When I began working for a city council campaign this summer in New York City’s District 1, I didn’t expect to walk into a political minefield. NYC’s District 1 is an overwhelmingly Democratic area that includes Tribeca, Soho, Chinatown, the Financial District, the Lower East Side, Two Bridges, and several other downtown Manhattan neighborhoods. This was my first experience in local politics, working for a candidate whose main issue was the lack of available and affordable housing in the city, and I was (falsely) under the impression that local politics were less combative than at the national level. I was quickly disabused of this notion as soon as I came into contact with volunteers and canvassers for the district’s incumbent, who was running for reelection.
While my candidate and the incumbent were only two of the four candidates in the race, the tension was the worst between my campaign and the incumbent’s. Although I’m going to keep the candidates anonymous here (if you’re interested, you can very easily look them up on your own), I would like to write a quick introduction of their platforms. During election season, Lower Manhattan faced two big issues: the lack of affordable housing and congestion pricing (a fee for vehicles entering certain parts of Manhattan). These issues proved to be more divisive than I expected.
This cycle was my candidate’s first time running for election, coming from a litigation background. He was a proponent of City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, a December 2024 resolution supporting rezoning to build more housing in every neighborhood. He supported congestion pricing in the name of pedestrian safety and reducing carbon emissions, and increasing outdoor dining. The incumbent, who had served since 2022, was largely against building new market-rate housing, advocating against the City of Yes due to his concern that it wouldn’t do much to increase truly affordable housing. He fought for congestion pricing discounts for residents, and did not want to increase the amount of outdoor dining in the area.
Going into my internship with the campaign, political polarization wasn’t something that I was particularly attuned to, even though I knew, of course, that Americans are increasingly responding to differing political opinions with intense vitriol. While political polarization is usually discussed in terms of how the right and the left have moved further apart in recent decades, I would like to use this space to discuss how we treat people with even slightly differing beliefs. My experiences this summer illuminated this to me.
A lot of the canvassing that takes place during a municipal campaign is standing on the same street corner and talking to people passing by. Naturally, canvassers from several different campaigns all stood in each others’ vicinity, especially during early voting and on election day when we camped outside polling sites. The combative politics quickly manifested, but at first simply like rudeness: the incumbent’s volunteers would tell me and other people on my campaign that they were the ones who truly cared about the neighborhood, speaking over us when potential voters stopped by, and saying that our candidate only supported fake “gentrifier” affordable housing. As election day creeped closer, however, things got more extreme. Full-blown arguments broke out, with canvassers from the incumbent’s campaign yelling about my team’s imagined disrespect towards them, randomly accusing several people of being white supremacists or racists, and throwing flyers on the ground out of anger. I myself was accused of “playing mind games” by offering canvassers water and Gatorade in 90º heat, while the incumbent city council member stood by silently watching. Overall, the situation was toxic, stressful to the point of being unbearable, and disruptive to the residents’everyday lives.
I was shocked by the treatment other canvassers and I received. Was I overreacting? The casual cruelty jarred me, and not only because of the stress and emotional pain it put me through. Did a city council election really merit this level of acrimony, especially one in such a small district, and one between candidates who agreed on so many issues? The level of contention during this Democratic primary had me questioning if I even wanted to continue working in politics at all. But when I expressed my frustrations, my candidate simply said, “This is just what he and his people do. He’s been doing this for 10 years.”
Whether this situation could be explained away as a career politician doing what he needed to do to stay in office was doubtful to me. While it was evident that the councilman was eager for reelection, the way his canvassers acted transcended a mere desire to win votes. Their behavior was self-righteous and at times downright spiteful. They acted as though they were going to save Lower Manhattan from destruction. But honestly? When asked about the difference in policy between the incumbent and the candidate I was working for, there wasn’t much for anyone to say.
I don’t believe that my experience on the campaign was a one-off occurrence: I think that political polarization has spread beyond simply the right and left, molding politics into a battle of who is right and who is wrong. Political polarization and the global shift towards extremism can be explained as a result of affective polarization, which suggests that the widening chasm between political ideologies is a result of personal identity and emotion coming into play in politics. When we see our political leanings as part of our identity, any challenge to our beliefs can be perceived as a personal attack. We see any and all political disagreement as an existential threat and allow our fears to take over. With this in mind, it’s not such a shock that the possibility of their candidate not winning reelection sparked such a strong reaction in the canvassers with whom I was interacting. In this poisonous mindset someone else in office doesn’t just mean new housing policies—it means the end of the world.
Honestly, this is a fair fear: it seems like a lot of the time, we disagree about the most fundamental moral issues. I believe, for example, that protecting marriage equality and access to contraception amounts to protecting human rights. It can be scary to talk to someone and realize that they have a completely different worldview on the morality of these issues, and even support policies that would have an enormous negative impact on your life or the lives of those around you. However, affective polarization is a slippery slope that can turn anyone into a perceived mortal enemy, and it is having a spillover effect on every conceivable issue in our politics. When it comes to a problem like how to best deal with Lower Manhattan’s housing and affordability crisis, we should be able to listen to each other with the goals of understanding new perspectives and coming together to form better ideas than the ones we had before.
Brief moments while campaigning reminded me of the danger of losing sight of our ability to collaborate across small differences. An elderly man passing by as I stood canvassing at the intersection of Greenwich St. and Park Place reminded me of this. When I and the canvassers for two of the other candidates fought to make our voices and our candidates’ positions heard, the man simply stood there, waiting for us to finish talking. He listened to each of our candidates’ beliefs and promises, nodding and taking it all in. And at the end of all of this, instead of professing which candidate had won his vote, he asked us why we were fighting against each other. After all, we were all young people, all New Yorkers, and all affiliated with the same political party. We should be working together, he said, to create a better future for us all.
The idea of losing an election or even an argument might be a scary one, but that shouldn’t mean we forget human decency when we disagree with people. Affective polarization emboldens the voice in all of our heads that screams to protect ourselves and our identity, a voice that, at least for me, grows stronger as the threat of authoritarianism creeps up on the United States and the world. The voice cries out that we are the only ones who are truly correct, and to fight anyone we disagree with. This voice, however, must sometimes be quieted in order to have constructive conversations. Cooperative argumentation, actively listening to others with the goal of finding the truth or amending your own views, is a tool that will be crucial to use in politics and activism over the coming years. The road back from the level of polarization we are currently at will be a long one, but one that we cannot ignore.
by Mia Rothschild
