Making sense of a New York bombshell

A view from the inside

Welcome to a Friday evening edition of Progress Report.

I had oral surgery today but I think the news that broke this morning is actually giving me the bigger headache.

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We want politicians to be human. But sometimes, that’s the problem.

Huh?

Back when I started this newsletter in late 2017, the idea was to cover grassroots efforts to rebuild progressive infrastructure and spotlight candidates running for state and local office. We raised millions of dollars for progressive candidates, including a number of young newcomers who were fighting to retake the New York state Senate back from a caucus of Republicans and turncoat “independent” Democrats backed by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Most of those young Democrats won their primaries, and the effort to give voters the legislature they wanted was a resounding success.

One of those victorious new Democrats was a former City Hall staffer named Jessica Ramos, who defeated a Cuomo-backed incumbent to take a seat based around Roosevelt Ave. in Queens. Ramos was a breath of fresh air: an aggressive pro-worker populist whose parents had emigrated from Colombia and worked blue collar jobs to achieve the American dream. During the pandemic, she led the charge to create the Excluded Worker Fund, which compensated undocumented and other New Yorkers who lost their jobs but were ineligible to receive unemployment benefits.

I got to know Sen. Ramos while working on a few stories at More Perfect Union, including one about her ultimately successful fight to raise the minimum wage in New York (you can thank Gov. Kathy Hochul for limiting the annual increase). As the Eric Adams show descended into farce, I would occasionally text her chief of staff, saying that Jessica should think about running for mayor. One day last summer, she texted me to say that it was happening and ask me if I wanted to help the campaign.

You never know what’s going to happen when you get involved in a political race, but waking up today to the news that Jessica Ramos had endorsed the disgraced former governor for mayor was just about the opposite of anything I could have anticipated when I produced the video below:

Some context: While I’ve never had particularly high opinions of politicians, it was a bummer to see a handful of the (many) Democrats this newsletter helped get elected in 2018 and 2020 become such corporate cowards. I couldn’t in good conscience ask people to donate to risky propositions, so between that hesitancy and my work as an advocacy journalist at More Perfect Union, I’d backed away from endorsing or raising money for most candidates. Instead, I was focused on reporting, and when I do raise money, it is largely for grassroots organizations and initiative campaigns that aim to create infrastructure for long-term change.

But I believed in Jessica, who had policy chops, a pugnacious approach to politics, and little interest in the perks that distract so many New York lawmakers.

Her lonely fight to thwart billionaire Mets owner Steve Cohen’s plans to house his casino on public land in her working class district was proof of her fierce independence and dignity. To avoid my own conflict of interests, I decided not to cover the mayoral race for More Perfect Union and worked as a volunteer consultant for Sen. Ramos, giving up evenings and some weekends to assist her campaign.

She hustled hard and tried to grow her coalition, with a focus on labor unions and other groups that she’d worked with in the Senate. And she had no problem throwing punches at Eric Adams or Andrew Cuomo, who we blasted for being a sexual predator and both causing and covering up the death of so many grandparents in nursing homes during the pandemic; Jessica was one of the first to call for his resignation back in 2021. As other New York politicians began falling in line behind Cuomo, former critics who called for his ouster suddenly silent or even turning heel to endorse him, Sen. Ramos remained firm in her disgust for the man.

We had a hit with the line “Fight like a Mother,” but her campaign just couldn’t seem to gain much traction: there were a ton of candidates, big machine unions were waiting for Cuomo, and she hadn’t made a lot of political allies in Albany. It was frustrating, because nobody had a better record on labor — she was the chair of the Senate Labor Committee and walked countless picket lines, and continued to do so, whether she’d earned an endorsement or not. It wasn’t that she wanted payback from labor, she just saw them as natural allies.

Then Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani entered the race, and with the help of his huge army of DSA volunteers, he took the progressive left by storm. She was not a fan, to say least, and saw herself as the real working class candidate: she’s a single mother of two who lives in a rent stabilized apartment and Mamdani is the son of a prominent filmmaker and professor. This is a central tension between the pro-worker factions in the Democratic Party, as I’ve seen time and again covering organizing campaigns run by young people who feel solidarity with unions but do not come from blue collar backgrounds.

Seriousness was a running theme. I pitched Jessica the kind of campaign that Mamdani is now running, but she was too focused on the nuts and bolts of how she’d govern to take many big swings or make big promises. Just one example: Last fall, before Mamdani entered the race, I wanted to her to promise she’d declare a housing state of emergency and go after big developers and management companies for driving rents to insane heights, but the concern I heard back was that she may have to work with those developers and landlords as mayor.

That’s a responsible and reasonable response, but responsible and reasonable don’t really sell in politics these days. She was paralyzed by caution, so she dithered on an array of proposals designed to expand her coalition: fighting the city’s decision to ruin outdoor dining, an entire agenda for a family-friendly New York, and more. She may have resented Mamdani, but he was willing to take those swings.

I’m not going to say that anything would have turned out differently had she taken our advice, but I also can’t tell you much about what happened after I stopped doing work for the campaign in February, when my time got tight and ideas weren’t breaking through. People I know who were on the campaign are equally baffled by what happened, so apologies to the folks who have texted me today looking for an explanation.

Right now, the best I can do is surmise that there were several factors that boiled over.

First, her campaign was in debt, vendors weren’t paid, and no money was coming in. A few Cuomo donors could wipe all those debts out with a check for a fraction of what they gave Fix the City, the former governor’s Super PAC. That probably was enticing, given the circumstances.

Second, Jessica’s anger at being initially excluded from the Working Families Party’s endorsements — which was frankly a mistake by the WFP — and her frustration at seeing Mamdani take the lane she had envisioned for herself, did not help the situation. Then there is the bad blood with AOC that dates back to 2022, when Jessica, whose district overlaps with the Congresswoman’s, accused her of abandoning constituents. It’s probably not a total coincidence that Jessica endorsed Cuomo the day after AOC finally backed Mamdani.

We’ve all made petty decisions and disappointed people who counted on us. The problem is that politicians spend years asking strangers for their support, cultivating their belief, and badgering them for money, with integrity as their only collateral. When they make mistakes or become overwhelmed by their personal grievances, it further deteriorates public faith in our rotten political system. And while I could be wrong about the reasoning, and Jessica could have some strategy behind endorsing Cuomo — he’s still the front-runner, and her district needs lots of help and attention — the effect remains the same.

Politics is dirty, not romantic, and I’m sure there will be much bigger disappointments down the line — just look at progressive hero John Fetterman and former leftist Kyrsten Sinema. The key is to not let it turn you off from pushing for political change, but it’s another reminder that we should invest far more in movements, in the grassroots, and in one another.

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