Everyman (sometimes) wins, but big money rules politics 

Illustrations: Menachem Weinreb

It’s hard not to take heart in the victories of the little guys.

Just look at Edward Durr, a truck driver who spent $2,300 on his campaign, half of it on Dunkin Donuts, to defeat Steve Sweeney, the president of the New Jersey state senate and the longest-serving politician in Garden State politics. Durr, outraged by the denial of his gun permit application, filmed a campaign video with his iPhone calling for change.

He is now, suspenders and all, the state senator–elect for the south Jersey district.

“I joked with people and I said, ‘I’m going to shock the world, I’m going to beat this man,’ ” Durr said after his Tuesday victory. “I was saying it, but really kind of joking. Because what chance did a person like me really stand against this man? He’s literally the second-most-powerful person in the state of New Jersey.”

There’s also Bruce Blakeman, a perennial office-seeker who unexpectedly won the race for executive of Nassau County, the wealthiest county in New York state and one of the most well-off in the country.

“Many people told him he had no chance,” said Michael Fragin, deputy mayor of the Village of Lawrence and a well-known Jewish liaison for Republican candidates going back a quarter century, including Governor George Pataki. “And guess what? He won, and he will be the Nassau County executive.”

The question of what makes an average Joe to decide to run for office has many answers. The purest motivation is to get things done or push an issue into the public awareness. Ross Perot ran for president in 1992 not to win but to put balancing the budget on the agenda. He lost, but the eventual winner, Bill Clinton, made good stewardship of the budget a priority.

Here in New York City, however, the question of why people run is increasingly getting a new answer — because there’s money to be made. The city has a generous (more like a free-for-all giveaway) campaign finance program that gives $8 for each dollar raised by candidates. You just have to raise $10 from at least 75 people and your $750 turns into a $6,000 windfall. This makes for a lot of money to hire family and friends, and for campaign consultants to go shopping for candidates.

It’s hard not to blink when so much money is available for the asking, says Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran political operative and consultant.

“Running for office is now a big business,” Sheinkopf tells Mishpacha. “There’s so much money involved. This is disastrous for democracy and just fuels a permanent political class.”

One immediate result of this matching funds program is headlines like the one that appeared in New York magazine in May, “Here’s Everyone Running for New York City Mayor (So Far): Meet the Twenty-Plus Candidates.” The number of candidates would go on to double. Just nine made it past the gate all the way to the general election, from the typical Democratic and Republican lines, to the Out Lawbreaker party who coaxed 99 votes out of New Yorkers, and the Humanity United candidate who got nine times that amount (but still lost).

Bill Pepitone was among the more plausible candidates. The Conservative Party nominee blasted out regular messages to his 1,574 followers on Twitter. His final tweet was on October 21, about two weeks before Election Day. He’s a cop with 30 years of experience, but few have even heard of him. He ended up with less than 1 percent of the vote, fewer even than the woman running on the openly Socialist line.

So why do they run? Well, as Joe Schriner, the Ohio house painter who has run for the White House six times since 2000, said, “My ultimate goal is actually to win. Seriously.”

That’s as good an answer as Willie Sutton gave when asked why he robbed a bank: “Because that’s where the money is.”

Crown Heights resident Menachem Raitport has run in six local elections in the past dozen years, including for state assembly, state senate, and borough president.

“Why have I decided to run? Very simple. To help people,” says Raitport, a Republican who is married with eight children. “It’s public service. That is literally what the job is called. There are some people who run for public office for the perks. That is not what I’m here for.”

Raitport’s latest campaign was for Brooklyn borough president, a race he was virtually assured of losing by a landslide after Williamsburg’s Councilman Antonio Reynoso locked up the Democratic nomination in June.

There is one main reason for his multiple candidacies, Raitport says: “I pay a fortune in tuition.” He wants to get into office so he can push for a voucher system for private education.

The office of Brooklyn borough president, currently held by Mayor-elect Eric Adams, is little understood by voters. Chiefly seen as a cheerleader and lobbyist for the borough, the office-holder also gets to decide on land-use decisions and controls millions of dollars to distribute.

“He lobbies the mayor for the borough, and he also gives out millions of dollars to different causes — food banks, for instance,” Raitport says. “He also gets to have a staff of about 70 people from all walks of life to help him know what is going on in every community.”

Menachem Raitport’s father is Rav Yitzchok Raitport, a rosh kollel in Boro Park who has written dozens of seforim on the Rambam. Menachem says his desire to run for office came from the house he grew up in.

“I come from a house of Rambam — but I also came from a house of chesed,” Raitport said. “This is to help Klal Yisrael, it’s to help other people. This is what it is all about.”

He is proud of the number of people who pulled the lever for him, despite his disappointment at lack of support from the Jewish establishment, which refused to endorse him, and the lackluster help from the local GOP. That resulted in many of his potential supporters being unaware of his candidacy, he says, although he acknowledges that the Republican establishment canvassed for the required signatures and paid the fees for him to run.

“I was running in a district that was predominantly African American, and the media was not giving me a fair shake,” Raitport said. “And I still got close to 75,000 votes, and that was without spending a penny. If the Republican Party had given me the support that I asked them for, and if the Jewish community had voted for me, then I could have won.”

Indeed, in last week’s race he took just 23 percent of the vote.

This was his best performance yet. His first race, in 2010, he ran against Assemblyman Karim Camara and took 12 percent. Four years later he lost to State Senator Jesse Hamilton, getting just 4 percent. He lost to Assemblywoman Diane Richardson in 2015, though with a more respectable 21 percent. The next year he got 6 percent in a rematch with Hamilton, and in 2020 took 11 percent in a race with Richardson.

Despite the string of losses, Raitport said that he has no plans to change party affiliation to make himself more palatable to voters in his mostly Democratic district.

“I am a Republican since I was 18, and I will never become a Democrat,” he said.

Does he regret the half dozen campaigns? “I don’t know,” Raitport says. “Sometimes I think yes, sometimes I think no.”

Would he do it again? Right now, he is taking a break from campaigning and has no plans of running in any of the state races next year.

“I have to reevaluate,” he said, “and decide what I want to do next.”

Fragin, who has been managing political campaigns for a quarter century, says that one sure marker he uses to gauge a candidate’s chances for victory is whether he wants to win. Those who don’t want to win — Edward Durr notwithstanding — usually don’t end up winning. And if they want to win, they put in the needed time and effort.

“The first thing is to assess is if they really, really want it,” Fragin says. “Running for any office is not easy. It takes a lot of fortitude to sell yourself to the public every single day. It takes a lot of fortitude to ask people for money every day. But it’s critical to winning.”

Another question Fragin asks is what this particular candidate brings to the table that is not there already. Fragin can run down a list of a bunch of candidates who “had no business running at all.” But he disputes the notion that you have to have all the necessary ingredients before jumping in — such as money in the bank, endorsements lined up, name recognition.

“I don’t really work for people who run and lose,” he said. “But I can tell you that one way for sure not to win is not to run.”

He refuses to say whether he’s gotten more calls feeling him out for a run for office since Republicans did so well, but he agreed that last week’s shockers will reverberate for a long time among potential candidates.

“I think,” he predicts, “that Republicans will now have an easier time recruiting candidates.”

The last time Republicans did so well came two years into the term of another Democratic president who overreached — Barack Obama, who in 2010 was pressing Israel to the wall on settlements and knee-deep in negotiating what turned out to be Obamacare. Bob Turner, a TV producer who never before held elected office, ran for the seat vacated by disgraced Representative Anthony Weiner and pulled off an upset.

The Flatbush and Queens district, previously held by current Senate majority leader Charles Schumer, had only elected Democrats. But anger over the two issues made it ripe for a Republican victory, at least for the two years before Democrats wiped the seat off the map after that year’s census count. There were other issues as well, such as Ed Koch making Obama’s treatment of Israel the central focus of the campaign and anger in the Jewish community at the Democratic nominee’s vote for the marriage redefinition bill then recently passed in Albany.

Turner’s win inspired a host of Republicans to run. David Storobin, for example, won a seat in the state senate, though he lost his bid for reelection after that, as well as several other races he tried in the years since.

Ben Akselrod got the political bug around that time, though he has since gotten over it. A teenage émigré from Soviet-era Belarus, he moved with his parents to New York and was enrolled in yeshivah. He later got a political science degree in Touro College.

“Parents who came from the Soviet Union wanted their children to become doctors,” Akselrod explains. “But I’m afraid of blood, so that wasn’t an option. The next best thing was to become a lawyer. But that didn’t work out. So I ended up in government.”

He was studying in Yeshiva Chaim Berlin when he went to work for Senator Seymour Lachman, a Democrat from Flatbush. “Government and politics are two different things, I hope your readers understand that,” he notes. “They are two totally different things. I was working for government, not as a politician.”

Akselrod decided to run for office in 2012, primarying Assemblyman Steve Cymbrowitz in the intraparty Democratic contest. His closer than expected margin — he lost 54 to 46 percent — gave him a push to try again... that very election. He ran in a rematch in the general election, this time on the Independence Party line, against Cymbrowitz, but he won just 19 percent.

“I believed that I had something to offer, from my personal story and my experience and knowledge,” Akselrod reflects. “Incumbents get used to what they do, and just like with any other job, could begin feeling that they are entitled to their seat. Incumbents look at campaigning as a necessary evil, or in some cases an unnecessary evil.”

Akselrod made one more attempt at political office in 2014, again against Cymbrowitz. He lost by nearly the same margin, 56 to 44 percent in the Democratic primary and in the general election, this time on the GOP ballot, 55 to 42 percent.

He is now finished with campaigning, having since returned to the private sector, and he has no regrets on his moves.

“I still believe that what I did was right,” Akselrod says. “I lost my election by just over a hundred votes. If someone is able to predict how an election will turn — that’s impossible.”

But he adds that campaigns are not for everybody.

“I have all types of friends,” he says. “I have a friend like Ari Kagan who just won a city council race. He has politics in his blood. With other friends, I would do anything and everything in the world to tell them not to do it. It depends on the individual.”

Both politicos interviewed for this article — Sheinkopf and Fragin — blame the city’s matching funds program for the flood of candidates.

“One of the real challenges is to raise money,” Fragin notes. “Having a matching campaign finance law takes most of the challenge away, so it just causes many more people to want to run. There’s no way you can convince people not to run for office until you change the law.”

Sheinkopf pointed to New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams as a symbol of the law’s incentive for corruption. Williams won reelection last week, but despite not having a credible opponent, filed for $3 million in campaign matching funds. He is now running for governor, and making use of the taxpayer dollars to promote himself with ads in the city’s expensive television market, watched by voters in the suburbs as well.

“Using public money in the way we do it is absolute geneivas daas,” charges Sheinkopf, who has semichah. “You have to have a system in place where if you lose, you disappear. Now, anyone with no chance at anything will be able to get city funding. We need some way to determine who has a possibility of winning.”

The system as currently run gives modestly funded candidates access to ample resources that can be used to hire friends; they then become targets for campaign consultants looking for jobs. In essence, campaign consultants are now going around shopping for candidates, rather than the other way around. It’s a sellers’ market.

“Consulting for campaigns used to be a job for once in four years,” Sheinkopf notes. “Now this is this full-time occupation.”

To reform the system, he suggests that a panel be appointed to look for improvements that would make it less prone to corruption. Candidates, he says, should be screened to see if they really want to serve the public. Now, many candidates are just running to create the possibility of a candidacy in the future, to raise a point or to be able to get public funds and hire family members.

Another reason candidates run for office is to get jobs in the next administration. They will likely declare their candidacy and mount a campaign, but then withdraw mid-race, telling the front-runner  that it’s to help him.

But most “perennials” are honest people and just are down on electoral luck, Sheinkopf says. Former city councilman Sal Albanese, for example, lost a campaign for city council in Staten Island last week, his eighth unsuccessful run, including multiple campaigns for mayor, Congress, and state assembly.

“He actually runs a real campaign and is honest,” Sheinkopf asserts. “He means well.”

Akselrod says he still does not know what he could have done differently in his races.

“Was I naive?” he asks rhetorically. “Certain things you just don’t know until you get inside the room. Would I change anything? Sure. But the fact that I ran, no. I enjoyed every minute of running.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 885)