After former Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer lost a bid for City Hall in 2005, one politician who was regularly touted by Democratic Party pols as a serious contender for citywide office is ex-Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, who now works as a domestic adviser in the Obama administration. “We'll have to wait awhile before someone else emerges. I told [Carrion] that he actually had a chance to become city comptroller,” recalls Badillo. “I also told him that he'd be lost in the bureaucracy of the White House if he took that job, which he has been. Nobody has ever heard anything from him since then, right?”
City Limits Magazine
Spring 2009:
A Week in the Life of the New York City Council
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Meanwhile, the challenge for other ethnic groups in New York hasn't been a lack of high-profile, citywide leader – but rather the sheer lack of any elected officeholders at all. The South Asian community, which boasts some 300,000 people, has been one of the city's fastest-growing populations in recent years, with a large segment of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants in the Jackson Heights section of Queens.
For an emerging generation of South Asians, there's a growing desire to participate in local politics. “We're seeing an awakening,” explains John Albert, 37 – a community organizer who was born in Chennai, India and made an unsuccessful 2002 bid for an Assembly seat in Flushing. “The South Asian vote is being diluted given how the district lines are drawn in Eastern Queens, and lawmakers will have to address that. When there's no representation, the nuanced points of policy that impacts the overall community doesn't get addressed by lawmakers.”
And while more electoral candidates are projected to emerge from New York's under-represented communities, experts caution that campaigns strictly rooted in blanket identity politics will be difficult to wage due to population shifts unfolding in many neighborhoods. “Like everything else, people make assumptions that simply having numbers is enough,” explains Jose Sanchez, a professor of political science at Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus. “But if you look at many Latino neighborhoods, for example, you aren't talking about one group. There's Puerto Ricans, Salvadorians, Mexicans, Cubans and Dominicans. And even though they speak the same language – there's different interests at work.”
Meanwhile, prospective contenders face plenty of other obstacles. “We've seen so many candidates from immigrant communities fail because they don't know what it takes to run a tactical campaign,” says Hong of NYIC, citing campaign financing difficulties and the lack of access to experienced consultants. “Anyone can be encouraged to run. But who's going to give them the technical assistance or help them meet the basic threshold to run a credible campaign?”
Any serious candidate knows those are real issues. But Reshma Saujani says something else is driving her uphill battle against a popular incumbent: “The stories that you hear from people across the district about the economic hardships that they're facing will break your heart. And that's what we're keeping at the forefront of this campaign.”
