Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders Bring Their Battle to Brooklyn
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Version 0 of 1. In Brooklyn Heights, on the 11th floor of an office building, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign headquarters was humming on Monday. Staff members and volunteers were working the phones in spacious offices with windows that look out on the Manhattan skyline. Photos of supporters, an array of campaign buttons and a hanging gong, with the names of states she has won scribbled onto it in marker, adorned the sleekly designed space. A retired New York police officer stood guard. Two miles away, in a gritty open-floor office space in Gowanus, Brooklyn, that smelled of fresh paint, an army of mostly young Bernie Sanders supporters began gathering two weeks ago to spread his message. Last weekend, they nibbled on orange slices, perched on plastic folding chairs and sifted through mountains of newly delivered cardboard boxes filled with Bernie for President pamphlets. Visitors walked up a driveway and through a half-open side door to enter. Brooklyn, where Mr. Sanders grew up and where Mrs. Clinton established her campaign headquarters a year ago, is the center of the next political contest: the New York Democratic primary on April 19. It is a crucial one in a race — and an election year — that has been full of surprises. The state has 291 delegates, including 247 pledged delegates up for grabs. (There are also 44 superdelegates.) Even with his recent wins in Washington, Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Hawaii and Wisconsin, Mr. Sanders would need an estimated 56 percent of the remaining pledged delegates nationwide to overtake Mrs. Clinton, who maintains a lead of 219. A win for Mr. Sanders in New York would not only buoy his candidacy, but it would also be an embarrassment to the former senator from New York. Of the three million people registered to vote as Democrats in New York City, about 945,600 live in Brooklyn, meaning the borough — the most populous in the city — is home to a significant portion of the 5.8 million Democrats registered across the state. Drawing even more attention to the borough, the two campaigns, after weeks of squabbling, have agreed to a televised debate between the candidates on April 14 to be held at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The styles, staffs and settings of the two campaigns are telling, both of the Democratic race and of Brooklyn itself, a rapidly changing amalgam of affluent Park Slope professionals, newly arrived Williamsburg hipsters, longtime owners of Fort Greene brownstones, diverse Caribbean-American residents of Crown Heights and members of tight-knit Orthodox Jewish communities in Borough Park. Million-dollar condominiums are rising next door to blocks of decaying public-housing complexes; shiny new coffee shops and high-priced gyms are appearing on formerly blighted streets. While most polls show Mrs. Clinton, 68, leading in New York, the contest is proving to be emblematic of the same issues that are driving the Democratic race nationally. Mr. Sanders, the 74-year-old senator of Vermont, where he has based his campaign headquarters, hopes to make gains among voters by arguing that he formed his core ideas about income inequality while growing up the son of a Polish immigrant in Brooklyn. Yet the location of his Brooklyn field office — a far leaner operation than Mrs. Clinton’s headquarters — in a gentrifying neighborhood serves as a vivid reminder that his base of support is likely to come from new residents of the borough, many of whom are unfamiliar with the Brooklyn of his boyhood but are eager to back a more left-leaning figure. Mrs. Clinton’s connections to Brooklyn are more recent, and with her two terms as a senator from New York, they run deep. She has backing from a long list of elected officials, including, somewhat recently, Mayor Bill de Blasio, and has a network of community leaders powering her get-out-the-vote efforts, as she has in many cities. She has already begun touring Brooklyn, visiting churches and making her case as a hometown politician. “She has all the advantage,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime political operative who is not affiliated with either campaign, but who has worked with Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor; Eliot Spitzer, the former New York governor; and President Bill Clinton. “Bernie’s chances are tough. Could he win it? Yes. Is it likely? No.” Many others, including Sanders supporters, agree with Mr. Sheinkopf. But Mr. Sanders has proved through a virtual tie in Iowa and his surprising victory in Michigan that he can beat the odds. On Tuesday, Mr. Sanders won 57 percent of the vote in Wisconsin. In his victory speech, the senator said that with the momentum from his victory in that state, he had “an excellent chance to win New York.” Mr. Sanders is poised to spend about $2.5 million on advertising in New York City and surrounding areas, with a lot of that money going toward winning Brooklyn, said Tad Devine, his senior campaign strategist. Mr. Devine added that Mr. Sanders planned to make several visits around the borough and hold the kind of large rallies he has staged in other states. “It’s a big place, and it’s a really progressive area in New York, so there are great target voters,” Mr. Devine said of Brooklyn. “We are going to talk about his own unique New York experience, his upbringing, the values that he learned growing up there and how that has shaped him in the course of his public career.” Last Sunday, Mrs. Clinton’s advantage in the borough was on display at the Christian Cultural Center in East New York, one of the largest evangelical churches in the city, which claims over 37,000 members — one of three churches she visited that day. The church is regularly visited by political leaders, particularly during election season. The Rev. A. R. Bernard, the church’s pastor, introduced Mrs. Clinton, saying that he had known her for more than 20 years and that the country needed “someone in power who knows how to manage that delicate balance between maintaining order and stability and fighting for justice and equality.” “I would be so humbled and honored to earn your support,” Mrs. Clinton said, pledging to reform the criminal justice system and focus on police killings. After she spoke, Mr. Bernard added that the country was at “a crossroads, socially and politically.” “I never thought that an openly announced socialist would ever be on a presidential ticket,” he said. “And, this is nothing against Bernie Sanders, but socialism is great in theory. But we’ve seen what it is in practice with the birth and collapse of the Soviet Union in Russia and what it left in Europe.” Danielle Cassidy, a 39-year-old nurse who lives in East New York, was among those applauding Mrs. Clinton’s visit. “It was really important for her to come here,” she said. Ms. Cassidy said that church and politics were separate, but she acknowledged that “they kind of go hand in hand.” Mrs. Clinton’s strengths also include longtime relationships with the borough’s Orthodox Jewish and Caribbean-American communities; several leaders in those communities said they had yet to hear from the Sanders campaign. Rabbi David Niederman, president of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg and North Brooklyn, said that late last year a friend called him asking him to support Mr. Sanders. He responded that he wanted to learn more; he had supported Mrs. Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary. Rabbi Niederman said he had never heard from the Sanders campaign directly and eventually decided to vote for Mrs. Clinton again after speaking with her twice. “At this point, I have a candidate whom I know, who has worked very well, who understands the general needs of the country, who understands and respects the Jewish communities and other communities’ religions and rights,” he said. “And that is somebody that I am on a personal level going to support.” Rabbi Niederman was one of several Jews interviewed for this article who expressed disappointment that Mr. Sanders was playing down his Jewish heritage. Una S. T. Clarke, the first Jamaican-born member of the City Council and a person well connected with the borough’s Caribbean neighborhoods, and Henry L. Butler, president of the Vanguard Independent Democratic Association Club, a group with some 200 members, have both endorsed Mrs. Clinton and are working to turn out votes for her by asking for support at community meetings, working the telephones and canvassing neighborhoods. “Bernie can try, but Bernie is not going to win,” Ms. Clarke said. “He seems to now identify with Brooklyn, but what has he done for Brooklyn?” Mr. Sanders’s campaign advisers said he planned to barnstorm New York before the primary, speaking to thousands in his unshakable Brooklyn accent. But as Mrs. Clinton turned her attention to New York last week, Mr. Sanders camped out in Wisconsin, holding back-to-back events there, and then headed to Pennsylvania. Many also say Mr. Sanders has not spent much time in Brooklyn since he graduated from James Madison High School, transferred from Brooklyn College to the University of Chicago and ultimately built his career in Vermont. He did appear at a rally in the Bronx on March 31, which his campaign said drew about 18,500 people. But in an interview with the editorial board of The Daily News this month, Mr. Sanders bungled a question about the New York City subway. “You get a token and you get in,” he said, even though tokens were long ago replaced by MetroCards. The tabloid also marked Mr. Sanders’s turn toward New York with a cover story this week attacking his position on granting immunity to gun manufacturers. Richard Byrnes, 57, a retired lawyer who volunteers for Mrs. Clinton five or six times a week, said Mr. Sanders had a “very tenuous connection” to Brooklyn. “Bernie’s life has been Vermont,” Mr. Byrnes said between phone-bank calls at Mrs. Clinton’s headquarters. “He was factually born in Brooklyn. I don’t think he devoted much of his life, especially his professional life, to Brooklyn. I think it’s basically an accident of birth. We are all born somewhere.” Harrell Kirstein, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, said the campaign held organizing meetings last month in Park Slope and Flatbush and had been using Brooklyn volunteers to encourage voters in other states to vote. Now those volunteers are focusing on their own neighborhoods. “I think people in New York saw that she always had their back as a U.S. senator and they know she will have their back as president of the United States,” he said. Though Mr. Sanders has fewer endorsements and a smaller staff, he does have some high-profile backers, including Councilman Rafael Espinal, the filmmaker Spike Lee and some clubs like the Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats. In an interview, Mr. Lee said Mr. Sanders’s being from Brooklyn, along with his message about rejecting the support of “super PACs,” persuaded him to back the senator over Mrs. Clinton. “I did not really know that much about him, because he is a senator from Vermont,” Mr. Lee said. “And then I started reading stories and that he’s from Brooklyn. Wait a minute. That really piqued my interest, and I really started doing my research and looking at the stuff he was saying, and looking at alternatives.” Mark Winston Griffith, a longtime Crown Heights resident and the executive director of the Brooklyn Movement Center, is also supporting Mr. Sanders, but he said he was not sure the senator could win. “There is a lot of energy among progressive white folks here,” Mr. Griffith said. “And there are black folks who are sort of waving their hands to say, ‘Yeah, I’m feeling the Bern, I’m going to support.’ But, let me not overstate it.” Like many Brooklynites interviewed for this article, Mr. Griffith said he had not seen much effort from either candidate in his neighborhood. “When I don’t see a lot of evidence of either campaign going on, that does not bode well for Bernie Sanders,” he said. “It is a much better sign for Hillary Clinton, because on some level she is in a position to take black votes for granted and he is not.” But Sanders supporters have been self-organizing for more than seven months, according to Karthik Ganapathy, a Sanders spokesman based in Brooklyn, who also explained that the campaign expected to do well in Crown Heights, Park Slope and Bushwick. “The mistake there would be to assume that those are the only places that we are going to do well,” Mr. Ganapathy added. Olivia Flood, 24, who lives in Flatbush and works at an entertainment company, said she had helped collect signatures to get Mr. Sanders on the ballot because supporting Mr. Sanders in Brooklyn meant acknowledging the easily seen economic differences in the borough. “You can’t live in a bubble in Brooklyn,” she said. “You step in one neighborhood, you’ve got a completely different way of life. Then, you step over the line and it’s another way of life.” A Long Island native who recently moved to the borough, Ms. Flood said she hoped other new residents would come out to support Mr. Sanders. “We can advocate for him and that’s important,” she said. Lisa Flythe of Park Slope is also among those advocates. She started volunteering in December; three weeks ago, she spent about three days canvassing on Flatbush Avenue, a main Brooklyn thoroughfare. The experience forced her to confront a now familiar issue. “The biggest problem is that people didn’t know who he was,” she said. Mr. Sanders’s advisers say they feel confident the senator can overcome obstacles, as he has in other places. “We are underdogs,” Mr. Ganapathy said. “We are in a familiar position. But that is just where we like to be.” |