Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Monday morning!
By the time early voting ended across New York State yesterday, more than 76,000 ballots had been cast throughout New York City, roughly half of them in Manhattan, where Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Jerry Nadler (D-NY) are battling to represent the newly drawn 12th Congressional District.
With many of their constituents spending the final weeks of summer in points north (the Hudson Valley and Catskills) and east (the Hamptons), Maloney and Nadler — as well as Suraj Patel, who trails them both in the polls — have had to reach out beyond the borders of the district, encouraging absentee voting and sending campaign mailers to second homes and summer houses.
Some 35,000 absentee ballots were distributed to voters in the 12th District in the weeks ahead of the race, The New York Times’ Nicholas Fandos reports, more than four times the number of absentee ballots sent out during the 2018 midterm primaries.
Efforts to get city residents who are upstate for the summer to vote, whether by absentee ballot or in person, have been “difficult,” Goldmont Realty CEO Leon Goldenberg told JI, and challenges abound. “Absentee is too late [at this point],” he added. Will people drive in [to the city] to vote? Highly unlikely.”
race to the finish
NY-10 Democratic primary enters homestretch

From left, Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, Rep. Mondaire Jones, Assemblywoman Jo Anne Simon, Councilwoman Carlina Rivera, Elizabeth Holtzman, and Attorney Dan Goldman participate in New York’s 10th Congressional District Democratic primary debate hosted by Spectrum News NY1 and WNYC, Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2022, at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York.
When a leading candidate for an open House seat in New York City expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel last month, the backlash was as fierce as it was immediate. In the weeks that have followed, Yuh-Line Niou, a progressive state assemblymember in Manhattan, has continued to face scrutiny in subsequent interviews and public appearances, even if the uproar over her position has abated somewhat, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports.
BDS barrage: Now, a recently launched super PAC is drawing renewed attention to Niou’s comments ahead of Tuesday’s primary. The group, New York Progressive, is targeting Jewish voters in New York’s redrawn 10th Congressional District, which encompasses Lower Manhattan and northwest Brooklyn, in a new mailer casting Niou’s platform as “dangerous,” “reckless” and “too extreme for our community.” “Yuh-Line Niou supports the antisemitic BDS agenda,” reads the mailer. “Vote no on Yuh-Line Niou for Congress.”
Highlighting ‘hypocrisy’: It is the latest hit in a series of attacks from New York Progressive, which has spent at least $225,000 on digital ads and direct mailers “to educate voters on Yuh-Line Niou’s hypocrisy,” Jeff Leb, the group’s treasurer, who previously worked to oppose a slate of left-leaning candidates for New York City Council in 2021, told JI. “Yuh-Line Niou pretends to be progressive but she’s anything but.” (Niou’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from JI.)
Vacillation calculation: As an increasingly heated debate over Middle East policy stokes division in Democratic primaries, few issues have inflamed tensions more than the BDS movement, which remains a fringe position even among the most outspoken critics of Israel. Niou, for her part, has since vacillated amid the uproar, claiming she does not agree with all of the movement’s demands and is open to visiting Israel. During a recent debate, Niou said she believes “Israel should exist” while also emphasizing a commitment to “the free speech rights of the BDS movement.” Niou confirmed she would vote against a House resolution opposing BDS.
Conformity of opinion: It remains to be seen whether Niou’s comments, persuasive or not, will factor into the crowded primary, where more than a dozen Democrats are on the ballot. The latest polling shows Niou in second place with 17% of the vote, trailing Dan Goldman, a moderate former federal prosecutor, by five points. But if Niou’s endorsement of BDS injected some volatility into the Middle East policy discussion, her evolving position has otherwise obscured a relatively unusual conformity of mainstream Democratic opinion on such issues among her main opponents in the race, which has grown increasingly acrimonious as it draws to its uncertain conclusion.
Read on for interviews with several leading candidates in the race.