By Colin Campbell
Collages by Rachel Day
It launched Chuck Schumer. Anthony Weiner. Geraldine Ferraro. It even belonged briefly to Joseph Pulitzer. But on September 13, voters handed New York’s ninth congressional district seat to Bob Turner, the first Republican to win it since Andrew Petersen ousted David J. O’Connell in 1921. Political observers had viewed the election as the Democrats’ to lose—and, as a result of upcoming redistricting, many expected the district, which encompasses southeast Brooklyn, the Rockaways, and parts of western and central Queens, to be erased. But Turner’s victory against Assemblyman David Weprin has shaken up state politics—even, perhaps, national ones, too. What happened? Was it Israel? Gay marriage? 9/11? Anti-Obama sentiment? Or just a poorly run campaign by a patsy for the powers that be?
The Loyalist
Everyone who’s met David Weprin considers him to be a genuinely good-natured guy. But many questioned the mustached (and toupéed) assemblyman’s other qualities as a candidate: he doesn’t exactly exude confidence when he speaks—his voice has been compared to Mayor Quimby’s from The Simpsons (but with even more umms, ahhs, and errs between thoughts); and former colleagues have noted that his public statements always needed to be written out. “Weprin is a nice guy, but he’s the dictionary definition of a schmendrick, or a dork,” one Brooklyn Democratic elected official says. “They picked him to be the candidate in NY-9 because that’s what he was.”
After Weiner’s fateful tweet at the end of May and his resignation three weeks later, Democrats were still confident they would hold the district in the special election to replace him; registered Democrats outnumber their Republican counterparts there three to one. Almost two thirds of the district lies in Democratic areas of Queens; the rest of it stretches down into a demographically curious slice of southeastern Brooklyn that leans more conservative. The Brooklyn part includes neighborhoods that are predominately Irish and Italian (Gerritsen Beach, Bergen Beach, and Marine Park), Russian Jewish (Sheepshead Bay, Manhattan Beach, and Brighton Beach), and Orthodox Jewish (Midwood).
New York State is destined to lose two Congressional seats in 2012’s election cycle, thanks to its relative population decline and the redistricting process. So Weiner’s sudden misfortune presented the perfect opportunity for the Queens Democrats—who held every Congressional seat in Queens—to select a placeholder candidate who would agree to serve only the remainder of the term, protecting incumbents in the area from losing this electoral game of musical chairs. (Special elections in New York don’t have primaries. Instead, nominees are selected by the county machines, weighted by their share of the district. The Queens Democratic and Republican parties, containing roughly two-thirds of the votes, handpicked their favored candidates to run for Weiner’s seat.)
Queens Democrats needed someone who was loyal enough to exit the stage after redistricting and who wouldn’t mind leaving his or her current job for a brief stint in Congress. They selected Assemblyman David Weprin, a former councilman who had run for New York City comptroller in 2009. (He came in last place in the Democratic primary.) An Orthodox Jew, Weprin was also thought to have an “in” with the district’s Orthodox Jewish population, which is more concentrated here than probably any other district in the country.
Most importantly, Weprin’s loyalty to the Queens County Democratic Party is unquestioned. He hails from an emergent local political dynasty. His father Saul was speaker of the State Assembly and his brother Mark ran for their father’s central Queens Assembly seat upon his death. When David left the city council to run for comptroller in 2009, Mark successfully ran for David’s council seat; after losing his comptroller bid, David took his brother’s now-vacant Assembly seat. Winning a heavily covered special election for the United States Congress could have raised David’s profile for higher political office, even if he declined to run for reelection after half a term in the House.
But then came Bob Turner, and a political storm the Democrats hadn’t anticipated.
The Outsider
Turner’s former volunteers describe the candidate as paternal. “He’s like everybody’s grandfather,” says Gene Berardelli of the imposingly tall 70 year old. Another volunteer, Jacob Kornbluh, describes driving Turner back from a campaign stop. “Before I took him home, we were going over the bridge to go to the Rockaways and he said, ‘Let’s stop at a few places—I want to show you something,’” Kornbluh recalls, explaining how they visited various sentimental neighborhood spots. “He acted like a father.”
That’s not to say Turner was the perfect candidate. He raised much less money than Weprin, and stuck his foot in his mouth repeatedly during the campaign. During one debate, stumped to name a tax loophole he would eliminate, Turner quipped, “As a Republican, I never met a loophole I didn’t like.” He insisted it was a joke, but for Democrats, it was a sound bite made in heaven.
Unlike Weprin the establishmentarian, Bob Turner cast himself as the anti-politician. His only political experience was running against Weiner in 2010, when he snagged a respectable 39 percent of the vote. The retired television executive lives on the southern tip of the Rockaway Peninsula and has a gruff plain-spokenness, a contrast to Weprin’s over-reliance on scripted statements.
The Campaign
Both men were largely down-the-line partisans, deviating rarely from the ideological orthodoxy of their national parties. The one issue on which Weprin professed strong disagreement with national Democrats was President Obama’s policies on Israel, specifically the president’s announcement that Israel’s 1967 borders should be a starting point for peace talks with Palestine. In the context of what some see as Obama’s overall anti-Israel attitude, this was political heresy in some of New York’s Jewish communities.
Despite Weprin’s disagreement with the President on Israel, his opponents bludgeoned him with the issue. The first sign that the race could be competitive came when former Mayor Ed Koch early on endorsed Turner, crossing party lines. Koch, who is still very popular in the district—especially with the elderly population that fondly remembers his time in office—announced that this election should be a referendum on President Obama’s errant policies on Israel. The press conference announcing Koch’s endorsement used as backdrop both the American and Israeli flags.
“Israel being used against David… should have been ridiculous,” says a local Democratic official. “The one issue in which he has true core values is Israel. This guy traveled to Lebanon to bring life vests to soldiers.” Even though the New York Times once referred to Weprin as a “Jewish Rambo,” his inability to articulate his positions allowed Turner to outflank him. While Weprin mumbled his disagreements with Obama or listed his pro-Israel credentials, Turner’s campaign denounced the president’s policies in clear terms. “Obama thinks he can fix the economy on a bus,” blared one full-page Turner ad run in Orthodox newspapers. “He already threw Israel under it.”
The Holy Land?
Israel’s symbolic significance has particular salience in New York’s Ninth, thanks to its heavy Russian and Orthodox Jewish populations. “The vast majority of the Russian community is Jewish,” says David Storobin, a Vice Chair of the Kings County Republican Party who is active in Brooklyn’s Russian community. “Not only that, but nine out of ten of them have close relatives in Israel.” These ties to Israel are shared by Brooklyn’s Orthodox population as well. “In the Jewish community we send our kids to Israel, so like 50 percent of the residents studied once in Israel,” Turner volunteer Jacob Kornbluh says. “So Israel actually plays a very big connecting role. People aren’t so into domestic policies because we don’t go to college, we don’t learn about political science… We listen to the radio, we read the newspapers, and we’re more of a closed community.”
Weprin, though a devout Orthodox Jew, quickly found himself shut out of this insular community. Not only did Turner outmatch him on Israel, but Weprin also found himself in hot water over his vote in favor of same-sex marriage—especially for a speech he gave on the floor of the Assembly. “I am an observant Jew. I was married by an Orthodox rabbi in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony,” Weprin said at the time. “My religion is very important to me personally, but this is not a religious issue.”
Although little-noticed at the time, Weprin’s position drew harsh responses during the campaign. One flier in Brooklyn declared that it is “forbidden according to Jewish law to vote for… David Weprin.” Writing that he sold “his soul” for supporting gay marriage, the largest Jewish newspaper in Brooklyn, Hamodia, editorialized that “Weprin has proved himself ready to sell out the principles he claimed he received in his yeshivah upbringing for a bowl of lentils.” The screws tightened when Democratic Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a socially conservative powerbroker in the Orthodox community—who has a big soapbox in the form of his weekly radio show—announced that he could never support Weprin for Congress because of his speech supporting gay marriage. Hikind went on to aggressively turn out Orthodox voters for the Turner campaign.
The Mistakes
Things didn’t always go poorly for Weprin. Turner made his biggest mistake of the campaign when he told the Daily News editorial board that the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act was “too broad” and shouldn’t cover volunteers who worked at Ground Zero. Turner quickly backed away from the remark, but Democrats pounced, convinced that they finally found an issue to beat him over the head with.
However, as with many opportunities presented to the Weprin campaign, it seemed almost determined not to capitalize on it. After the Daily News story came out, Weprin’s team didn’t respond for six full hours. (In the compressed intensity of a competitive special election, six hours might as well be six years.) Volunteers for and donors to the Weprin campaign describe a campaign without a plan. “I went to a fundraiser for Weprin at about five or six weeks out before the election,” one Weprin donor recalls. “The fundraiser turned into a strategic planning session, which wasn’t very inspiring as five weeks before Election Day we shouldn’t be strategizing about how we’re going to win this campaign!”
Weprin’s campaign was filled with more examples of perplexing decisions. A few days before Election Day, instead of campaigning in the district, Weprin held a protest in Manhattan against Donald Trump. Yet Weprin’s biggest mistake could have been his decision to suddenly pull out of a debate hosted by the Juniper Park Civic Association. “The hurricane caused major logistical and scheduling problems for the campaign and thus David is not able to make the debate this evening.” That was the campaign’s official excuse. But Hurricane Irene had passed two days before. The Civic Association published an article headlined “Weprin to Middle Village, Maspeth, Glendale & Ridgewood—DROP DEAD!”
The Body Blows
Unlike Weprin’s campaign, Turner’s was smooth, sometimes even clever. When the election began and Turner had no campaign funds, his campaign ran a television ad dredging up the “Ground Zero Mosque” hullabaloo. However, it only put a small amount of money into actually running the ad, instead letting the internet and cable news broadcast it for him as coverage of a controversial news item. The ad was a cheap shot against Weprin. But, for very little money, Turner generated a lot of media coverage for his fledgling campaign.
His team was often ingenious. Less than a minute after the Weprin campaign sent out a press release announcing that a Republican councilman was crossing party lines to endorse him, Turner sent out his own press release re-announcing the endorsement of another Republican councilman who had endorsed Turner months ago—and, indeed, had been campaigning regularly for him since. But the media, unable to keep track of these details, covered Weprin’s legitimate endorsement announcement with a “dueling endorsements” angle, minimizing the impact of Weprin’s news in the day’s cycle.
As the race dragged on, Turner’s campaign prospered and Weprin’s faltered. The polls shifted in Turner’s favor a few weeks before Election Day, and Democrats across the country finally acknowledged the stark reality: Weprin could actually lose the election. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the electoral arm of House Democrats, rushed half-a-million dollars in television ads to give Weprin a last minute boost. But the last-minute efforts by national Democrats to save the Weprin campaign turned out to be too little, too late.
The Upset
On the cool September night before Election Day, Weprin did not shake hands or make last minute calls to organizers. He attended a random bar mitzvah for the son of a Rabbi in Williamsburg—far, far away from New York’s Ninth. The next day, when all the votes had been tallied, the district’s voters had made history by electing Bob Turner, their first Republican in generations. Although Weprin narrowly won the Queens majority of the district, Turner dominated in Brooklyn by an astronomical two-to-one margin, resulting in a comfortable five percent win overall. Much of Turner’s success can be attributed to the passion of his supporters: there were stories of Russian voters in other parts of Brooklyn showing up to vote and refusing to leave the polling station until they could vote for Turner; he received a number of write-in votes for an unrelated judicial election happening outside of the district. At Turner’s swearing-in in November, a volunteer (and former Marine) physically removed a protester associated with Occupy Wall Street, going well beyond the call of duty.
Turner ran a good campaign, but his victory was also rooted in a coalition of voters that had been, or were already trending, Republican for some time. Irish and Italian voters in Brooklyn, although diminishing in numbers, are as close to the traditional Republican base as you can get. Russian residents, many of whom escaped the Soviet Union, tend to be conservative across the policy spectrum, and their civic participation in the electoral process has steadily increased as they’ve assimilated. And conservative Orthodox voters have seen their share of the population rapidly rise—in no small part because of the typically large sizes of their families. This part of New York is now far from the solidly blue voting base it once was.
National commentators argued that Turner’s victory reflected poorly on Obama’s reelection chances—that it was a microcosm of the national disenchantment with the Democrats. In truth, local Democrats have been performing progressively worse over the last few election cycles in many of the neighborhoods that make up New York’s Ninth. Still, Turner’s win was a major victory; for a good portion of the campaign, he was a serious underdog. His win was only possible by energizing his base and securing the vote of thousands of traditionally Democratic voters. Running against a campaign that was unable to present a coherent strategy or message certainly helped as well. “The biggest takeaway is that when times are tough, the usual rules don’t apply,” says Steven Stites, a political consultant in the district. “If you can’t articulate a message as to how you can actually help people’s lives, people don’t care if you’re a Democrat or Republican.” •
Colin Campbell is the founder of brooklynpolitics.com
