Nearly two dozen Brooklyn district leader candidates backed by the Brooklyn Can’t Wait coalition – a group spearheaded by progressive reform club New Kings Democrats – won their races Tuesday night, giving reformers the majority of seats on the county party’s 42-member executive committee, according to City & State New York.
This may mean trouble for state Assemblymember Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn and her reign over the Brooklyn Democratic Party, the news site reported.
Eight of the nine reform-aligned candidates running in contested races successfully unseated old guard incumbents. In addition to the coalition’s 14 returning district leaders who ran uncontested, that’s likely enough to wrest control of Brooklyn’s political machine from Bichotte Hermelyn – if reformers are able to consolidate, according to the news site.
New York City Council Member Sandy Nurse were among the winners, easily capturing their district leader races in Bushwick and Cypress Hills. As did deed theft advocates Carmella Charrington and Omar Hardy in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights. The two political newcomers successfully unseated the county-aligned Kenesha Traynham-Cooper and Brooklyn Dems Executive Committee Vice Chair Henry Butler, who many had seen as a potential compromise candidate for party chair, according to City & State.
Former state committee member Akel Williams unseated Anthony Beckford in central Brooklyn. And the lone insurgent candidate who’d lost, Stanley Scutt, did so against one of the party’s most powerful members: former Brooklyn Democratic Party boss Frank Seddio in southern Brooklyn, the news site reported.
