Donovan Richards And Carolyn Maloney Co-Endorse Each Other

ASTORIA-LONG ISLAND CITY, QUEENS — Queens Borough President Donovan Richards and U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) co-endorsed each other on Friday, as they both run campaigns for re-election against progressive challengers in The World’s Borough.

Richards, a former Queens City Council Member, is seeking re-election for Borough President of Queens after winning a special election to fill the seat in late 2020, and longtime congresswoman Maloney is running to represent the city’s 12th District for another term in 2022.

Although Maloney boasts a long list of endorsements, Richards is among the few sitting elected officials in the Queens portion of the 12th District — which encompasses the Upper East Side, East Village, and parts of western Queens and north Brooklyn — to get behind her campaign, following Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan whose 37th Assembly District also encompasses parts of western Queens. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) also endorsed Maloney.

Both Richards and Maloney have drawn progressive challengers in their campaigns for re-election: Jimmy Van Bramer, a longtime, term-limited Long Island City Council Member, is seeking to unseat Richards in this year’s borough president election, and activist Rana Abdelhamid is running for Congress against Maloney.

Van Bramer and Abdelhamid co-endorsed each other at the beginning of May.

In their Friday cross endorsement announcement, which was delivered in front of the Astoria Houses NYCHA complex, Richards and Maloney described each other as champions of equity who would partner to support Queens through the post-pandemic recovery.

Speaking of the Biden administration’s wide-reaching infrastructure plans, Richards said that “there’s a real opportunity to bring $80 billion down to the local level on this next infrastructure package and we need to be at the forefront of this conversation, and it needs to be looked at through an equity lens” for which he said Maloney is a “firm partner in ensuring that in this part of the world, in this part of Queens, we’re going to deliver for the people who need it the most.”

He also cited Maloney’s commitment to expanding Pre-K access in NYC, and further extending Astoria’s ferry routes as examples of her commitment to access for people citywide, and especially in Queens.

“I used to be a City Council member and I loved it, but in that job I learned that you need a federal partner. I am his federal partner,” Maloney said of Richards, noting the money that she’s secured on the federal level to support repair projects and pop-up vaccine clinics in the Astoria Houses and bike improvements across the borough, in partnership with Richards.

Maloney described Richards as someone who makes “helping people his top priority” adding “when there is a need, Donovan is always there with the resources, with the heart, with the direction.”

“I can’t always be here, I’m in Washington, but I’m working closely with him every day to get resources that people need in our great city and in the great borough of Queens,” she said, likely taking aim at Van Bramer and Abdelhamid who have criticized her commitment to constituents in other parts of the district over people in Queens.

The NYC borough president elections will be held in November 2021, whereas Maloney's congressional election won't be until 2022 — by which point it's expected that Suraj Patel, a 37-year-old attorney who ran against her in 2018 and 2020 and told Patch he plans to run again in 2022, will have also entered the race.