NY19 Rap Narratives Painfully Free of Substance

In the last installment of Chronogram’s NY19 coverage, we gave the national media a less-than-satisfactory report card for their primary hot-takes. Now, with the general election well underway, some national outlets seem intent on repeating their mistakes by grasping at yet another misguided take on the race, while others are giving that take outsize attention. In the primary, it was “Beals as progressive champion.” In the general, it seems to be “Delgado as urban iconoclast.”

It began, to the best of my knowledge, with a now-deleted anonymous Twitter account spreading a not-so-quiet-whisper campaign about lyrics from AD the Voice, Delgado’s short lived hip-hop persona from the late 2000s. The songs in his album Painfully Free, the account revealed, are fraught with profanity, anti-capitalist sentiments, and contentious critiques of race relations in America, as well as some misogynistic language. From that spark, a blazing brushfire grew and engulfed all other election news.

A few weeks after the election, the New York Post, owned by conservative media magnate Rupert Murdoch, penned its first piece on NY19. The piece focused entirely on Delgado’s rap career, failing to even mention his longer and more recent legal career, any policy or political issues in the district, or critiques of incumbent Rep. John Faso. Faso and his allies seized on that narrative, with Faso putting out a statement condemning Delgado’s decade-old lyrics and the Congressional Leadership Fund, a House GOP-aligned Super PAC that has pledged to spend a million dollars in support of Faso, putting out a radio ad slamming the lyrics as “vile, a sonic blast of hateful rhetoric and anti-American views.”

The story then jumped the shark when, on Tuesday, the New York Times gave it a write up, followed by an editorial on Wednesday. It has now been featured on Vox, Fox News, Politico, the New Republic, NBC, Inside Higher Ed, and a slew of local and Albany newspapers. It’s safe to say that this story, the largest of this campaign coverage-wise, has been given more than enough oxygen.

It’s not surprising that publications like the Post and the Times picked up this story. It’s the kind of scandalous, flashy, shocking story that attracts readers from outside the district: those who don’t care about the bread and butter issues of the campaign. However, it is not an adequate angle from which to cover this race. Not by a mile. Not a single voter that I’ve spoken to, from liberals in Kingston to Trump supporters in Delhi, have expressed even the slightest concern about Delgado’s rap music.

In fact, the only concerns about the music seem to have manifested in the form of liberal backlash to Republicans using it as an attack. As with many small scale elections, the NY19 race has been focused much more on substantive issues of policy and local politics rather than cultural issues of race and morality.

This indifference towards the issue is consistent with polling on voter priorities in 2018. A Gallup poll in June found that voters overwhelmingly cited policy issues like the economy, government performance, healthcare, and foreign affairs as the issues they believe to be the most important, rather than cultural issues like race relations and faith and family.

This is backed up by a Pew poll back in 2016 that showed about 70 percent of voters calling education, the economy, terrorism, and healthcare “top priorities” compared to just over 50 percent saying the same of race relations. Issues of race, culture, and religion don’t motivate the majority of voters. So, instead of focusing on Delgado’s music, let’s instead explore four issues that will be of actual importance in this election.

Healthcare

Healthcare has been and will continue to be the staple policy debate of this race. In the primary, it served as both a rallying cry against Faso and a divider between the more progressive and more moderate candidates. While most Democratic candidates supported the single-payer ‘Medicare-for-all’ proposal, Delgado supports a more moderate plan of achieving universal coverage through fixes of existing healthcare law to create a Medicare-buy-in system, which would expand medicare benefits to anyone who wishes to enroll.

Delgado’s plan is, no doubt, a progressive solution, but one more along the lines of Hillary Clinton’s “pragmatic progressivism” rather than Bernie Sanders’ scorched earth Democratic socialism.

In their first TV ad, the Delgado campaign hammered Faso on the issue by introducing Andrea Mitchell. Mitchell has a brain tumor and a spinal condition and was at risk of losing her healthcare when the repeal Obamacare, which protects patients with pre-existing conditions like Mitchell’s, was being debated in Congress last year. She confronted Rep. Faso about this at a “Faso Friday” protest in 2017 and got him to promise her he would not take away her healthcare. But he went back on that promise.

Later that year, he voted for the GOP’s American Healthcare Act (AHCA), a wildly unpopular piece of legislation that would’ve scrapped those ACA protections. The repeal effort was later stymied in the Senate, but not before it did its damage to Faso’s reelection prospects. Mitchell has since become one of Delgado’s most steadfast supporters.

In his 2016 campaign, Faso said he would “seek to repeal and replace Obamacare with a patient-centered approach that provides more choices to families.” True to his word, he did just that. In 2018, he has been more aloof about his healthcare views. He has avoided explicitly staking out a position, opting instead to blast primary candidates who supported the more left-wing “medicare-for-all” proposal.

Faso particularly hammered Jeff Beals’ proposal, with his campaign sounding off in a press release: “the Sanders-Beals plan will cost taxpayers trillions in new taxes and voters throughout the district deserve a straight-forward answer on how Jeff Beals plans to pay for it.” He has not, as yet, attacked Delgado’s more moderate Medicare-buy-in plan. He also has not offered an alternative healthcare proposal, and did not return request for comment on the issue, leaving voters guessing as to where he stands on the issue.

Communication and Engagement

Faso has been blasted by activists for his lack of communication with voters. The most notable example of this came when Faso failed to hold a town hall in May 2017, the heated period in which Obamacare repeal was being debated. Rep. Sean Maloney of NY18, the district just south of NY19, “adopted” the NY19 for a day, holding a town hall in Faso’s stead in what was widely seen as an embarassment for Faso. Faso, Maloney said, was attending a fundraiser in Albany at the time of the town hall.

Faso had already received flak earlier that year for calling town halls “not productive,” opting instead for small-group meetings before finally succumbing to pressure from activists and holding a handful of town halls. This was a central topic throughout the primary. He has also been criticized for quite literally “phoning it in” this summer by holding call-in town halls, where voters must sign up early and receive instructions on how to ask a question.

While the argument might be made that this issue will be contained among the outraged liberals already firmly backing Delgado, there are signs that it might be a widespread sentiment. Voters of all political stripes throughout the district have expressed varying levels of concern and discontent with Faso’s presence in their communities. The slogan “No-show Faso” has made its way from progressives in Ulster County to Trump voters in Delaware and other rural counties–a constituency that Faso must hold in order to win in November.

Delgado cited the “tele-town halls” as a prime example of Faso being “inaccessible to his constituents,” asserting that he “lacks the transparency we need from the people elected to represent us.” For his part, he says he “will communicate directly with voters at the doors, on the phones, digitally, in the mail box and on TV,” and states he will “not be outworked.” For an example of his voter engagement, he pointed to an instance earlier this week in which he “answered questions at a public town hall in Cooperstown and heard concerns about a lack of access to healthcare, quality education, and good paying jobs.” Faso did not return request for comment on the matter.

Faso’s poll numbers have clearly taken a hit as a result of his perceived absenteeism. A DCCC poll of 545 NY19 voters taken on June 27-28, just after the primary election, showed Faso with a mediocre 33% favorable rating. That is compared to a 45% disapproval rating, including 23% of Republicans. Even for a partisan poll, a -15 favorability split is substantial. Delgado, meanwhile, has a +20 split, with 35% viewing him favorably and 15% viewing him unfavorably. Faso is, at the moment, polling well below the benchmarks he needs to pull off a win.

Community Ties

“Carpetbagger” is a label that can weigh down congressional candidates like a lead jacket. Being called a carpetbagger is tantamount to being called a Russian spy in a district where voters have a strong community identity and/or demographic homogeneity. NY19 is one of those districts. As the most rural district in New York State, and the 6th most rural in the country, NY19 has something of a chip on its shoulder.

NY19 is the overwhelmingly white, heartland region of a state defined by its diverse metropolis. As a result, many NY19 voters are highly suspicious of outsider politicians, especially those from downstate who they perceive as liberal elitists. When Sean Eldridge and Zephyr Teachout moved to the district from New York City to run for Congress in 2014 and 2016 respectively, they were both slammed with the carpetbagger label and soundly defeated. With Faso and Delgado, it may be a different story.

Both Delgado and Faso have moderate ties to the district. Delgado was raised in Schenectady which is just outside the district lines and, for all intents and purposes, lies within the same region. He was later educated at Colgate, a little further outside the district but still upstate New York, before going to Oxford and Harvard, then moving to LA and New Jersey before settling in Rhinebeck in February 2017. While he doesn’t have the strongest claim to NY19 heritage, it is definitely stronger than the claims of Eldridge or Teachout.

Faso’s roots, on the other hand, are much further downstate; he grew up on Long Island and attended high school in Queens. He attended SUNY Brockport, just outside of Rochester, and studied law at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Around his time at Georgetown, he took jobs in Long Island and DC before finally settling in Kinderhook.

In choosing Kinderhook, Faso was, according to the New York Times, “purposely choosing a district of a longtime assemblyman whom Mr. Faso wanted to replace.” He served the region in the Assembly until 2002, then made failed runs for Governor and Congress. Finally, in 2016, he was elected to Congress, the culmination of years of political maneuvering.

Delgado and Faso’s ties to NY19 are comparable, and so a carpetbagger attack by either may backfire. Faso has already pursued that narrative, putting out a statement shortly after Delgado captured the nomination that read, “This November, Mr. Delgado will cast his first ever general election vote for Congress in our district after just moving here from New Jersey. He will soon learn, as the last two Democrat [sic] candidates for Congress before him, that our neighbors do not look kindly upon candidates who have just moved into our district and presume to represent us.”

The only problem with this attack is that Faso did just that decades earlier. Delgado noted that in an interview with Chronogram just before the primary election, stating, “If there’s someone who actually is a carpetbagger here, it’s John Faso,” and saying of Faso’s carpetbagger label, “If that’s the line of attack that he wants to take, it’s a rather weak one and I welcome it.” If Faso keeps pushing the carpetbagger label on Delgado, it may unleash an unwanted conversation about Faso’s own ties to the district.

Literally Everything Else

Net neutrality, Russia, taxes, Iran, free trade, immigration, terrorism, North Korea, the environment, voting rights, SNAP, women’s health, policing, election security. There is an endless supply issues that mean a great deal to the people of NY19. In my reporting, I’ve heard voters cite a wide range of policy and political concerns that are crucial to them and their votes.

What I have not heard, however, is voters griping about Delgado’s lyrics. Nor have I heard voters echo the sentiments of Gerald Benjamin, a Faso-aligned SUNY New Paltz Professor who told the New York Times, “this is about culture and commonality with the district and its values. People like us, people in rural New York, we are not people who respond to this part of American culture.” That misses the mark entirely.

NY19 voters are generally not concerned with the scandal and intrigue that defines national politics in the Trump era, at least not on the local level. Nor do they seem to feel that Delgado is somehow unfit to serve them because of his background in rap.

“It does not concern me,” said one Sullivan county voter who believes that “Faso’s statements are nothing more than race-baiting and reveal the mean-spiritedness of his campaign.” Another says she “see[s] it as a non-issue,” and “completely irrelevant.” A voter from Broome county said, “it definitely would not influence my vote at all,” while one Republican from Dutchess County said “[it] has nothing to do with policy,” and is “going to cost [Faso].” The reviews are in, and it’s a thumbs down from the voters.

Instead, voters I’ve spoken to are concerned with tangible issues. Some are still recovering from the aftermath of a recession and Hurricane Irene. Others are fighting to maintain their health coverage. Most are deeply concerned about the sorry state of American democracy, whether that be due to Trump’s undermining of political norms, or the as-yet undrained swamp of establishment politicians.

In Washington, the moral and civil fiber that holds together our cherished democratic institutions is rapidly decaying. At home, small towns and rural counties are seeing an exodus of young people and skilled labor, suffering from a lack of health and transportation infrastructure and trying to make the American dream work–or at least make ends meet–in an increasingly unequal society. John Faso is going to need to talk a lot more about their issues, and a lot less about rap music, if he wants to win their votes come November.

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This article appears in July 2018.