AOC and Cummings, battling over House seat, 'come across things differently'

Oct 20, 2020

This year's battle for New York's 14th District offers a study of contrasts between two Catholics.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the incumbent, is the simply freshman representative to be nationally known by her initials (AOC) and to exist portrayed on "Sat Night Live." She rode a 2022 progressive surge into unseating a longtime Democratic centrist in a primary battle, is a proponent of the Green New Deal and a frequent Twitter target for President Donald Trump.

John Cummings, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez'due south Republican challenger, is a sometime NYPD law officeholder, and a teacher for 22 years at St. Raymond High Schoolhouse for Boys in the Bronx, his alma mater. He told NCR, playing on the thought that all politics is local, that he is focused on exploiting what he described as an underlying dissatisfaction with Ocasio-Cortez in the heavily Democratic commune.

They bring ii singled-out viewpoints: Ocasio-Cortez, who has become a progressive icon in two short years, and Cummings, the Republican who has campaigned nearly all that fourth dimension to get known in the 14th District, which comprises parts of the 2 New York City boroughs of Queens and the Bronx, separated by h2o and connected by bridges.

Ocasio-Cortez described her faith in a 2022 America article. In that Jesuit journal, she pushed for criminal justice reform, stating that as a Catholic she believes in the forgiveness of sins and that Blacks and Latinos take disproportionately suffered from castigating and unjust sentencing in the U.S. criminal justice organization.

Cummings defines his faith as part of what he described as a life of service, showtime as an NYPD officeholder who retired after an on-the-job injury, and his teaching social studies at St. Raymond, a largely minority, all-boys schoolhouse.

He sings in the choir at St. Frances de Chantal Church in the Throgs Cervix section of the Bronx, an area, far unlike, and much more than full of middle-class homeowners, than the movie image of the Bronx.

Ocasio-Cortez declined to speak with NCR for this commodity, while Cummings told NCR that, while his opponent has basked in a national spotlight, he wants this election decided on local issues.

"People feel she is looking by us to something bigger," he said.

Cummings argued that he is better connected to the district, which is roughly 35% in the Bronx, with the rest in Queens. The district ranges from, on the Queens side, the struggling immigrant communities of Corona, which suffered massive casualties during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, to the high-rent loftier rises of Long Island City. That neighborhood was in one case the proposed site of a giant Amazon distribution center, successfully fought past Ocasio-Cortez, who argued that it relied too heavily on government subsidies and would overwhelm neighborhood services, including mass transit. Cummings makes the case that the commune needed the more than 25,000 jobs promised past the mega-corporation.

Cummings described himself every bit a product of Catholic schools in the Bronx, and is quick to add that Ocasio-Cortez graduated from Yorktown Loftier School, in a suburban surface area 37 miles from the metropolis.

Cummings downplayed the religious connection to the campaign. "I don't know if it'south important to the race," he said most his Catholicism. And, while his email fundraising pitches offer scathing criticisms of Ocasio-Cortez's stances on the Amazon evolution, the Dark-green New Bargain, and her support of socialist ideas, he said he has no sick will lodged against her personally.

They met once, terminal year.

"She seems similar a pleasant person. We just see things differently," Cummings told NCR about his opponent.

Cummings said that the people in the commune are anxious about increased criminal offence. He said that the increase in shootings in New York take frightened many and, contrary to the wishes of much of this summer'due south street protesters, at that place is trivial support for defunding the police. He said his potential constituents want more cops, non fewer.

He said that much of the reluctance in the district to send children back to school is non due to the coronavirus, but fear of increased offense.

"Parents are going with distance learning considering they don't want their children to exist on the streets," he said.

As a Republican, Cummings said he both opposes and supports the president'southward initiatives. The district has a big immigrant population and information technology went overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in the last election. In Trump's domicile borough of Queens, where the former reality tv set star is known best, his support is meager. The president won only a quarter of the vote there in 2022 and, in the Bronx, Clinton won more than than eighty percent.

Cummings is counting on the voters in the commune, including immigrants and longtime Democrats, to give him a look. He said he wants a pathway to immigration reform, but only after the borders are sealed. Near half the district is Latino, and it ranks 7th in the percent of foreign-born residents amidst all U.South. Congressional districts.

"They want constabulary and order. They want to feel safe," he said almost voters in the district.

There are no contained polls of sentiment in New York's 14th. Cummings said that individual polls his entrada has sponsored bespeak dissatisfaction with Ocasio-Cortez, with voters responding that she has permit her national profile overwhelm her attending to the district.

Ocasio-Cortez is paying little attention to her opponent, a conventional political strategy of candidates expected to overwhelm a challenger. Cummings said he is looking forward to their one debate, planned for October.

On November. 4, he said, he hopes, "I volition exist the No. two story that day." Otherwise, he told NCR, he volition accept plenty of material to share with the students in his government class at St. Raymond'south about what it'due south like to run for Congress.

[Peter Feuerherd is NCR news editor. His email is pfeuerherd@ncronline.org.]

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