Queens voters cast ballots in hotly contested primary races
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Queens voters turned out to the polls on Tuesday for a number of contested races throughout the borough. Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach
By Ryan Schwach & Jacob Kaye
New York’s heat wave may have broken just before Tuesday’s primary elections, but a number of contested races throughout Queens had yet to cool down.
Across the World’s Borough on Tuesday, a relatively small number of voters headed to the polls to cast their ballots in a number of hotly contested Democratic primary elections – and one Republican primary – in Queens.
All eyes were on the Queens County Democratic Party, which was fighting to retain or win around a half dozen seats where candidates of theirs faced serious challenges from insurgent campaigns.
At least three Assembly seats were on the line, as were two Civil Court judicial spots and the Surrogate’s Court bench, which the county party has controlled for decades. In several of those races, insurgent candidates vastly outraised and outspent candidates backed by the Queens Dems – a factor in a local race that could make all the difference.
But party-backed candidates and insurgent candidates alike across the borough Tuesday morning appeared mostly calm and optimistic, even as voter turnout in Queens and the city at large appeared to be low.
Through 3 p.m. on Tuesday, 33,459 voters cast ballots in Queens. About 14,280 of those votes came from voters who cast their ballots during the 10-day early voting period that preceded election day. With around 736,751 active registered Democrats, approximately 4.5 percent of voters made their voice heard with six hours left before the polls closed.
But those who did vote said they did so not because of any specific issue or race but out of their sense of civic duty.
“I try to vote every election,” said Cherisse Hendrix, a voter in Elmhurst.
The Eagle visited a number of districts home to competitive primaries on Tuesday and spoke with voters there, as well as with candidates hoping to get out the vote and change the minds of undecided voters in their favor.
The race for Queens’ only open seat
The First Baptist Church of East Elmhurst was buzzing Tuesday morning. In many ways, it was the center of the race for the borough’s only open Assembly seat.
Larinda Hooks and Hiram Monserrate battled it out for Queens’ only open Assembly seat on Tuesday. Hooks voted alongside Assemblymember Jeffrion Aubry, whose impending retirement created the opening for the seat. Eagle photos by Jacob Kaye
The impending retirement of longtime Assemblymember Jeffrion Aubry made it so Tuesday’s Democratic primary election was the first time in around three decades that the incumbent’s name wasn’t on the ballot in Assembly District 35.
Instead, voters saw a matchup between Aubry’s hand-picked successor, Larinda Hooks, and his longtime foe, Hiram Monserrate, the former elected official who was booted from the State Senate after being convicted of misdemeanor assault against his then-girlfriend and who later served time in federal prison for corruption charges.
Monserrate has attempted to get back into public office nearly every year since his release from prison. He’s challenged Aubry – and failed – multiple times. But without the incumbent running, Monserrate had as good an opportunity as he’s ever had to get back to representing East Elmhurst, LeFrak City, and parts of Corona, Elmhurst and Rego Park in Albany.
Throughout his campaign, Monserrate has claimed that voters should give him a second chance and that he’s learned from his past – his campaign website does not refer to his past convictions and instead lists his time in prison on his resume as a “political hiatus.”
But voters the Eagle spoke with on Tuesday appeared to agree.
“We all have a past,” said Cherisse Hendrix, an East Elmhurst voter who cast a ballot for the former councilmember and senator.
Madelyn Smiley voted for Hooks in the Assembly race but voted for Monserrate in his race for a district leader position.
“[The convictions] were a long time ago and people change,” Smiley said. “He seems like he’ll do a better job, now that he’s been busted.”
But not everyone is willing to forgive and forget.
“Notwithstanding whatever reformation process might have occurred, Hiram disgraced this community with his behavior,” Aubry told the Eagle outside the poll site, where he was stumping for Hooks. “I would never want him to take my place.”
Though Aubry made a career of passing legislation aimed at improving the lives of the formerly incarcerated, he said for Monserrate, some jobs should be off limits.
“I afforded him a lot of rights,” Aubry said. “That doesn't necessarily mean that he should hold the kind of job that he wants to hold.”
The day before the primary, Betsy Gotbaum, a former colleague of Monserrate’s in the City Council and the current executive director of good government group Citizens Union, called Monserrate’s bid for office “alarming”
When asked about Gotbaum’s comments on Tuesday, Monserrate called the former public advocate a “tremendous person” and said that it was ultimately up to the voters to decide whether or not he should be given another shot in public office.
“The bottom line is, we should never be judged by our worst moments in life,” Monserrate said. “The incidents that happened to me close to 20 years ago are in my past. I've learned from them, I've grown.”
If Monserrate wins, it’s unclear how many elected officials will be willing to work with him in Albany. He may also run into issues at home with pols representing his district at different levels of government.
On Tuesday, around a half dozen Queens County Democratic Party-backed candidates and elected officials rallied around Hooks outside of the East Elmhurst church. Even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is no friend of the Queens Dems but who shares constituents with AD35, came out to support Hooks.
“I am a collaborator, I build coalitions with everyone,” Hooks said. “It doesn't really matter what end of the spectrum that the electeds are from, they all are here to support me.”
The DSA and Dems face off
In Sunnyside, voters made their picks in one of the most anticipated Queens primaries this election season.
There, Democratic Socialists of America-backed Claire Valdez and Queens Dems-backed Johanna Carmona both tried to unseat Assemblymember Juan Ardila. Both Valdez and Carmona jumped into the race last year when it was reported that two women claimed that Ardila had sexually assaulted them at a 2015 college party, around seven years before he took office.
The allegations and subsequent calls for Ardia’s resignation made it so the incumbent raised little money this election season and saw virtually no support from his elected colleagues or any political institutions.
As such, the race appeared on Tuesday to have come down to Valdez and Carmona, in a now-classic fight between the more progressive wing of the Democratic party and its more moderate wing.
There was a hotly contested race in Assembly District 37, where DSA-backed Claire Valdez faced off against Queens County Democratic Party-backed Johanna Carmona to unseat incumbent Juan Ardila, who faced sexual assault allegations last year. Eagle file photo by Ryan Schwach
Valdez was campaigning outside P.S 93 in her hometown of Ridgewood on Tuesday, alongside State Senator Julia Salazar.
“I’m feeling really good…the response has been really positive,” she said. “We want to make sure that people understand our vision from Queens.”
One voter Danny Roberts, a fellow Ridgewood resident, was all in on Valdez’s vision, particularly when it comes to housing.
“I am altogether in favor of a sort of pro-tenant housing platform that encourages things like Good Cause Eviction and rent regulation,” he said. “In addition to constructing new affordable units.”
Roberts also expressed his desire for some change to the political status quo.
“It's no secret that in Queens especially, but in New York broadly, there is a certain machine politics that has been the status quo of local governing for time immemorial,” he said. “I think that there are a lot of issues bearing down on New Yorkers that some real institutional change could help.”
The Eagle made multiple attempts to reach Carmona and her campaign on Tuesday and in the days leading up to the election but received no response.
Tensions boil over in Flushing
Over in the bustling neighborhood of Flushing, incumbent Ron Kim was in a tight three-way race to retain his seat.
Kim faced a challenge from Chinese American activist and business owner Yi Andy Chen, and perennial candidate Dao Yin.
By Tuesday, the race had mostly come down to just Kim and Chen, who vastly outraised and outspent the incumbent in the race.
In Flushing, the race for Assembly District 40 came down to incumbent Ron Kim and Yi Andy Chen, who’s supporters came out in numbers on election day. Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach
On the corner near P.S. 20, both campaigns exchanged jeers back and forth, chanting their chosen candidates’ name while a looped recording repeatedly echoed the importance of voting.
Both leading candidates spoke with supporters and gave interviews to English and Chinese language news outlets observing the rising tensions between the campaigns.
In his last election cycle in 2022, Kim narrowly squeaked by in both the primary and the general. Observers had predicted a similar difficulty for Kim in 2024.
Chen, who only moved into the district three years ago, raised significant contributions and attacked Kim on his alleged shift on public safety issues.
Chen’s campaign’s talking points resonated with at least one voter, Jerry Cheng, who told the Eagle he voted for the challenger because of his support for law enforcement.
“I think he pays more attention to safety,” Cheng said.
Cheng lives in a nearby Flushing co-op, and doesn’t feel as safe walking the streets as he did a few years ago, he said. The Flushing resident said he remembered Chen going door-to-door in his building.
“He went to every single unit…he is doing a very good job, and really paying attention to the middle class people in Flushing,” Cheng said.
Regardless, Kim said he felt better than ever, and was running his “most organized” campaign in a dozen years.
“We have a lot of excitement,” Kim told the Eagle as he marched with supporters from a rally at the Murray Hill LIRR station. “We’ve had more voters who have identified their support for us than ever before.”
Kim said he felt good partially because of support he’s received in the Chinese American community, which he has had to pull from his two Chinese American opponents, Chen and Yin.
“We’re building new bridges,” he said, adding that Tuesday comes down to the “bread and butter” of campaigning: face-to-face time with voters.
Chen – who deployed a noticeably large number of volunteers to Flushing corners on Tuesday – also said he felt good.
“I feel positive about talking to voters and understanding their issues,” he told the Eagle. “I have been hearing [support] from very diverse voters, from parents to seniors, the Asian community, the Latino community…we need a change.”
Mere hours before polls opened on Tuesday, an already contentious race got even more contentious when Kim claimed that Chen’s father assaulted one of his campaign volunteers outside a poll site on Monday.
“There was only one crime that was committed, which was my opponent's father assaulting a young volunteer yesterday,” Kim said on Tuesday. “It was like a whole week of my opponent's parents harassing and chasing [volunteers].”
Chen and his campaign denied the incident occurred as Kim described it, and said it was Kim’s volunteer who snatched literature from Chen’s mother, instigating some sort of a conflict.
“Prove it, show some proof,” Chen said when speaking to the Eagle outside P.S 20. “It's not up to what he says that our volunteer does something, or his volunteer did something, it's about what the actual police report, what actually happened.”
Both sides say they had filed police reports in the matter as of midday on Tuesday.
The race for the bench
Though few voters the Eagle spoke with on Tuesday were aware of it, a major race for a little-known judicial seat was underway.
Queens Supreme Court Justice Cassandra Johnson and Manhattan Civil Court Judge Wendy Li were locked in a battle for Queens Surrogate’s Court judge. Johnson was backed by the Queens County Democratic Party in the race, while Li was running essentially as an insurgent candidate.
The Queens County Democratic Party has for years controlled the court. Not only has the party’s chosen candidate sat atop the court for decades, but the party’s attorneys, Sweeney, Reich & Bolz, also hold the coveted public administrator role within the court, which largely deals with wills of the deceased and guardianship issues.
Queens County Democratic Party judicial candidates Cassandra Johnson, Amish Doshi, Sharifa Nasser-Cuéllar, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Assembly candidate Larinda Hooks pose for a photo in East Elmhurst. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
Li had centered her campaign around claims that she would free the court of “political influence” if elected.
But the Civil Court judge was dealt a major blow earlier this month when both the Queens County Bar Association and the New York City Bar Association said they found her to be “not approved” for the position while finding Johnson to be “qualified.”
Multiple attempts to contact Li on Tuesday were unsuccessful.
Johnson told the Eagle on Tuesday that she was feeling good about her chances based on the turnout she saw at voting sites throughout the borough.
But even at busy poll sites, there was no guarantee voters knew much about the Surrogate's Court or the two candidates hoping to run it.
“I was not tapped into the Surrogate’s race” said Danny Roberts, a voter in Ridgewood.
Voter David Stein did some research and a little reading on the candidates, but still came to his polling place wishing he knew more.
“There's never enough out there,” Stein said. “I'm always frustrated that the paper of record, [The New York Times], doesn't cover New York politics or New York crime, and doesn't cover New York anything, and that you can read about a the national races, and have more info than actually knowing what's happening in New York City, let alone the boroughs.”
Johnson said that the information gap about the court was at the center of her campaign, which she used to “educate voters on the Surrogate’s Court.”
“Each time I've run, I've used it as an opportunity to educate voters, and the community generally, about what the different courts do,” she said.
Voters were similarly unopinionated on the race for two vacancies on the borough’s Civil Court.
There, Queens Dems-backed candidates and attorneys Sharifa Nasser-Cuéllar and Amish Doshi faced off against attorneys Julie Milner and Glenda Hernandez.
Both Milner and Hernandez were backed in the race by Monserrate, who has had success getting his judicial candidates onto the bench in recent years even when challenging a party-backed candidate.
The Eagle spoke with both Nasser-Cuéllar and Doshi outside of an East Elmhurst polling site on Tuesday about how they felt about the race, where something as simple as the order in which the candidates are listed on the ballot can play a major role in the results.
Nasser-Cuéllar was listed first on the ballot, which she chalked up to the “grace of god.”
“I got number one on the ballot and I’m very excited about that,” she said. “But it doesn’t mean I sat back. We’ve been at it, we’ve been going to events, we’ve been out in the community, we’ve been doing everything we have to do to win this.”
Doshi, who was listed last on the ballot, said that he was trying not to put too much stock into ballot placement.
“It’s the luck of the draw,” Doshi said. “It’s one of those things that’s not in my control.”
What was in his control, however, was the effort he made to meet with voters and let them know where his name would appear.
“I would have campaigned the same no matter what number I was,” he said. “I give it 100 percent.”
Check back with the Eagle for the results from Tuesday’s primary elections.
