Editor's Note: The following commentary piece originally published on the author's Substack and has been republished on IVN by request of and with permission from the author.
Brad Lander is running for Congress. Yet in the final days before the general election, he was in Israel, not New York, making his case to voters. The debate over his arrest during a demonstration there has focused on whether people agree with what he was doing. That misses the bigger point.
Lander is a candidate for public office. Where he goes and how he spends the final days of his campaign are legitimate questions for voters. But there is a more basic question. Why can a candidate in a heavily Democratic district spend the final stretch before Election Day without having to fight very hard for the votes that will send him to Congress?
Because in New York, the election that matters is usually over in June.
IVN Editorial Board
New York has perfected a remarkable form of political entitlement: win the primary, which Lander did in June, and you can practically take the summer and fall off. Go to the beach. Book the vacation. Leave town. The real contest is behind him. The voters who decide whether he gets to Congress have largely had their say. Millions of other New Yorkers have not.
That is what closed primaries do. They allow a small slice of the electorate to decide who gets to represent everyone else. Candidates know which voters they need to reach and which they can afford to ignore. By November, the outcome may be all but settled.
New York has 1.2 million independent voters. More than half are people of color. Hundreds of thousands of Black, Latino, Asian and other New Yorkers cannot vote in the Democratic primary that may determine who represents their neighborhoods in Congress. They pay taxes. They live with the decisions their representatives make. They have a stake in the outcome. But when the election that counts comes around, they are locked out.
And Brad Lander has defended that system.
Last year, he testified before the New York City Charter Revision Commission in favor of keeping the city’s primaries closed. He had an opportunity to speak up for the independent voters shut out of the process. Instead, he defended the rules that keep them out.
Shawn Griffiths
Lander understands how New York elections work. He knows that in many districts, the Democratic primary effectively determines who wins office. He also knows that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers cannot participate simply because they are not enrolled in a political party.
Those voters are not asking for a special advantage. They are asking to vote in an election that determines who represents them. What is hard to defend is a system that is taxpayer funded and government administered while denying eligible voters a voice in the contest that matters most.
The parties have their own interests. They want to protect their control over nominations and decide who gets a place at the table. But public elections belong to the public. A party’s interest in maintaining its power should not take precedence over the right of voters to help choose their representatives.
The consequences are plain. Candidates appeal to the voters who can decide a closed primary. Those shut out have less influence and fewer opportunities to hold elected officials accountable. Then politicians wonder why so many people feel the system does not work for them.
This is not about whether Lander’s actions in Israel were right or wrong. New Yorkers can make up their own minds. The question is why a candidate can defend a system that excludes so many of his constituents and enter the general election under so little pressure to win their support.
If Lander wins in November, he will represent independents whether they voted for him or not. Yet our election laws give those voters far less influence over who gets elected.
Brad Lander knows how this system works. He won under its rules and has defended keeping them in place. New Yorkers should ask him why.