Financial District resident Yuh-Line Niou has won the primary race to determine which of six candidates would get the Democratic Party nomination to represent Lower Manhattan’s 65th Assembly district in Albany for the next two years. Although the general election is in November, the heavily “blue” landscape of Lower Manhattan makes the nomination of the Democratic party tantamount to winning the wider contest, and usually relegates the actual election to the status of a formality.
“I just want to make sure we hit the ground running on day one and begin delivering on constituent services, like I promised,” Ms. Niou told the Broadsheet shortly after midnight, once the results became apparent.
According to the State Board of Elections (BOE), out of 8,692 votes cast, Ms. Niou won 2,742. She was followed by Battery Park City resident Jenifer Rajkumar, with 1,612 votes, and Lower East Side resident Paul Newell, who garnered 1,381 votes. The incumbent, Alice Cancel (who also lives on the Lower East Side), took 1,069 votes, while Battery Park City resident Don Lee won 984 votes. Gigi Li, the former chair of Community Board 3, received 827 votes. The BOE calculates that there are slightly more than 43,000 registered Democrats in the 65th Assembly district, which means that overall turnout was just over 20 percent.
All six candidates were running for the seat once occupied by former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who stepped down last November, after being convicted on federal corruption charges. Ms. Cancel was technically the incumbent, having a won a special election held in April to serve out the remaining weeks of Mr. Silver’s term. But each of the half-dozen hopefuls promised a fresh start.
Ms. Niou is emblematic of a new generation of political leaders who are ascending to positions of power Downtown. Her campaign attracted establishment support (from mainstream figures such as State Senator Daniel Squadron and City Comptroller Scott Stringer), but also had the flavor of an insurgency. This aspect of her appeal was highlighted in the run-up to the April special election that Ms. Cancel won. After the Democratic Party’s County Committee gave Ms. Cancel the nomination, Ms. Niou assailed the process as “insider politics” and mounted a spirited campaign under the banner of the Working Families Party. Although she lost that race, Ms. Niou finished a strong second, polling 6,250 votes (or 35.3 percent of the total) to Ms. Cancel’s 7,284 ballots (or 41.1 percent). In a district where the sway of the Democratic Party domination is assumed to be a near-absolute, such a strong showing by a third-party candidate augured both weakness on Ms. Cancel’s part and a likely challenge by Ms. Niou in the September race.
That challenge began in earnest almost immediately after the April special election was over. Ms. Niou once again began raising money and reaching out to local leaders through a grassroots network that circumvented the influence of the traditional political clubs, such as Downtown Independent Democrats. Her profile was also raised by an endorsement from the New York Times.
Ms. Niou says one of her initial areas of focus as a new member of the Assembly will be housing affordability. Her plans for preserving affordability include, “strengthening our rent laws and ending tenant harassment by landlords. We also need to move with great caution before allowing any new development, and if it is going to happen, we need to make sure it fits the character of our community and provides housing that is affordable for the families who already live here. And we need to make sure any new development includes expansion of our infrastructure, including schools, parks and mass transit.”
In a second race to represent Lower Manhattan, Lower East Side resident Lee Berman won a three-way contest to speak for the same district on the State Committee of the Democratic Party, outpolling Dodge Landesman and Christopher Marte. The State Committee is an unpaid council of elected leaders who are responsible for shaping the platform of the New York State Democratic Party. They also play an important, if unofficial role, in setting the agenda that more prominent elected officials, such as State legislators, consider when setting priorities.
If Ms. Niou’s victory points to the political future of Lower Manhattan, Mr. Berman’s seems more deeply rooted in local history. A decades-long resident of the Lower East Side neighborhood that was Mr. Silver’s political base, the 49-year-old Mr. Berman won against two candidates in their 20s, who (like Ms. Niou) are part of a new generation bidding for positions of leadership.
Mr. Landesman is already in some ways a seasoned political veteran. In 2009, he made New York City history by becoming the youngest-ever candidate for City Council, while still a senior in high school. (He lost to incumbent Rosie Mendez.) The following year, he became the youngest appointed official in City government, when then-Manhattan Borough President (now City Comptroller) Scott Stringer named him to Community Board 2. More recently, he handled local community outreach for Ms. Niou’s April campaign for Assembly on the Working Families Party line.
Mr. Marte is a social media consultant who was born and raised on Rivington Street to parents who had emigrated from the Dominican Republic. Growing up working in his father’s bodega, Mr. Marte came to activism as a teenager, by fighting to preserve community gardens created on empty land.
In the same way that Ms. Niou’s April defeat did not deter her from the September primary that proved successful, it appears unlikely that Lower Manhattan residents have heard the last from either Mr. Landesman or Mr. Marte.