Eric Adams with Ruben Diaz Jr, Ydanis Rodriguez, and others (photo: @ydanis)
The Democratic mayoral primary is finally over. Over too is the ranked-choice vote counting process. We know enough for a preliminary analysis of how many Latinos voted and how, though those numbers will need to be fine-tuned after results have been certified and voter information updated.
Here is what we know right now: In a crowded field, Eric Adams earned the greatest chunk of the Latino vote, especially in the Bronx, the only Latino-majority borough in the City of New York. It appears that Adams won over 50% of the first-choice votes in the election districts with the highest number of Latino voters. That’s an impressive feat considering that there were 13 candidates vying for the Democratic nomination, including one Latina (Dianne Morales) and another candidate with a Latino surname (Kathryn Garcia). Though the obvious second choice for many Latinos might have been Morales or Garcia, in fact, election night results show they voted overwhelmingly for Maya Wiley (again, in terms of first-rank votes, we will eventually seek how all the ranked ballots turned out).
Adams’ performance among Latinos in other boroughs was not as decisive as in the Bronx, though he garnered at least a third of the first-rank votes in election districts with high Latino concentrations and won most of them. Take the 72nd Assembly District in Washington Heights: there, Adams earned almost 33% of first-place votes, the most of any candidate. Wiley received a quarter of the first-place vote in this overwhelmingly Latino district. Of course, this is the home district of Congressional Rep. Adriano Espaillat, who eventually endorsed Adams, and City Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez, who was a strong supporter from early in the campaign.
This same Adams-Wiley dynamic is evident in majority Latino election districts in Brooklyn (Cypress Hills, and parts of Bushwick, East New York, and Williamsburg), Manhattan (East Harlem, the Lower East Side, and Washington Heights), and Queens (Corona, East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights).
Why was Adams’ performance among Latinos decisive in the Bronx and not as impressive in the other boroughs? Here are my hunches.
On one hand, Adams earned critical endorsements in the condado de la Salsa. Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., Rep. Espaillat (whose district covers Upper Manhattan and much of the West Bronx), Assemblymember José Rivera, City Council Member Rafael Salamanca, and former Borough President Fernando Ferrer all endorsed Adams. (Congressional Rep. Ritchie Torres announced Adams as his second pick after Andrew Yang.)
Were the Diaz Jr. and Espaillat endorsements a key moment for Latino voter preference in the Bronx—besides Adams’ own campaign operations and the independent expenditure support there, of course? And what was the full impact of Espaillat’s nod? Remember that in the past he has not only given his name to candidates but has also lent them his well-oiled campaign apparatus. The most obvious example of this was Oswald Feliz’s victory in the special election to succeed Torres in the City Council.
One must also evaluate the potential significance of Adams’ message of public safety. Presumably sensible and just public safety enforcement is a message that resonates with Latinos more than acknowledged. Since much of the violent crime occurs in Black and Brown neighborhoods, increasingly in the Bronx, this is hardly surprising. Adams also spoke clearly to key issues like the struggles for small business owners and the quality of the city's public schools, which are both high on the list for many Latino voters, and pledged to address them.
There are many reasons why Eric Adams earned the biggest chunk of the Latino vote, the largest share coming from the Bronx. Latinos formed an essential part of the coalition Adams needed to move him past the Democratic primary and into the general election in November.
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Eli Valentin is a political analyst and author of the forthcoming book, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Political Life. On Twitter @EliValentinNY.
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Mayor de Blasio makes a climate announcement (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography)
In 2019, New York City passed some of the most progressive climate legislation in the country. Local Law 97 requires 50,000 large buildings to slash their carbon output en route to cutting emissions 40% by 2030. Yet if the passage of the law suggested that the city would be putting people and the planet before the typical monied powers that be (real estate, the utilities, and others), the latest city report on the law’s actual implementation — co-commissioned and funded by Con Edison and National Grid — certainly suggests otherwise.
Let us be clear up front: no climate study commissioned and funded by billion-dollar corporations that treat vital energy as a plaything for shareholders and not a basic human right can be taken the least bit seriously. Con Edison and National Grid are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Their participation makes the study a non-starter for real planning.
The fact that the city nonetheless calls its partnership with the companies “groundbreaking” and “historic” should disturb us greatly. These are companies that, in the past few years alone, have spent millions lobbying against climate legislation and renewable energy; neglected critical infrastructure, intentionally blacked out low-income neighborhoods, and inflated gas demand for the sake of profit; held ratepayers hostage as bargaining chips; used outdated statistics on methane in their own manipulative emissions reporting; and, most recently, indulged in bribery schemes—and all while charging New Yorkers the second highest municipal energy rates in the country. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, this isn’t a “groundbreaking” partnership so much as a stupid one.
The report’s trick is to present its proposed “pathways” to carbon neutrality as though they’d been chosen because they’re possible, not because they’re profitable. Take, for example, the inclusion of gas-based solutions as a key component of all three pathways—itself a disastrous proposition. At no point does the report mention that National Grid’s business model in New York City relies almost exclusively on gas, since it doesn’t provide electricity in the area. Were all of its customers to electrify their heating and cooking, billions of dollars in gas distribution assets would become stranded.
The report’s absurd task thus becomes how to save those gas assets while at the same time making meaningful reductions in gas emissions. That this is impossible is laid bare by the report’s tortured attempt to frame renewable natural gas and hydrogen gas blends as the emissions-reducing saviors of the gas system even as the authors repeatedly allude to the unlikelihood of these solutions coming to fruition. They have bet the house on a technocratic solution that clearly isn’t one.
As the report puts it elsewhere: fossil gas use would be reduced across all pathways, but only to the degree to which these “greener” gases are available. To be available, they would require massive new pipelines to carry RNG from factory farms into the city, commodity costs dropping precipitously, and precious renewable electricity being diverted into the production of costly “green hydrogen” just to keep gas assets from becoming stranded. All of this, in turn, would likely force low-income gas customers to shoulder more and more of the costs of maintaining increasingly obsolete infrastructure as affluent customers abandon it to electrify.
The report even leaves open the possibility of adding more pipelines and gas, conveniently sidestepping the mayor’s Executive Order 52, which bans any increase in the city’s supply of fossil fuels, by claiming that the order was issued after the report was researched. One can only speculate that this was to leave open the possibility of creating an exception for “green” gas blends in some forsaken future.
“Reimagining the role of existing infrastructure,” the report calls it elsewhere. Manipulative nonsense. If the city needs to reimagine anything, it is the monopoly utilities themselves. Yet we can likely only expect more concessions to these corporate giants in the near future. In the ongoing rate negotiations with National Grid, for instance, the city has so far done the bare minimum to reject a proposal (supported by Governor Cuomo’s feckless Department of Public Safety) that would raise New Yorkers’ gas bills to pay for more fossil fuel infrastructure we don’t need, failing to use its substantial influence to ensure that New Yorkers truly are protected.
The NY Build Public Renewables Act (NYBPRA), introduced in Albany in the spring but stymied so far by fossil fuel-friendly lawmakers, would offer another path forward. It would begin the work of replacing our corporate energy providers with a democratically-controlled, publicly-owned utility that would answer to New Yorkers, not shareholders, while foregoing profits for the sake of 100% renewable electricity and tens of thousands of green union jobs, among other things.
We’ll keep fighting for NYBPRA, because we know that the only way to truly solve the climate crisis is to end the corporate control of our ecological future. Until the city understands that as well, we’ll have to settle for gas-friendly compromises that get us nowhere.
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Kim Fraczek is the director of Sane Energy Project. Robert Wood is a member of the NYC-DSA Ecosocialist Working Group.
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Father and son and longtime Crown Heights residents after voting
The New York City 2021 Democratic primaries saw Brooklyn's hotly-contested 35th City Council district swing in favor of community organizer Crystal Hudson, who bested tenant activist Michael Hollingsworth by eight points. This district includes Prospect Heights, Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, parts of Bedford–Stuyvesant and Crown Heights. All of these neighborhoods have been devoured by gentrification in recent years.
Primary voter turnout in the district was high, about 35%, easily surpassing city-wide average turnout of about 25%. And while you might think that this level of civic engagement is a good thing, leftists close to the Hollingsworth campaign, like the Democratic Socialists of America and the Crown Heights Tenants Union, would disagree — because those voters were Chassidic Jews.
In the aftermath of the primaries, which Hollingsworth lost by about 2,400 votes, progressive rage was directed at the Lubavitch community of Crown Heights, whose massive turnout exceeded Hudson's margin of victory, while also garnering some 4,500 votes for Eric Adams' mayoral campaign. Social media has since been dripping with insults toward Crown Heights Jews as fake Democrats, accusing Hudson of nefarious backroom dealmaking, and reviving antisemitic Jewish conspiracy tropes of bygone centuries.
The message, overall, is clear: the Chassidic community had no business getting involved here. A terrible electoral injustice was committed when these people had the absolute chutzpah to cast votes for the representation of their neighborhood. Had this backlash been directed at any other ethnic group, the news media and others would have commenced a weeks-long focus on the bigotry.
In truth, the secret to Hudson's success is fairly mundane: good campaigning. She took the time to get to know the Lubavitch community, for whom Crown Heights has served as the spiritual and cultural epicenter since World War 2. Hudson nurtured a running conversation with Jewish leaders and institutions, while Hollingsworth was remarkable in declining dialog with one of the very communities he sought to represent in the City Council. Furthermore, Hollingsworth's inflammatory position against Israel during its conflict with Hamas, contrasted with his silence on anti-Jewish street violence, spoke volumes to Jewish voters.
The Lubavitch community of Crown Heights had been, over the years, politically ambivalent. Had Hollingsworth not antagonized them, causing a huge spike in their turnout, many would likely have stayed home and history might have played out differently.
The fuel behind the Hollingsworth campaign was an endorsement by the radical DSA, which offered up a base of mostly white, leftist activists — the same gentrifiers who’ve contributed mightily to the insane housing costs Hollingsworth decries. Instead of good politics, his campaign opted for rhetorical bomb-throwing and marginalized a sizable Jewish enclave with over 80 years of history in the district. Hollingsworth’s alliance with DSA won the vote of yuppies and mostly young, white newcomers to the district, while Hudson won long-time residents: working class, Black, and Chassidic Jewish families.
So, according to leftist internet rage, voter turnout is not always good. While socialists usually purport to be on the side of the people, post-election tantrums indicate this may only be true of certain people. In conditions of higher voter turnout, ideological grandstanding, class warfare, and ethnic antagonism weren't enough to thwart a neighborhood that simply voted for a representative who cared about representing everyone.
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Rabbi Yaacov Behrman is founder of the Jewish Future Alliance and a lifelong resident of Crown Heights. On Twitter @ChabadLubavitch.
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