When it did get interpreted, the defeat of first time candidate Cynthia Nixon, who ran to the left of Governor Andrew Cuomo, was offered as proof from 10,000 feet that there are limits to how far progressives can go in transforming the Democratic Party from a pro-choice corporatist front into an instrument of radical economic transformation.
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But on the ground in the Empire State the reality is very different, with populist progressives defeating all but one of eight incumbent Democrat State Senators who were much better funded and aligned under the centrist Independent Democratic Conference. Since 2011 the IDC had allied with State Senate Republicans, permitting the GOP to control the upper house and the Albany agenda.
“New Yorkers voters rejected weak corporate Democrats for bold progressives with strong economic-populist messages who will fight for working families,”Stephanie Taylor, co-fonder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told cable news channel NY1.
For decades New York voter turnout has performed well below the nation as a whole. In 2016, only 57.2 percent of the voting age population turned out, ranking it the “eighth-worst voter turnout among states” according to Politico.
In 2013, when Bill de Blasio won his first primary, only 20 percent of the eligible Democrats bothered to vote, roughly just three percent of the city’s residents.
A common thread running through the successful insurgent Senate challenges was a sense of urgency about the status of the economy for working class New Yorkers who continue to fall behind even as the prospects for their children grow bleaker thanks to crippling student debt.
Thanks to the presence of Wall Street, New York leads the nation in income inequality, which has only accelerated since the Great Recession. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the top one percent earned average incomes that were more than 40 times those of the bottom 99 percent. EPI reports that New York was one of 15 states where the top one percent between 2009 and 2013 “captured all income growth.”
In many ways the Empire State has been a failing state for some time. While the serial public corruption trials suck up a lot of the air, there’s insufficient reporting on the state’s long term economic structural deterioration. In many places it is very much like what we have seen in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin that gave Trump his minuscule 70,000 popular vote margin for victory.
Back in the 1960s it had 43 members of Congress. Today it has dwindled to 27. In upstate counties, good manufacturing jobs have disappeared and now the only decent jobs are in the healthcare sector or in the prisons.
Leading up to the 2016 November election I did a detailed historical analysis on the adult and childhood poverty rates for all of New York State’s 62 counties. I contrasted and compared these data points over the 25-year arc of Governor Mario Cuomo’s tenure and his son Andrew.
The results were disturbing. In 58 counties adult poverty was up. In 59 childhood poverty was also up. In some neighborhoods in cities like Rochester, the childhood poverty rate approached the 50 percent mark. In once affluent suburbs like Rockland County childhood poverty had spike from 9.7 percent in 1989 to 25.5 percent in 2014.
According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, New York’s childhood poverty rate is at 22 percent, as compared to the nation’s rate of 19 percent. The racial disparity among the 900,490 poor children is quite pronounced—31 percent of black children; 33 percent of Hispanic children; and 26 percent of American Indian children.
But even that federal poverty criteria masks a growing underclass of families that, while not officially poor, struggle week to week to cover the basics.
“Children living in families with incomes below the federal poverty threshold are referred to as poor,” according to the National Center for Children In Poverty. “But research suggests that, on average, families need an income of about twice the federal poverty threshold to meet their basic needs. The United States measures poverty by an outdated standard developed in the 1960s.”
That pressing economic reality, that is entirely ignored by the corporate news media, has been vividly captured by the United Way which has developed its ALICE matrix. It localizes state by state, and county by county, what it actually costs for a family with children to survive.
It tracks what the Asset Limited, Income Constrained, but Employed (ALICE) households are paying locally for taxes, shelter, childcare, health care, and transportation. When you add the below poverty cohort in with the ALICE families you can see why the economic populist message is catching fire and why Wall Street Democrats and Republicans need to worry.
Case in point, the 14th Congressional District where insurgent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez upset ten term incumbent Congressman Joseph Crowley. That district is made up of the Bronx and Queens Counties. In the Bronx 71 percent of households struggle week to week while in Queens its 50 percent.
There’s no doubt that Nixon’s campaign helped galvanize voters engagement. Her opponent, the incumbent had deep pockets and strong support from organized labor, which in the state with the highest percentage of union members is a big deal.
And for progressives who want to win there’s a lesson in the Nixon campaign. Early on in the actor/activist candidacy she framed much of her message around Governor Cuomo’s presiding over the decline of the New York City’s subways. In the process, she laid some of the blame on the city’s trade unions for the deepening mass transit crisis.
“The unions have to understand . . . with the deals they have now you can’t hope to make the improvements to the trains in a fiscally responsible way,” Nixon said. “Everybody’s got to pull together, and make sacrifices.”
“I think the same day she declared that she was running for Governor she pointed fingers at union workers that build and maintain the subway and she said workers were going to have to give up concessions in order to start fixing up the subways,” said John Samuelsen, president of the International Transport Workers Union, which backed Cuomo. “ So, her basic instinct was to jump on the narrative put forward by the nonunion developers that want to chase the trade union movement out of subway construction projects and want to blame workers for problems with subway construction.”
After Nixon tacked to the center on that issue, she tried a course correction sending an email to In These Times. “I am and have been a proud union member for forty years,” Nixon wrote. “My wife Christine was a union organizer . . . I always have and always will stand with working families and my union brothers and sisters.”
But that initial take didn’t go over well in a state where billionaires have long been calling all the shots and the public and private sector unions are the last semblance of a diminishing middle class.
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