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There are 300 members of the Democratic State Committee. Each Assembly district gets two, one man, one woman. They are elected every two years, along with the Assembly members, charged officially only with placing candidates for statewide office on the primary ballot (though candidates can also get there by collecting petition signatures) and to attend regular meetings.
Voters tend against ousting incumbents or voting in primaries at all, and state committee races are rarely competitive in the first place. The race within the Upper West Side Assembly district of Linda Rosenthal, which runs from 44th to 93rd streets, has therefore surprised many.
Elizabeth Starkey, a longtime political and community activist in the neighborhood, has held the post for the last decade. She is a lawyer and a member of Community Board 7.
Starkey believes the challenge is payback for supporting Charles Simon in the Feb. 28 special election to fill the Assembly seat Scott Stringer had resigned from to take office as the new Manhattan borough president. But Starkey’s challenger, Deborah Cooper, said she was running because of her own interest in serving on the party committee.
Rosenthal won the Democratic nomination for that race through a county committee vote in late January, a process many have criticized for being flawed and closed to all but party insiders. She was supported by Stringer and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, on whose staff she had served for 13 years.
After losing the Democratic nomination, Simon ran as the candidate of the West Side Progressive Party, which he created for the purposes of the run. Starkey supported him early, and throughout, angering some who believe that she should have supported party unity and backed Rosenthal after she won the nomination.
“I think I’ve been a good progressive member of the State Committee,” she said. “I don’t think I should be turned on because I didn’t support the candidate in what everyone agrees is a flawed process.”
Arthur Greig, the Democratic County Committee’s law chair who abruptly withdrew his own candidacy against Rosenthal approximately 48 hours before the county committee vote, is poised to win the other state committee spot as the district’s male representative.
Starkey also backed Mark Green in the race for attorney general, which she says angered one of Green’s opponents, Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo is backed by 1199, the large healthcare union.
“I was warned that the 1199 phone bank might be turned against me if I didn’t get on board,” Starkey said.
Cooper, a longtime community activist herself who has volunteered and lobbied on behalf of NARAL and other pro-choice and women’s issues groups, insisted that Starkey had followed the wrong course in the Assembly special election.
“I think that once you pick the nominee, parties should support their nominee. I think that’s a very important principle,” she said.
She had long been looking at making a run for the State Committee, she said, and this year the time seemed right.
“I’ve always wanted to get more involved in the official part of the Democratic Party,” she added. “You go where there seems to be a place to go, and the State Committee seemed like a good outlet for me.”
Cooper has received the endorsements of Rosenthal, Stringer, Nadler and State Sen. Eric Schneiderman.
According to Cooper, Starkey “hasn’t enlarged her circle of [political] people,” and her approach to activism has grown stale. Cooper feels she has a demonstrated ability to reach out to new, younger people to involve them in the party structure, and said that she hoped to use the State Committee position to facilitate that process.
“I know those parts of the party. I’ve been an unabashed progressive my entire life, and I’m unapologetic about it,” she said. “I marched in the streets, but now it’s time to do something else.”
Starkey, however, insisted that she had the right approach, and is eager to continue the work she has done on the State Committee authoring reform-minded policy resolutions.
“I do feel attached to the work of the State Committee because I do see it as a grassroots connection between the voters and the elected officials,” she said. “I don’t think I deserve to be ousted for what doesn’t seem to me to be anything but club politics.”