The Bronx, N.Y—Jamaal Bowman is feeling good—like,
really good.
He and his campaign manager are standing atop the Van Cortlandt Park-242nd Street subway station platform handing out his campaign flyers to commuters rushing to make the train. The stop is one of those elevated stations that’s outside, where you can see the street down below and the horizon before you. Some of the commuters nod without making much eye contact and take a flyer as most New Yorkers usually do as a defense mechanism to avoid eager people trying to sell them their mixtape or something.
Then came Joe Hernandez, who was getting off at the front of the train almost exactly where Bowman was passing out flyers. Bowman went into his pitch.
“Hello. I’m Jamaal Bowman and I’m running for Congress and..”
Bowman, a former middle school principal who grew up in Manhattan, didn’t have to say much else because Hernandez knew who he was and said he was supporting him.
“I like [Eliot] Engel,” Hernandez told Bowman before giving him a fist bump. “I used to vote for him. But I heard he was away during this virus. If he’s not going to be here with the people, to hell with him.”
“I appreciate that, man,” Bowman replied.
“You’re going to win,” Hernandez said.
Since U.S. Rep. Engel made his disastrous hot mic comments a few weeks ago at a Bronx press conference addressing the unrest connected to the police killings of black people across the country, the 16-term Democratic incumbent has been playing defense in ways neither he nor his colleagues in Washington ever imagined. During the press conference with Bronx borough president Ruben Diaz Jr., Engel said, “If I didn’t have a primary, I wouldn’t care,” after Diaz refused to allow him to speak because he worried it would politicize the event.
Engel tried to apologize, but the damage was done. The Atlantic’s piece
outlining his absence away from his district during the pandemic certainly hasn’t helped, either. The incumbent who was considered very safe may now be dangerously close to losing his seat.
I asked Bowman if he felt Engel had gotten too comfortable and didn’t see him coming.
“Not just comfortable but content in the way like, ‘I’ve had this job 31 years, people keep voting me into office.’ Sixteen times so far. I guess he feels that he’s entitled to the position,” Bowman told me as he greeted commuters through his surgical mask. “That sense of entitlement is what came through in that statement and how he’s taken the voters of this district for granted for decades. That’s unacceptable and unforgivable. The gentleman who mentioned once he found out he’s not here for the people during the pandemic, it captures the same sentiment, you know?”
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