Marlene CintronKonto zweryfikowane

Today we have Black and Latino political leaders in 4 of the 5 Democratic county organizations. That didn't happen overnight. With that power is the ability to have a plethora of new Black and Latino judges and elected officials at every level from the communities they represent.

The role of outside groups fully funding and running primary campaign isn't illegal, and trust me I know many great people in those movements, but we should question what it means to our civic and democratic process as well as to germane political influence of Blacks and Latinos.

We can gauge the success of many immigrant groups in many ways. One metric has always been the ability to gain political power. From the Irish to the Italians to Blacks, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans and now we see new ethnicities that are growing in numbers also make vital gains.

Juan Gonzalez writes about this phenomenon in Harvest of Empire. What does it mean when now folks on Tennessee can use http://match.com  criteria to select and find candidates the go district shopping to defeat the groups that have worked tirelessly to make those gains?

With the incredible volume of folks moving into NYC from other places, often w no historical reference point of the intrinsic struggle for polítical influence, this strategy of running prepackaged transplanted candidates further erodes the role of political and civic engagement.

In a place like my home in the Bronx, where political influence nationally is needed and took a long time to achieve, we lost critical influence when we unnecessarily lost seniority in Congress. In '18 we lost a future Speaker and in '20 a Chair of Foreign Relations Committee.

Both Crowley & Engel were legislative leaders. Often those in leadership spent most of their time fundraising for the party nationally and move closer to DC. Fair criticism from some who expect reps to live at home. Ironically, Crowley raised millions used for Dems to win maj'rty

It'll take us a real long time to get back the seniority we lost. Perhaps it's a failure of those in office to connect w newcomers, perhaps it's a change in demographics that allow for prepackaged candidates, or a lack of understanding of the role of seniority in Congress.