New York Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado won the Democratic primary on Tuesday and won a convincing victory over his closest challenger, Ana María Archila, a longtime activist who emerged as the left wing’s best chance for a nationwide office to win this election cycle.
Mr. Delgado won despite his late entry into the race just last month, when Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed him as her second-in-command and management partner and the former lt.gov. Brian A. Benjamin, who was arrested on charges of fraud for federal campaign funding.
But within just a few weeks, Mr. Delgado, a former Hudson Valley congressman, managed to overwhelm his opponents with millions of dollars spent on television commercials and campaign broadcasts. With Me. Hochul’s support garnered the party’s institutional support and ratification of major unions, giving him a definite edge when he rushed to introduce himself to voters nationwide.
The election for the state’s second highest office has become one of the most compelling and rigorous competitions in Tuesday’s primary election after Mr. Benjamin’s resignation rocked the race. It sheds the spotlight on a typical low-profile office with few statutory duties other than to succeed the governor – a once rare event that has nevertheless happened to two of the last three governors.
The race has competing visions of an office typically used to bolster the governor’s agenda and touched on divisive issues surrounding ideology, Latino representation in government and the influence of money in the State Capitol.
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And it has a potentially uncomfortable outcome for me. Hochul area: If me. Archila had recorded a disturbance, Ms. Hochul shared the Democratic ticket with a candidate who was not of her choice in the general election.
Mr. Delgado won 60 percent of the Democratic primary vote, counting with 28 percent of the expected vote, according to The Associated Press. Me. Archila received 26 percent of the vote, followed by Diana Reyna, with 14 percent.
Me. Reyna 48, a former Brooklyn city councilor, was the managing partner of Representative Thomas Suozzi of Long Island, who Ms. Hochul unsuccessfully challenged in primary school.
Mr. Delgado’s main competition was presumably from me. Archila, the preferred candidate of the Working Families Party, who tried to incite the party’s left flank by launching a rebellious campaign that received endorsements from representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nydia Velázquez, and a series of progressive groups. Me. Archila, along with New York City Public Defender Jumaane Williams, promised not to use the lieutenant – governor’s office not as a ceremonial role, but as an independent bullying pulpit to push back against the governor’s office.
In me. Archila, 43, saw the party’s progressive activist wing see his latest opportunity to catapult one of his own to a nationwide office for the first time, after a series of failed attempts in recent years: Mr. Williams himself came close to marrying Mrs. Hochul when he was lieutenant governor in 2018.
But me. Archila’s swift campaign was not equal to Mr. Delgado’s giant campaign war chest, which helped him spend his opponents 80 on one on the airwaves.
Mr. Delgado poured $ 5.3 million into the race to pay for an avalanche of television and digital ads leading up to Election Day. The Archila campaign and the Working Families Party spent only $ 66,000 on advertising on her behalf, according to AdImpact, a firm that monitors political advertising spending.
Mr. Delgado, 45, was elected to Congress in 2018 as part of the so-called blue wave during the Trump presidency, which turned a largely rural home in the Hudson Valley and became the first person of color to form a district in New York. represented outside. New York City and its suburbs in Washington.
A newcomer to the complexities of state politics, Mr. Delgado was founded in May by Ms. Hochul recruited to serve as her lieutenant governor and running mate after she worked through legislation to get Mr. To remove Benjamin from the ballot after his arrest. The Hochul campaign in mr. Delgado saw a proven campaigner who could potentially win in competitive districts and me. Hochul, who is white, could help make inroads among Black and Latino communities.
Mr. Delgado, who identifies as Afro-Latino, struggled during his first news conference in Albany to explain his Spanish roots, which upset Latino political leaders who were eager to turn a Latino into a nationwide state for the first time in the state’s history. office to elevate. Concerns about his ethnicity were heightened by the two Latinas who challenged him; Me. Archila was born in Colombia, while Ms. Reyna is a Dominican-American.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Delgado often highlighted his upbringing in a working-class household in Schenectady and his honed resume as a Rhodes scholar and graduate of Harvard Law School, as well as his brief stint as a rapper – an example, he said, of an unplanned trajectory that led him to enter public service.
Mr. Delgado said he is in close partnership with Ms. Hochul will work if elected for a full term and, due to his commitments in Washington, serve as a link between New York and the federal government.