The new guard has arrived in Harlem.
A pair of relative unknowns running for party positions in the 70th District caused an uptown upset when they bested candidates handpicked by longtime Assemblyman Keith Wright.
Wright, a political fixture in Harlem for decades, is the leader of the Manhattan Democratic Party and a staunch ally of powerful Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver — but even his clout wasn’t enough to defeat Marisol Alcantara, 38, and Jamaal Nelson, 35, two newbies who were elected district leaders last month.
Their win was mirrored downtown, where two Silver-backed district leaders were ousted by Paul Newell and Jenifer Rajkumar. Newell, the incumbent, and Rajkumar, a first-timer, swept to victory in Silver’s own 64th Assembly District.
Nobody expected candidates anointed by Silver and his comrades to lose, said a longtime party insider. The unexpected victories were a “shock” to the establishment, he said.
Nelson, a married father of two, agreed. “We did the unthinkable. We beat the machine,” he said.
His connection to Harlem’s black community through his church, and Alcantara’s ties to the growing Latino presence along the district’s west side, made the perfect “black-brown coalition,” Nelson said.
Alcantara, a Dominican-born former union organizer raised in Washington, DC, said she and Nelson took pains to arm themselves against usual political tricks employed by experienced party operatives.
“You have to get 500 signatures from registered Democrats in the district to get on the ballot, so we got about 1,700. We wanted three times the required amount in case of challenges,” said Alcantara.
She ran against April Tyler, an 18-year-incumbent endorsed by Wright.
Alcantara, with a tiny staff of unpaid volunteers, focused her grassroots campaign on the often-overlooked projects and immigrant communities in her West Harlem neighborhood.