Council Watch: Nowhere to Run

The greatest predictor of electoral success in New York State is incumbency: According to Citizens Union, 97 percent of state legislators were re-elected in 2012. The numbers are even starker in New York City, where almost nobody ever loses. Getting elected to office is practically like a federal judgeship in terms of job security.

General Election Day in New York City, even for people who care about such things, is like a quaint pro forma commemoration of some half-forgotten civic ritual: like a colder version of Flag Day, except neighborhood senior citizens and party hacks are given $200 to fuss over scraps of paper.

The observance of Election Day in the five boroughs remains technically necessary, but increasingly resembles the democratic charade of the world’s totalitarian regimes. Part of the reason for the lopsided nature of our elections is that we are, more or less, a one-party city, save for Staten Island, where Republicans have not yet gone the way of the dinosaurs, as they have for the most part in the other four boroughs. The GOP lost its last Manhattan representatives a decade ago when Assemblyman John Ravitz and State Sen. Roy Goodman left office. There are no GOP elected officials in the Bronx, and the sole holdout in Brooklyn is state Sen. Marty Golden. Frank Padavan was the last Republican holdout in the state Legislature from Queens until he was unseated by Tony Avella in 2010. New York City Councilman Eric Ulrich, the lone GOP elected official from his borough, recently told NY1 that the “Republican Party is on the verge of extinction in Queens County,” where almost none of the incumbent Democratic legislators even have an opponent in the general.

Elsewhere in the city there are Republican challengers occupying ballot lines, but in most if not all cases theirs are essentially symbolic candidacies at best. For instance, Richard Gottfried, who has represented the Manhattan neighborhoods of Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen in the Assembly since 1970, is ostensibly being opposed by attorney Harry DeMell. DeMell has run for a variety of offices, including Nassau County legislator, New York city councilman, congressman and judge. However, though he is listed on the ballot for this year’s election, his campaign finance committee shows no activity whatsoever, and DeMell did not return numerous calls for an interview.

The state Board of Elections candidate list is replete with these Republican cipher candidacies. Who would have guessed that the Democratic Assembly nominee Charles Barron, who was term-limited out of the Council last year, is facing opposition from the GOP in the spectral form of Leroy R. Bates Sr.? Or that perennial central Brooklyn Republican candidate Jonathan H. Anderson is contesting Martin Dilan’s Senate seat? Neither Bates nor Anderson has raised any money for their respective campaigns, and they have no campaign offices or Internet presence to speak of. So whether their candidacies are for the sake of vanity or protest, it is impossible to say. But technically at least, democracy flourishes in Brooklyn.

There are a few Republican candidates around the city who, despite rather long odds, are making a game effort at running. Maureen Koetz, a former assistant secretary for installations, environment and logistics for the Air Force, fills the Republican line in New York’s 65th AD, otherwise known as the home district of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who is known as a formidable campaigner, and who is still a force to be reckoned with in Albany despite his troubles in recent years.

Koetz, an amiable technocrat originally from Queens who served her country as a Navy JAG officer, acknowledges that she faces a tough road to victory. “I try to maintain my sense of humor. … It’s not the easiest thing to run as a Republican in Manhattan, especially against long-term incumbencies,” she allows. Asked why she is bothering to run such an uphill campaign to unseat the Speaker, Koetz points to what she believes is “extreme” corruption on Silver’s part.

“Coming out of federal service instead of the state system, I can recognize conflicts of interest plainly,” says Koetz, who argues that New York politicians are so mired in corruption that obvious violations go practically unnoticed. Citing the Speaker’s of-counsel work with the personal injury powerhouse law firm Weitz & Luxenberg as a blatant violation of Section 74 of the state’s Public Officers Law, Koetz elaborates, “You can’t profit from tort awards and be the person blocking tort reform.”

Koetz isn’t exactly measuring the drapes for her district office yet, but she notes that the lower Manhattan district in which she and Silver reside is going through significant demographic change. Young professional families have taken root in Battery Park City and the financial district, turning the area into a kind of “bedroom community” that could perhaps one day raise a Republican into office.

Further uptown, Nick Di iorio is making a vigorous run for U.S. Congress against 20-year veteran Rep. Carolyn Maloney. Di iorio, a 28-year-old Fordham graduate from Rhode Island, is banking on endorsements from the Republican, Conservative and Independence parties, as well as “the Libertarian Party of Queens,” to catapult him past Maloney, whom he characterizes as “the most ineffective member of the national Legislature.”

Di iorio considers it an insult to the people of the 12th Congressional District that Maloney will not debate him, and that “she is not even running a campaign.” Di iorio claims, “Nobody ever sees Carolyn—she is taking the election for granted”—which, even if true, is not all that unreasonable considering that when Reshma Saujani amassed an impressive $1.3 million four years ago to wage a high-profile challenge of Maloney in the Democratic primary, the popular congresswoman crushed her, garnering 81 percent of the vote. Still, Di iorio harps on the fact that the media has given his campaign hardly any coverage, and thus in his mind is complicit in Maloney being able to get away with assuming victory.

Indeed, we don’t hear a lot about the races that aren’t close, though it is hard to make the case that the media is to blame for the non-competitive nature of most of these general election campaigns. Dick Dadey, the executive director of the good-government watchdog group Citizens Union, notes, “There are rare instances where incumbency does not protect even bad candidates.”

Even indictment often can’t trump the power of incumbency, as evidenced by state Sen. John Sampson’s victory in the recent Democratic primary, despite the fact that he is currently facing two separate indictments. With other indicted pols like Assemblyman William Scarborough—and perhaps Rep. Michael Grimm—also on the brink of re-election, it makes all but the most jaded of observers wonder whether there is any way to fix such a dysfunctional system.

Seth Barron (@NYCCouncil Watch on Twitter) runs City Council Watch, an investigative website focusing on local New York City politics.