Tuesday, June 19, 2018

New York Today: Primary Races to Watch



We are a week away from the primaries.

Democrats and Republicans in New York are holding nominating contests next Tuesday for federal seats, including the House and the Senate. (State primaries, which include the governor’s race, will take place in September.)

To get us up to speed on the most important and interesting races in the state, we spoke to Shane Goldmacher, the chief political correspondent on The Times’s Metro desk.
Here’s what he’s watching:

A heated race in New York City’s Trump Country. “The most interesting Republican primary, certainly in New York, possibly in the country, is in Staten Island,” Mr. Goldmacher said. Michael Grimm once represented the 11th Congressional District, which includes Staten Island and parts of southern Brooklyn, but resigned the seat in 2014 after pleading guilty to tax fraud. (He served seven months in prison.) Now, he’d like his old job back. He’s challenging Representative Dan Donovan, and the two are competing to see who’s more aligned with President Trump — the president endorsed Mr. Donovan, but the swaggering Mr. Grimm is the more Trump-like figure.

Democratic upstarts in the city. A group of incumbent Democrats in New York are facing primary challengers, many of whom are first-time candidates under the age of 35. Representative Joseph Crowley, who some see as possibly replacing Nancy Pelosi as the head of the House Democrats, is being challenged for the first time since 2004, by the progressive candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Representatives Carolyn Maloney (Manhattan’s East Side and parts of Queens), Eliot Engel (the Bronx), Yvette Clarke (central Brooklyn) and Gregory W. Meeks (southern Queens) are also facing insurgents within their party.

Click here for the full article. 

Source: The New York Times (via Empire Report New York) 

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