BY SARAH FERGUSON | On Tuesday night, even Downtown New York was Hillary Country. After losing the last eight contests, former New York Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton walloped Bernie Sanders in New York’s hotly contested Democratic primary, besting the Brooklyn-born Vermont Senator by 16 points.
Clinton drew some of her most decisive margins in Chelsea, Union Square and Gramercy, where she garnered 68 percent of the vote, according to unofficial results.
She earned a solid 66 percent of the vote in the West Village, and carried the Lower East Side and Chinatown by 59 percent.
Even the progressive East Village went for Hillary by a tight margin of 50.8 to 49.2 percent — a rather hairsplitting result, considering that a measly 7,500 people even bothered to go to the polls in those districts.
However, Sanders held on to much of the heart of the East Village, winning with margins of from 51 percent to 58 percent, in most of the electoral districts stretching from E. 14th St. to E. Sixth St. from First Ave. to Avenue C, as well as some E.D.’s south of there, and also some stretching to Avenue D and Second Ave.
Like elsewhere in New York, there were reports of chaos and exclusion at the polls, where many voters said they were told they weren’t registered.
“A poll worker told me that roughly 40 percent of the voters that turned up at the 22nd Electoral District in the East Village had to do affidavit paper ballots because their names were not on the voter rolls,” said Internet entrepreneur Paul Garrin, who runs WiFi-NY.
That includes Garrin himself, who had to fill out an affidavit at the polling place where he’s been voting for the last 22 years.
“I’m one of the Democratic County Committee representatives for the 22nd District, and being a registered voter is a requirement to serve,” Garrin told The Villager. “So, obviously something’s screwed up if even I came up as not registered to vote.”
At La Plaza Cultural, a community garden on E. Ninth St. and Avenue C, there were groans, and shrugs of disgust from the Bernie fans who showed up at an outdoor primary viewing party and barbecue organized by Time’s Up and the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS), with the help of a WiFi-NY Internet connection.
About 50 people gathered inside the garden to watch the primary results being live-streamed from a laptop and then projected onto a big screen on the garden’s stone amphitheater.
“I’m waiting for her to get indicted, that’s my backup plan,” quipped one East Village bookkeeper who declined to be named, registering his disgust at Clinton’s win in her “adopted hometown” when the results were called at 9:40 pm.
It didn’t help the mood much that Donald Trump had just thumped his Republican rivals with a “Yuge!” win, that was announced just as the polls closed at 9 p.m.
“I predicted this,” opined East Village tree house designer Roderick Wolgamott. “If she takes this many delegates as they’re showing, it’s basically game over.
“He fought a good fight, man,” Wolgamatt added, shaking his head. “He’s got so many people excited. That was amazing that someone as left as he is got that far. I believe in everything he said.”
Reflecting how contested this New York turf was, this Downtown Bernie gathering also drew some Hillary supporters, including landscape architect Ross Martin, who said he voted for Clinton because of her “experience — and nostalgia for Bill Clinton.”
“If you want to pretend that the Supreme Court doesn’t matter, stay home and be a jerk,” added his partner Eric Hoffman, who also backed Clinton.
There was also a young self-proclaimed anarchist who gloated that he didn’t vote and hence had taken a “personal health day” instead.
But many said they weren’t at all ready to give up the fight for Sanders, despite the tortured delegate math he now faces. Sanders was never really expected to win in New York — the goal was to hit 45 points or above, they noted. At 42 points, Sanders was close, and he still managed to garner more votes than Obama did against Clinton in 2008.
Still, the results were rather devastating coming after the exuberance that thousands of Bernie fans felt at the mass rallies he held the past week in Mott Haven, Washington Square, Prospect Park and Long Island City.
Despite these mass turnouts, and Sanders outspending Clinton 2-to-1 in New York City, he could not translate this surge in popularity at the polls.
Many blamed New York’s closed primary system — whereby only registered Democrats and Republicans can vote to nominate a candidate. As a result, more than 3 million independents were excluded from the primary, along with all those registered in the Working Families and Green parties. Certainly, many of those people would have gone with Sanders if they had the chance.
And many of Sanders’s young volunteers said they had missed the deadline to register for a party by the absurdly early October deadline.
“I think it’s ridiculous. I think we should be able to vote for anyone,” said Katrina Echanique, a 23-year-old independent, who was canvassing for Sanders in Union Square on Tuesday. “It’s so ridiculous the way the system divides us,” added Echanique, who said she was attracted to Sanders because of his “positive message for all of us.
“He makes you want to stand up and fight for what is right, even if it’s not popular,” Echanique said as she passed out fliers to passersby.
And many Sanders fans are already making plans to fan out to the next contests in Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Rhode Island on April 26. Indeed, Reddit is filled with posts from young Sanders supporters about how to do phone-banking and face-banking to bring out the vote in those states.
And there’s going to be a big push for the June 7 California primary. However, like New York, California’s primary is not open to independent voters.
Whether Sanders can sustain enough convincing wins to bring about a contested Democratic National Convention in July is still up for grabs. But many said that his campaign had already profoundly altered the nation’s political consciousness, regardless of whether he wins the nomination. The focus, they say, should be on building a movement for progressive change to build on the ideals that Sanders says he stands for.
“We have to take back the original patriotic values of this country,” said Jim Glaser, an artist and founder of the events group Kostume Kult, who came to the 28,000-strong Prospect Park, Brooklyn rally dressed like Uncle Sam. “Either Bernie is our candidate or he’s a highly energized senator who can lead our movement from the Senate.
“Hillary is a weather vane,” Glaser added. “Like many politicians, she will follow what a constituency says. History is pointing toward campaign finance reform and better environmental policies. With enough pressure from Bernie, Elizabeth Warren and the rest of this movement, she will do the best she can.
“I love Bernie,” Glaser continued, “but I could live with Hillary, because Bernie will be breathing down Hillary’s neck with all of us behind him. If Bernie is leading the movement and she is taking all the heat from the ‘Repugnicans’ — as I call them — it might not be a bad thing. There will be more cameras focused on him than any other senator… . It’s the movement and getting new people talking like him. He can still lead bottom up, whether he wins or loses.”
Kyle Black, a 40-year old sustainable surfboard maker from Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, said he had been waiting all his life for a “candidate who would call out the monetary superpowers.”
“Say the worst possible outcome happens and Bernie’s not making it through,” Black said. “But at the same time, the collective consciousness of America has been affected by Bernie. Now so many have had their eyes opened, so there’s nowhere to turn.”
