With rumors swirling that U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer could face a challenge from within his own party in the 2022 Democratic primaries, a Bronx Republican is the first to officially challenge the longtime lawmaker.
On Nov. 18, Aleksander Mici, a Morris Park resident, officially filed to run against Schumer in the 2022 election as a Republican. Schumer, who has served as Senate majority leader since 2021 and in the Senate since 1999, is running for a fifth term. If reelected, he would become the longest-serving U.S. senator in New York State history.
Mici lost a close District 13 City Council race on Nov. 2 to Democrat Marjorie Velázquez, capturing 44.6% votes with 96% of scanners reporting.
Fleeing a brutal communist dictator in Albania to eventually come to the United States in 1991, Mici is sick of seeing the U.S. turn into a socialist nation, he told the Bronx Times. Schumer has been a lawmaker for decades and his time has passed, Mici added.
“I am running for the United States Senate because I know firsthand how dangerous the Socialist creep into American politics will turn out to be,” Mici said in a statement. “While Chuck Schumer was voting to raise property and gas taxes, I was suffering, like millions of Albanians, under a tyrannical communist dictatorship and struggling to make it to America. And now almost three decades later, the past is prologue: under Chuck Schumer’s leadership, Democrats are still doing everything in their power to raise costs on everything, while everyday Americans struggle.”
Mici, 46, is a practicing attorney with a law degree from Fordham Law School. He was born and raised in Albania, where his parents instilled in him a desire to fight for a freer and more humane world. In 1991, the candidate organized an uprising with his high school classmates in Shkoder against the tyrannical Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha, the Albanian dictator who executed thousands of political dissidents and jailed tens of thousands more in forced labor camps during his 40-year dictatorship, he said.
But at age 15, Mici, like many millions of others across the world, had escaped a brutal Stalinist dictatorship and eventually found freedom in America.
As 2022 approaches, Mici said the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction. He said he is against the numerous vaccine and mask mandates, dislikes having Critical Race Theory (CRT) in schools, wants the country and state to be more fiscally conservative and wants the government to honor the Second Amendment.
“For me, the impact I’d like to make is ideological,” he said.
The Republican said that teaching CRT is wrong because there isn’t proof that the entire country has ever been racist. He is also tired of President Joe Biden, who he said is doing a terrible job and claimed that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.
“If everything lines up for me and I win this seat, I will do my best to fight for the people of New York,” Mici said. “Schumer has been in power almost 50 years and hasn’t done anything. “I’m ready to take on this social cabal in a way this country was founded.
U.S. senators are elected to six-year terms. Schumer currently earns an annual salary of nearly $200,000.
Reach Jason Cohen at jcohen@schnepsmedia.com or (718) 260-4598. For more coverage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @bronxtimes.
