In the last week, new information has come to me about this race. Some is public, such as a new super PAC donation of $850,000 to attack Ramos and bolster JGR – the largest single independent expenditure ever made in a NY legislative primary, and we don’t know the identity of the donor, but they must have seriously deep pockets. Some is not; I’ve had many private conversations, including with working-class people of color who do organizing in the district, and who span the spectrum from strongly pro-Ramos to “I really wish we had some better candidates” to strongly pro-González-Rojas. Some of them shared with me information they hadn’t been comfortable sharing with me before. Some of what they told me, I can talk about with you in a conversation if you want to talk in person at my outreach table, or, if we already know each other, on a call.

With all of that in mind, I want to discuss some issues and questions that might make you want to vote for Ramos, and share one final concern.

• Ramos as a legislator
• No More 24
• Fighting the casino going forward
• Constituent services, “doing the work” locally, and delivering for the local neighborhood
• Personality
• The dark money and the sliminess of the campaign supporting González-Rojas
• What matters more to you?
• Whether to worry about Monserrate

Ramos as a legislator

As I pointed to in my previous post, a neighbor summarized the two Jessicas’ legislative records in this Reddit post. That’s a summary of this spreadsheet and kudos to the (I believe deliberately anonymous? I don’t know who “starfoxprime” is) person/people who put it together.

To quote brunowe from the Reddit post:

Ramos has sponsored or co-sponsored 1,888 bills across four legislative sessions. Of the 523 bills she introduced as sole or primary sponsor — bills she carried — 50 were signed into law. That's an 9.6% passage rate for sole-sponsored bills in a 63-member chamber where most legislation dies in committee. You don't move bills through Albany without building coalitions and productively working with others. You don't get labor protections, veterans' benefits, and workers' comp reforms enacted by burning bridges — the signed bills are the bridges.

Now look at JGR's record. Of 213 sole/primary-sponsored bills over three sessions, 3 were signed into law. Many of her bills attracted 100+ co-sponsors in the Assembly — impressive visibility — but it's ultimately what gets signed into law that matters.

Rejoinders from JGR’s supporters:

Comparing an Assemblymember to a Senator is comparing apples-and-oranges (or chalk-and-cheese, if you prefer). The Assembly has way more members and different politics. González-Rojas’s record in the Assembly is not bad once you account for that.

The important thing is the bill, not whether the legislator in question is its sole or primary sponsor. González-Rojas tries to be discerning and only sponsor or co-sponsor bills where she believes her office can put their weight behind the bill and it has a decent chance of passing. Once you include bills that González-Rojas co-sponsored, her record has 106 bills signed into law over three legislative sessions, which doesn’t sound so bad.

One reason that a big proportion of the successful bills González-Rojas champions are ones that she’s signing onto as a co-sponsor is that JGR’s office is open to collaborating with other progressive groups and the movement more generally, even ones that sometimes disagree with her on some issues. And perhaps her office is more willing to do so than Ramos’s office has been in recent years. I’ve spoken with local organizers who had this experience. Some advocacy groups working on policy priorities that Ramos generally agrees with, maybe even strongly backed, have now found she is not as reliable a partner. I am truly sorry that I can’t write in more detail here but there is stuff about this that I have been asked not to publish.

So: if your legislative priorities align with Jessica Ramos’s personal policy preferences and those of her most dedicated allies (such as unions), you might want to vote for her! But things outside that scope are less likely to be as prominent on her legislative agenda.

Then, a few counterarguments that I don’t find very convincing:

The JGR campaign has also criticized Ramos for the number of Senate votes (“nearly a thousand”) that Ramos missed while campaigning for Mayor (see 1:08 in this video clip). I am mostly of the opinion that this is sort of an inflated statistic that didn’t matter very much. Some proportion of votes in a legislature are rote formalities, or are overwhelmingly lopsided. Party leadership helps legislators schedule their absences not so they’ll miss zero votes, but so that they’ll be present for the votes that really matter. Did her missed votes in the last couple years matter? For instance, an environmental advocacy nonprofit, Environmental Advocates Action, gave her a 100 score for the 2022 session and a 93 score for the 2023 session. (2024: hard to find that particular scorecard but a different environmental nonprofit (NYLCV) showed she voted yes on all their priority bills in that session.) EAA gave her an “INCOMPLETE” for the 2025 session because of her many absences. However, NYLCV gave Ramos a perfect 100 score, because all of her absences were “excused.”

A more complicated argument: from day one, Ramos got to be chair of the Labor Committee, a seat so powerful that it probably helps her pass lots of other legislation too, so her good stats aren’t just about her own personal skills. But so what? The point isn’t “who is magically inherently better at passing bills,” it’s “who would likely be more effective at passing bills if elected.” Given that the Senate Majority Leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, endorses Ramos’s campaign (and was even campaigning with her this week), it seems extremely likely Ramos would keep this role in the next session if re-elected, and would thus keep this power and continue to use it to pass her bills. There’s not even any tentative assurance that JGR, if elected to this seat, would get a similarly powerful position.

No More 24

There’s a bill that appeared before the New York City Council this year that would ban 24-hour shifts for home care aides. The fact of 24-hour shifts is absolutely horrific! The specifics of the bill have been under negotiation to make sure they don’t cause an accidental catastrophe for disabled people, to figure out how to accommodate the state’s existing Medicaid law, and deal with concerns/opposition from the Legal Aid Society and at least one union, DC37. Governor Hochul’s opposition (even though it’s a city-level bill) has gotten in the way of the bill.

Ramos has shown up and physically been with the workers who went on hunger strike to support the bill. González-Rojas has not. It’s a bit hard to find a plain-text explanation on the web of the full anti-JGR argument on this issue, but videos and graphics on the Youth Against Sweatshops Instagram feed assert that González-Rojas took campaign money from Chinese-American Planning Council, which they characterize as a sweatshop. They further assert that DC37 chose to support JGR specifically because Ramos supports No More 24.

Elected officials at all levels of government can and should show up for their constituents, even if the problem at hand is not one they can directly help with. And politicians ought to be careful about whose money they accept, and be very quick to refund donations from skeevy groups. That being said, No More 24 is a city-level bill. And, there is a state-level bill (S1762/A10333) (thank you to a neighbor for digging that up), which both González-Rojas and Ramos are co-sponsoring, that “Places limits on the maximum amount of hours a home care aide may be required to work without voluntarily consenting to such an assignment.”

If there’s some other specific statewide bill or some other action that a state-level legislator can materially act on here (which does seem like it would be a good idea, to modify the Medicaid rules), it has not been written about where I can find, and a local organizer confirmed with me that there doesn’t seem to be one.

Fighting the casino going forward

People who (like me) oppose the proposed Metropolitan Park casino have often framed the argument as “don’t vote for JGR, because she voted for the casino.” But how would re-electing Ramos would help us materially fight the casino in the future? The two arguments I’ve heard:

1. Prevention: The project is not a done deal (in fact, construction is months behind schedule and may not yet have started at all), and we collectively have a variety of tools available to us to continue to delay and prevent it. Pro-Ramos folks contend that Ramos can fight for and with us more effectively in her seat as a senator. Here I unfortunately cannot publish some of the specifics people have shared with me, as they include strategic details that would lose effectiveness if the Metropolitan Park side learned of them in advance. However, if any future step includes "the state senator for this district gets to appoint someone to a relevant decisionmaking committee," then in my opinion that’s not a very strong argument, because the last time Ramos had a chance to do that, she appointed George Dixon, who voted to approve the casino license. Therefore I would want ironbound assurances that Ramos would this time serve on the committee herself, or appoint someone committed to voting no. (This kind of assurance would be less necessary in a world where Ramos had not suddenly betrayed her “no perverts pledge” to endorse Cuomo.)
2. Oversight: If Metropolitan Park succeeds in moving forward – as a casino in about 2030, but also as a massive construction project (on a floodplain!!!) along the way – it will need oversight, and wouldn’t you trust Ramos more to conduct rigorous oversight, instead of JGR whose backers are so closely tied to the casino? This argument is stronger. González-Rojas’s answers about how we’ll try to combat the likely increase in human trafficking emphasize partnering with the facility; you might prefer the ferocity of “I will be on their ass for every little thing, because I have a grudge against them fueled by the fire of ten thousand suns.” (If you care most about oversight of the casino itself if/once it’s operational, it’s deeply unlikely to open within the 2027-2028 Senate term, so the person who wins this election would have to win again in two years to oversee that. But incumbency advantage does a lot.)

Constituent services, “doing the work” locally, and delivering for the local neighborhood

The people I know have varied and mixed experiences here. It gets so personal and anecdotal. Like: this person had a much better time getting Ramos to use some of her discretionary money on a local improvement than they had trying to get a meeting with González-Rojas’s office. This person was able to coordinate with González-Rojas’s office to [sensitive info goes here]. And so on. The way the district lines split up and overlap here (State Senate District 13 overlaps with four different Assembly districts) means that quite a lot of people only have experience being Ramos’s constituent or González-Rojas’s, and can’t compare. Overall, neither of them come out smelling like roses but neither are abysmal either, and I think Ramos has the edge here. And of course if you perceive opposing Metropolitan Park as trying to stand up for one’s local neighborhood, then that might overshadow everything else!

Personality

Ramos seems to, more than González-Rojas, be able to perform sincerity in a way that many people find convincing. They believe that she is candid and blunt. In interpersonal interaction, they find that González-Rojas feels more like “a politician.” This framing means that Ramos’s “reputation as a bruiser, someone who is often direct to people in meetings to the point of rudeness, and with whom people generally try to avoid working if they don't feel like being bowled over” (per yesterday’s Hell Gate NYC article) is a strength, as it means she stands up for what she believes and keeps her principles intact.

But this framing can’t excuse Ramos’s needless fight-picking on Twitter with overlapping-district Assemblymember Catalina Cruz in 2020 and overlapping-district House member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As far as I’m aware, she’s never apologized for those. In my opinion, those are unforced errors that demonstrate something worrisome about Ramos’s judgment. I want a rep who stands up for principles that matter in well-chosen fights, and who can appropriately use diplomacy in well-chosen venues to work through issues with colleagues. The fact that she lashed out with those posts lends more credence to the reports others share of her cutting off alliances – that would benefit her constituents – over relatively minor disagreements.

Also, my own assessment, based on my own personal experience and knowledge of them, is that the difference in demeanor is just that, a difference in demeanor, and that it does not reveal that one of them is more honest or straightforward or reliable.

The dark money and the sliminess of the campaign supporting González-Rojas

This is the thing that is most making me rethink my endorsement..

In my opinion, little of the scumminess in either the Metropolitan Park campaign or the electoral campaign is about things that González-Rojas individually did/is doing. Some of it came from the zillion lobbyists (including former local elected officials), consultants, and other similar entities associated with the Metropolitan Park project, which as early as 2022 was laying the groundwork for manipulating the neighborhood into consent.

And a lot of it comes from super PACs (not just “Progress for New York” but at least one other, “Working Families Party PAC-NYS IE”) – and the rules say that campaigns can’t coordinate with independent expenditures, but the government’s always playing catch-up to enforce those rules. Examples abound. A quick search just now turns up City Council races in 2013 and a DC mayoral race this month, in addition to Cuomo’s run for mayor last year, where campaign finance boards fined the relevant entities for illegally coordinating. The damage gets done in those sensitive moments, voters absorbing those advertising messages, and the independent expenditure laws are only a partial deterrent.

(Side note: City & State’s list of super PACs in these primary elections, and NYC’s “Independent Expenditure Portal” for citywide elections, remind me of how ridiculously generic those entity names are. Don’t forget to donate to my super PAC: United, Sensible, Independent, Common-Sense New York Workers and Families and Retirees Fighting Forward for Community Progress to Fix New York and Build a Better, More Accountable, Affordable, Abundant, Stronger, Future New York Today For New Yorkers 2026 PAC.)

Another example: Mamdani has not endorsed JGR (it seems he’s avoided endorsing challengers to incumbents in the state legislature this time, to reduce conflict with Albany). But he ostentatiously marched with her at Queens Pride and put his arm around her and juuuuust skirted endorsing her in a video her campaign promoted on her social media feed, and then that and similar images are showing up in all these Super PAC ads, like the one on the video truck roaming around the other day, and the zillion texts and paper mailers that people in the district are getting. That is gross. It's scummy.

This week we got news of a new super PAC, “Progress for New York”, funded by a mystery donor, with $850,000 to attack Ramos and bolster JGR – the largest single independent expenditure ever made in a NY legislative primary. Most people I know suspect this money comes from Steve Cohen, one of the people behind Metropolitan Park. This is all in keeping with the scumminess of finding out that certain people or groups got donations from Cohen to support Metropolitan Park. Thanks to a neighbor for pointing out a revealing moment in an FAQ NYC podcast episode from March 31st, 2025. The City Reporter's Katie Honan said (starting about 6min30sec in):

What Steve Cohen's been doing, obviously, the lobbying records are out, he gives millions of dollars to lobbyists. But I've also been told that there's plenty of other people working on this casino bid who are not registered lobbyists, who are just in the communities making hundreds of thousands of dollars to talk about how great it is. Reporting this, I've had to be very careful because some people have texted me--you know I used to cover Jackson Heights, Corona, Elmhurst, East Elmhurst, so I know people. And they're like 'I actually think the casino project is, like, a really great project, and it's just a parking lot now', so then I'd ask. 'Hey, I just have to ask, like, are you being paid in any capacity by Steve Cohen?' And then usually I wouldn't hear back, and then 'Well, yes, I ha-.' So there's that kind of stuff.

This all rhymes with the sliminess of the mega-funded (but by a mysterious donor) super PAC opposing Ramos, and the fact that all the local electeds but her lined up to support the casino and have lined up to oppose her campaign. And if you can talk with me in person or on the phone I can talk with you about an odd maybe-slimy thing that came up privately this week that’s also all of a piece with the sliminess around the anti-Ramos campaign and Metropolitan Park.

The argument that to vote for JGR is to support the casino has been a contentious one, as I discussed in my previous post and in the section above on “Fighting the casino going forward”. We do know of a single vote, that Parkland Alienation bill, where JGR voted a way that Cohen would like her to vote, and if she’d voted no, it likely wouldn’t have made a material difference because the vote would then have been 133 to 12 instead of 134 to 11. There’s no proof that Cohen would affect how she votes on other legislation. But that 850k super PAC expenditure indicates they sure would prefer JGR over Ramos in that seat. Rich people don't do this for free or for no reason. What will they want next?

Ramos does have some big money and establishment support behind her! Several well-off unions are supporting her (endorsement logos at the bottom of her campaign’s main webpage, unfortunately not listed in text or any other accessibility-friendly way as far as I can tell). Some of her more powerful Senate and Assembly colleagues, such as the Assembly Speaker and Senate Majority Leader, endorse her. It's not like she's one person all alone, with zero institutional support. Her opponents raise questions about whether rival casinos were behind any donations to her re-election campaign. But: even if Ramos is beholden to any others, at least she is not beholden to Cohen, and she thus provides a bulwark against the wealthy jerk (Cohen) and the associated machine whose influence pervades the region. It’s sort of an anti-monopoly argument. (Hey Lina Khan, we could use your advice here.)

What matters more to you?

Your Jessica preference in this race may come down to what matters more to you:

A local partner vs. a partner in Albany. If you’re more concerned with electing a local power broker and gatekeeper regarding local land use proposals and the member’s discretionary fund, this is not so much about Albany, but about things happening inside the district, then some people consider Ramos to be a better steward of that role. But if you are more concerned with electing a senator who’s willing to partner with groups on legislation that isn’t already the kind of thing she prioritizes, and meet and negotiate with groups even when they disagree on some things, González-Rojas seems the better bet.

Stark truths vs. troubling likelihoods. Ramos’s unpleasant surprises that made splashes and even headlines – the Cuomo endorsement, the Twitter feuds, the CAC vote being unanimous because her appointee voted yes – were stark. They’re obvious. They’re individual choices that she made – in some cases before the Metropolitan Park project ever came on the scene, and they aren’t examples of wise stewardship of her responsibility. But if González-Rojas wins, maybe an oligarch achieves a monopoly on the elected officials at multiple levels in this geographic area. The super PAC donation this week is that power base showing its hand, and it’s extremely troubling. But: if you want to trust Ramos to be a good bulwark against billionaires, you also have to think about:

Predictability. Jessica Ramos goes her own way. A lot of people do have a good experience working with her (many unions, and many other legislators in Albany). But she might go back on a pledge, like the “no perverts” pledge. And she might suddenly stop working with a group on a policy campaign. In contrast, if I understand correctly, once JGR signs onto a legislative project, she stays signed on and available. And so far, in her legislative career, she has mostly been a reliable DSA-type progressive, championing policies that the left likes. But then there’s this huge exception – the casino. And what if something else comes up that interferes with Cohen’s preferences? After a giant super PAC’s donation helps elect her, would she be able to truly and wholeheartedly push for a Tax the Rich agenda?

Right now, I am leaning towards reluctantly voting for someone whose credibility I don’t trust very much – Jessica Ramos – because the super PAC contribution demonstrates what a very rich entity wants, and that arouses my opposition, and because of the odd maybe-slimy thing from this week that happened that I can talk about in person.

But personally, I’m waiting till Election Day to choose and to vote. Because more bombshells might come out in the next few days. And because the summary above is not my actual conclusion.

Whether to worry about Monserrate

Very little of the commentary around the Jessicas has discussed the danger of Monserrate winning.

Monserrate is also claiming to be an anti-casino candidate, although my anti-casino activist friends loathe him and know he’s never shown up to help with any of their work. But, as this gross Reddit post demonstrates, there’s some effort out there to get anti-casino votes to pull to Monserrate instead of Ramos.

As I mentioned in the previous post: I’m concerned about the danger of the two Jessicas splitting the progressive vote and Monserrate getting just enough to win. In 2024, Monserrate got about 40% of the vote in the Democratic primary for Assembly District 30, which has about a 56% overlap with State Senate District 13 (I believe geographically, not by population).

I have been at a couple forums for SD13 candidates, including the one where ex-cop Monserrate said that back in the 90s we [cops] "got it right." (Audio clip available at the end of this radio show.) The cheers for him ("Papá!"), the signs in business windows, the Trumpy way a campaign for a guy convicted of fraud and assault hammers on law-and-order (and got nearly no jeers or heckles during the forums!) -- it's at least gross and sometimes gets troubling. And the past ten years of electoral politics have taught me that I need to be really careful about underestimating a campaign with those characteristics.

If Monserrate wins the Democratic primary, González-Rojas could run in the general election on the Working Families Party line. But given how much the pro-Ramos, anti-casino side loathes González-Rojas and/or the forces that support her, would it help campaign for her to defeat Monserrate? or sit that one out? I’m guessing it would be a very hard-fought battle in the fall, and I’m not sure we’d win.

Right now, no one has publicly released any polling data. If any such data emerges by Election Day, and it’s high-quality, and it says that one of the Jessicas has the edge, I’m likely to support that one, because I care more about defeating Monserrate than I do about which Jessica wins.