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An update on the race for the 10th Congressional District
Well, it’s a free-for-all. There are 15 candidates registered with the Federal Election Commission; official state filings are not due until July 15, so for now I am adding to my list from two weeks ago. The Downtown Independent Democrats will hold a forum on June 29 and 30 on Zoom (they are splitting the field across the two nights). Register here.
ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN
Liz Holtzman has one of the more robust resumes on this list: a four-term congresswoman (1972-1980); Brooklyn DA for eight years (1981-1989); she was the first (and only) woman to be elected city comptroller (in 1991). She is now at the law firm Herrick, Feinstein and co-chair of the government relations group.
CARLINA RIVERA
Carlina Rivera is the current City Councilwoman for District 2 on the Lower East Side. She was born and raised there, attended Marist College and then worked for afterschool programs and was programs director at Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES), a local non-profit focused on social justice.
MAUD MARON
Soho resident Maud Maron most recently ran for City Council (for the seat won by Christopher Marte). She was a Legal Aid lawyer for two decades until she started campaigning, and she was president of the Community Education Council for District 2. She’s also served on the board of the Greenwich Village Little League and CB2. She and her husband have four children in city schools.
DAN GOLDMAN
Dan Goldman served for 10 years with Preet Bharara as an assistant United States attorney in the Southern District of New York. More recently, Goldman was the lead counsel for the Democrats in the House impeachment investigation into Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. (The House impeached Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in December 2019; Trump was acquitted in the Senate.) He and his wife, Corinne, live in Lower Manhattan with their five children.
JO ANNE SIMON
Jo Anne Simon is the current state assemblywoman for District 52 in Brooklyn, elected in 2014. She grew up in Yonkers but has spent most of her adult life in the city, working as a lawyer for disability civil rights. She is also a law professor at Fordham and she ran for Brooklyn borough president in 2020, coming in second. She lives in Boerum Hill with her husband and has two grown stepsons.
YAN XIONG
Yan Xiong is Chinese-American human rights activist, military officer and Protestant chaplain. He was a dissident in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and came to the US as a political refugee in 1992. He later became a chaplain in U.S. Army, serving in Iraq. He lives in Lower Manhattan with his wife and five children.
MONDAIRE JONES
The first openly gay Black members of Congress, Jones currently represents the 17th District in Westchester and Putnam counties and lives in Westchester but was recently drawn out of his own district and into the 16th. However there is no constitutional requirement that a candidate live in the district (they most only live in the state), so he jumped into the race for this open seat in order to avoid a tough race in the general election in the 17th and a tough primary in the 16th. His rationale: the district includes Greenwich Village, which he considers the birthplace of the LGBTQ+ movement. The Intercept has a good story on why he switched districts, if you want the nitty gritty.
He was raised in Rockland County (in Spring Valley), went to Stanford undergrad and Harvard Law School and worked for the Department of Justice and the Obama Administration. He was a litigator here in the city before was elected to Congress in 2016.
BILL DE BLASIO
I don’t need to fill you in much on him since his strong suit and his weakness are the same: name recognition. But a lot of people have voted for him before, and his base is solidly in the Brooklyn half of the district. City & State asks a bunch of talking heads to weigh in on the race, and de Blasio seems to come out on top.
YUH-LINE NIOU
Assemblymember Yuh-Line Niou, who currently represents Chinatown, the Financial District (and lives there) and Battery Park City, has toggled between a couple races in this primary season but jumped on this seat once it opened up. She made the announcement in Columbus Park. Niou was the first Asian-American to represent the district in Albany, elected in 2016 to Shelly Silver’s seat. She was born in Taiwan (she’s 38) and immigrated here as a child, grew up in the Pacific Northwest and came to the city to get her master’s from Baruch. She is openly autistic and her election would make her the highest ranking autistic elected official in the country.
BRIAN ROBINSON
Robinson is a Tribecan and new to politics; he sold the company he founded in order to run for the seat. Read more in my recent profile here.
ASHMI SHETH SHE IS RUNNING FOR DISTRICT 12
Sheth lives in Hell’s Kitchen so like Nadler, her home was drawn out of the district. But she seems to be sticking with her plans to run for NY10. Sheth immigrated with her family from India and grew up and went to college in Maryland. She moved to the city to get her master’s in public policy at Columbia and worked for just under two years for the Federal Reserve before deciding to run against Nadler.
ELIZABETH KIM
Kim is an applied behavioral scientist at Spotify (and before that at Jet.com), where she conducts “theory-driven experiments to understand why people do what they do and nudge behavior to create a better experience.” She was a psychology major at Duke, graduating in 2017, and grew up in rural Georgia helping her father, a Korean immigrant, run his business.
THE FULL LIST REGISTERED WITH THE FEC
The deadline to register with the FEC was June 10; another state deadline will come up in mid July. Other than the list above, there is one Republican, Benine Hamden, as well as a few Democrats for whom I could find no digital footprint: Ian Anthony Medina (it does seem like he is running for our seat as well as a seat in Miami), John Herron, Jimmy Jiang Li. David Yassky is running for State Senate, and Bob Wyman appears to be running for Congressional District 12 (he has a question mark in his Twitter handle).
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“Rep. Mondaire Jones used a congressional COVID rule to assign another lawmaker to vote for him on more than a dozen bills in the House of Representatives — while he partied on the French Riviera at HBO star Issa Rae’s lavish wedding, The Post has learned.”
https://nypost.com/2022/06/15/democrat-mondaire-jones-skipped-house-votes-for-issa-rae-wedding/
Someone named Michael Lange has very good in-depth coverage of this race on his Substack.
However, he leaves out Rivera’s big controversy (the heavy opposition to the East River Park project) as well as a smaller one (her little living-in-Section-8-housing kerfuffle), whereas he correctly points out Mondaire Jones’s staff threatening to quit if he tried to primary Jamaal Bowman, as well as Niou’s allegedly low staff pay.
Name recognition? The human clown car known as Bill DeBlasio served 8 years as Mayor and sits at – drumroll please – all of 6% in the latest poll.
I’m liking Brian Robinson.
i read that Mondaire recently moved into the district.
On Liz Holtzman: I’m reading a new history of Watergate, and the author notes that her defeat of then-Judiciary Committee chairman Emmanuel Cellar in the 1972 Democratic primary had an underrated impact on how the scandal played out. If Cellar had remained chair, the House’s impeachment process would have played out very differently.
DeBlasio is NOT a friend to lower Manhattan. His Soho Noho Upzoning scheme that he pushed through in his final days as mayor was a give away to his real estate cronies – disregarding the historic district preservation of the neighborhood. And it was disguised as a boost to low income housing – a sham. And this scheme designated Chinatown as ‘Soho East’… how’s that for dirtespect.
A left-wing state lawmaker who has pushed for cutting police funding first moved to the district she is seeking to represent in Congress because “safety issues” near “the projects” in Harlem prompted her to shack up with her tech bro then-fiancé in the Financial District, The Post has learned.
Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou (D-Lower Manhattan) told a local publication in 2016 — when she was campaigning to initially get elected to her current seat — that she headed to the wealthier Manhattan neighborhood because she witnessed a pair of disturbing crimes and fell victim to one.
https://nypost.com/2022/06/21/yuh-line-niou-house-wannabe-who-preaches-cop-defund-fled-from-harlem/
After a hugely successful tenure in Congress in the 1970s, Holtzman was robbed of a Senate seat in 1980, which would have spared NY that moron D’Amato. In the later 1980s, despite having bounced back to serve with distinction as the first woman elected to demanding but unglamorous local offices — Brooklyn DA and NYC Comptroller — she was overshadowed by the less accomplished Ferraro, who by then had a bigger national profile, and the 1992 Senate race primary was a disaster for them both. Had she won the Senate in 1980, there might easily have been a Majority Leader, Vice President or President Holtzman. As AOC has acknowledged, Holtzman was her 36 years earlier, and she should endorse (as she did the elder Markey in MA in 2020). Holtzman is the same age or younger than the current Democratic House leadership. This is not ego, this is someone who has earned going back to Congress, and will work tirelessly.
I’m hoping for more polling data in the upcoming weeks. I’m a resident of NY10 and I will support any candidate OTHER than Bill DeBlasio. I will vote for whomever has the strongest chance of defeating DeBlasio to ensure that he is never elected to any position of authority again.