The 'Power Grab' in the Brooklyn Democratic Party

**Cusha Navadar** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Cusha Navadar filling in for Brian.
Now we turn to some infighting in the Brooklyn Democratic Party.
And it's kind of a tale as old as time, a fight between the old guard and the new guard, stalwarts versus reformists, State Assemblymember Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn has been in the Brooklyn Democratic Party chair since 2020 when she won the seat handily as an ally of the old guard. But there's been a growing faction of reformists who say the party is in desperate need of new leadership. In June, the reformist party successfully ousted eight members of the executive committee, which meant they had the necessary majority to vote in a new leader of the party.
Just a couple of months later, Hermelyn launched an ambitious scheme to change the rules. The new rules would likely allow the existing party leaders to take back the majority from reformers who seem poised to push Hermelyn out and usher in new leadership. The rule changes were approved in a contentious committee vote last week, despite several prominent Democrats essentially calling it an undemocratic power grab. That includes House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, Senator Chuck Schumer, Governor Hokel, Brooklyn Borough President Jumaane Williams, Brad Lander, and Mayor Mamdani.
That's a pretty broad coalition of Democrats who opinions were overridden. The story itself gets pretty in the weeds, so we will try to keep it legible. But in a macro sense, the party infighting brings up a lot of questions about the role of local party chapters in people's political lives. It seems especially relevant given that New York City's chapter of the DSA has been thrust into the spotlight for their growing influence on local elections. So for this segment, we're going to dig into how the Brooklyn Democratic Party has been meeting the moment, or as some would argue, has not been meeting the moment. And we'll hear from listeners about their own relationships with their political parties. And I am lucky to be joined in the studio by two journalists who've been covering this saga. Gwynne Hogan, a senior reporter at The City Reporter. Hi Gwynne, welcome back to WNYC.

**Gwynne Hogan** (2:16)
Hey, it's good to be back.

**Cusha Navadar** (2:17)
And Jeff Colton, the editor-in-chief of City & State. Hi Jeff, welcome.

**Jeff Coltin** (2:22)
Thanks for having me. Been following this for years. It's just this is like the biggest Brooklyn Dems news that we've seen in a long time. It's really something.

**Cusha Navadar** (2:29)
Yeah, and as somebody who lives in Brooklyn, it is very interesting to me and I'm hoping that we can lay out why it's interesting to folks wherever they find themselves geographically. So Gwynne, let's lay out some of the background first before we get into the recent rule changes. So what have reformists been saying needs to change about the Brooklyn Democratic Party?

**Gwynne Hogan** (2:49)
That's always such a good question when you kind of boil it down to reformers and old guard. But I think like the start of this goes back many years now, sort of to the election of Barack Obama in 2008 There was sort of all these young people that were inspired by that grassroots campaign and they were like, I live in Brooklyn, let me get involved. They were kind of brushed aside by party leadership at the time.
So some of them are now council members, Antonio Reynoso, Lincoln Wrestler. These are people who were kind of at the beginning of the formulations of New King's Democrats, who were sort of inspired by Nidia Velasquez, the outgoing congresswoman who was kind of the first anti-Brooklyn machine person that rose to the Congress. They kind of started building their own little party organization where they were trying to get more grassroots involvement, trying to get candidates elected, and flash forward many years. This fight has been going on. And like you said, when Rodneyse was elected, she actually had a majority of support. She had unified the party after many, many years of fighting between these two factions, but that all kind of fell apart. And I think the criticism of her tenure in the past six years is she spent a lot of time and energy fighting the left wing of the party, including backing lawsuits to try to get these reformed district leaders off the ballot, as opposed to fighting Republicans in Southern Brooklyn, where the Democrats have been seeding ground.

**Cusha Navadar** (4:23)
Interesting.

**Gwynne Hogan** (4:23)
And that's sort of the main contention that has bubbled up is, this party should be activating people and helping get people elected. And in the dearth of that, we've really seen, like you mentioned, the DSA, the Working Families Party fill a lot of that void and be able to get candidates elected. Whereas we see Brooklyn Democratic Party really focused on judge appointments and poll worker jobs and board of election jobs.