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Tag: new york primary
Endorse This: Peter King On Ted Cruz: ‘I’ll Take Cyanide If He Wins The Nomination’

Endorse This: Peter King On Ted Cruz: ‘I’ll Take Cyanide If He Wins The Nomination’

In an interview yesterday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Congressman Peter King made his opinions known on Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who later failed to pick up a single delegate in King’s state of New York:

“Well, first of all, in case anybody gets confused, I’m not endorsing Ted Cruz. I hate Ted Cruz. And I think I’ll take cyanide if he got the nomination,” King said.

King had previously said of a potential Cruz nomination, “I will jump off that bridge when we come to it.”

Nassau and Suffolk counties, whose voters elected King to his 12th term representing New York’s second congressional district in 2014, both voted for Donald Trump by wide margins.

King said he’d voted for John Kasich, “to send a message,” but recalled how his constituents on Long Island couldn’t stop talking about Donald Trump. In early March he joked that “Maybe I’ll become a reporter for the Daily News,” if Trump were the Republican nominee in an interview with that paper.

King said later in the same Morning Joe interview that he wasn’t endorsing John Kasich because he wanted “to keep my powder dry” for a convention endorsement.

Given Kasich’s — or anyone else’s — slim chances at wrestling this nomination away from either Trump or Cruz in Cleveland, Congressman King may have an unenviable choice to make in a few months.

Video and photo: MSNBC/ Washington Free Beacon.

Who Are The 3.2 Million New Yorkers Who Can’t Vote Today?

Who Are The 3.2 Million New Yorkers Who Can’t Vote Today?

Today is one of the most important days on the primary calendar: New York is finally voting! The stakes are high for candidates in both parties, but especially so for the Democrats, each vying for part of the 247 delegates up for grabs.

However, millions of New Yorkers will be unable to take part in today’s voting: aside from the scores of independent voters who are ineligible to take part in closed party primaries, in which only party members can vote, many thousands more reportedly discovered recently that their voter registrations had been changed.

Both Ivanka and Eric Trump missed the October 2015 deadline to change their voter registrations to Republican so they could support their father, and they’re not alone: around 3.2 million New York voters can’t vote in today’s primary, and many of them favor the anti-establishment candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

According to Vice News, political minorities are disproportionately affected by the state’s election laws. Around 37 percent of New Yorkers under 30 don’t identify with either party, and 15 percent of African American voters and 22 percent of Latino voters were also politically unaffiliated.

Furthermore, recent revelations of voter roll purges show that even some committed party voters may be shut out of voting: the names of 126,000 Brooklyn registered Democrats have been removed from voter rolls since November 2015, resulting in a net loss of 63,500 registered Democratic voters. Executive director at the NYC Board of Elections Michael Ryan told WNYC that the drop was the result of the removal of inactive voters and the address changes of those leaving the borough.

But such a dramatic loss is still suspect, even to New York City’s Brooklynite mayor Bill de Blasio, who told WNYC “I admit that Brooklyn has had a lot of transient population – that’s obvious. Lot of people moving in, lot of people moving out. That might account for some of it. But I’m confused since so many people have moved in, that the number would move that much in the negative direction.”

The Election Justice USA, which describes itself as “a national organization advancing election integrity, transparency, and the protection of voting rights,” filed a lawsuit yesterday on behalf of “all disenfranchised and purged voters,” alleging that the unapproved registration changes deny affected voters equal protection under the law. The organization has called for a blanket order allowing “tens of thousands” of potential plaintiffs to vote in the primary today.

“We were seeing an alarming number of voter affiliations changed without people’s knowledge or consent, people who were registered listed as not registered,” said Shyla Nelson, a spokeswoman for Election Justice USA, to local New York City publication Gothamist. But, given that the lawsuit was filed just yesterday, it is unlikely that a decision will be made before polls close at 9 p.m. tonight.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders brought up that fact, which will undoubtedly impact his support levels in the state, during a campaign rally in Washington Square Park last week. “We have a system here in New York where independents can’t get involved in the democratic primary,” he said. “Where young people who have not previously registered and want to register today just can’t do it. So this is going be a tough primary for us.”

Of course, New York’s primary has been closed to independents for decades.

For Hillary Clinton, the absence of independent voters skews the Democratic vote for her, given she has polled poorly among Democratic-leaning independents. And while Donald Trump remains nearly unchallenged in the state, his argument that the party systems are “corrupt” has focused squarely on primaries and caucuses that he can paint as “undemocratic.”

“I hope it doesn’t involve violence. I hope it doesn’t. I’m not suggesting that,” he said Sunday, referring this time to the Republican National Committee’s delegate system. “I hope it doesn’t involve violence, and I don’t think it will. But I will say this, it’s a rigged system, it’s a crooked system. It’s 100 percent corrupt.”

Photo: A demonstrator dressed as U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump protests outside the Trump Tower building in midtown Manhattan in New York March 19, 2016. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Bernie’s Gun Record Won’t Help Him In New York

Bernie’s Gun Record Won’t Help Him In New York

As Democrats go to the polls today in the New York primary, Bernie Sanders has paid a dear political price for his views on gun control, and his initial reaction to a lawsuit brought by family of the survivors of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre against an assault weapons manufacturer.

“Bernie Sanders’ views on guns are inconsistent with those of New York Democratic party primary voters,” claimed Manhattan-based Democratic Strategist Hank Sheinkopf in an email to The National Memo. “The Clinton campaign in ads and rhetoric has effectively used Sanders’ gun positions to blunt his appeals to minority voters, who are disproportionately gun crime victims.”

Clinton, the former Secretary of State and former senator from New York, has positioned herself well to the left of the self-described democratic socialist from Vermont on gun issues. She has called Sanders a “reliable” supporter of the National Rifle Association and repeatedly slammed him for voting for the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, a 2005 bill passed by Congress which gives gun manufacturers immunity from liability should a lawfully purchased gun be used illegally. (Clinton has said she would work to repeal the bill if elected.)

But during a heated debate with Clinton in Brooklyn last Thursday, Sanders reversed his earlier position on a lawsuit brought by nine family members of children murdered at Sandy Hook and a teacher who was wounded when Adam Lanza went on his shooting spree at the school in Newtown, Conn., armed with an AR-15 assault rifle.

“They have the right to sue, and I support them and anyone else who wants the right to sue,” Sanders said.

Last week, a Superior Court judge in Connecticut denied a motion by lawyers for Bushmaster Fire Arms International, the rifle’s manufacturer, to dismiss the lawsuit, allowing the litigation to continue.

Meanwhile, Clinton surrogates continue to paint Sanders as a callous shill of the gun lobby, noting that he voted against the Brady Bill five times.

“(Sanders) doesn’t have the sensitivity he needs to the horror that is happening in these families,” opined Kristen Gillibrand, junior senator from upstate New York during an interview Monday with Glenn Thrush in his Off Message podcast for Politico. “I just don’t think he’s fully getting how horrible it is for these families,” she added.

Thrush wrote in an article after recording the podcast that he was surprised by Gillibrand’s accusations, given her past as a conservative Blue Dog Democrat and former upstate member of the House who once held a 100 percent rating from the NRA and kept a shotgun under her bed. He questioned whether her conversion to the strict gun control orthodoxy of many liberal states was one of “the shot gun variety” — a marriage of expediency resulting from her appointment in 2009 by then Gov. David Paterson to take over Clinton’s vacated senate seat. But he also noted that she is a passionate Clinton backer and a feminist, one who now believes that strict gun control is a women’s issue.

David McReynolds, a well-known 86-year-old socialist and pacifist who lives in Manhattan’s East Village and has run for president twice on third party tickets, unsuccessfully, was appalled by Gillibrand’s claims about Sanders, whom he intends to vote for today. “I think that reading is outrageous — it makes him sound like he doesn’t give damn,” McReynolds said in a telephone conversation. “I can’t imagine Bernie being indifferent to the slaughter of school kids.”

McReynolds noted Sanders currently has a “D-minus” grade from the NRA and has voted for a ban on assault weapons. But he did denounce his comments on guns during the Brooklyn debate last week as “weak” and believes he got “caught on the horns of a dilemma: I think he got mousetrapped.”

New York State assembly member Deborah Glick is a strong Clinton supporter whose 66th assembly district covers Greenwich Village. She too says Sanders has been hurt by his views on guns. “I hope he has,” she added, claiming that Sanders has contributed to the image that he’s callous about the subject. “He’s been very abrupt when asked questions about it and that comes across to many people as unfeeling or uncaring,” she told this reporter. “I don’t know if he was irritated. He does have a bit of a short fuse. He was curt and that comes across as unsympathetic to what was a horrifying and shocking moment.”

As for the lawsuit, Glick observed the plaintiffs “aren’t suing to end gun manufacturing. They’re suing because it is their contention that intentionally marketing military style weapons to a young demographic is dangerous to society. They’re putting profits before people which would seem to be inconsistent with Sanders’ mantra.”

Glick touted Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s work banning assault weapons in New York shortly after he was elected.

Sanders may have shot himself in the foot when he was asked during a tense April 1 interview with the editorial board of the New York Daily News if victims of gun violence should sue gun makers. “No, I don’t,” he said in his characteristically blunt manner. He then added, “But I do believe that gun manufacturers and gun dealers should be able to be sued when they should know that guns are going into the hands of wrong people.”

Arthur Schwartz, a prominent labor lawyer who served as counsel for Sanders’s New York City campaign, doesn’t believe guns are a big issue for his candidate. “I think Hillary periodically jumps on the issue. I think Hillary has found a good line. But Bernie Sanders has successfully convinced everybody that he isn’t a friend of gun manufacturers and the NRA.”

Photo: Activists hold a protest and vigil against gun violence on the third anniversary of the Sandy Hook mass shooting, outside the National Rifle Association (NRA) headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia December 14, 2015. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Endorse This: Trump Remembers ‘7/11’

Endorse This: Trump Remembers ‘7/11’

Ever since Ted Cruz lambasted “New York values” at January’s Fox Business debate — presumably because he didn’t think he would need New Yorkers’ votes, or maybe because he didn’t want them — Donald Trump has bumped former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani for the title of most 9/11-happy politician in the country, bragging about his proximity to the events on that day 15 years ago and re-tooling the largest attack on American soil to suit his political ends.

In his campaigning ahead of New York’s primary, Trump made Cruz’s comments, and his 9/11-centric rebuttal to them, the central part of his stump speech, whipping up crowds from Suffolk County to Buffalo into frenzies over something he didn’t really have anything to do with — unlike Giuliani, obviously.

Trump seems to have gotten so numb to the phrase “9/11” that he must have forgotten it altogether — he either misremembered the attacks happening in July or was caught daydreaming about midnight taquitos while recalling aloud the bravery of his having been alive 15 years ago.

Neither Trump nor his audience batted an eye at the mistake — though that silence wasn’t as powerful as Trump’s was last fall, when he refused to support the James Zadroga Act, which permanently extended heath care benefits to 9/11 first responders.

Photo: Screenshot from Reuters video.