On Wednesday afternoon, when I reached her by phone, State Senator Alessandra Biaggi was making her way from the Bronx River Parkway to the Saw Mill, in the midst of a move to her new home about 10 miles north of White Plains. “I’m literally on the way,” she told me. “I’m not even kidding.”
I could not help imagining her gunning the engine, with a kayak, perhaps, lashed to the roof of her car, a coffee maker and a bag of hastily bought essentials from Bed Bath & Beyond in the back seat. Four years ago, when she was elected to the New York State Senate as a progressive to represent a large swath of the Bronx and southern Westchester, she had been living in Pelham. In the spring, when the 17th Congressional District was completely redrawn, she decided to run to represent it; now the primary was four weeks away, and she was relocating.
The change of address was unlikely to quiet accusations of a dubious territorial claim coming from the opposition, which in this case takes the formidable shape of a long-serving member of Congress: Sean Patrick Maloney, the well-funded and powerful chairman of the Democrats’ congressional fund-raising arm whose campaign website features a movie-poster image of him jogging along the Hudson River, looking ironman capable.
Mr. Maloney lives with his husband and three children in the Hudson Valley, which makes up part of the 17th House District’s new geography. So while he hasn’t had to grab any packing tape himself, his quick decision to run in this newly configured political landscape and not in his existing district, set off a chain reaction of displacement and disillusion, illustrating the left’s easy will to self-canibalize.
The chief result was to nudge out the freshman congressman who for more than a year has represented what is now the old territory of the 17th — Mondaire Jones, the Black, gay progressive who grew up in Section 8 housing in the area who was then left to enter a crowded Democratic field for the 10th District seat encompassing Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, where recent polling put him in fourth place.
Writing in The Intercept, Ryan Grim called Mr. Maloney’s play, which would help secure him a safer general-election win, perhaps “the most brazenly selfish district hop in American political history.”
From her car, Ms. Biaggi wanted to stress at the outset that she would not have run in this race had Mondaire Jones been in it, given their ideological alignment. But she and Mr. Maloney, a Clintonian pragmatist, were not of one mind about many things. She considered him overly solicitous of Wall Street, having voted to roll back certain provisions of Dodd-Frank legislation, which tightened regulation of the banking industry in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
The defense from the Maloney camp has relied on the idea that the law unduly oppressed small regional banks and credit unions, which were not the primary agents of a catastrophic venality. But the new rules, passed in 2018, ultimately left fewer than 10 banks in the country subject to more rigorous federal oversight, releasing thousands of institutions from more strenuous monitoring.
“Sean has a record of showing that his loyalties rest with his donors,’’ Ms. Biaggi said, but “people are begging us to act with fervor on their behalf.” Her opponent’s camp has pointed out that he supports a Green New Deal and that he helped to pass a law prohibiting oil barges from anchoring in the Hudson. As his campaign spokeswoman Mia Ehrenberg put it: “Only one candidate in this primary has passed legislation through the House to get money out of politics and earned the endorsement of End Citizens United: Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney.”
The day before I spoke with Ms. Biaggi, the Working Families Party, which has endorsed her, released an ad attacking Mr. Maloney’s record on the Affordable Care Act, but the situation was more complicated than the spot suggested. In 2015, he backed a Republican measure to repeal the medical device tax, which imposed fees on makers of X-ray machines and other equipment that would have raised $29 billion over a decade to help fund health care reform.
This has been a particular sticking point for the Biaggi campaign. A New York Times editorial, seven years ago, called the repeal “a terrible idea” that had been given “a veneer of respectability’’ because liberals like Elizabeth Warren and Al Franken, who had a significant number of medical manufacturers in their states, supported it. On several other occasions, though, Mr. Maloney voted to protect Obamacare.
The eagerness of voters to untangle complex policy positions from spin in a primary during the last few days of August, the most somnolent week in the Western calendar, is likely to match their interest in wearing Shetland wool in a heat wave. The forces of image and endorsements will be even more likely to guide them.
Mr. Maloney, who is well known in the district, has the support of dozens of local officials and various labor unions. Ms. Biaggi has been endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and so to some extent the race will serve as a test of progressive firepower in the current political moment. Last month, Jessica Cisneros, a Texas congressional candidate who challenged a nine-term Democratic incumbent from the left, failed in her effort, in a race decided by fewer than 300 votes.
Despite her relative anonymity in the newly mapped 17th District, Ms. Biaggi might be well served by the pandemic exodus of liberal New Yorkers to the Hudson Valley, a bloc that would reliably stand by, for example, her staunch support of bail reform. On the whole, though, the district leans more to the right than the one she currently represents. Rockland County is home to many in law enforcement and a significant Orthodox Jewish community.
But Ms. Biaggi has famously defied consensus before. To win her seat in the Senate, she delivered a stunning defeat to Jeff Klein, the head of a group of obstructionist Democrats who caucused with Republicans. When she arrived in Albany, she became the chairwoman of the committee on ethics and successfully fought for stronger laws around sexual harassment and abuse, which had plagued the State Capitol for decades.
Recent polls from the Maloney and Biaggi camps both show Mr. Maloney ahead but by different margins. In each case though, the sample size of respondents was too small — in Mr. Maloney’s poll, only 233 people were surveyed — to feel meaningful. Early voting begins in two weeks.
