Congressional fixture Jerry Nadler faces primary challenges this year

The two new options on the table are Boylan, a 36-year-old Columbia Business School graduate whom Andrew Cuomo appointed Deputy Secretary for Economic Development and Special Adviser to the Governor in 2018, and Herzog, a 25-year-old who joined Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign after serving as co-president of Harvard Law School’s student government. Herzog hopes to advocate for Yang’s platform in Congress – namely, a universal basic income of $1,000 a month for every American adult.

While most Red Hook residents live in New York’s seventh congressional district, where U.S. Representative Nydia Velazquez currently seeks a 15th term, a small portion of the neighborhood belongs to New York’s 10th congressional district and, for now, to Rep. Jerry Nadler, who likewise won office in 1992. Ahead of 2020’s general election, two fresh faces – Lindsey Boylan and Jonathan Herzog – will challenge Nadler, a powerful, well-known Democrat, in the June 23 primary.

Nadler’s district extends from the Upper West Side to Bensonhurst, with a narrow band of Brooklyn’s industrial shoreline linking the population centers on either end. Nadler’s section of Red Hook, which includes Atlantic Basin and Erie Basin, is mostly nonresidential, but local maritime advocates have noted his longtime support for the Port of New York and New Jersey and blue-collar waterfront jobs – and, in particular, his defense of the Red Hook Container Terminal amid real estate pressure. The International Longshoreman’s Association union has contributed $76,000 in campaign donations over the length of his career in Washington.

Although Nadler’s few constituents in Red Hook are unlikely to play a decisive role in the NY-10 primary, his territory includes two rows of single-family homes on Conover and Coffey streets, a handful of multi-unit buildings on the western side of Beard Street, and the apartments above Fairway Market in the Red Hook Stores. Here, voters will take part in a Democratic congressional primary for the first time since 2016, when Nadler defeated Oliver Rosenberg with a commanding 89.5 per cent of the vote.

The two new options on the table are Boylan, a 36-year-old Columbia Business School graduate whom Andrew Cuomo appointed Deputy Secretary for Economic Development and Special Adviser to the Governor in 2018, and Herzog, a 25-year-old who joined Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign after serving as co-president of Harvard Law School’s student government. Herzog hopes to advocate for Yang’s platform in Congress – namely, a universal basic income of $1,000 a month for every American adult.

A stronger fundraiser (with connections in the financial industry) and a popular Twitter user, Boylan has earned a greater share of the media attention in the race. A Teen Vogue profile cast her as a progressive challenger in the mold of congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Presley, who successfully primaried older, male legislators in 2018. It didn’t mention, however, that Boylan and Ocasio-Cortez had fallen on opposite sides of the controversy surrounding Amazon’s “HQ2” proposal in Queens.

It didn’t point out, either, that Nadler – who has cosponsored Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s Medicare for All Act and Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal resolution (and who, in the Clinton era, opposed NAFTA and 1994’s infamously punitive crime bill) – is considerably more liberal than Joe Crowley, the Queens power broker who voted for the Iraq War and the Patriot Act before his surprising defeat at the hands of Ocasio-Cortez. Nadler’s clashes with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are typically confined to the question of Palestine.

A staunch ally of Israel in a district with significant Jewish communities, Nadler urged the House of Representatives to denounce a UN Security Council resolution against illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian territories in 2017 and cosponsored an official condemnation of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement in 2019 (though in 2014 he supported Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, which AIPAC opposed). Boylan makes no mention of foreign policy on her campaign’s website.

While the candidacies of other notable insurgents like Jamaal Bowman (NY-16) and Lauren Ashcraft (NY-12) have centred distinctly left-wing agendas on bread-and-butter issues, Boylan has generated much of her following as a critic of Donald Trump (a “self-absorbed, racist misogynist,” in her words) on broader moral and procedural grounds. Boylan – like Bowman and Ashcraft– supports single-payer healthcare and increased funding for public housing (and has highlighted her own role in establishing New York State’s paid family leave), but mainstream Democratic concern over the White House’s “abuses of power” figures just as prominently in her campaign.

Boylan’s line of attack on Nadler focuses on what she perceives to be the veteran congressman’s insufficiently aggressive prosecution of the Trump administration within the House Judiciary Committee, which he chairs. Boylan spent much of 2019 – prior to the Ukraine scandal – expressing exasperation at Nadler’s reluctance to initiate impeachment hearings against Trump for myriad offenses, such as enabling Russian election interference, obstruction of justice, and human rights violations at the US-Mexico border.

In the wake of new revelations, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi launched an impeachment inquiry in September, and Nadler, with her blessing, put forth the articles of impeachment in December. The ensuing trial put the congressman in the national spotlight until, in late January, he left Washington to care for his cancer-stricken wife. More recently, Boylan has criticized Nadler for declining to subpoena US Attorney General William Bar after Trump’s Department of Justice dropped criminal charges against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

Boylan has refused corporate PAC contributions, while Nadler has accepted donations from PACs sponsored by Facebook, Microsoft, Comcast, and other large companies. In part, Boylan has relied on her own bank account instead, contributing $135,524 in personal donations and loans to her campaign’s treasury.

In May, Nadler Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren joined the Working Families Party in endorsing Nadler. Twitter users – including Boylan herself, a former Warren fan, now stung – erupted in debate. Had the so-called progressives (their reputations already weakened, perhaps, by missteps in the presidential primary) shamefully boosted a moderate, or was the moderate in the race actually a progressive, and the progressive a moderate? Or were they both moderates, or both progressives?

Andrew Yang, Herzog’s political mentor, has sought to resist classification within the left-right political spectrum. The dispute between factions supporting Boylan and Nadler may suggest the need, at least, for some definitional clarity in Democratic Party discourse.

The Democratic nominee in NY-10 – whether Boylan, Herzog, or Nadler – will expect almost certain victory in November. No Republican primary will take place in the solidly blue district this year.