mater Arlington High School in LaGrange in 2021 where I was a comically bad student who rarely even attended class, Northeastern University took a chance on me because of my SAT score and let’s just say their gamble is yet to pay off. I major in Computer Science so it’s been a baptism by fire. My main source of income is delivering UberEats around metro Boston when I’m out of class on a gray-market ebike I bought in Flushing Chinatown for $1,200 and somehow convinced an Amtrak conductor to allow onboard.
I’ve been involved with local politics since high school, though as my family has since left the area, I haven’t been back since last summer . With that said, I remain in touch with friends involved in local politics and keep up to date with local news. Whether I will be back or not depends on various factors, but what I do know is I love where I grew up and I have no intention to disengage.
What to expect
I am not a journalist or a professional political analyst. But I know my way around data and I know how to analyze and create maps from it. I write from a left perspective as I don’t check my views at the door, but that does not mean that everything I write about will have to do with left politics. Here are the concepts for articles to come for a general idea of what I plan to do here in no particular order:
Analysis of the “left-ness” of precincts in the Mid-Hudson Valley, giving a score from 0.000 to 1.000 based on how they voted in various primaries and what share of the vote went to the “most progressive” option wherever such a determination can be made fairly and how that may relate to future races and WFP vote share in the general election (sample thread)
The kids are gonna be alright: analysis of voter registration of my graduating class in a district that voted for Trump both times (sample thread)
Demographic shift in NYC migration to the MHV (TL;DR: Whiter, higher income, more Manhattan and Brooklyn than historical Bronx and Staten) (sample thread)
Bowman vs Latimer, bit outside my focus but I’ve already done precinct analysis (sample thread)
Analysis of turnout in the 2022 NY-19 special election and the 2022 general election, how did Pat Ryan beat Molinaro and then become the only swing district Democrat to win (hint: Ulster County went wild)
Races to watch next year (Claire Cousins vs Didi Barrett, NY-39 Senate, NY-17, NY-18)
Redistricting breakdown, how it may affect MHV politics
Kiryas Joel and the Satmar Hasidim, what elections have they been the tipping point in and why they’re not as uniform a bloc vote as often presented
Poughkeepsie municipal races, particularly how low turnout historically is (aka how on earth did Rolison become and stay mayor) and a recap of the 2023 race
The successful fight for Good Cause Eviction in all four of our principal cities, the legal challenges that struck them down, and the fight for a state law
Precinct-level analysis of Sarahana Shrestha’s victory in the NY-103 Assembly primary, how it happened and what it says about future races (Climate justice and housing are winning issues)
What to watch for in the 2023 local elections, likely to be the first article after this
Analysis of 2023 elections, can’t analyze them until they happen
Political profile pieces on all four of our principal cities
Political history of the Village of New Paltz, probably the one place in the whole Mid-Hudson that has a longstanding history of left politics
The Hudson Highlands Fjord Trail, local opposition and the benefits
Something on the Empire State Trail + cycling generally, a far more general NY piece than my other ideas but still from a MHV perspective.
Phenomenon of congressional candidates moving back to the Hudson Valley to run for office, Delgado/Ryan/Riley/Esposito all did this and SPM moved here to run
Transplant vs native candidates, is there a noticable difference in how they perform electorally? (Yes, but less so now than ten years ago)
Pieces on the careers of Pat Ryan, Antonio Delgado
Post-COVID remote work and the effect on MHV migration and housing prices
General piece on the MHV housing market, both buying and renting
The Molinaro Effect, his historic overperformance in MHV elections until the second he ran for federal office
Something on the decline of Stewart International Airport
The decline of the MetroNorth supercommuter
The Working Families Party: history, strategy, pitfalls, and what it says about a future left party (might release this on The Rose Garden, a DSA-specific publication I write for)
Historical piece on the Hamilton Fish dynasty as a quintessential example of what the “old Hudson Valley” was like politically (a tad too fond of Hitler)
I’m not gonna run out of article ideas any time soon. As I’ve said before this is a hobby for me, and as such I have no plans to have paid articles. That said I have enabled paid subscriptions, so if you want to support me and incentivize my posting habit feel free to do so. I also do not have a fixed schedule for articles though I’m looking to publish pretty frequently, perhaps even multiple times a week given I have the research done for a lot of these ideas.
If you’re interested in this project, I encourage you to subscribe to it for free so you’ll get new articles in your email inbox as soon as they’re released. If you think someone else may also be interested in it, I encourage you to share it with them. Even more than starting a paid subscription, that’s the best way to ensure I keep writing. If you wish to reach out to me for any reason, I don’t recommend social media DM which I am notoriously bad at responding to, my email is mv@ndr.sn and that is the best way to reach me.