Dianne Morales Makes Her Move
A once unknown nonprofit executive is trying to lay claim to the progressive lane in the race for NYC mayor
By Ross Barkan
New York City is a strange place. Enormous, multifarious, infuriating, lovely, and mythic, it is like nowhere else in America. There are cities within the city, towns within the neighborhoods, international outposts arrayed on street corners. Pandemic-ravaged, it is still a resilient place, and the comeback, when it arrives, will be glorious.
The political scene is trickier than meets the eye. The city, for various parts of the last century, has been a hotbed of socialist activity. The richest men in the world live here. New York is the city of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, and Vito Marcantonio. It is also the city of Donald J. Trump and Rudolph Giuliani. All kinds of currents course through here.
Are we a progressive city? With the decline of the outer borough white ethnics who furiously sloughed off the radicalism of their ancestors, we are much more than we used to be. Today’s Giulianis won’t get elected here. We’re also a city where Trump grew his vote total in 2020, particularly among Latinos. The Democratic electorate skews more left, of course, and that’s how mayoral races get decided. Bill de Blasio won in 2013 seizing the progressive lane in the Democratic primary, Bloomberg-bashing his way to a commanding victory. The progressive infrastructure in New York has only grown stronger since then, with the remarkable rise of the DSA, Justice Democrats, and the relative durability of the Working Families Party and other left-wing nonprofit actors.
The debates of 2013 would seem alien to today’s left. John Liu, the city comptroller, was mocked for saying he’d support legalizing weed. De Blasio thought a $9 minimum wage was high enough; Liu was the radical for saying it should be $11.50. There was no such thing as defund or abolish the police. There was curtailing stop-and-frisk, and by what degree. Dov Hikind, an Obama-hating Islamophobe, was regarded as a kingmaker in the Democratic primary.
The 2021 Democratic primary for mayor sits far to the left of these debates. No one wants to lower the minimum wage from $15 an hour. No one is talking about ripping up bike lanes. No one, publicly at least, is against the current push in Albany to legalize marijuana.
But there are policy differences among the major candidates, and no one in the next tier has been able to excite the young, new left as much as Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive. For months, particularly after the entrance of Andrew Yang into the mayoral race, I argued that leftists had compromised choices among the top tier candidates who will likely become mayor. I still think this is true. Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, used to be a Republican and empowered a member of the Independent Democratic Conference. Scott Stringer, who has won endorsements from several leading leftist politicians, including Jamaal Bowman and Julia Salazar, has largely existed for most of his career on a conventional, center-left ideological continuum, occasionally falling to the right of de Blasio. Maya Wiley, who is courting leftists and upscale liberals like Stringer, made her name in city politics as de Blasio’s lawyer. And Yang is paying Bradley Tusk, a leftist-hating millionaire Uber investor who worked for Michael Bloomberg, to advise him.
This week, Morales announced she had finally qualified for public matching funds, which will entitle her campaign to an 8:1 match on small donations—if the City Campaign Finance Board approves her, as she has promised. With less than $300,000 in the bank, the matching funds payout could provide a significant lift, moving her into seven-figures territory. She will still have far less than Stringer, Yang, and Adams, who could each end up spending $10 million or so by the end of the race, but she will have enough to remain in the primary until its conclusion and garner a significant amount of media attention.
This by, itself, is an accomplishment. Morales fans may want more from me—how do you know she won’t just go out and win it?—and my rebuttal would be, plainly, that going on television in New York City can cost $1 million a week, and only a few campaigns can afford that sort of rate. There is no winning campaign, in the Covid era especially, without heavy TV expenditures. This recent tweet from Nate Silver, which argued New York’s primary electorate isn’t as liberal as it appears, unintentionally underscored my point. Silver argued Andrew Cuomo’s drubbing of Cynthia Nixon in 2018 proved New York wasn’t ready for a leftist governor, particularly in the five boroughs, where Cuomo did quite well. My rejoinder to Silver was that Cuomo blew $27 million on his race and Nixon spent around $2 million. The summer of 2018 was nothing but Cuomo for governor ads repeating on the TV and radio. Nixon never had a shot.
So yes, without many millions, Morales cannot break into the first tier. But her candidacy is already starting to remind me of another from not too long ago: Andrew Yang’s. Morales fans, at this point, will recoil. Leftists have grown to loathe Yang, the front-runner, in this race, though he’s occasionally been open to their ideas, like decriminalizing sex work, opening a public bank, and embracing community land trusts. Astute readers may figure out I’m referring here to Yang’s presidential campaign, not the current one, when he rose from obscurity to excite a large number of people and build a formidable social media following while polling unexpectedly well but winning few votes. In a field with Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and a slew of other U.S. senators, Yang could never be taken seriously by enough Democrats as a viable opponent for Trump. But his upbeat campaigning, savvy messaging, and ability to connect with young voters made him more of a contender than the current vice president of the United States, and politicians like Beto O’ Rourke, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Cory Booker.
Morales occupies that space now. Through her ebullience, charisma, and ability to connect online—essential for all modern campaigns, but even more necessary now with the pandemic limiting in-person events—she has grown a Twitter following that has surpassed Stringer’s campaign account and threatens to overtake Adams’. Her campaign is hawking cheeky t-shirts and crafting Morales-themed sneakers. It’s the sort of stuff you need to get attention in a sleepy race. So far, it’s working.
None of this should be undersold. Having run a race myself, I know how hard it is. Wiley, with her own formidable social media following grown from her days as an MSNBC analyst, has not captivated online progressives in the same way, though she’d like to. Stringer, with his array of endorsements, hasn’t either. Morales is, in some ways, outflanking them both, threatening to gobble up voters in the new class coalition, which may be as large as 20 percent of the primary electorate, in the estimation of veteran Democratic analyst Jerry Skurnik. (Skurnik defines new class as white progressive voters in Manhattan, parts of Brooklyn and Queens.)
Morales is certainly a favorite of DSA members, though the organization will not formally endorse in the mayoral race, preferring to focus on City Council contests. She is like Yang in another way too: she quietly resists ideological labels. “I’ve been really reluctant to label myself in any way, shape or form, or try to talk about, claiming a lane, or fitting in a box. I think my positions speak for themselves,” she told City and State earlier this year. “I'm not a part of DSA or any of that. Do I see a lot of similarities between my beliefs and the things that they put out? Yes. Do I have some problems with some of the structures or machinations of that organization? Yeah.”