There was a debate last night between two incumbent Democrats who are now facing off in a single district. Rep. Jerry Nadler and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, both in their mid 70s, have been representing different parts of Manhattan for decades. Nadler represented the Upper West Side and Maloney the Upper East Side. But thanks to a fiasco created by state Democrats, a judge ruled electoral maps in the state were heavily gerrymandered. He handed the creation of new maps to a special master who wound up combining parts of the two districts into one. That led to a showdown between the two incumbents:
About 60 percent of Maloney’s old district is in the new one, but it was Nadler who announced his campaign first and outright refused to run in the 10th, which included the downtown turf that he has represented for decades. He said he wasn’t willing to be the congressman for a district he didn’t live in — though he was more than willing, according to Maloney, to tell her to move downtown. She refused. “He said, ‘Step aside, I’m running.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m running too. I’m not leaving,’” Maloney says. “He said, ‘I’m gonna win.’ I said, ‘I’m gonna win.’ We haven’t spoken since.”
But they did speak last night during the debate and, by all accounts, it was mostly cordial.
If fireworks were expected, then the debate was something of a washout: The two longtime Democrats stood and sat side by side, each collegially allowing the other to recite decades of accomplishments and showing an unusual degree of deference.
…even as the two essentially made cases for their political survival, Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney largely refrained from attacking each other or offering strong reasons for voters to choose one of them over the other. When given the opportunity to cross-examine an opponent, both chose to question Mr. Patel.
Ms. Maloney even admitted she “didn’t want to run” against Mr. Nadler, her “good friend” and ally…
It was only toward the end of Tuesday’s debate that Ms. Maloney seemed to set her sights on Mr. Nadler. In a conversation about infrastructure, she argued that he had wrongfully taken credit for helping fund the Second Avenue Subway, a long-sought project in her district.
There may not have been fireworks but the NY Post suggests the gracious behavior didn’t run very deep:
Maloney and Nadler, with six decades as friends in Congress between them, are now cordial enemies. In saying how much she regretted having to run against her old “friend” Nadler, Maloney sounded just as sincere as a Mafia don mournful over axing an uncooperative deputy.
For his part, when called on to ask another candidate a question, Nadler invited Patel to slam Maloney’s voting record (over her vote for the Iraq War).
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That may be true but the only exchange that really made news outside New York City was this one in which both Nadler and Maloney declined to support President Biden running for reelection.
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This morning New York Magazine published a story about the ongoing competition. It’s currently headlined, “Only a Couple of New York Neighbors Can Fight This Nasty” but the URl suggests the original headline was “Jerry Nadler and Carolyn Maloney really hate each other.”
The two liberal stalwarts are colliding in an August 23 primary, locked in a war for political survival. Almost nothing is off limits now, including the subway. “She’ll deny it, but I was instrumental in getting the Second Avenue subway running,” Nadler tells me on a recent sweltering Saturday at Old John’s Diner, one of his regular Upper West Side haunts. “Carolyn came to me and asked me to get the funding, and I got it.”
Maloney is furious that Nadler, a longtime transportation Committee member, would boast about securing funds for the subway line that runs through the heart of her old Upper East Side district. “I do not know of one project he has brought into the West Side. That’s what his constituents tell me,” she says over oatmeal and berries at her own neighborhood mainstay, the Mansion on York Avenue. “He was not at the groundbreaking, he was not at the ribbon-cutting, he was not at any of the meetings I had with the MTA. We had hearings on it in the city, and he never came to any of them. He’s lying.”
The deciding factor in this particular race could turn out to be an endorsement:
Hanging over it all is the endorsement decision from the New York Times editorial board. There is no district in America where the Paper of Record’s sign-off is more crucial, particularly to those on the West Side who treat the Times as a totem. With his votes against Iraq and for the Iran deal, Nadler is thought to have the edge with the board’s liberals, though Maloney, as a woman and fierce advocate for abortion rights in a post-Roe world, is not out of the hunt.
A poll reported yesterday showed Nadler and Maloney are in a dead heat with just under three weeks left to go. But the third candidate in the race also has pretty substantial support so anything could happen.
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Whoever wins, nothing much will change in New York though things are likely to change nationally. Republicans are still favored to take the House and that means either Nadler or Maloney will be in the minority. They won’t have quite the same opportunities for grandstanding they’ve had for the past few years. Whoever wins, this is likely to turn out to be a pyrrhic victory.
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