Faces of the future
BRONX’S POLITICAL OLD GUARD ON THE WAY OUT
The Bronx is burning — its political establishment to the ground.
Longtime stalwarts of the borough’s political machine are losing races to liberal upstarts or, in some cases, quitting politics altogether, giving a new generation of leaders a chance to reshape the long-neglected county.
“We’re younger, we’re more progressive and we think differently in terms of the grassroots centering of our campaigns,” said Jamaal Bowman, who has a double-digit lead over Rep. Eliot Engel after the June 23 Democratic primary with mailin ballots yet to be counted.
“We tried to work as hard as we possibly could not to focus on the machine,” added Bowman, 44, a former middleschool principal. “We were focused on the people and the voters in the district.”
Across the borough, City Councilman Ritchie Torres trounced the Bronx machine’s de facto candidate, Councilman Ruben Diaz Sr., in the race to succeed Rep. Jose Serrano, who’s retiring.
Including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset 2018 victory over the establishment candidate, Joseph Crowley, the Bronx machine is 0-for-3 on recent congressional races.
Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed Bowman, is widely credited with catalyzing the insurgent wave in the Bronx, her stronghold of Queens and beyond.
But the Bronx machine appears to have fallen apart faster than its counterparts in other boroughs where new crops of progressive pols have also sprung up.
The difference in the Bronx may come down to incumbents being more insular and political newcomers more fired up than in other parts of the city.
Glory days
Not long ago, the Bronx machine appeared to be on top of the world of city and state politics.
Former state Sen. Jeffrey Klein maneuvered his way to becoming “co-majority leader” of the Senate in 2012, an unusual arrangement between him, his Republican counterpart and Gov. Cuomo that gave Klein major influence in Albany — and access to plenty of pork barrel spending for his district, which spanned neighborhoods from Riverdale to the East Bronx.
Around the start of Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz second term in 2014, he inspired talk of a mayoral run, eventually throwing his hat in the ring.
And Assemblyman Carl Heastie was elected speaker of his chamber in 2015, the first Bronxite to attain that role since the borough became a county a century earlier.
Fast forward to 2020, and Klein is out of office, Díaz Jr. has quit the mayoral race and Heastie is left clinging to the remnants of the Bronx Democratic Party, the chairman of which resigned days after the June primaries.
“The old regime is crumbling,” said Kenneth Sherrill, a political scientist at the CUNY Graduate Center, discussing machines in all five boroughs. “The Bronx has collapsed, whereas the others have eroded.
“It’s not surprising that the Bronx went first — that’s where the poverty is the greatest,” he added. “You also have the rise of a new generation of leaderman ship who aren’t being inducted into the machine organizations.”
Culture of exclusion
For years, politically ambitious Bronxites have complained of being excluded from the county organization.
“Part of it is ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” said Bowman’s campaign manager, Luke Hayes, alluding to the film’s famous man behind the curtain. “You project power; that kind of scares people off.”
Meanwhile, the machine has unquestioningly supported members of its ranks, no matter the embarrassment. Councilman Andy King was recently suspended for infractions including harassment, Diaz Sr. is infamous for frequent homophobic remarks, and CouncilMark Gjonaj is reeling from one scandal after another — all without a peep of public criticism from Heastie, Diaz Jr. or the recently resigned party chairman, Marcos Crespo, who unceremoniously ditched his Assembly seat, too.
“People are so concerned about protecting their power that they don’t want new people coming in,” said Sherrill. “As one generation grows old and tired it turns out there’s nobody to replace them, and there are other young, hungry, ambitious people who have entirely different methods of organizing.”
As city government has become more professional over the years, the Bronx machine is no longer able to give out the kinds of favors that used to sustain it in a borough where poverty and poor health remain rampant, Sherrill noted. More than a quarter of Bronxites live in poverty, according to the U.S.
Census Bureau, and the boroughconsistentlyrankslastin the state in a range of health indicators.
“The new kind of politician is not based on distributing tangible benefits like helping somebody get an apartment or a job,” Sherrill said. “It’s easier … to get somebody’s attention online than it is to get somebody’s attention through the old ways.”
Ripe for the fall
The cliquey group of Bronx elected officials seem especially vulnerable to challenges during the new age of AOC, who toppled one of their own in 2018. (While Crowley was bigger in the Queens part of his district, Bronx incumbents tried to support him, too.)
Amid disenchantment with the status quo and ongoing fury over the Trump presidency, voters appear to be more enJr.‘s
gaged than ever — counting just in-person votes in this year’s contest, there were 14,062 more than the total number of ballots cast in Engel’s 2018 primary.
“I’ve called them ‘recently woke,’ ” Hayes said of the new voters.
“There’s a certain segment of the Democratic base that expanded,” he added. “People started to tune in more to local races, local politics.”
While the city’s political establishment didn’t take AOC’s challenge to Crowley seriously until it was too late, Democratic Party stalwarts came out in force for Engel, 73.
Hillary Clinton endorsed him. So did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), both of New York’s U.S. senators and Cuomo, along with a small army of local pols.
Bowman took a grassroots approach as he loudly championed AOC’s Green New Deal and criticized Engel’s centrist foreign policy stances.
“It was about building deep, quality relationships and sustaining those relationships, not just to Election Day, but beyond that,” Bowman said.
The challenger won 25,863 in-person votes to the 16-term incumbent’s 15,680, or 59% of the ballot to 36%, according to unofficial results from the state Board of Elections — a gap Engel seems unlikely to close as the mail-in vote count gets underway.
In the South Bronx congressional primary, Diaz Sr., 77, was considered the establishment choice by default. Crespo used to work for Diaz Sr., and the controversial councilman’s son is borough president.
Torres, 32, called on his record of advocating for NYCHA residents and support from national pro-LGBT groups to win 29% of the in“Ruben person vote in the packed race, to Diaz Sr.‘s 14%. Diaz Sr. was widely thought to be unbeatable,” said Torres. “We’re living in a volatile political moment where the myth of unbeatability is exactly that — a myth.”
The lost congressional seats leave the Bronx establishment with a weak hold on a handful of state and city districts — “fiefdoms,” in the words of Hayes, run by the likes of Diaz Sr. (who’s eligible to run for reelection to the Council), Gjonaj, Heastie and King.
“Now that Crespo is gone, I don’t know that the power vacuum is going to be filled right away,” said Hayes. “There’s new energy and new blood. It may not settle itself in the next year or two.”
Councilman Fernando Cabrera, who’s been in office since 2010 and is running for Bronx borough president, said he wel“Change comed the change in the political landscape. in party machines is natural,” he said. “What is unnatural is, as far back as I can think of, how strong the Bronx machine was.”
Cabrera predicted future races will be shaped by key issues to emerge since the outbreak of coronavirus — public health, massive unemployment and concerns about crime.
“We don’t need a grand experiment right now,” he said. “We need somebody who’s going to be able to execute.”
A club without clubiness
So what’s next for the Bronx? New leaders like Bowman and state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi, who toppled Klein in 2018, hope to build on their recent successes.
Biaggi, 34, recently quit a local political club that’s long had a tight grip on power in the northwest part of the borough.
She plans to start a new organization, though she is loath to use the word “club,” which has a ring of exclusion to her.
“I want to take time and be building this in a way that’s thoughtful,” she said. “I don’t want to be the queen of the club.”
Biaggi said she will try to nurture new leaders for races including next year’s contest for Riverdale’s City Council seat. In a sign of the old way of doing things, local Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz has worked for years to land his son in that job.
“There is a very exciting crop of young people in the Bronx who are engaged now,” Biaggi said. “I know and would put all of my money in the bank on that — there are 10 times more of that kind of energetic people that we can reach and they can learn and they can become the future leaders.”