NEW YORK — During the Covid-19 pandemic’s early surge, several of the top contenders in the tight Democratic primary race for New York’s 10th Congressional District remained cooped up in their apartments. But like many of the city’s wealthiest residents, one front-runner — Trump impeachment lawyer Dan Goldman, who has recently polled in the race’s top three candidates — decamped the city for ocean air in the Hamptons.
POLITICO asked the top six polling primary candidates where they spent 2020 while Covid was shaking the lives of New Yorkers. Three of them held local elected office at the time and naturally stayed in their New York City homes. Rep. Mondaire Jones was campaigning for a congressional seat in Westchester County and spent his time in the New York suburbs. Another candidate, former congressmember Elizabeth Holtzman, left the city from late March until late May, and Goldman was gone from March until late August.
“The pandemic put leaders to the test, and voters should take note of who stepped up,” Sochie Nnaemeka, the director of the New York Working Families Party, which has endorsed Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou in the NY-10 race, wrote in a statement.
A review of social media posts and Goldman’s television appearances shows that the lawyer, who has never held elected office, spent the early months of the pandemic with his wife and children at their multi-million-dollar second home in Water Mill — a hamlet within the town of Southampton, on the eastern end of Long Island — while the virus was raging through the city. Election records reveal that he requested an absentee ballot at the address in June 2020.
A spokesperson for Goldman, who appears within reach of winning the hyper-competitive race for the newly drawn district covering lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, said Goldman left the city for Long Island after testing positive for Covid in March 2020, and he stayed there until “mid to late” August, returning to the city in time for his kids to go back to school. Goldman had already finished up his legal stint on Capitol Hill and returned to the city right before the pandemic hit.
Candidates’ pandemic whereabouts played a prominent role in the 2021 mayoral race, when it came to light that Andrew Yang left the city for his second home in Hudson Valley during the early Covid surge. Mayor Eric Adams — then Brooklyn’s borough president — boasted at the time that he slept on a mattress in his office to help manage the crisis. The question could similarly impact the NY-10 race, in which all of the top primary candidates are vying to reduce income inequality and combat disparities.
But in a diverse district where many wealthy residents embarked on an exodus to their vacation homes, it remains to be seen whether voters will focus on the candidates' whereabouts. Affluent New Yorkers fled the city in record numbers throughout the pandemic while less-resourced residents bore the brunt of the viral spread — and well-heeled neighborhoods within the NY-10, such as Tribeca, Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope were among those that emptied out the most in spring 2020.
Goldman, who owes much of his personal wealth to his familial ties to the Levi Strauss & Co. clothing empire, isn’t the only NY-10 candidate who departed the early epicenter of the pandemic. Holtzman, who similarly did not hold elected office at the time, left her Brooklyn home to stay “with a longtime friend” in Massachusetts from late March through May 2020, according to a campaign spokesperson.
Holtzman polled fourth behind Goldman in a recent Data for Progress poll, while an internal Working Families Party poll, conducted before former mayor Bill de Blasio dropped out of the race, did not find Holtzman among the top six candidates.
City Council member Carlina Rivera, who tied for the race’s top contender with Niou in the Working Families Party poll, was in office and spent the pandemic with her husband in their one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. A spokesperson for Rivera said she “did not leave NY from March 2020 until July,” when she left the city for a few days.
Niou and Assembly Member Jo Anne Simon, who were also in office at the time, stayed at their homes in the lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, respectively, their campaigns said.
Rep. Mondaire Jones, who was running in the 17th Congressional District in the New York suburbs, was campaigning there at the time, according to a spokesperson. After winning the election in November of 2020, Jones began splitting time between Westchester and D.C. in December. He recently moved to Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens after deciding to run in the NY-10. Critics have called Jones a “carpetbagger” for seeking the New York City seat after redistricting pitted him against fellow Democratic Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney.
Goldman, who raised over $1.2 million for his congressional campaign between April and June, according to the most recently available filings, has said that he has not spent any of his own money in the race so far — though he also hasn’t ruled out doing so. Much of Goldman’s fundraising came from members of his immediate and extended family. But the former lawyer, who had nearly $1.1 million in cash on hand as of June 30, still trails far behind Jones, who had the most cash on hand at that time with $2.8 million.
