Council District 2: East Village, Gramercy Park, Kips Bay, Lower East Side, Murray Hill, Rose Hill
An artifact of the way in which Bloomberg and his City Council extended their leadership by an additional term is that most of the current crop of officials came into office in 2013, ran for re-election in 2017 and those seats are opening again in a huge wave. This is not the case for District 2. A byproduct of term limits is that putative candidates for office are more likely to seek their lane in an open year than when the incumbent is running for re-election.
The incumbent, Carlina Rivera, runs unopposed for her seat. Her predecessor, Rosie Méndez, came into office after the 2005 election, and got to serve her third term starting in 2014. It is kind of a quirk of election law that Mendez got a third term and it won’t be explained here, but Rivera, who was elected in 2017, is seeking her second term now.
This is one of the neighborhoods of Manhattan I have lived in.
This is a good baseline chart for a healthy incumbent. You can see fairly continuous fundraising activity. There are definitely visible peaks around 3 successive filing deadlines.
We have mapped every campaign’s fundraising by ZIP code as well. The map starts “zoomed all the way out” when you visit it because it contains donations in ZIP codes on the other side of the country.
Suffice it to say, we have already generated every insight possible from the January filing, and about all 372 active filers.
