Eliot Engel leads the Foreign Affairs Committee, after first being elected to the House in 1988. Carolyn Maloney was the first woman to represent her district when she was elected in 1992. Yvette Clarke, serving since 2007, has delivered some of the most consistently progressive votes in her party.
All four New York House members are facing primary challenges from multiple insurgent candidates.
Almost a year before the June 2020 primary, more than a dozen Democrats in New York have declared their plans to run, forming one of the most contentious congressional fields in the country at this stage. They are targeting some of the country’s longest-serving or most powerful politicians — most as first-time or outsider candidates, and some in the same district.
The phenomenon is not unique: Progressives across the country are plotting primary battles, spurred on by the victories last year of figures such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as growing disenchantment with the Democratic Party’s old-guard wing. Early challengers have emerged in blue states including New Jersey and California.
But they have taken on added significance in New York, which is quickly emerging as one of the country’s most high-profile — and potentially consequential — battlegrounds.
Nearly a third of New York’s Democratic delegation was elected more than 20 years ago. Yet over the past year, progressive unrest coupled with solidly blue demographics have vaulted a new crop of activists and officials to power.
Of the 10 House races in New York featuring the longest-serving Democrats, eight already have primary contenders.
One of Nadler’s three challengers raised more than $250,000 last quarter. One of Engel’s was endorsed by Justice Democrats, the progressive group that recruited Ocasio-Cortez. In Brooklyn, Adem Bunkeddeko, a 31-year-old Harvard graduate and son of Ugandan refugees, plans on Monday to launch a new campaign against Clarke, after losing to her by fewer than 1,100 votes last year.
But the insurgents’ mobilization has also met hardened institutional resistance.
Spooked incumbents have been shoring up their progressive credentials. The House Democratic campaign arm has vowed not to work with political consultants who work for primary challengers.
And history weighs heavily in favor of incumbents. Between 1999 and 2018, just 49 incumbents in the House of Representatives lost their primaries — a victory rate of almost 99%. Last year, only two Democratic incumbents lost their renomination bids.
As a result, next year’s primaries in New York are likely to be more than a show of how Ocasio-Cortez’s primary victory over former Rep. Joseph Crowley has reverberated through the party. They will also test who can replicate that victory, and under what conditions.
“AOC taught them that anything is possible,” Steve Israel, a retired congressman from Long Island, said of the challengers. “But theory runs into reality at a certain point in politics. And the reality is that there’s not a single Democratic incumbent who’s going to be caught unawares.”
One potential make-or-break factor is the involvement of Ocasio-Cortez herself, whose endorsement is highly coveted among progressive candidates. A spokesman for her declined to say whether she would get involved in congressional primaries.
But Justice Democrats, a grassroots group sometimes seen as a proxy of sorts for its most famous ally, has already leapt into action.
The group last month endorsed Jamaal Bowman, a middle school principal in the Bronx, against Engel. It is one of just four endorsements the group has made of insurgent candidates in House races, a backing that has already paid dividends for Bowman.
He raised about $75,000 last quarter. None of Engel’s three primary challengers last year had raised any money at this stage in the campaign.
“This is a whole different ballgame than last time,” Bowman said of Justice Democrats’ role in the coming elections.
“They were working with an unknown. They were operating in the shadows for the majority of the contest,” he said of the group’s backing of Ocasio-Cortez in 2018. “Now, they’re coming out guns blazing.”
Candidates without high-profile left-wing backing have made inroads as well. Lindsey Boylan, a former aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, has raised more than $250,000 for her challenge to Nadler — a remarkable sum for a first-time candidate. (Of that total, $56,000 is earmarked for a general election and cannot be used in the primary; dozens of her donors have also given the maximum amount of $2,800.)
Boylan has also lent $75,000 to her campaign and has hired Peter Daou, a former top aide to Hillary Clinton, as a senior adviser.
Still, the uphill battle is clear. Engel easily dispatched his challengers last year. One of his intended opponents in 2020 has already dropped out, citing the influx of other progressive candidates.
“It could be one, it could be several, it could be none,” Arnold Linhardt, a consultant to Engel’s campaign, said of the number of challengers.
Engel has a record “probably as liberal as anybody,” Linhardt added. “A number of people running against him don’t really have strong grounds to stand on.”
He also cited Engel’s long tenure as an asset. “These are people with seniority, influence,” he said. For them to lose their seats, “it doesn’t work for the citizens of the state.”
Nadler has rarely faced primary opponents: Before 2016, he had not been challenged for 20 years. But he also has broad name recognition and last week said impeachment was “under consideration” as part of his committee’s investigation of the president, potentially weakening a central attack from opponents who say he has not been aggressive enough.
The Brooklyn race, between Bunkeddeko and Clarke, is one of the few expected rematches — and perhaps the one considered most likely to turn over. The contest last year was one of the closest congressional primaries in the country.
But it, too, may reveal what it means to run in a post-AOC world, as well as why insurgency is hardly a comprehensive label, or a guarantee of success.
Like Ocasio-Cortez, Bunkeddeko last year made anti-machine politics a centerpiece of his campaign, a theme he plans to repeat this year. “For a long time, the machine has picked run-of-the-mill politicians who aren’t getting anything done,” he said.
But while Ocasio-Cortez repeatedly emphasized how her primary rival, Crowley, no longer matched the demographics of the district, both Bunkeddeko and Clarke are black. And while Ocasio-Cortez ran to the left of Crowley, Bunkeddeko readily admits there is little daylight on policy between himself and Clarke, who has one of the most liberal voting records in Congress.
Another candidate may run to the left of both Bunkeddeko and Clarke: Isiah James, a 32-year-old military veteran, is running as a democratic socialist.
Rebecca Katz, a political consultant who is working with Justice Democrats, said the argument for new faces alone might be insufficient.
“Because AOC happened, and happened in our backyard, everyone is looking for the next AOC in New York,” she said. But “if people are going to really shake things up, they have to show a clear contrast.
“They are not going to just say, ‘Oh, you’re a challenger. OK, I’m with you,’” Katz said of progressive voters.
Israel, who once led the House Democrats’ campaign committee, said incumbents’ attention to their résumés and campaign operations over the past year would add an extra hurdle.
“The energy is almost nuclear” among progressives, he said. “But I just think that if you have a Nadler or an Engel, who has consistently stood up to President Trump and whose ideology aligns with primary voters, it’s hard to make the case that those members should be replaced.”
Clarke’s campaign did not return a request for comment, but she said this year that she had reorganized her district office and was courting the more gentrified parts of her district, which had supported Bunkeddeko.
Still, Bunkeddeko said the enhanced attention would work to his benefit, too.
“What will be different is the level of attention that we didn’t necessarily get the last time around,” he said. “That’s an opportunity for us.”
Boylan said she was not dismayed by the idea of facing a prepared Nadler.
“I don’t want to surprise Congressman Nadler,” she said. “I want him to try as hard as he can, and obviously I want to win. But it doesn’t serve the district to not have a genuine race.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.