What it means to be a representative
What it means to be a representative
Working on the ground elevates real leaders
Welcome to a big Monday edition of Progress Report.
We have a new candidate endorsement tonight, one that comes after weeks of painstaking thought and reflection.
During half-time of the Liverpool-Man City match this weekend, my brother and I got to talking about how we’d spend the $1.3 billion Mega Millions jackpot that had just been won by a very lucky person in Illinois. The lottery is undoubtedly a tax on the poor, but there’s no harm in daydreaming once in a while.
As New Yorkers, we both put buying an apartment at the top of our to-do lists. Then came helping family members (and seeing a Liverpool match at Anfield). My biggest imaginary outlay was devoted to building political power — both defeating Republican fascism this fall and building long-term community organizations that are essential ligaments in working class politics.
Too much of the money given to Democratic campaigns and committees winds up spent on TV ads and consultant fees. They’re rarely a great return on the grassroots donor’s investment, because while outlays can provide a modest boost in a single election, they do little to foster a cohesive culture, deliver for locals, and rewire politics. We don’t just need to win elections, we have to reorient our culture. Needless to say, using donor money to boost right-wing maniacs is doing the exact opposite.
Republicans are building community centers aimed at Hispanic communities in swing states. Long-dormant right-wing organizations are finding second lives as organizing points for local candidates. New organizations exist to take over school boards. All of it is aimed at creating a cohesiveness in a time of great isolation, which translates to political returns. Years into this project, there are more than a dozen radicalized legislatures, safely in GOP hands, quietly seeking to rewrite the constitution.
There are some Democrats that understand this, and they focus tirelessly on building up and delivering for their communities. That list includes tonight’s endorsed candidate, who is running in perhaps the most competitive primary in the nation.
Thank you to our latest crowd-funding donors: Mary Beth and Lee!
When a mysterious illness began to surface in New York City back in March 2020, the first cases were largely concentrated in the city’s two Chinatowns, in Queens and lower Manhattan. New Yorkers began avoiding what were until that point vibrant hubs of culture and commerce, and as Covid began to consume the city, they experienced a steep rise in racist rhetoric and violent hate crimes.
Residents desperately needed a champion, and over the next two years, State Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou worked relentlessly to deliver for the communities under siege.
“With the virus and the anti-Asian hatred, it was basically two pandemics in one,” Niou tells Progress Report, reflecting on the dire circumstances that have only recently started to recede. “In this moment, I saw that there was such a huge need for representation that understood how to get the resources to the right places on the ground.”
Niou, who represents Lower Manhattan in the legislature, turned her office into a 24/7 constituent service depot, combatting hunger and homelessness with meal deliveries, medical supplies, donated home goods, and assistance with applications for government assistance. She fought in the legislature to secure millions in aid earmarked for communities in need and sought to ensure that state agency websites were offered in the many different languages spoken around New York.
Niou also spoke out repeatedly against the skyrocketing scourge of anti-Asian hate crimes, delivering passionate speeches on the Assembly floor and putting herself in the crosshairs with public appearances and urgent interviews during the worst of the attacks. Over the past three years, she’s helped allocate $30 million in state funding for groups working to mitigate hate crimes against local Asian communities, while also seeking out funds and protections for other minority groups in the most diverse city in the world.
New York has experienced an uneven recovery; real estate prices have soared as people flock back to the city, but in many communities, small businesses are buckling under the weight of accrued debt, increased rent, and the reorientation of work. It’s been particularly difficult for small businesses owned by Asian-Americans, which stretch far beyond Chinatown and exist all across Niou’s district. Soaring inflation numbers present another hardship, especially in a city as expensive as New York.
“There's still food insecurity, there's still job insecurity, there's still housing instability,” Niou says. “And yet [the government] has stopped a lot of services, it’s already paring back on COVID relief, and not only is the pandemic still going, we are actually experiencing inflation and economic free fall. That’s why it's so important for us to get ahead and think about what we need to do to prevent a further deepening of this upcoming recession.”
Now, Niou is seeking to do that hard work in Washington as a member of Congress, on behalf of both her community and people all across the country.
“A Once in a Lifetime Opportunity for This Community”
When a conservative state judge decided in June to toss out New York’s new Congressional map and hand redistricting power to an outside academic, it threw the state’s sensitive political ecosystem into disarray. Shifting lines presented a number of difficult dilemmas to both politicians and voters, and nowhere has that been more apparent in New York’s newly redrawn 10th Congressional district.
Niou had been all set to run a primary challenge against moderate State Sen. Brian Kavanagh when word broke that the entirety of her Assembly district would be part of the new Congressional district, which was reconfigured enough to not have an incumbent. The 10th also includes stretches of north Brooklyn, with another prominent Asian community within its borders along with many other vibrant blocs.
“I just knew that if I didn't run… this opportunity is a once in a lifetime opportunity for our district, to have the representation that it needs in Congress,” Niou says, explaining her decision to switch gears and jump into the race. “I couldn't just pass it up and not do it.”
Complicating matters was the fact that many other New York politicians also sought to seize on the rare open Congressional race, while still others were forced into it by party powerbrokers.
DCCC chair Sean Patrick Maloney’s decision to ignore his job description and run in the 17th district essentially forced incumbent Rep. Mondaire Jones into a no-win decision: The impressive first-term representative could fight Maloney in a bloody primary that would make him the target of untold sums of corporate PAC money; incur the wrath of progressives by challenging the popular Rep. Jamal Bowman in the neighboring 16th district; or find some other district in which to run.
Jones went with the third option and threw his hat into the race to represent NY-10, which sits a good 30+ miles from his base in Rockland County. In doing so, he joined an already crowded field that included Niou, City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera, former federal prosecutor and Levi Strauss heir Dan Goldman, and former Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Jones running in a Manhattan/Brooklyn district makes for an awkward fit, geographically if not politically. Still, he’s had a very impressive first term, displaying a brave willingness to lead on important issues like Supreme Court expansion, a topic that many veteran Democrats began the cycle desperately trying to avoid. We here at Progress Report endorsed Jones’ first campaign early in the 2020 cycle because it was very obvious that he should be in Congress. We still believe that Mondaire Jones should be in Congress — just not as a representative of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, not when there’s a local progressive option.
A member of Congress’s first responsibility is to take care of their district, and Niou has the experience and deep connections that make her the best bet to represent its complicated needs. She has worked to score funding for local small businesses, deliver relief for struggling working class residents, navigate the district’s troubled NYCHA housing, and anticipate future problems.
The Working Families Party agreed, backing Niou’s campaign with what could be a game-changing endorsement for the August 23rd primary. The race is currently neck and neck; the most recent public poll, released two weeks ago, showed Niou just behind Rivera, who sits in first place thanks to plenty of donations from Wall Street interests.
Niou has been a long-time advocate for Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, which aids local businesses, many of which she discovered could not even sniff a PPP loan during the height of the pandemic. This year, she scored $500k in revolving funds for the CDFI fund in the most recent session, which will be a lifeline for many locals. Knowing how to navigate this sort of funding on a national scale could benefit businesses across the country.
We spent much of our conversation discussing the complications of soaring rents and corporate landlords in her district, where her office has worked to deliver rent relief funding to residents while advocating for better public housing. Niou has an ambitious vision for social housing that builds on elements of what Rep. Maxine Waters proposed and what has been done in countries all around the world. Closer to home, Niou helped to author what would become the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, but knows that the situation is still dire.
“I recently went into one of our units like LaGuardia Houses, and the boiler itself was trashed that you could walk into it — there was a hole so big you literally just walk inside of it,” she recalls. “And they had a garden hose feeding the thing — a garden hose from Home Depot.”
The funding that Niou brought home to her district is particularly notable because she did not hesitate to vote against several of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s big priorities, including the $850 million giveaway for a new Buffalo Bills stadium. There has rarely been a righteous fight that Niou has not been willing to take up since entering politics as a staffer for State Assemblyman Ron Kim, another progressive thorn in the corporate establishment’s side.
After falling just short in a special election to replace the disgraced former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Niou came back to defeat his hand-picked successor in the 2016 election, striking a major blow to the powerful conservative power structure that dominated the New York Democratic Party and kept Republicans in power in the State Senate.
Her Assembly career has been one of challenging entrenched power. Niou gave a stirring testimony in 2019 about experiencing sexual abuse as a child as part of a successful push to pass protections for survivors that languished in the Republican-held state Senate for years. She was one of the most vocal critics of Gov. Andrew Cuomo throughout his own harassment scandal, demanding that he resign for months and months before he was forced out of office. Once he left, Niou tried to pressure House Speaker Carl Heastie to pursue impeachment hearings so that the full breadth of Cuomo’s harassment and corruption would be exposed.
Even during the height of Cuomo’s early Covid-era stardom, Niou was defiant against the governor’s indulgences, voting against a budget that provided zero relief for renters while granting the governor the broad emergency powers that he would soon abuse.
The vicious and frequently bigoted online abuse Niou receives is still relentless — for being Asian, for being autistic, for daring to take on corrosive figures with high public approval ratings. That won’t stop in Congress, not when she’s very vocal about her support for Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, LGBTQ+ rights, and broad investments in public housing that piss off developers and private equity funds everywhere.
“People will send me all kinds of stuff, but I think as long as I'm always looking through a racial justice lens, a social justice lens, an environmental justice lens, an economic justice lens, and a disability lens, as long as we're doing that, then we're doing the right thing,” Niou says. “If we're not fighting for human rights, if there's ever a time when I blink, then I don't deserve to be here.”
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