Six weeks after an election day celebrated by the national news media, Tiffany Cabán has finally conceded the Democratic primary race for District Attorney of Queens County.
Cabán’s candidacy became a cause célèbre among the country’s top Democrats, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren all emphatically endorsing her first-time bid for public office. Yet despite the national celebrity, Queens Borough president and career Democrat Melinda Katz won.
All but one of the congressional districts that take in parts of Queens have partisan voting indexes hovering around D+30. If a candidate who promised not to prosecute most nonviolent crimes and to ban ICE agents from courtrooms can’t win in the place that sent AOC to Congress, the prison-abolitionist Left seems doomed nationwide.
It’s worth noting that despite her AOC-style extremism, Cabán was about as strong a candidate that crazy New York socialists could have drafted. The coalition of the Left that wants to lock up the rich and free everyone else from jail was never going to find a career politician, and for a relatively young candidate, Cabán was fairly compelling. Despite Cabán’s constant campaigning on her race and sexuality, she was a public defender with strong community ties, and unlike another outer-borough Latina beloved by the Left, Cabán balanced an effective use of social media with eloquence and intelligence.
Sure, her views were wild, but she dressed them up well with a calm and notably positive demeanor and actual knowledge of the policies she proposed. Yet she lost in one of the bluest areas of the country, and despite what her supporters may say, she lost fair and square.
Cabán declared victory on election night, but Katz refused to concede. And seeing as Katz ran a remarkable absentee ballot operation with a reputation that preceded it, she was wise not to. As absentee ballots came in, they triggered an automatic recount, and for the last six weeks, the Katz and Cabán campaigns have been sparring over individual ballots, with a number of affidavit ballots for Cabán trashed because voters violated standards and rules. Ultimately, Katz won the closed primary by 55 votes.
For a fixture in Queens politics, that’s barely a victory. But it’s a victory nonetheless, and one snatched from every top leftist in the country. If a put-together and likeable leftist couldn’t bring the seeds of prison abolitionism to Queens with the backing of multiple presidential front-runners, what hope is there for the left-wing justice movement’s success anywhere else in the country?
