A Sneakerhead Runs for State Senate
Zellnor Myrie would like to introduce himself to you, Central Brooklyn. Zellnor — just Z, if you’d prefer — is the progressive challenger for Jesse Hamilton’s District 20 State Senate seat, and though his campaign only began in earnest in February, when he quit his full time job at global law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, he’s already covered considerable ground in the district, greeting commuters at train stations, marching in parades, attending church services, speaking at bars and banquets and high school graduation ceremonies, and, of course, knocking on doors.
Canvassing held him up for our interview at a cafe off of Crown Heights’ Franklin Avenue, and though I’d met him only in passing at a fundraising event at Gotham Market, the energetic 31-year-old greeted me with a hug. Train delays. “There are parts of the district where it takes me longer to get to than it would for me to get to the city,” he told me with a laugh. I had to hand that to him, District 20 is indeed an odd one, horseshoeing narrowly around Prospect Park and encompassing swaths of Bed-Stuy, Fort Greene, Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, and Sunset Park.
On a recent 90 degree evening, in the tiny stretch of Park Slope, in his district, I met up with him and his aide Godfre — who joined the campaign by way of a Twitter DM — and despite it being the first dreadful day of summer, Myrie looked cool as ever in his typical uniform: button-up, tie, dress pants. Loafers were the one irregularity for the unabashed sneakerhead. (“I take great pride in the fact that I wore Jordans and listened to Migos in the elevator of my former law firm,” he recently tweeted in a thread linked with #Vote4TheCulture. “Let’s show people that we can be fly and civically engaged at the same time.”)
Godfre also serves as an occasional hypeman, gently coaxing Z to knock again, a daunting task when there’s so much to say, and when one of the main topics on your agenda — the IDC — is a tough concept to convey period, let alone in the time your average New Yorker is willing to give a stranger.
The Independent Democratic Conference, or IDC, is a faction of Democratic state senators who vote with Senate Republicans, giving them the power to pass legislation despite the Dem’s 32 – 31 majority. Formed by Jeffrey Klein in 2011, when Republicans briefly held a majority, members claim the coalition is a bipartisan effort to move legislation forward. Anti-IDC groups paint another picture, one of kickbacks in the form of committee chair positions (complete with salary increases) and a chokehold on progressive legislation, including bills on comprehensive health care, anti-LGBTQ discrimination, and reproductive rights.
In early April, Governor Andrew Cuomo brokered a deal to reunify the IDC with mainstream Senate Democrats, but the move inspires tepid confidence, and progressive challengers, including Myrie, still consider the strange political games a need-to-know for all Brooklynites. “We’re at a time in our country where we cannot afford to have Democrats not be Democrats,” the candidate, usually mild-mannered, stressed, “It’s just why people hate politics. Because you have people that come before you and give you lip service and they say, this is what I’m fighting for, and it’s all surface level stuff.”
Hamilton, who ran in 2014 and took office in 2015, pledged himself to the IDC just before election day in 2016. “When it comes to the substance and when you peel the curtain back,” Myrie continues, “you see that nothing is there, and meanwhile we have tens of thousands of families being kicked out of their rent stabilized apartments because we don’t have the right laws on the books. Meanwhile we’ve got people in jail because they are poor. Meanwhile we have schools that are owed tens of millions of dollars all within this district because people have decided to play politics.”
Myrie’s quick to point out the different fundraising styles between his and Hamilton’s campaign as well. To date, Hamilton has taken tens of thousands from real estate special interest groups, including The Real Estate Board of New York. Myrie, by contrast, boasts that 100 percent of his first quarter donations came from individuals. Only time will tell if this grassroots approach will pay off, though; incumbents historically bank wins on name recognition and larger coffers. Add to that New York State’s infamously low voter turnout, even for presidential elections, and it’s a far cry from an easy victory.
But this isn’t Myrie’s first foray into politics. After graduating with a bachelor’s in communications and master’s in Urban Studies from Fordham University, Zellnor worked as Legislative Director for City Councilman Fernando Cabrera. While earning his JD at Cornell, he served as president of the Cornell Law Student Association.
And he’s confident about his odds because he’s been talking to the people.
Myrie is both plagued and inspired by the problems that lie behind the many doors of the district, like the senior citizens who don’t know how they’re going to make rent or low-income housing fallen into disrepair. “I’ve had people in NYCHA facilities bring me into their apartments and show me the ceilings coming down in their bathrooms. They’ve shown me the insects that have gathered in the kitchen,” he recounts. “When all of the other challenges of running and being a candidate surface, I remember people I’ve spoken to who really need help.”
As he often does, Z brings up his mother, Marcelina, a Costa Rican immigrant who came to the city four decades ago on the promise of a mattress and a factory job and built a life for herself and her son in Prospect Lefferts Gardens thanks in no small part to affordable housing. “That stability, my mom being secure in the fact that she knew that her rent would only go up by a certain percentage,” he shared, “I think allowed her to flourish in the other areas of her life.” Like keeping a watchful eye on her son, sending him to P.S. 161 and Brooklyn Technical High School, making sure he was home by 7 p.m. sharp and his homework was done.
Myrie isn’t shy about expressing gratitude and love for the community that raised him, and it’s this pride and concern that brings him back, Ivy League law degree in hand, to legislate for social change. “I do not consider myself exceptional,” he is quoted in his post-grad, pre-campaign “success story” on the Cornell Law School website. “I have just been in the right place, at the right time, around the right people. My job, outside of work, is to provide those things — the place, time, and people — to those who do not have them.” He echoed a similar sentiment when we spoke, his campaign now a reality, and well underway. “You gotta change the law,” he said. “That’s how you change the arc of our community.”
When one of the last doors we knocked on opened, a kitten darted out and Myrie put out his foot to gently block the animal’s bound down the stairs. As the woman brought the kitten in, he turned around grinned. Did you see that save? The woman poked her head back out with a slightly bothered air, but as he started his spiel, faint recognition dawned. “Oh, you’re running against…” she searched. Jesse Hamilton, Z offered. “Who’s part of that bad group…” The woman again let Myrie fill in her blank. The IDC, yes. “Oh yes,” she concluded, grabbing his outstretched flyer. “I’ll vote for you.”
If only it were always that easy.
But election day is months away, and he’s still gathering signatures to get his name on the ballot. Then there’s voter registration. Endorsements continue to roll in, including from the Working Families Party, Independent Neighborhood Democrats, and Lambda Independent Democrats, but Myrie’s still out and about, morning to night.
That evening, he stood on the steps of a building with no conceivable entry system — the last building of the night — and scrolled through a calendar on his iPhone. It wasn’t even 9, a mercifully early end to the night’s work, given the thunder that rumbled ominously overhead. “At the end of the day, I like to check and see what the first thing I have to do the next morning is,” he said. Trains. 7:30 am.
“It’s day by day, you know. It’s a war of attrition kind of thing,” Myrie reflected with a smile when I asked how he keeps his energy up. “But that makes it exciting because then you look back and you’re like, ‘Oh wow. Over this time period, look at what we’ve been able to accomplish.’”
For Myrie, there’s no time to consider defeat and little time to even consider his opponent Hamilton, who so far has done little to engage with the progressive upstart. There’s only time to lace up his sneakers, keep his eyes on September, and just keep running.
