District 2 City Councilmember Carlina Rivera made it official yesterday, announcing that she is running for Congress in the newly redrawn 10th District that spans parts of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.
It's a highly coveted seat, with competition that includes former Mayor Bill de Blasio, Rep. Mondaire Jones, Assemblymember Yuh-Line Niou, Assemblymember Jo Anne Simon, former New York City Comptroller Elizabeth Holtzman and Dan Goldman, former lead counsel for House Democrats during the first impeachment of Donald Trump.
In interviews yesterday, Rivera emphasized her local roots.
"I was born in Bellevue Hospital. I grew up in Section 8 housing on the Lower East Side. I went to school here. I played basketball here. Every milestone in my life is here," she told
City & State.
The new 10th District leans heavily Democratic, spanning all of Manhattan below 14th Street and areas of Brooklyn spanning Dumbo and Brooklyn Heights to Park Slope all the way to Sunset Park and Borough Park. Whomever wins the Democratic primary in August is expected to cruise to a November general election victory.
First elected to the Council in 2017, Rivera now represents several Manhattan neighborhoods where she'll be wooing voters, including parts of Chinatown and the Lower East Side, the East Village and Alphabet City.
In a phone interview on Tuesday, Rivera listed housing and climate change among the top issues in the district and touted her efforts to expand affordable housing development and climate resiliency.
A POLITICO analysis of the 2018 Democratic primary for governor — the last year New Yorkers voted in a midterm election — showed that parts of Rivera's lower Manhattan district, including Chinatown and the Lower East Side, voted in far fewer numbers than Park Slope and Cobble Hill. Not only did those Brooklyn areas lead turnout in the newly drawn congressional seat, they are consistently among the highest-performing districts across the city, election returns and data from the CUNY’s Center for Urban Research show. They are also the home turf of competitors, including de Blasio and Simon.
And...
While she doesn’t have the baggage of former Mayor Bill de Blasio ... she also doesn't have his near-universal name recognition. What's more, Rivera hails from lower Manhattan and hasn't appeared on the ballot in some of the most civically active neighborhoods within the district, which de Blasio represented for eight years in the Council.
While she grew up in the district — unlike fellow hopeful Rep. Mondaire Jones , whose nearest office is more than 20 miles away — she now lives eight blocks north of its boundaries. And she has just begun to fundraise, whereas Jones already has $2.9 million in the bank as of the most recent filing.
Still, her team believes she will prevail, as outlined in an email — titled "Carlina Rivera NY-10 Path to Victory" — sent to media outlets yesterday.
We believe that Council Member Rivera has the clearest and most straightforward path to victory in NY-10 of any announced or potential candidate in the race.
Rivera has a reliable voter base in Council District 2, the clear ability to win Hispanic voters across Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, a history of winning in NYCHA and housing cooperatives, and a proven appeal to high-turnout liberal voters in racially and economically diverse neighborhoods throughout the district who aligned with Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia in the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary.
No other candidate in this race combines such a strong existing constituency with such a clear path to building a district-wide coalition, and no other candidate has been able to secure such a strong level of support from elected officials both within the district and around the city.
A recent poll conducted by PIX11/Emerson College/The Hill (before Rivera entered the race) found that 77% of Democratic voters in the district are undecided on who they would vote for in the Aug. 23 primary.
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For further listening: Carlina Rivera on Running for Congress in the New NY-10 (Podcast at Gotham Gazette)
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