The Bowtie: The Black Vote in NYC

Black voters powered Eric Adams to top job in the city and have been the driving force in NYC politics in the 21st century.

This post is a long time coming, I’ve been encouraged to write this for two years by many on Twitter and especially my wife. Plenty of professional journalists and other substacks, mediums and other journals have been inspired and in some cases have taken my tweets verbatim as their own work in regard to this topic. There are two very specific incidents from this past week that I will address later in this writing that further fuel my desire to finally put this together in one place in longform. It’s only right I show my work.

It’s often argued by commenters of all stripes that NYC is a progressive city. The Big Apple is mentioned in the same breath as the West Coast progressive hotbeds like Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco by many when it comes to leftist politics. From the outside looking in that claim seems to make sense. Especially, when considering the biggest star of the far left is a congressperson from the NYC metro area.

But that thought is awfully hard to square away with the election of Eric Adams, and before that the drubbing of Cynthia Nixon by ex-Governor Cuomo.

To make sense of it all one has to understand the size of NYC, which is a hard ask even for many natives of the city. It’s in understanding these massive numbers that electoral politics become more transparent. Just how big? Well the population of those 3 progressive left coast cities combined are roughly 40,000 less than the borough of Queens' population. Queens itself accounts for quarter of the total population of the city. NYC is 4 times larger than San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland combined.

Yet the reputations of those cities far outpaced that of Brooklyn and Queens for much of the twentieth century. Now especially in the case of Brooklyn the argument could be made that its popularity has caught up to its staggering population.

This newfound popularity and notoriety comes from gentrification. For it is with the gentrifying set that Brooklyn news and happenings become national happenings. This popularity does little to explain how Brooklynites would elect Eric Adams as borough president and then mayor. All things being equal Cynthia Nixon or some activist turned pol should be Brooklyn’s choice. Yet Eric Adams speaks to the parts of the borough that aren’t gentrified and he hints toward their majority. So while a large swath of Brooklyn has experienced gentrification which attracts media types that isn’t the majority.

The idea of a black voting bloc isn’t new nationally or citywide. What’s new is that I’ve identified the specific geographic area where this vote resides and Twitter. Twitter here is shorthand for social media, micro blogging, and digital comment sections.

Twitter

Twitter and the aforementioned digital political arena are probably why you know who AOC is but have no clue who Carolyn Maloney, Greg Meeks, or Hakeem Jeffries are. That likely doesn’t apply to my core readers but for the average somewhat politcally aware person it definitely does. Yet Meeks and Jeffries are top 20 players if we were to power rank congressional representatives by committee assignments and bills passed. Whereas Ocasio-Cortez would be at the very bottom of such rankings. However, the 3 congresspeople have less than 500k followers on Twitter; Ocasio-Cortez is currently nearing 13 million followers.

Those numbers paint a stark picture of the amplification and mentions that Ocasio-Cortez can drive but they belie how many voters she can attract in her district. In the last election for NY-14 roughly 150,000 voters bubbled the circle next to her name. As for the 3 other reps mentioned, each registered almost 100,00 more votes if not more than that total, with Maloney leading the pack with 265,000 votes/377,000 registered voters.

Journalists and news organizations have incorporated Twitter and other platforms into their news gathering. Journalists not only actively scour social media but they also contribute content. It’s a non stop feedback loop. It’s why AOC is a mononym. She dominates the space.

While Ocasio did signal the contingency pick with her endorsement of Wiley after the Morales crash and burn it was a given for one that Wiley would be the choice of this group.

In spite of the outsized platform and tremendous digital reach, Ocasio-Cortez has difficulty connecting with voters in her district, she’s unable to turnout a majority of registered voters in district (150,000 votes/~340,000 registered voters) as the other NYC reps mentioned do. That is ironic because NY-14 is considered the epicenter of the far left movement in NYC. If given any other district within the city it’s possible that she would stand no chance of winning or keeping the seat. Redistricting looms large for AOC, the addition of 50,000 voters in one direction or the other could seal her congressional electoral fate for the next ten years.

This in brief explains her lagging fortunes in the NY delegation and in intra city politics. And to an extent the dissonance between media opinion and electoral results. Because after all if that digital platform were representative of the state electorate, Andrew Cuomo would have had no chance against Cynthia Nixon. Rather Cuomo served Nixon a 30 point beating. No amount of media coverage and “Cynthia could do it because AOC won” op-eds from the paper of record could change that.

The Bowtie and Eric Adams

You may soon read or have read several articles on why Tish James is a strong candidate for Governor or that she may split the black vote with Jumaane leading to best chances for x candidate. Subscribers to the latter narrative have no clue as to what they’re saying and haven’t learned the lesson of Eric Adams’ path to victory.

Naturally, these are the same folks that would look to other writers from outside the Bowtie area to explain the dynamics to them. Here’s looking at you Jeff Coltin. With a little bit of research you might find the true source of that outsider’s writing.

Full disclosure, the paragraph above refers to one of the previously mentioned events that spurred this writing; I like the young man who wrote the piece on James that has WFP and DSA accounts and Jeff Coltin swooning but fact is he’s regurgitating my wife’s talking points on Tish along with the demographic electoral facts I repeat over and over. Yet he is being credited as a top notch researcher. How do I know this? My wife was his boss. And I’ve explained the bowtie in writing to him. Furthermore, I’ve written and been credited on Twitter for pointing out the geographic lay of the land years earlier while being followed by many that are giving these kudos to a field organizer, who has never seen what he speaks of from the back end big data side. Moreover, the young writer believed Yang would have been the choice for mayor. Clearly this information about the black vote and Tish isn’t something he had an inkling about but rather something he was told and wrote down verbatim without attribution.

At any rate, let’s go over the lesson from June 2021.

Black voters were presented with 3 viable choices:

1. Eric Adams

2. Ray McGuire

3. Maya Wiley

Eric is a proxy for Tish and Maya for Jumaane. The decision is already made. Tish is more viable, she’s capable of courting white moderate votes and has the state wide A-side of the ticket vote count from her previous run for AG. Remember Cuomo was AG prior to his gubernatorial run. If Tish James wins, it would mean every governor elected so far in the 21st century would have held the office of AG prior to their election.

Here’s a wonderful explainer of the dynamic at play in this selection process, by a black woman, P.R. Lockhart, on a far left site no less. In short, black voters are pragmatic and consolidate their vote in order to amplify their power. It’s not an ideological monolith but rather a pragmatic decision making that results in a hyper majority of black voters arriving at the same choice in national and local elections.

In NYC, that hyper-majority vote is produced in the borough of Brooklyn and Queens. The area ranges from Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy in the Central North East of Brooklyn down to Flatlands and Canarsie in the South East and continues east and funnels into a point at East New York, forming a triangle. In Queens the northern most easterly point is South Jamaica with the southern most easterly point being Rosedale; continuing back west to Richmond Hill another triangle is made. The two triangles create a neat bowtie,

The area described covers NY-5, NY-8, and NY-9 or the “8 assembly districts in Central Brooklyn and South East Queens” that powered Tish James’ AG run. The de Blasio 2017 general election map features the Republican knot prominently.

with the Republican and mainly white stronghold of Howard Beach, Ozone Park, Woodhaven forming the knot of the bowtie, ironic to say least.

Fivethirtyeight sneakily put out an article a day before the primary this summer which was very similar to my twitter threads on the divisions of the city but they broke the city into 5 divisions politically. In my opinion, it’s 3. The differences in the breakdown and breadth of 538’s data research along with the release date kept me from making as big a deal. A follow up comparing and contrasting the breakdowns will follow.

These areas have been largely black for the last two generations and have been powering elections in NYC for just as long. The 1974 film “The Lords of Flatbush”, was shot mainly in Nassau County, NY and Stamford, CT because Flatbush had changed so quickly demographically from 1958, the year the film is set in.

Samuel J. Tilden HS in East Flatbush was the only site to feaure in the Lords of Flatbush that was in Flatbush. Flatbush’s northern and western areas had already become black majority by the mid 70’s. The majority of the film was shot in Italo-Irish enclaves in the suburbs of NYC.

In 2005, the NYT attributed Bloomberg’s ability to win due to the fact that he was able to split the black vote. Those times were simpler and electoral politics were clearer to politcal writers precisely because the echo chamber of the internet played a far smaller role in those writers’ lives. For a Republican to win a citywide they must split the Bowtie vote, that knowledge was a given years before. More often than not this meant winning the Brooklyn side while ceding the Queens side to the Democratic opposition as was seen in Bloomberg’s path to victory and I hypothesize it’s the path for Giuliani in 1993, can’t find the maps.

Common knowledge in 2005. Social media has obscured what was once well known. The volume and loudness of the voices that skew toward the far left fool many writers into believing the cohort is the most dominant bloc of voters.

Brooklyn is often the choice because NY-5 Queens is one of the highest turnout districts in the entire country and it is far more loyal to the Democratic Party. Morevover, it is more homogenous than the Brooklyn sections of the Bowtie, leaning more African American. Without going into a 1619 type breakdown, there are obvious reasons why African Americans would be less likely to pair with the GOP than say West Indian Black voters.

Prior to his fall from grace, Giuliani was quick to compliment the Brooklyn side of the Bowtie via his advocacy for the West Indian Day Carnival. There are several recorded occasions in which he courts that specific vote which is concentrated on the Brooklyn side of the Bowtie. Little Caribbean’s placement is instructive in this regard as well.

This leads me to the second event of the week prior. The NY Post for whatever reason decided to run with the progressive rumor that Edu Hermelyn was an unqualified political consultant, yet the man has years of tenant activism and has worked the offices of local electeds in Flatbush. If you’re not black this sort of experience is often enough to be named political director of a large 8 figured budget advocacy group or even hold office. If you’re following you’d understand that Hermelyn’s experience in that geographic location is far more important to winning it all than any experience that could be had in NY-14, where this rumor likely originated.

To this point, look at who gets credit for de Blasio’s wins. That firm was expected to repeat, they tied for 7th place this time. Chirlane was the reason de Blasio made hay in the Bowtie but of course that firm got the credit. That commercial with Dante was the reason de Blasio made hay in the Bowtie. None of these things were replicable for any of the non-black candidates in the race. Meaning no firm outside of a Bowtie based black firms could guarantee the vote. Many of these firms collected hundreds of thousands even millions in some cases without question or comment to perform a task they could never complete.

No one questions the Manhattan firms and their claims of being able to win it all despite having no inroads to the Bowtie. No one questions how it is the same set that’s most angry about Adams’ win would know what a real campaign and citywide organizing looks like after they just happened to self implode and KO Morales’ chances. No one says anything about how Tusk fumbled the bag and pocketed Yang’s millions. No one questions their polling. They’re all qualified while losing spectacularly.

Likewise, many are lauding a young man for retelling common knowledge within the black community with out any attribution. It’s not research, it’s regurgitation.

If you want to know how to win a city-wide - interview black consultants and attribute your work. Want to win a city wide as a candidate - hire black consultants as your general consultant.