#Brooklyn Congresswoman Yvette Clarke battles to hang on in another tough race

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Yvette Clarke speaks at a press conference in 2019.
AP

Longtime Brooklyn Rep. Yvette Clarke appeared poised to turn away a second fierce Democratic primary challenge Tuesday night, though the outcome could still be reversed by thousands of absentee ballots that have yet to be counted.

Clarke scored a commanding 60.8 percent (29,254 votes) of the ballots cast during early voting and on primary day, while her chief opponent Adem Bunkeddeko notched just 19.1 percent (9,180 votes) of the vote, with 80 percent of precincts reporting. Councilman Chaim Deutsch was in third with 9.8 percent (4,725 votes). Isiah James, an Army vet who scored an endorsement from the Democratic Socialists of America, had 9 percent.

At first blush, it is a stunning reversal from 2018 when Clarke edged out the young community activist by fewer than 2,000 votes.

However, records from the Board of Elections showed that voters in the 9th Congressional District requested nearly 76,000 absentee ballots, none of which have been counted yet. The records indicate that the bulk of the requests came from portions of the district Bunkeddeko did well in two years earlier.

Under state law, the New York City Board of Elections won’t begin counting those ballots until next week, leaving the outcome of the race in some doubt for the next several days.

Citywide, it appeared that roughly two-thirds of the vote may have been cast by mail as New Yorkers opted for absentee ballots to avoid lines at the polls and possible exposure to COVID-19.

Unlike 2018’s head-to-head contest, the 2020 race featured two other notable candidates, a development that seemingly fractured the opposition vote and benefitted Clarke.

The dramatic expansion of vote-by-mail is just one way that COVID-19 turned this race — and politics across the Big Apple — upside-down as the disease ripped across the city and killed more than 22,000 New Yorkers in the process.

Social-distancing rules effectively put a kibosh on the glad-handing and door-to-door campaigning that would be a normal feature of any New York political race.

Clarke — the daughter of Flatbush political powerhouse and former Councilwoman Una Clarke — has represented Central Brooklyn in Congress since 2007, after spending four years on the City Council.

But, those deep ties appeared to atrophy in recent years as longstanding complaints from local activists that Clarke simply wasn’t paying enough attention to her district were compounded a dramatic shift in the area’s demographics — fueled in large part by an influx of white professionals seeking affordable rents.

A 2018 City University of New York analysis of the district’s population revealed that 66,000 voting-age New Yorkers had moved to the 9th Congressional District since 2000 and that more than half of the recent arrivals, 36,000, were white.

The wave of recent arrivals has turned Prospect Heights and Crown Heights into the poster children for the wave of gentrification sweeping across Brooklyn and provided the fuel in 2018 for Bunkeddeko’s campaign. Those neighborhoods — and upscale Park Slope — gave the then-newbie politician the bulk of his support, the CUNY analysis found.