Dianne Morales: ‘I don’t think New York City is as progressive as we’d like to think’
It’s a blustery day in the New York city neighborhood of Astoria, Queens, where the mayoral candidate Dianne Morales is due to speak to the crowd.
By the time she arrives, the pitching of Morales’s tent, branded in her colors of purple, pink and orange, has already been abandoned due to the wind, and volunteers have been sent sprinting across Astoria park to retrieve hundreds of white campaign pamphlets sent flying across the grass.
It doesn’t matter. Morales, who would be the city’s first female mayor since the position was created in 1665, gets a big cheer when she strolls out to the crowd of about 100 people, nestled under the towering Triborough Bridge.
Dressed all in black and wearing a hand-stitched campaign face mask, Morales is here as part of her “traveling block party tour”, where she meets, and hopes to win over, potential voters ahead of the 22 June New York City Democratic primary.
An unashamedly progressive candidate who would also be New York City’s first Afro-Latina mayor, Morales is a former non-profit executive who goes the furthest of her myriad competitors in wanting to defund the police, and who plans to revamp public accommodation in a city with a dire housing crisis exacerbated by the coronavirus.
“I’m running because for too long, the voices of some of our most vulnerable and marginalized communities have not been centered and elevated and leadership and policy-making,” Morales tells the Guardian.
“The essential workers, the working-class immigrants, the undocumented, the low-income, black and brown folks, the people who operated our trains, the people who delivered our meals, the people who stocked the grocery shelves, those people who are not being taken care of by us, for far too long have been living on the edge, and have been pushed even further as a result of this pandemic.”
This is Morales’s first time running for office. A 52-year-old single mother of two, she has spent most of her career working for non-profits; working to support homeless youth and later becoming CEO of an organization that trains young adults to work in healthcare.
Her campaign has attracted the
enthusiastic, non-wealthy support – the average contribution to her campaign is $47, and Morales says 30% of her donors are unemployed – that same combination fueled the elections of progressive New Yorkers Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman to US Congress, but she faces challenges.
In much of the wider US, and around the world, New York City is seen as a forward-thinking place, a bastion of leftwing politics, gender equality and progress. But since 1834, when the mayor of New York City began being elected by popular vote, it has elected 109 leaders, every one of them a man.
The city has had only one nonwhite mayor, David Dinkins, who lasted four years in office at the beginning of the 1990s before losing his re-election bid to Rudy Giuliani.
“I don’t think New York City, as a whole, is as progressive as we’d like to think,” Morales says.
“There are sort of political dynasties that are deeply entrenched and deeply rooted here. And the fact that so many people have not felt represented by politics that they haven’t felt compelled to participate.”
Morales’s hope is that more people do participate, and with the first debate scheduled for 13 May, and television adverts already beginning to bombard New Yorkers’ screens, the race is hotting up. In a city with a Democratic majority, the winner of the June primary is expected to win the election proper on 2 November.
With demand for racial equality heightened in New York after tens of thousands of people attended Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, there is enthusiasm among many for the city to appoint its second nonwhite mayor – although Morales cautions that it should be the right candidate.
“Not all people of color are created equal,” Morales says. Her Democratic running mates include Eric Adams, a former New York police department captain, who is Black, and Maya Wiley, a Black woman who formerly advised Bill de Blasio.
“But that being said, I think it’s critically important to have someone whose lived experiences can reflect and speak to the challenges of the vast majority of New Yorkers or people of color. Because I think it’s one thing to be able to advocate for someone else. It’s another thing to really have a direct first-hand understanding of those experiences and those challenges. It gives you a different perspective.”
Morales’s past includes having experienced police violence first-hand, most recently at a Black Lives Matter demonstration with her family last May.
“I watched as much as both of my children first got pepper-sprayed, and then as my son got assaulted by a police officer,” Morales says.
As Morales and her family were being hemmed in by police, she said she waded forward to protect her son, who was being punched by a police officer.
“In that moment, time both speeds up and slows down, and I remember coming up behind my son, putting my hand around his chest, pulling him back towards me. And in that moment, that was when everything slowed down, I felt like I could hear him, felt his beating heart. And I remember thinking he’s a baby, and he’s terrified,” Morales said.
“It was terrifying and devastating and traumatizing.”
Several candidates expressed interest in hacking the NYPD’s budget after that summer, but as the primary grows closer, many have backed away from the strongest proposals. Morales’s plan – “defund the police; fund the people”, her website reads – goes furthest, cutting $3bn from the NYPD’s $6bn budget and swapping out police with trained responders who would respond to mental health, wellness and social issues callouts.
Primaries in New York City are known for being unpredictable. At a similar stage in the 2013 Democratic vote, De Blasio was in fourth place, but went on to clinch victory with 40% of the vote. That gives hope for Morales, who in a recent poll was in a cluster of candidates trailing Andrew Yang, a tech entrepreneur; Adams, the current Brooklyn borough president; and Scott Stringer, the New York City comptroller who is hemorrhaging support after an accusation of sexual misconduct.
Morales, unlike the candidates currently in that top three, has never run for public office before, but believes this is her time.
“I am not doing this for the sake of the next step, or, just for the sake of holding office,” Morales says.
“I’m doing this for the sake of actually trying to dramatically improve the quality of life and the access to dignity of so many New Yorkers.”
There are sort of political dynasties that are deeply entrenched and deeply rooted here
Dianne Morales