Brooklyn Primary

The current representative in Congress for my Brooklyn neighborhood (NY District 11) is Major R. Owens (D) who won 94% of the vote in 2004, but he's retiring after 24 years. Evidently, he likes to put his political speeches in Congress into rap!

Anyway, we had a primary election in New York yesterday. Few races were competitive - such as Hillary Clinton for senator or Eliot Spitzer for governor. The only interesting race in my district was the Democratic primary for US House to replace Mr. Owens. The district is overwelmingly Democratic in party registration and has demographics of 59% African-American and 32% Jew. In the primary race, three of the democratic contenders were black (one of which was Owens' son Chris), and one was a white Jew named David Yassky, a Brooklyn city council member who moved recently moved to the district in order to be eligible to run for Congress.

The district was created to enable minority representation in Congress (read: elect an African-American) and so some black leaders were really upset with Yassky. Assuming voters only vote for members of the same race: if the 4 black candidates equally split the black vote, each would receive about 15% and Yassky could pull out a victory. Regardless, Yassky was endorsed by the NY Times and his campaign workers were out in force yesterday. At the subway stop near my apartment, one of them asked me to vote for Yassky and gave me some information about him.

Yassky finished 2nd in the primary with 26% of the vote, behind another city council member, Yvette Clark, who had 31%..

Because the district is so overwelmingly democratic, she will be my next representative in Congress. However, she comes with her own scandal: the NY Times reports that she lied about graduating from Oberlin College, claiming she had the degree when she was actually a few classes short.
Unfortunately, she'll probably stay in Congress for the next 24 years.