"That AOC is putting up candidates is waking all of us up. This is definitely the biggest wake-up call in the political arena”
Mere weeks after a self-identified socialist declared victory in the Queens district attorney race, the results of a manual recount have produced a sharp reversal.
The morning after the June 25 election, public defender Tiffany Caban claimed she had won the race to serve as the chief law enforcement officer in New York City’s largest borough, while her mainstream opponent, Queens borough president Melinda Katz, urged caution. Now Katz is declaring victory while Caban is preparing to file a lawsuit.
Katz’s win — by a mere 60 votes — means the borough, and particularly its sizeable Orthodox community, has dodged a bullet, said Rabbi Yaniv Meirav, who heads one of Queens’ largest Jewish organizations. Caban, an acolyte of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (also known as AOC), had tweeted the day after her premature victory declaration that she would be a kinder, gentler prosecutor who would no longer hold accountable anyone guilty of a long list of quality-of-life crimes.
“I’m very close to Melinda,” said Rabbi Meirav, the founder and director of Chazaq, an organization that promotes Jewish education in Queens. “She attends our events. When a Jewish boy got beaten up in the street a few months ago, I was in her office every few days. She was very outspoken about that. But with Tiffany, nobody ever heard of her.”
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