Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll look at the Manhattan congressional campaign of Jack Schlossberg, President John F. Kennedy’s grandson. We’ll also get details on an obscure metric that will figure in the new second-home tax in New York City.
Jack Schlossberg is one of nine candidates running for a House seat in Manhattan. When he entered the race, he was known for his social media personality — and for being President John F. Kennedy’s grandson. But rapid staff turnover and Schlossberg’s own erratic actions have gotten attention in the New York political world. With the Democratic primary only six weeks away, I asked my colleague Nicholas Fandos for an assessment. His campaign sounds like it’s not ready for prime time. Is that a reasonable assessment? This is the first time he’s run for office. There are few political campaigns that I’ve covered that are not at least a little messy. It comes with the territory. But the degree of the messiness in Schlossberg’s campaign, and the specifics, are unusual. He has had a surprisingly high rate of staff turnover — at least two campaign managers, two field directors, a handful of advisers and a rotating cast of consultants in the six months since he announced his candidacy. On the day of his campaign launch, Schlossberg said he needed to nap and then was unreachable for most of the rest of the day, which left his team scrambling. A couple of weeks after the announcement, he had a run-in with a sitting congressman who felt that Schlossberg had ripped off his social media commentary. Many candidates run on their records. What does Schlossberg list as accomplishments when he’s asked? Schlossberg has relatively little professional experience, so when he talks about what qualifies him for the job, he brings up things like receiving law and business degrees at Harvard, scoring near the top on the bar exam and being an E.M.T. in college. He’s also worked as a freelancer for Vogue and as an assistant at the State Department, but both of those gigs lasted only a few months. And he readily points out that he has built a large social media following. There is no standard set of qualifications to be a member of Congress, but most people who run have worked their way up through local government or careers in business or the law. Sclossberg has not followed any of those paths. What was that social media dust-up about? Social media seems to be one of Schlossberg’s biggest strengths, but it’s also potentially a vulnerability. He has built a large audience with revealing, funny and sometimes outright bizarre posts that are captivating to some and alienating to others. I found that in at least one case in this campaign, he essentially mimicked a video from Representative Seth Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts, commenting on President Trump’s policy on Venezuela. He made his own video, saying almost the same thing Moulton had said. He rewrote the words, but it was still very close. Moulton’s team was so taken aback that they reached out to Schlossberg, asking, What gives? They were told that he had indeed copied Moulton’s post because he had liked it so much. This may be common social media practice, but it’s traditionally been a no-no in politics. What about fund-raising? Has he raised more than his opponents? He’s doing well on fund-raising. He’s not at the front of the pack, but he has raised $2.3 million from donors. Some of that has come from small donations across the country, and others from large checks from friends of his famous family. He has his own substantial wealth but has said that he does not intend to spend any of it on the race. Is he the front-runner right now? There has not been good polling. The internal polls that we have seen show that he’s a slight favorite in a crowded field that includes two state assemblymen, Micah Lasher and Alex Bores. Lasher is a protégé of Representative Jerrold Nadler, who’s vacating the seat they’re all running for. Two of the other candidates are George Conway, a former Republican who has become one of President Trump’s biggest critics, and Nina Schwalbe, a global health expert. Schlossberg did not talk to you when you were reporting the story you wrote. What did his aides tell you about Schlossberg’s management of his campaign and the turnover of his staff? Schlossberg’s campaign did not dispute most of the details in my story. They downplayed the significance of the staff turnover, saying no one should be surprised that a first-time candidate, especially one as intense as he is, would cycle through staff members in a high-pressure campaign. In addressing his occasional absences from the campaign, they pointed out that the campaign had coincided with the death of his sister Tatiana Schlossberg, from cancer. WEATHER Sunny skies with a high around 67 degrees. Tonight will be mostly clear with a low near 54. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until May 22 (Shavuot). QUOTE OF THE DAY “I’m standing behind a mylar curtain, building the character. I part the curtain, stand in a fixed position, and allow the audience to feed me with shouts of joy and respect and admiration and whatever else they’re thinking. Let the people have what they came for. Apotheosis.” — André De Shields, who plays the godlike Old Deuteronomy in “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” on how he gets into character. The latest Metro news
We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. For multimillion-dollar second homes, ‘market value’ matters
What’s the “market value” of your co-op or condo? Those two words are in quotation marks for a reason. In New York City, the “market value” of an apartment may not be what it sells for, because “market value” is a bureaucratic metric that often underestimates an apartment’s actual worth. “Market value” will figure in the new tax surcharge on part-time residents of the city. As proposed by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the second-home tax plan would initially target co-ops and condos that have a “market value” of at least $1 million. They would be taxed an extra 4 percent to 6.5 percent in addition to their existing property taxes. How many apartments would be affected is unclear. The governor’s office says that an apartment with a “market value” of $1 million would sell for about $5 million. But the disparity is often more pronounced: One Midtown Manhattan penthouse with a “market value” of about $4.2 million sold for more than $135 million last year. The surcharge has been the talk of the New York political world since Hochul announced it last month. It wouldn’t bring in as much revenue as some of its boosters had wanted, but Mayor Zohran Mamdani cast it as an example of how government was making good on his promise to tax the rich. The “market value” metric would govern second-home surcharge payments for only the first two years of the new tax. After that, the city and the state would rely on a different measurement to determine which properties are above the threshold. That new metric would be added to a tax system that many taxpayers already find impenetrable. “I know we just sent people around the moon and back, so you’d think anything is possible,” said Jason Haber, a real estate broker and a co-founder of the American Real Estate Association. “But because of how the city tax system is set up, this is crazy complicated in the first place. And they tried to rush it though, I think without fully appreciating its complexity.” METROPOLITAN DIARY Out of stock
Dear Diary: It was a Saturday, and I was on Fifth Avenue and 14th Street. Two young women were walking and talking behind me. “Is there anything you need at the market?” one said. “The will to live,” the other replied. I couldn’t help myself. “I don’t think they sell that there,” I said. We all laughed and kept going. — Nancy Lane Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New Yo |
