Hope you are having a cool summer and are not fatigued from all the campaigning. We still have a couple months to go until 2024 presidential campaigns are kicked off.
New York lost a congressional seat which caused a fury of redistricting. Hakeem Jeffries and Nydia Velasquez both are running in districts they do not live in but have closely represented in the past. Sean Patrick Maloney is running in the district he lives in, but not the one he mostly represented previously. And Mondaire Jones thought his best course of action was to move to a completely new part of the state and run for office.
With early voting ending yesterday and the normally scheduled poll program tomorrow, 2xParked is looking at the numbers of the most contested congressional Democratic primaries in NYC.
NY10
The incumbent reelection rate is around 90%, which means for the candidates vying for the newly formed NY10 district, winning this year will have a head start for the next few elections.
Many of the candidates have prided themselves in the stances they will take on certain future bills, but in reality, this is hot air. Even the most “radical” of NYC congresspersons, AOC, has agreed with Joe Biden 94% of the time. In likelihood, all of these candidates will say yay or nay on the same items regardless of who is elected.
The real value in these legislators is literally putting pen to paper. This goes beyond raising hands and yelling, but translating an idea into a bill and working that bill into a law, i.e. the job of a legislator.
Four of the top candidates in this district are active legislators, so we have some data to look at. For each of these four candidates, I looked at how many bills this candidate sponsored in their legislative house during the most recent session and compared it to their peers. I also translated the absolute number to percentile to better gauge where that candidate stands. The higher the number (i.e. the further right), the better the candidate has been at legislating according to this metric.
This measure is not perfect since not all bills are equal, but from what we can see:
Jo Anne Simon, NYS Assembly, and Carlina Rivera, NYC City Council, have been extremely active in being a primary legislation sponsor. This is a good trait.
Yuh-Line Niou has been solidly below-average as a legislator in the NYS Assembly. This is something to keep in mind for voters who share her vision and have not considered if she can execute it.
In sports when a player is struggling but shows potential, the talking heads say the player might need a “change of scenery”. After a pretty poor showing as a freshman, perhaps Mondaire Jones might need a change of scenery with his move to NY10?
Two of the other top candidates, Daniel Goldman and Elizabeth Holtzman, have no recent legislative experience, but this is not a pre-requisite of the job. Some of the most popular legislators, from AOC to Elizabeth Warren, were not elected to anything prior to their current spots.
NY12
The last time both Jerry Nadler and Carolyn Maloney were both not elected to a public office was 1982, the year before Maloney became a City Councilwoman.
In the most recent PIX11/Emerson College Polling/The Hill poll, Nadler finds himself up on Maloney, 51% to 29%, with Suraj Patel receiving 14%. This puts Nadler in a the driver seat. I want to explore the likelihood of Nadler celebrating on Tuesday evening by converting poll numbers to probabilities. Using the power of Bayes, I can do just that.
Unfortunately for Maloney, her chances of winning are not good. I estimate them to be around 0.00003% using this framework. Of course, as we have discussed, a poll is only as good as the accuracy of its assumptions.
NY17
The battle of Northern NYC (and South Westchester) features a race between “incumbent” Sean Patrick Maloney and the next-in-line to the Biaggi NYS political family, Alessandra Biaggi.
Biaggi, the underdog “progressive” candidate, has come under fire recently after doubling down on an offensive tweet seemingly aimed at older women. 2xParked can not condone this tweet, but I am interested in how something like this might impact an election.
Most of the polls have been essentially internal, and if we look at the recent one more bullish on Biaggi, we see Maloney leading 34% to 21%. If we assume 55% of democrat voters are women and 60% of them are above 45 years old, then about 1/3 of potential voters might be offended by these comments.
Using a similar framework that I did for NY12, if Biaggi offended 1% of these potential voters with these comments to the point of them switching their vote away from her, her odds of winning are reduced by 2%. If she offended 5% of these potential voters, her odds of winning are reduced by 19%.
Given that she is an underdog already, offending constituents without the gains of new ones does not seem like a strategic move.
Summary
The NY Times has stirred conversation from its endorsements, but this is not a life or death sentence. Kathryn Garcia was endorsed by the Times, and she lost many of the districts now in NY10 to Maya Wiley. Zephyr Teachout was endorsed by the Times, and she has yet to win a single election. Brad Lander was endorsed by the Times, and he jumped to a dominating victory for City Comptroller. Polls and endorsements are guesses and opinions, not facts.
This is expected to be a low turnout affair, so every vote will matter. As businessman Michael Scott once said “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take - Wayne Gretzky”. The best and easiest way to make the changes you want is to go vote, so if you have not yet, get ready on Tuesday!
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Comments? Suggestions? Questions? Email me at 2xParked@gmail.com.