For the primary on August 23, I will be talking to candidates for the newly drawn NY10. The top of the post is the result of a brief interview; scroll down for the answers to a questionnaire. I have contacted all the candidates; at the bottom are the ones who have chosen to participate so far.

“Here we go again!” Maud Maron said when we connected last week. We last spoke when she was running for our City Council seat last May, and she put her hat in the ring again for a simple reason: “I have felt so absolutely not represented by the people running my state and city,” she said. “It’s with deep frustration –- I am not an outlier. I just think my views, which I sometimes call commonsense views, are in the majority.”

She realizes this does not mean she can necessarily win a Democratic primary these days — in fact, her loss in the council race would prove that. But she thinks that speaks to the problem: what she calls “the increasingly far-left agenda” is pushing candidates out of the race before they can be heard by voters. (A group of Brooklyn Democratic political clubs disinvited her from their debate last month.)

Her local causes continue to be what she thinks her neighbors really care about: increasing crime, safety on the subways, the school system and the success of public school students.

“Look around at our neighborhood,” she says (Maron lives in Soho). “There are still a lot of stores and businesses that boarded up due to bad management around covid. I don’t know anyone who thinks we should have kept the schools longer, or the businesses closed longer. That’s what motivates me. I think we need people representing us who are actually in line with what the people in the district want and need.”

Maron worked as a public defender for the Legal Aid Society — she went to Barnard and then Cardozo — for 20 years, with a few breaks built in for kids, and took a sabbatical in 2019 to run for office. She and her husband, an Argentinian immigrant, are raising four kids in Soho — ages 5 to 15 who all attend city public schools. She was born here in the city, but her mother and stepfather moved the family to Pennsylvania when she was a young girl. She has also served for years on the District 2 Community Education Council.

Maron is worried that people are leaving the city — enrollment is down by 80,000 students in public schools — and she’s worried that the Democrats are alienating voters at the same time, and then worries that could happen even in a district as solidly blue like ours. (“There’s a uniformity of thought that you can’t disagree with people. That’s not how a healthy Democracy works.”) She wants to tackle federal issues like protecting Title IX and lesbian and gay rights, simplifying the tax code, maintaining support for Israel; but she also wants to use the position to keep an eye on local issues.

“New York City has to be a place that retains people instead of chasing them away,” she says. “Public schools and safety are the two reasons people leave. It shouldn’t be so blistering hard to send a hardworking kid to a great high school. It’s gotten more expensive, less safe, and less inviting in New York – and it should be the opposite, the way it was just a few short years ago when Bloomberg handed the city off to De Blasio.”

“It just feels like nobody’s minding the home front,” Maron added, “taking care of the bread and butter issue that impact families like mine, and like my neighbors’.”

…………………………………..

1. How long have you lived in the district? 
I have lived downtown for three decades. I was born in Manhattan and after living in Pennsylvania came back to Manhattan in the 80’s to go to Barnard College.

2. Married? Partnered?
My husband, Juan Pablo, is an Argentine who owns his own business.

3. Kids? Pets?
4 kids, 0 pets and no plans to change either number!

4. Where do you live?
I live in SoHo.

5. What do you do for a living?
My most recent work was as a public defender. Now, running for Congress as a mom of 4 takes up most of my time!

6. What do you hope to change, or do better, once in office?
Our country is so divided right now. One thing I hope to do is work together with people of all backgrounds to produce results for the American people.

7. What are the first three issues you will tackle if you win the election?
My first priority is restoring public safety here at home. All New Yorkers deserve safe, clean streets and a fully funded NYPD. We must also form federal-local partnerships in order to remove illegal guns from our streets, if we are serious about restoring public safety. Second, we must tackle the affordability crisis facing our city. We must lower taxes to remain fiscally competitive, to retain our population and to attract new residents. Finally, we must strengthen our federal civil rights laws that protect all Americans from discrimination and provide due process at our federally funded institutions. I would lead the charge in Congress to protect Title IX specifically, which has done so much to help women and girls over the last 50 years.

8. What is most important in helping the nation recover from the pandemic?
The most important thing we can do right now is continue to return to a pre-pandemic sense of normalcy. I agree with Mayor Adams when he notes that COVID is not going away, but we have the tools to deal with it at this time. We also must do all that we can to ensure our children have a normal 2022-2023 school year ahead. We cannot return to shut downs and masking children at school.

9. Name three ways that local issues important to you as a district resident can be solved (or helped) from a federal perch.
First, the federal government can play an active role in combating the gun violence plaguing our city. I would fight for federal funding of partnerships to help localities remove illegal guns off the streets. Second, I would lead the fight in Congress to restore the SALT deductions; the current Trump-era policy hurts middle class families in high tax environments like New York. And finally, since women’s rights is extremely important to me, I would fight to defend Title IX against efforts to elevate gender identity over biological sex.

10. What committees would you like to sit on if elected?
The Education and Labor, Foreign Affairs, and Judiciary committees are of particular interest to me.

11. What do you love about the district?
I love raising my family here, and all of the opportunities it has afforded my children growing up in this district. The diversity our district has, from its people, languages spoken, and food, to its arts, culture, and architecture never ceases to impress me.

12. What do you think is a challenge for this district?
The challenges facing the district are similar to those affecting our city at large: New York is less clean, less safe, and less affordable than it was before Bill de Blasio became our mayor. I am more determined every day to go to Congress and help fix these real challenges facing NY-10 and our city as a whole.

13. What is challenging about representing it?
We are a polarized nation right now and we can see that in our district as well. It is hard to have conversations with people who are convinced that people with opposing or different views are not worth listening to. It is hard, but important, and I always make the effort to have real conversations because that is how we will solve real problems–by listening to each other and working together.

The candidates
Brian Robinson
Dan Goldman
Mondaire Jones
Jo Anne Simon
Elizabeth Holtzman
Carlina Rivera
Yan Xiong
Yuh-Line Niou
Jimmy Li
Quanda Francis
Peter Gleason