Staten Island Goes Purple
Voters on Staten Island—long the only Republicn corner of New York City—have turned their Republican Congressman Dan Donovan out of office. New York’s 11th District—which the island shares with a couple of neighborhoods across the Verrazanno Bridge in Brooklyn—was the last part of the city to be represented by a Republican in the U.S. House. Although Democrats in the district outnumber Republicans by a 2-to-1 margin, Donald Trump won 58 percent of the vote there in 2016. The President retains some popular support on the island, his policies less so.
The surprising victory of Democrat Max Rose signals that Staten Island is genuinely a swing district—something that New York Democrats have precious little experience with. The combination of gerrymandering and “big sort” demographic shifts created a sort of district-by-district one-party domination in New York State that has resulted, at least within the city, in neither party knowing how to run in competitive elections.
In a deep-blue city like New York, political posts are handed down like family heirlooms. More politicians leave office in handcuffs or a pine box than because of voter will. As a result, the county—or, in NYC-speak, borough—political organizations are hollowed out. They’re less machines than automatons that go through the motions with little if any involvement from actual people.
A Purple Heart military veteran, Rose was recruited to move to Staten Island and run for office by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. His campaign messaging included complaints about “both sides” and swipes at Mayor Bill DeBlasio, a focus on opioid addiction and an allergic reaction to Medicare-for-All, with a wonkish focus on expanding access to health care within the framework of the Affordable Care Act.
Centrist Democratic consultants will point to Rose’s campaign messaging as a lesson for Democrats in 2020, but there’s probably more of an organizing lesson to be learned. The Rose campaign activated hundreds of volunteers who canvassed the district to identify over 86,000 likely voters, and then turn them—and more—out to win with a decisive 52.8 percent of the vote.
Rose has staying power, and Staten Island’s political landscape will never be the same. The election is no less than a political realignment in New York’s most conservative borough, which can no longer be written off as Republican territory. Now comes a day of reckoning for both parties’ local organizations, and some badly-needed soul-searching for New York’s unions about how they approach the question of “electability” and “sure-things.”
WHEN DISTRICTS REALIGN, both parties’ old orders are threatened.
The Republican party operation on Staten Island was once a nigh-unstoppable machine that was crucial to the election victories of Ronald Reagan, Alphonse D’amato, and Rudy Giuliani. In recent years it’s been dependant on low-turnout special and midterm elections to retain its competitive edge.
For four decades, the Staten Island GOP was led by Guy V. Molinari, the politician who first flipped what had been a reliably Democratic congressional district in 1980—the year of Reagan’s presidential election—before moving on to become Borough President. Molinari passed away this summer, but his party machine never outgrew him or his grudges. He openly feuded with Representative Donovan as well as James Oddo, the current Republican Borough President. In a healthy organization either of these elected officials would be their party’s official leader. Instead Molinari threatened them both with primary challenges. He encouraged his protege, ex-con ex-Representative Michael Grimm, to run against Donovan for his old seat. That bruising primary campaign fatally damaged Donovan’s credibility as a moderate by compelling him, as Republican primaries do, to move further to the right.
One party operative publicly blamed “years of neglect and years of trying to make the county organization smaller and subservient to its leaders” for the historic loss of Molinari’s old seat.
Lawn signs ordinarily might not be an indication of anything significant, but it was notable how few Dan Donovan lawn signs could be seen around the island—especially compared to Max Rose’s and even the faded Michael Grimm signs from his failed primary bid. I don’t know a single friend or neighbor who had a Donovan volunteer knock on their door or call on the phone. None of my fellow commuters could recall seeing the Donovan team passing out campaign lit at the Staten Island Ferry, which is the barest minimum that any local political effort must do.
We all assumed that the Republicans had some secret weapon or really reliable internal polling, but the post-election public recriminations in our local paper of record, the Staten Island Advance, confirm that there was nothing; just a misguided assumption that the rubes would keep on voting Republican in sufficient numbers.
It is all but certain that there will be a significant personnel shake-up at the Staten Island GOP.
On the Democratic side, the county committee has been a baffling mess. Earlier in the year, one of Staten Island’s few elected Democratic state legislators, Matthew Titone, decided to forego re-election for his safe seat in order to run for the borough-wide position of Surrogate Judge. Party chairman John Gulino strong-armed his county committee to deny Titone the party’s endorsement—possibly because Titone is an out gay man, and Gulino has some notion that such a thing is political poison in Staten Island’s more conservative enclaves (or it could be for an even dumber reason that we’ll never fully understand).
Nonetheless, Titone trounced the party’s hand-picked mediocrity in the primary and cruised to victory in the same general election that saw Rose upend the borough’s political calculus. In the interim, the rusty S.I. Democratic machine failed to even file the necessary paperwork for its down-ballot judicial nominees, allowing the Republicans to win those races free from competition.
In 2014, with Michael Grimm running for re-election under the cloud of a 20-count indictment, the SI Dems allowed the Brooklyn machine to fob off an inarticulate city councilman from the other side other side of the Verrazzano who bumbled his way to an ignominious defeat. Before that, they ran the son of the crook who had lost his seat to Molinari four decades ago.
Clearly there are going to be big changes in the thoroughly-discredited Democratic county committee, and Rose would be the natural party leader. One close observer of S.I. politics speculates that Rose’s chief of staff, Kevin Elkins, will replace Gulino and turn the party into the kind of GOTV organization that put Rose over the top.
MOSTLY ABSENT FROM THE STORY of Max Rose’s ground-breaking victory are unions. The New York state AFL-CIO endorsed Donovan, the Republican incumbent. Although 1199 SEIU and the Staten Island-based local 1102 of the Communications Workers put a lot of feet in the street on Rose’s behalf, the rest of the labor movement took the cautious approach of issuing paper endorsements of the GOP incumbent who was favored to win re-election.
Their calculation was as simple as it was cold. Donovan picked up the phone when they called. He could do them small favors and GOP leadership gave him permission to vote no on the really big bad bills like the billionaire tax cut and health care repeal. That those bills came to the floor at all was because Donovan caucused with the death cult that is the congressional Republican party, but his permission from Paul Ryan to avoid getting his hands dirty allowed him to avoid hardcore opposition from the unions. For the unions, the question was why risk losing access to a flawed Republican when a good Democrat who wins without labor’s backing can be expected to forgive and forget (and count on their backing for re-election)?
Staying away from Rose’s long-shot campaign was hardly the most embarrassing inaction by New York’s unions this political season. The most electrifying primary election in the country saw newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeat 10-term congressman Joe Crowley. The idea that the fourth ranked Democrat in Congress and chairman of his county’s Democratic machine could be crushed by a 28-year-old democratic socialist with no financial war chest stunned the political establishment. And in New York unions are very much a part of the political establishment. With nearly a quarter of New York workers belonging to one, unions remain powerful and influential—and exceedingly cautious when it comes to political endorsements.In that primary, the unions reflexively endorsed the incumbent, Crowley.
Nationally, 2020 likely will see more left wing primary challenges in deep blue districts—and the general election will see the last of the moderate Republicans in the fight of their political lives. Unions that back centrist Democrats and moderate Republicans will have some difficult decisions to make.
[This article originally appeared at The American Prospect.]
Drop all the bridge tolls, tax the billionaires
The toll on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is too damn high.
I realize that it’s a time-honored tradition for Staten Islanders to beat our breasts and complain about how “forgotten” and taken for granted we are. Don’t let me steal your birthright from ya, but there are hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who have to go over the river and through the woods and across two expensive bridges to get to Grandma’s house in New Jersey. They feel your pain.
A $17 bridge toll, a free ride for tourists on the ferry and $2.75 for a subway train that’s as likely to break down as get you to work on time is an inequitable system for all parties involved.
Writing in these pages, columnist Tom Wrobleski points to the toll-free East River bridges and notes, “They’re one of the few examples of government totally overlooking a revenue source.”
He suggests “toll equity.” I would humbly propose that our problem is one of a lack of imagination and memory.
Once upon a time, all bridges were intended to be free to cross. Tolls were merely temporary fees charged to travelers to pay back the bond money borrowed to fund their construction. The Brooklyn Bridge was a legendary expenditure of time and money to construct. The bridge was never for sale, but horse-drawn carriages had to rent it for the first few years until toll revenue had paid off its creditors. Now it, like the other East River crossings that were built before 1909, is free to commuters.
What changed? A man named Robert Moses began consolidating power as a public works planner in the 1920s.
When it comes to Moses’ legacy, there are two camps. Some give him all the credit for the highways, byways and thousands of acres of parkland scattered throughout our region. The rest of us curse his name during our interminable commutes.
Moses hated buses and trains and wasn’t that fond of the idea of black and brown people having too many of options for traveling beyond their neighborhood slums. His dollars-over-pennies “master planner” budgeting is why traffic is so awful. One example: the reason traffic backs up for a couple of miles before the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, as thousands of cars cram into the one-and-a-half lanes that lead from Brooklyn into Queens, was that Moses was convinced that the vast majority of drivers would always and forever need to get into lower Manhattan instead. (And that we’d all be driving instead of taking buses, boats and trains in to work.)
Moses couldn’t win an election to save his life. But he concurrently headed up various New York public authorities between 1924 and 1981. The authorities were governed by mayoral, county and gubernatorial appointees – none of whose terms expired at the same time – making Moses uniquely immune to direct accountability to voters.
To keep his appointed boards of governors in check, Moses hid behind his fiduciary responsibility to the bondholders who financed the impressive highways and bridges he built.
And he kept on borrowing money to build them and raising the tolls on them in order to maintain that responsibility to the bondholders that he used as an excuse to disagree with and flat-out ignore the governors and mayors that we-the-people elected under the misguided notion that they should be accountable to us and not some megalomaniacal man who didn’t even drive a car.
Restoring the tolls on the free bridges along the East River has been a favorite solution of tax-loathing billionaires like former mayor Mike Bloomberg ever since the city of London introduced “congestion pricing” under socialist mayor Ken Livingstone in 2003.
But all of these bridges really should be free from tolls, and our mass transit system deserves a massive reinvestment and a radical expansion. Staten Islanders deserve everything from high-speed ferries on the South Shore to an R train that crosses the Verrazano and a PATH train that connects a West Shore light rail line to Bayonne, Jersey City and lower Manhattan.
My preferred solution is to do something much closer to the spirit of socialism and tax the crap out of the billionaires who rely on the bridges, subways and buses to help the rest of us schlubs drag our sorry butts to work every day.
[This op-ed originally appeared in The Staten Island Advance.]
Republicans Are Hard at Work to Turn Staten Island Blue
Is Donald Trump an albatross around the neck of congressional Republicans? By appealing to his base and embracing the polarizing strategies that he has brought to new heights, will they cost themselves the last few swing districts in Trump-abhorring blue states?
We New Yorkers might have the best view of the GOP’s struggle to stay afloat in America’s big cities right here on Staten Island. Republican Dan Donovan, who has represented New York’s 11th Congressional District for all of a term and a half, is in the fight of his political life in the June 26 GOP primary.
Our ex-con ex-Congressman, Republican Michael Grimm—fresh out of jail—is running against Donovan to reclaim his old job. Grimm has gone full fascist in order to win the backing of former White House consigliere Stephen Bannon, as part of Bannon’s effort to destroy what’s left of the Republican establishment.
Grimm gushed over Bannon’s early and enthusiastic endorsement. His campaign materials studiously avoid any policy stances of substance. Instead they emphasize his past military and law enforcement credentials and—of course—putting America first. He has pledged—and maintained—fidelity to what he calls “President Trump’s agenda,” adding, “Anyone that’s against that agenda needs to get out of the way.”
On the Democratic side, Purple Heart veteran Max Rose is leading a crowded field. He has more cash on hand than any candidate vying for New York’s 11th District, raising three times as much money as Donovan this year. (Full disclosure: I knocked on doors to get signatures to put Rose on the Working Families Party ballot line. I found a lot more enthusiasm for him than my Republican neighbors demonstrate for Donovan.)
In recent weeks, Donovan has been scurrying to the right. His latest “Hail Mary pass” was to introduce a bill in Congress banning so-called “Sanctuary Cities” from receiving federal funding, despite having voted against a similar bill last June.
Indeed, until recently Donovan had been doing all of the things a moderate Republican would traditionally do to win re-election in a swing district in a blue state. This time last year, he was co-authoring an op-ed in The Washington Post with a Dreamer, grasping for “common ground” with the most sympathetic of group of undocumented immigrants. He’d even won the backing of the state AFL-CIO.
That was before Grimm began taunting him in the Staten Island Advance as “Desperate Dan” and initiated a juvenile slap war in which each besmirched his rival as a “liberal.” In far-right Bizarro World, each had committed the unforgiveable sin of not always voting in lock-step with John Boehner and Paul Ryan to keep health insurance as expensive as possible for working people.
These attacks seem to have made Grimm the favorite of the party’s shrinking base. A recent poll commissioned by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee showed Donovan trailing Grimm by ten percentage points in the upcoming primary. Donovan’s camp has dismissed the polling as so much fake news, but his complete about-face on immigration issues suggests the poll is a lot closer to the truth than they’re willing to admit publicly.
Hence his complete reversal on immigrants and sanctuary cities. And a costly reversal it is: His attempt to save himself in the primary will make it exquisitely difficult for him to win in November—should he even make it that far.
I realize that Staten Island has a national reputation as a conservative enclave in perpetual rebellion against the rest of “liberal” New York City—but the reality is a lot more complicated. There are more than twice as many registered Democrats and independents (even a sprinkling of socialists) on Staten Island than there are Republicans. One in five residents were born in another country, and anti-immigrant rhetoric still sounds anti-immigrant to the documented and undocumented alike.
The ongoing demographic “big sort”—where people choose to live in communities where their neighbors are more likely to share their values—encourages the political parties to campaign to their base and focus on turnout. That probably means that the Democrats’ best hopes for retaking the House lie in California, New Jersey, and—yes—Staten Island, NYC.
As the GOP’s rural voters increasingly embrace an extremist and reactionary agenda, the party becomes more of a fringe movement in diverse working-class communities like Staten Island’s north shore and the Brooklyn neighborhoods that have been saddled with us in NY 11. Winning the majority of a Republican minority is not going to be enough to win elections in a district like ours.
Whatever your opinion on Sanctuary Cities policies—which commit local law enforcement to do the barest minimum of cooperation with federal immigration authorities seeking to deport law-abiding undocumented residents—the fact is that it is currently settled law in New York City, and that is not an issue that is on the ballot in November. Yet Donovan’s bill proposes to deprive his constituents of a lot of our federal tax dollars. How do you stand before the voters in a general election on that kind of track record?
Grimm—the apparent GOP primary frontrunner—has long been a national embarrassment for Republicans. You might remember him from the time he threatened to “break” a reporter “like a boy” on live camera. He was under a cloud immediately after he won his first election when suspicious cash bundles raised by a foreign national quickly sparked a federal investigation.
Grimm’s former girlfriend got a slap on the wrist conviction for the clumsy violation of campaign-finance law. She didn’t roll on her former paramour, however, so he didn’t get convicted for that particular crime.
But the FBI investigation revealed a sordid history of tip-stealing at his Upper East Side health-food store. He was indicted on 20 counts ranging from tax evasion, lying under oath, and hiring undocumented workers. He eventually pled guilty to one count of tax evasion and served eight months in prison (but not before he won re-election in a 2014 race that the national Democrats also had high hopes for).
Would Grimm’s ignominious presence as the once-again standard-bearer for the GOP cause the establishment to beg Donovan to stay in the November race as a kind of “Never (Again) Trump?” Unless he withdraws, Donovan’s name will be on the ballot in the general election no matter what. Thanks to New York’s fusion voting laws—which allow third parties to co-endorse candidates as a kind of ideological “Good Housekeeping” seal of approval—his name will appear on the third- and sixth-place lines—the Conservative and Independence parties—on the November ballot. The choice for the Republican establishment may well come down to their deciding to split the vote of their diminished legions or let ex-con Grimm carry their banner in an ugly—and presumably embarrassing—defeat in November. There are not a lot of scenarios here that look good for the GOP retaining a toehold in NYC.
[This article originally appeared at The American Prospect.]
Next Stop
I was on the 1 train today, riding from Whitehall (South Ferry) to SoHo. There were a bunch of high-acheiving high school nerds trading notes on AP courses and SAT prep. As the train pulled out of the Rector St. station, one of them misheard the conductor’s garbled “Next Stop!” announcement and gasped, “Wait, is that open now?”
Confusion, as every part of this conversation was initially misunderstood by each other:
Kid 2: “What, no. Chambers is open.”
Kid 1: “No, that other stop that’s always under construction.”
Kid 3: “I sincerely hope not. We’re late enough.”
Kid 4: “I hear that station’s gonna be closed for, like, three years.”
Kid 3: “That station has been closed for, like, 20 years. Like, after 20 years, does anyone even want to go to Cortlandt Street anymore?”
Cortlandt St. – for those of you not from around here – has been greyed out and listed as “TEMPORARILY CLOSED” on subway maps since October of 2001. It was obliterated when the Towers fell. There are now mostly-functional semi-adult human beings currently earning college level credits who have never known it as anything but an urban wreck, a permanent construction zone, a ghost train station.