Scoring the Election
The primary is over here in the Eleventh Congressional District of New York State. I don’t yet know who won the judicial races (Surely, someone somewhere posts complete election results; but whoever it is I haven’t been able to find them with Google) but not counting those races I’m 2 for 6. I.e. of the six candidates I voted for, 2 won.
My only real victory was at the top of the ticket where Eliot Spitzer easily defeated Tom Suozzi. John Faso won’t be any more of a challenge in November; but after that the results get pretty bleak. Eric Adams did win the open State Senate seat, though that was sort of a default choice. None of the three candidates for that seat stood out in any way.
I didn’t really expect Tasini to beat Hillary, (though one can always hope) but I don’t understand how Mark Green lost to Andrew Cuomo. Green was so clearly the more qualified candidate, it shouldn’t have even been close. Maybe it’s just a question of name recognition? Or maybe a lot of the slurs on Green over the years damaged him too much to make him a viable candidate. Green really is a machine politician’s worst nightmare: an honest Democrat who fights back. Nothing’s as threatening to the political hacks as an effective true believer. Consequently they’ve been smearing him for years. Cuomo, like his father before him, is a machine politician who talks a far more progressive game than he plays. Oh well. At least we still have Spitzer.
Locally, it’s even harder to tell what actually happened since the race didn’t attract a lot of polling or analysis. Hakeem Jeffries beat my preferred candidate Bill Batson for assembly. He would have been my second choice. Maybe he’ll be OK.
The New York Times attributed Yvette Clark’s victory over Chris Owens and two others to labor support and its ability to turn out voters. That may be part of it, but I suspect she may have also benefited from Caribbean voters backing their preferred candidate en masse. Her mother Una tried that a few years ago in an effort to unseat Major Owens; but she lost about 60-40. There just weren’t enough Caribbean voters to put her over the top. However in a four-way race, block voting may have been a lot more important.
So that’s it: two candidates out of six. Maybe we’ll have better luck in two years.
