Carolyn Maloney - Political Campaigns

Political Campaigns

See also: United States House of Representatives elections in New York, 2012#District 12

In 1992, Maloney was elected to the House of Representatives, narrowly defeating 15-year incumbent Bill Green, a progressive Republican, to become the first woman to ever represent the district. The 14th and its predecessors had been one of the few districts in the city where Republicans usually did well; in fact, they held the seat for all but eight of the 56 years between 1937 and Maloney's victory. Although the district had been made significantly more Democratic in redistricting, Maloney's win is still considered an upset.

Following Maloney's win, Republicans continued to hold most of the State Senate, Assembly, and City Council seats on Manhattan's East Side for nearly another decade. Since 2002, the Democrats have dominated the area, and now hold all of the area's seats in the state legislature and City Council.

Maloney faced significant opposition from Republican City Councilman Charles Millard in 1994, the year of a Republican tidal wave in the midterm congressional elections. She defeated Millard handily, taking 64 percent of the vote. She has not faced credible opposition since, and has been reelected eight more times by an average of 77 percent of the vote.

In 2004, Maloney faced a potential Democratic primary challenge from Robert Jereski, a former Green Party political candidate and unsuccessful candidate for delegate to the 2004 Democratic National Convention on the slate of Dennis Kucinich. Jereski opposed the Iraq War while Maloney had initially voted for the resolution to authorize force; she later forcefully renounced the war, including most memorably at a town hall meeting in her district with antiwar Congressman John Murtha. However, Jereski didn't qualify for the ballot because his petition was found to have invalid signatures, leaving him 4 short of the 1250 required.

In December 2008, Maloney hired a public-relations firm to help bolster her efforts to be named by Governor David Paterson as Hillary Clinton's successor as a New York Senator. Maloney toured parts of the state, but was overshadowed by Caroline Kennedy's promotional tour for the same seat. Maloney interviewed with the governor for 55 minutes. Public opinion polls placed Maloney's support for the Senate seat in the single digits, trailing the front-runner, then-New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, although her bid was endorsed by the National Organization for Women Political Action Committee, the Feminist Majority Political Action Committee, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, and other columnists and editorial boards.

On January 23, 2009, Paterson named Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand to the post. Many urged Maloney to run against Gillibrand in 2010.

Although she had been leading Gillibrand in both the Rasmussen and the Quinnipiac polls, Maloney ruled out a run for the U.S. Senate and instead retained her congressional seat.

In the Democratic Primary for Congress on September 14, 2010, Maloney defeated a well-funded opponent, Reshma Saujani, a 34-year-old Indian-American hedge fund lawyer, by a landslide, 62-percentage point margin, racking up more than 81% of the vote to Saujani's 19 percent. Her success was due in large part to a substantial grassroots effort, with volunteers and a motivated field team reaching out to registered voters across the district. That night, Saujani said, "I'm definitely running again", but three months later announced publicly that she would not challenge Maloney again.