Bruce Gyory

Top Democratic consultant Bruce Gyory weighs in on the recent congressional primaries in our print issue out today:

Pundits do a good job of assessing winners and losers after electoral events like the recent congressional primaries. Few are better, for example, than City & State’s First Read on Fridays.

Yet while this last primary’s victors have already been determined, I would like to parse the significant factors underlying who won, who lost and why.

First, let’s look at the GOP Senate race. In statewide primaries generally the most potent combination a candidate can achieve is being dubbed the most conservative in the field and winning the designation of upstate’s horse. That is what Wendy Long rode to victory.

The GOP registration breakdown is 53 percent from upstate, 30 percent from the suburbs (Long Island, Westchester and Rockland) and 17 percent from New York City. But in terms of who actually votes in GOP primaries, upstate is in the driver’s seat. In the 2010 gubernatorial primary, the regional split in the vote among Republicans was 66 percent upstate, 25 percent in the suburbs and 9 percent in New York City.

The preliminary returns in this year’s Senate primary show upstate voters casting 60 percent of the GOP vote, the suburbs accounting for 27 percent and the five boroughs making up the remaining 13 percent. Long carried upstate by a wide margin, enabling her to win a majority in a three-way race. Long first demonstrated her strength upstate at the GOP convention. In a Republican primary, Turner’s base in New York City and Maragos’ in Nassau simply were too slender to carry a statewide primary.

Regionalism was also bolstered by ideology. Long was perceived to be the most conservative candidate in the race (e.g., carrying Suffolk County). Her endorsement by the Conservative Party became the seal of approval for right-wing Republicans.

To read the full article at City & State click here.

In his latest musing, Diaz tries to guess at who the “rat” is within the Democratic conference that fed that piece of speculation to Daily News reporter Ken Lovett, dropping the names of several of his Democratic colleagues as possibilities. And he even singles out Gov. Andrew Cuomo as a likely candidate for the leak.

You should know that as soon as I read the article, I went around asking people, “Who do you think is this high ranking source plotting to knock Sampson out?”  It is interesting to see all of the names that people mention, starting with Jeff Klein, Liz Krueger, Mike Ginaris and – now hold on to your hats folks – Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Out of all of them, Andrew Cuomo is the most frequent name mentioned.  Even during our Democratic closed-door Conference, his name was mentioned by most of the Senators.  To many, this plot is an act of desperation by those who already visualize a victory in November by the Democrats when the Republicans (will probably) lose their Majority and control of the Senate.

Strangely, Diaz himself called earlier this year for Sampson’s ouster at Senate minority leader, so his moral outrage about the leak seems a little bit odd. But at least, his public outcries against his colleagues are always on the record. And in his column today, Diaz seems to have had a change of heart about Sampson, now saying that with Democrats back in the majority, Sampson would be a “bionic reconstructed man” who is “better, faster, and stronger.”

Here’s the full release from Diaz:

To read the full article at City & State click here.

To read the rest of this City & State article click here.

A memo being circulated by Todd Breitbart, a Democratic redistricting attorney expert who has worked closely with the Senate Democrats, states that the proposed redistricting constitutional amendment released late last night would bring back prison-based gerrymandering.

In 2010, the practice, which had counted prison inmates in the largely upstate communities where they were held, rather than in the downstate communities where many of those inmates hailed from, was ended through legislation passed by the Democratic-controlled Senate. The Senate Republicans, who have since regained the majority, sued to overturn the law, but eventually dropped the litigation.

But Breitbart says the constitutional amendment, as proposed, would get rid of the 2010 law abolishing prison-based gerrymandering:

The amendment would reverse the one significant reform of New York legislative redistricting since the one-person-one-vote decisions of the 1960’s – the end of prison-based gerrymandering.

The reform enacted [in] 2010 specifically requires LATFOR to create a database in which inmates of state and federal prisons have been subtracted from their places of incarceration, and reallocated insofar as possible to their prior home addresses. LATFOR is further required to use the adjusted database in recommending Senate and Assembly districts to the Legislature.

The prisoner subtraction-and-reallocation law is in the Legislative Law, Section 83-m, Subsection 13, which would be completely superseded by the proposed amendment. The amendment abolishes LATFOR, but does not impose the prisoner subtraction-and-reallocation rule upon the new commission or the Legislature. It thus repeals the rule, and brings back prison-based gerrymandering.

To read the rest of the article click here.

Jacobs, who was elected to the Assembly in 1978, represents a district that covers primarily Flatbush and Midwood. There is a heavy Caribbean population and also a sizable Orthodox Jewish population. Bichotte is of Haitian descent, while Jacobs is Jewish.

Though the district is heavily minority because of a redistricting in 1982, Jacobs for years has nonetheless held onto the seat.

Bichotte, who did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment, is close to Councilman Jumaane Williams, who supported Bichotte’s 2010 district leader run.

Below is a video of Bichotte protesting with her political ally Mercedes Narcisse, who is also of Haitian descent, and is running for Councilman Lew Fidler’s seat against former Assemblyman Frank Seddio.

After Williams’ office got the letter today, Ringel said that he also reached out to two other Council members’ offices — those of Manhattan Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez and Queens Councilman Jim Gennaro — and both had also received it.

The letter to Williams was stamped on Feb. 5 by the postal service in Charlotte, NC, according to Ringel.

– Chris Bragg