Why Are There So Many Candidates for Brooklyn Council District 38?

Andrew
Andrew
Aug 8, 2017 · 5 min read

In 2013, Carlos Menchaca unseated 11-year incumbent Sara Gonzalez in the race for City Council in Brooklyn’s District 38, representing Sunset Park and Red Hook. A combination of key endorsements for Menchaca coupled with Gonzalez’s low attendance to council meetings and low visibility within the district led to a surprisingly lop-sided Menchaca victory, 58.8%–41.2%. To the casual observer, a strong show of support like that would seem to translate to a comfortable incumbency advantage in his next race, deterring most potential challengers.

And yet…

candidates for CD 38

Menchaca faces six challengers in this election (five democrats and a green party candidate). His main challenger is current Assemblyman Felix Ortiz, and though the lions share of the vote is likely to be split between those two, with a field as crowded as this one a winner could plausibly sneak in with less than 25% of the vote. Why have so many competitors chosen to jump in to this race? How does the competitiveness of this race compare to other council races across the city?

To begin with, I’ll note that District 38 is not the most competitive race this year in absolute number of candidates. Among districts with an incumbent running for re-election, Bill Perkins’ 9th District is the most crowded, with 8 challengers looking to unseat the Councilman. With Perkins having only just won the seat in a special election earlier this February, the contest should play out as a retread of that race, with Perkins relying on his name recognition and resume from his long career in Harlem politics.

Overall, there are 12 incumbents seeking re-election this year:

*: Bill Perkins won a special election on 2/14/17

After Perkins, Menchaca faces the most challengers in his upcoming primary. How far out of the ordinary is this race? There have been three city council primary election cycles since 2009, not including special elections. In that span, 28 city council members have stood for re-election for the first time (meaning, they won election once and are now facing their first challenge as an incumbent). The average number of challengers in these races has been 1.68. In that same span, there have been 32 city council members facing their second re-election, with the average number of challengers rising slightly to 2.2. Both of these averages are far lower than the number of candidates challenging Menchaca, at first blush indicating that opposition to Menchaca is higher than the historical average.

Every race has its own set of dynamics, however. I’ll note that the number of primary challengers currently in the race might not be the same as the number on the day of the election. Challengers often drop out closer to election time, be it from campaign lawyers contesting signatures and pushing them off the ballot or from campaign donations drying up. If three of Menchaca’s challengers don’t make it to the actual date of the primary, history will show this to have been a fairly typical primary challenge to a first-term councilman.

So a preliminary glance suggests an atypically competitive race in District 38, though we’d need to wait until the days leading up to the election to see if that observation holds. We’re still left with the “why”: Why have all of these challengers thrown their hat in the ring?

Cynically speaking, it’s doubtful that everyone in this race thinks they have a legitimate chance at winning. Javier Nieves, for example, has not received much in terms of campaign contributions, and at the moment his campaign finances are in the red. It could be argued that candidates like Nieves, a former assemblyman, and Miao and Valdes, are running to raise their profiles within the community.

Ortiz, the candidate with the closest shot at unseating Menchaca, has the advantage of name recognition and experience in the district, having represented the area as a state assemblyman. He has been in office for 20+ years and is currently the Assistant Speaker of the Assembly. While it may seem like a step down in terms of career advancement, Ortiz may see more of a future for himself in city politics. And he certainly knows that his salary would increase by nearly 90% should he be elected to the city council. Why now, though? According to Ortiz himself, he’s running because he doesn’t think Menchaca is up to the task:

I would like to know what [Menchaca]was done, because I haven’t seen anything done. What I’ve been seeing is more division, lack of leadership, lack of experience, and lack of knowledge. When we talk about job creation, when we talk about energizing people so they can have a different living. When we’re trying to find ways to build low-income affordable housing, I think there has been a lack of real commitment, and I’m not talking about the lack of advocacy[.]”

The first line jumps out given who Menchaca replaced in the role. His insurgent strategy in 2013 strongly relied on painting Gonzalez as absent and missing in action. Ortiz’s next sentence, and his allusion to division, may be key to his strategy. Sunset Park, along with much of Brooklyn, is experiencing rapid change. To many long-time residents, Menchaca’s win four years ago was indicative of that change, however positive it may have been compared to Gonzalez’s absentee leadership. And while most of these changes were underway prior to Menchaca’s election (Industry City, the poster child of encroaching gentrification, began actively courting artists and companies in 2009), voters often take out their frustration with macro-level trends on their elected leaders. Ortiz likely knew that these anxieties were present among the electorate in past primaries, yet never felt compelled to run against Gonzalez, a Sunset Park native with roots just as deep as Ortiz’s, during her time in office. Menchaca, with his outsider status as a young Tejano transplant, may provide Ortiz with a perfect metaphor to run against.

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