Race for House seat in NYC’s 10th District heats up as de Blasio drops out

The hotly contested Democratic race to represent the new House district covering lower Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn got a jolt last week when former Mayor de Blasio dropped out early, bowing to pitiful poll numbers.

More twists may be incoming.

The race for the district, New York’s 10th, has attracted a teeming tent of hopefuls, more than a dozen total.

And though analysts poring over polls spy a top tier crystallizing after de Blasio’s humbling exit, the contest in the safely blue district seems mostly unsettled with less than a month until the Aug. 23 Primary Day.

“It’s almost like watching the Kentucky Derby with 20 horses,” said Bruce Gyory, a Democratic strategist who is closely following the campaign. “Who gets the open lane? And who takes advantage?”

The diverse district stretches from the West Village in Manhattan to Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, spanning the lavish halls of Wall Street, the chaotic blocks of Chinatown and the sprawling public housing complexes of Red Hook and the Lower East Side.

A trio of lower Manhattan candidates have pushed to the front of the field — for now.

They include Councilwoman Carlina Rivera, who recently led an abortion protections push in the Council and has picked up key early endorsements in the campaign, and Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, who immigrated from Taiwan as an infant and has staked out a particularly progressive platform.

Daniel Goldman, 46, who lives in tony Tribeca and led the first House impeachment inquiry into former President Donald Trump, appears to be running alongside Rivera and Niou.

All three hopefuls scored double-digit support in a pair of public opinion polls that surfaced this month. But both surveys showed at least a quarter of voters saying they were still undecided.

Rivera had perhaps the largest role in quickly closing de Blasio’s path. She won a coveted endorsement from Local 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, the city’s largest union, which helped push de Blasio into City Hall in 2013.

“I’m the proud product of a union household,” said Rivera, who presents herself as a pragmatic politician focused on housing and education, and bristles at ideological litmus tests. “They’ve seen me work,” she added of the 1199 endorsement.

She also seems to have made the fewest mistakes of any leading candidate in the field, though her campaign was left last week to clarify an ambiguous response she gave to a question — from the Jewish news outlet Hamodia — about religious exemptions for anti-gay businesses. (Her campaign clarified that she opposes such exemptions.)

Meanwhile, Niou, of the Financial District, has picked up the prized endorsement of the progressive Working Families Party, which recently released a poll showing her and Rivera locked in first at 16%.

A prolific tweeter, Niou is an outspoken activist who joined a hunger strike for taxi workers last year. The 39-year-old supports divesting from Israel and redistributing police funding. In the winter, she liked a tweet comparing cops to Nazis; she later suggested it was an accident.

Niou and Goldman did not make themselves available for interviews for this story, though Goldman’s campaign issued a two-sentence statement praising his “vision for protecting our democracy and defending our fundamental rights.”

The well-funded first-time candidate may have hurt himself with liberal voters last week by telling Hamodia that he would not object to a state law barring abortions after a fetus is considered viable. He quickly backtracked, but his rivals unloaded criticism on him. (In May, he tweeted, “You can be against abortion and pro-choice.”)

In recent polls, all three front-runners led Rep. Mondaire Jones, a first-term congressman from suburban White Plains who was drawn out of his current district in the spring, and then moved to the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn to run in the 10th District.

Jones, one of the first Black openly gay lawmakers elected to Congress, entered the race flush with cash and seen as a favorite by insiders.

But he has not yet caught on, trailing the top three in public and internal surveys, and struggling to answer criticism of his politically motivated relocation. He has languished in the single digits in early polls.

In an interview on Friday, Jones said he has a “deep connection” to the district. The 35-year-old said the district “helped me grow into the person that I am today: a leading effective progressive champion.”

He defensively noted that Rivera lives outside the district.

She recently moved to a home in Kips Bay, eight blocks beyond the district’s borders, but grew up in Section 8 housing on the Lower East Side within the district, and was a longtime resident of the East Village, also in the district, where she worked as a community board member and organizer.

“For the people who love this city,” Rivera, 38, said, “I am their candidate.”

Jones lost out to Rivera for the endorsement of the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, a prominent progressive group launched by LGBTQ activists, an unmistakable blow.

Still, he had $2.8 million in his war chest at the end of June, according to federal campaign finance records, more than double anyone else in the race. Analysts see plenty of paths for him to rise, including through endorsements from newspaper editorial boards.

And Jones may benefit from his access to a possible Brooklyn lane, if he can captivate voters in the borough.

“There is only one progressive candidate in this race with a track record of actually delivering progressive results in the United States Congress,” he said.

Working against him: Brooklyn is also home to a jumble of long shots and spoilers in the race, including Elizabeth Holtzman, an 80-year-old trailblazer who served in Congress from 1973 to 1981 and is trying to again — with Gloria Steinem behind her.

Despite her advanced age and light funding — she had roughly $100,000 in her campaign wallet last month, ninth in the field, according to campaign finance records — Holtzman led Jones in a Data For Progress survey, scoring 9% and coming in fourth. (Other polling has put her further behind.)

Holtzman, of Boerum Hill, said she does not expect voters to make their decisions based “on age, hair color, height, weight.”

“They’re going to vote, I believe, on who’s principled and who’s going to fight effectively,” said Holtzman, a former city comptroller and Brooklyn district attorney. “When people see my record and see my energy, they’ll know I’m going to fight for them.”

One of her Boerum Hill neighbors, Assemblywoman Jo Anne Simon, is also trying to keep up in the race despite limited cash. Simon, a civil rights lawyer, has picked up endorsements from a smattering of Brooklyn political clubs and pitches herself as a uniquely accessible candidate.

“I’m a person people know from well before I ran for office,” Simon, 69, said.

It is not clear if de Blasio’s exit will make much of a mark on the race after he failed to gain traction, nor is it clear if he will throw his weight — publicly or privately — behind another candidate. He said Tuesday that it was “too soon” to say if he would offer an endorsement.

Camille Rivera, a progressive political strategist who lives in the district, predicted more long-shot candidates will follow his lead in dropping out, as the remaining hopefuls hit the hot summer pavement, knocking on doors, trying to coax out every last vote.

“It’s becoming a more sensible field of candidates,” she said. “I think it’s going to be a field game.”