(l-r) Top: Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, Antonio Reynoso, Nydia Velazquez, Hakeem Jeffries; Bottom: Eric Adams, Brad Lander, & Jumaane Williams

Update: The 'Brooklyn Can't Wait' campaign ran 20 candidates for district leader who pledged to reform the Brooklyn Democratic Party. Thirteen of them, including incumbents, won their races in the June election. This gives reformers significant leverage, but likely not a majority of District Leaders, as the party moves into its next phases. Read the full story below for background and other context about the 'civil war' in the

Emily Gallagher with campaign supporters (photo: @em4assembly)

Community activist Emily Gallagher ran a successful insurgent Democratic primary campaign like few others: one with no endorsements from elected officials, no support from ascendent lefitist groups the Working Families Party or New York City branch of the Democratic Socialists of America, and relatively little money compared to her opponent, a 47-year incumbent State Assembly member who had not even faced a primary challenge for a decade.

Gallagher, who has lived in North Brooklyn’s Assembly

(photo: @newkingsdems)

After the 2016 election, I was one of the millions of people who felt helpless and depressed about the state of politics. To feel less helpless and depressed, I decided to get involved; the only problem was that I had no idea where to start. Sure, I marched, donated, and even hosted a few letter-writing parties, but I couldn’t shake a nagging feeling that, somehow, it wasn’t enough.

Then I got an email from #RepYourBlock, a campaign led by the New Kings Democrats, asking me if I wanted to run for a seat on County Committee – the

Frank Seddio & Senator Persaud (photo: Frank Seddio on Facebook)

Democracy in action can be messy, but the election law as well as state and local party rules are clear when it comes to how governments and political parties carry out their business. And despite the cathartic and frantic attempts by the New Kings Democrats to claim that party “bosses” thwarted their attempts to take over the Brooklyn Democratic County

Kings County Democratic Committee meeting (photo: James Boo, New Kings Democrats)

This summer I collected signatures from neighbors to represent my election district, an area of a few blocks, as a member of the Kings County Democratic Committee (KCDC), the Brooklyn denomination of the New York State Democratic Party.

I had signed up with the #RepYourBlock campaign, convened by New Kings Democrats (NKD), one-and-a-half years earlier for this purpose. I handed in my petitions in June and a few months later I received a postcard informing me of KCDC’s bi-annual rules

The New Queens Democrats recently formed (photo via NQD on Facebook)

When Sahand Shahrabani moved to Forest Hills, Queens in 2013, the recent college graduate had one goal: to get involved in local politics. But a Google search turned up eerily sparse results for Democratic clubs in the borough and no trace of the Queens County Democratic Party.

“They don't have Facebook and there’s no website. I was definitely surprised and disappointed by the lack of web presence,” said Shahrabani, now 29.

During the 2016 presidential race,

former State Sen. Dan Squadron, right, with other officials (photo: @LtGovHochulNY)

When Daniel Squadron released his statement resigning as a New York State Senator, many of us were surprised and disappointed to see a legislator committed to progressive reforms go. In particular, Sen. Squadron fought the LLC loophole allowing corporations to exceed donation limits by contributing through multiple entities treated as individuals, and Squadron cited the dysfunction of Albany as one cause for his decision to step down.

With a district that

Senator Bernie Sanders (photo: @BernieSanders)

With the 2016 presidential election over, can the populist fervor surrounding the candidacies of Senator Bernie Sanders and President-elect Donald Trump be harnessed into a new kind of revolution on a state level here in New York?

A year from now, next Election Day, New Yorkers will have the chance to vote on a referendum to call a Constitutional Convention, an opportunity to rewrite state laws that comes around once every 20 years. Proponents of the convention — at this point mostly academics