The New Kings of Brooklyn’s Politics
New Kings Democrats' meeting / photo: Sarah Baker
Brooklyn, NY. Oct. 21, 2010 – The Smolenski Democratic Club in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, looks like an abandoned bar, complete with dusty cocktail tables, barstools with chipped paint and broken mirrors. It’s a good place for political outsiders to meet.
And in fact, that is where the New Kings Democrats, an upstart political club looking to dislodge Brooklyn’s Democratic political power, held its last meeting before the midterm elections. But this time the grassroots organization, committed to bring inclusionary democracy to the Kings County Democratic Party, is throwing its full support and get-out-the-vote efforts to help the Democratic establishment.
“We’re pushing for reform at a local level and we can accomplish that in the future,” said Matthew Cowherd, the club’s president. “But now we’re concerned with the Democrats maintaining their majority in Congress.”
Reformer political groups such as the New Kings Democrats in Brooklyn, had to switch their goals these days and their top priority is to keep the focus in a national agenda by encouraging young people and other Brooklynites to get out and vote in this Nov. 2nd elections. At the same time they want to maintain the pressure for changes at the local level.
The New King Democrats, a group that started during the Obama campaign, recently agitated the Brooklyn Democratic establishment by getting one of their own, Lincoln Restler, elected as 50th Assembly District leader. Cowherd still remembers the day, almost two years ago, when Brooklyn’s Democratic Party leader and Assemblyman Vito Lopez turned away his group’s offer to do political work at a community level.
“I was called ‘gentrifier’, among other things, and told that there was nothing to do,” said Cowherd, 34, a composed and soft-spoken person who works as a corporate lawyer for a Manhattan law firm.
But he knew it was plenty to do. “We’ve been educating people about how the Party in Brooklyn is structured and operates. Thanks to that, we were able to get Lincoln elected against the Democratic machine,” Cowherd said.
For the next two weeks, Cowherd’s political club will assist Democratic candidates in Brooklyn, as Mike McMahon, who is running for reelection, doing phone banks and other events to get people to go the voting booths, especially those young voters that elected Barack Obama in 2008 but now seem to have disappear from the political scene.
“Once Obama was elected, people believed the job was done,” said Cowherd. “Right now we’re helping McMahon, among others candidates, who is in a tight race against the Mike Grimm in the 13th congressional district in south Brooklyn and Staten Island”
Marc Lapidus, a political consultant who runs the Brooklyn consulting firm Red Horse Strategies says that groups like the New Kings Democrats can be really effective in bringing voters to polling places.
“You can have a perfect storm when you have candidates helped by organizations that are closer to the ground, knocking doors, talking to neighbors and rallying troops,” Lapidus said.
Cowherd and his grassroots organization know that after the midterm elections the political battle goes back to the district leaders arena. Their best hope to achieve changes at the local level is to get more candidates such as Lincoln Restler elected in the future.
“We don’t want the next party leader to fall into the same pattern of corruption,” said Cowherd. “And we won’t give up in our demands for reform.”
Photo: Sarah Baker, NKD.
