Lauren Ashcraft Believes She is the Progressive to Beat 13-term Rep. Carolyn Maloney
I spent a week with the NY-12 progressive challenger in November, getting to know her and her policy proposals for the East River district.
Serafina Smith
December 9, 2019
Lauren Ashcraft has a wide smile and an unassuming, soft voice. As she welcomes guests into a wood-floored, second-story apartment in Brooklyn, the gathering has an open, friendly feeling unfamiliar to many political events. But this is a political event - a meet-and-greet planned for voters to meet Ashcraft, the person and the passionate progressive. Tonight, Ashcraft is hoping to win these voters over before the June 23 democratic primary and unseat Rep. Carolyn Maloney in New York's twelfth congressional district.
Dressed in black slacks, loafers and a plain blouse, Ashcraft looks the part of a typical NYC young professional - which she was until a few weeks ago, when she quit her job as a compliance project manager at J.P. Morgan. Now, she’s drinking a Miller Lite and chatting with Shiv Soin, a 19-year-old NYU sophomore and organizer for the Climate March (he’s drinking water). “I’m a Ravenclaw,” she says with a laugh, “but I was once sorted into Slytherin.”
Soin, also a Ravenclaw, is excited to vote in his first Presidential election in 2020, as well as Ashcraft’s congressional primary. He doesn’t believe Rep. Maloney has taken enough of a stance on climate, whereas Ashcraft promises to vigorously support the Green New Deal. “I think just looking at her policies, you can see what she stands for,” he says. “And you can see who's donating to her campaign.”
Renouncing corporate PAC money and relying instead on individual donors is indeed one of the pillars of Ashcraft’s movement. That’s why she’s at this gathering, one of many she regularly attends. They’re usually hosted by enthusiastic constituents who want to give their friends and neighbors a chance to meet the candidate. She has another one lined up after this one ends at 10 pm.
This part of Brooklyn near the Barclay’s Center, however, is not in Ashcraft’s district, which spans the eastern side of Manhattan, Long Island City, and the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg. But being in the district doesn’t matter to some of the crowd, who believe that getting the message out there is as important as convincing likely voters. One of these out-of-district true believers is the evening’s host, a young Brooklyn real estate agent. “We love her and we believe in what she’s fighting for,” the host says of Ashcraft, carefully arranging an assortment of recycling options.
Also in the room are several constituents who have done their due diligence and believe Ashcraft represents the best hope for their district. Jake Vadeboncoeur is a 31-year-old lawyer who carefully researched all the candidates in the race against Rep. Maloney before deciding Ashcraft had his vote. “She seemed the most committed to a comprehensive, productive political package, including universal healthcare, Green New Deal, housing security, and rolling back the industrial incarceration machine,” he says.
Ashcraft’s friends and dedicated volunteers are there as well. Amanda Frankel, who lives in Borough Park, was running for Congress herself in New York’s tenth district before leaving the race for family reasons. She met Ashcraft in the summer of 2019 when they were both in the race, and the two quickly developed an emotional bond. Frankel says that even with her crazy campaign schedule, Ashcraft has always made time for a late-night phone call to help Frankel through hard times, adding that Ashcraft is one of the kindest people she knows. But she’s also quick to point out that perhaps Ashcraft is “not given enough credit” for how “intelligent and hard-working” she is.
Now, Frankel has thrown herself wholeheartedly behind her friend, and can be found perennially by Ashcraft’s side -- pumping her up, supporting her, eloquently delivering her stump speech with fervor and brassy confidence. This evening she is a commanding presence over the stove, diligently braising and poaching, chopping and garnishing. She is in charge of the food for the event, and she certainly delivers: salmon and risotto, perfectly pink steak and chilled pea puree, the deconstructed lemon tarts she is now re-constructing.
“When you think of like, What's wrong in Washington? There's the symptoms, and there's the disease,” she says, filling lemon curd into tiny tart shells from a Ziploc pastry bag. “All these things, like housing issues and homelessness, are symptoms of the fact that corporations are buying our elections and they're buying our officials.”
Plates of Frankel’s salmon and steak in hand, guests sip on wine and consider donating another $15 to the cause as they listen to Ashcraft’s mini-speech in Rose’s living room. Ashcraft isn’t afraid of big, loud ideas -- and she is articulate, clearly knowledgeable and a vivid storyteller. Her platform includes progressive ideas blue state voters are used to, such as fighting climate change and funding single-payer Medicare for All, but Ashcraft goes further. As a democratic socialist, she says she isn’t afraid to fight hard. “I want to be the type of leader that, regardless of how politically popular it is, stands up for what I believe in,” she says.
What Ashcraft believes in is abolishing ICE, mandating that the federal government enforce the Americans with Disabilities Act, eradicating homelessness in New York and nationwide, and a whole host of government-funded free programs -- free public transit, free college -- financed by a controversial economic idea known as Modern Monetary Theory.
The group claps, Frankel loudly urges everyone to donate, and the tarts are served.
One district over from Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s New York 14, Ashcraft is hoping to unseat another semi-legend of the Democratic establishment, just as Rep. Ocasio-Cortez gave Joe Crowley the boot two years ago. But newly-appointed Chair of the House Oversight Committee Rep. Carolyn Maloney, once a liberal sweetheart herself who has represented her Upper East Side supporters in Congress for over twenty-five years, won’t be easy to beat.
The reality is that Ashcraft is just one of three insurgent primary challengers vying to unseat Rep. Maloney in New York’s June 23, 2020 Democratic congressional primary. Voters will have to choose between Maloney, Ashcraft, and two others: Suraj Patel, a second-time challenger and Obama alum, and Peter Harrison, another democratic socialist and housing advocate. This is all to say, the ballot will be crowded.
But Ashcraft may have a secret weapon: the endorsement and institutional backing of the ultra-liberal grassroots group, Brand New Congress.
Blacklisted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Brand New Congress is a leftist candidate-finding machine that can appear to mirror the Tea Party’s extremism – just on the other side of the aisle. Founded in 2016, their inaugural electoral test was the 2018 midterm election, when they ran their first slate of progressive primary challengers in Democratic races across the country. Most of them lost to establishment Democrats. But one of them, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, won -- and her name has become a rallying call for 2020 primary hopefuls across the country.
For Ashcraft, the group represents solidarity. “If there's 20 of us that make it to DC next year, then that's 20 more people that are going to be really loud advocates for their communities,” she says. The idea is that they’ll all vote in a block, and communally vocalize ideas like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All.
Ashcraft got involved in activism in a rather unorthodox way. “Stand-up comedy is actually how I got really involved in my community,” she says.
In November 2016, an event planned by Ashcraft’s stand-up collective to celebrate “the end of Trump” was forced to quickly rebrand after it became clear that it was, in fact, just the beginning of Trump. Ashcraft saw it as an opportunity to start organizing, and turned the show into a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood. Admission was still free, as always, but a box was passed around for donations -- and “Collection Box Comedy” was born.
From there, Ashcraft’s comedy troupe went on to raise money for groups such as the ACLU, Emily’s List, and others both local and further afield -- from soup kitchens to feed the hungry in New York City to efforts to rebuild Puerto Rico and bring clean water to Flint, Michigan.
Ashcraft’s partner, Paul Warren, cites her comedy as one thing that initially sparked the relationship. Warren, a blond-haired data analyst, met Ashcraft at a bar trivia night organized by a mutual friend. “I was like, Oh my god, she's a comedian and she's got a sense of humor,” he says of that first encounter. “We just hit it off.”
Now, two years later, Ashcraft and Warren live together in Long Island City with their two cats, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Jean Louise, named after the character from To Kill a Mockingbird. More than just a life partner, Warren has now become a main component of her campaign, spending most of the hours outside his full-time job in retail analytics doing data analytics for Ashcraft. Despite the near-constant stress, however, the couple has managed to make it work. The secret? Movies and popcorn on Friday nights. Friday is a bad night for campaigning anyway.
Ironically, it was comedy that motivated Ashcraft to take activism more seriously. It also helped her to overcome her anxiety and become comfortable speaking in front of crowds, a skill which she hopes will serve her well in Congress. She says she’s already gotten quite the confidence boost. “I remember the first class -- the only thing that we were asked to do was go up on stage and say our names, and I was shaking and sweating profusely,” she says. “And to think that now I'm running for Congress.”
The moment Ashcraft decided to launch that run was early in 2019, as she emceed the New York City Women’s March. The ultimate test for her stage fright to overcome? Perhaps. But it was also a launchpad for a crazy idea: Should she throw her own hat into the political ring?
It was on that stage, as she welcomed her role model Rep. Ocasio-Cortez as a guest speaker, that Ashcraft says “something just clicked.” She was going to run, and she ran home to tell Warren. “When she said she wanted to run, I knew how much she hated her job,” he says, “and I wanted her to be doing something that is meaningful.”
Ashcraft wasn’t born and raised in her district. She was raised in Pennsylvania and also has roots in West Virginia, which has raised questions from detractors about why she wants to run in New York. Her answer to that is simple: New York is her home. It’s also a deep blue state, with a liberal population that has proven it can support progressive primary challengers before. Purple Pennsylvania may not ready for that just yet.
In fact, her own parents probably aren’t ready for that. Ashcraft was raised in a conservative household, (although her parents didn’t vote for Trump in 2016). But Ashcraft says her parents might be starting to change their ways. She says they both wrote letters to their Republican Congressman in favor of impeachment, and are surprisingly supportive of Ashcraft’s campaign -- her mother has even donated to the cause. Healthcare might be a part of that shift: Ashcraft’s father recently lost his job, causing both of her parents to lose their insurance. Although she didn’t comment on whether they now support a more progressive healthcare policy, such as Medicare for All, Ashcraft says that paying for marketplace insurance has been “a very difficult experience.”
But Ashcraft’s conservative parents are not a part of her usual spiel. She does a masterful job of weaving her policy ideas into her personal story, which she always starts with her grandparents.
Both sides of her family have heartbreaking stories which slide seamlessly into her framework of progressive ideas. One disabled grandfather inspires her passion for disability rights; her other grandfather’s untimely death in the 1968 Farmington Mine Disaster informs her platform on workers’ rights and safety; last but not least, her immigrant grandmother is the pedestal for abolishing ICE as well as expanding social welfare programs, as she subsisted on social security after her husband, the miner, died. “There's so many things that my eyes were just opened to as part of my childhood and part of being in my family,” she says. “And I saw that people like my family go completely ignored.”
Ashcraft says she “felt nothing” in the Lutheran Church in which she was raised. She was never particularly devout, but turned away from religion quickly as she grew up -- her rejection of the church mirroring her transition away from the conservative ideology of her parents. As she slid across the aisle from Republican to Independent to card-carrying democratic socialist, she began to see salvation as synonymous with the religious right, not as a reflection of a messiah who turned the other cheek and advocated for the poor. That’s until she found Middle Church, where leftist activism is the gospel.
This congregation does more than just pray: they participate actively in their community with initiatives to feed the hungry, prepare care packages for homeless LGBTQIA+ youth, and much more. Middle Church has become such a part of Ashcraft’s life that when she quit her job in compliance at J.P. Morgan in November 2019, she began working part-time with the senior minister, Reverend Jacqueline Lewis, PhD, to make ends meet.
On a rainy Sunday last fall, Ashcraft listens quietly, almost diligently, in a second row pew, her hands folded in her lap. She is dressed in her Congressional candidate Sunday best: smart black jeans, short block heels, a yellow blouse and blazer. She’s friendly with the other staff members in the very front row, smiling widely and opening her arms to greet them.
The choir opens with a rendition of “God is Awesome” that’s rousing enough to awaken Sunday sleepers for blocks around. It’s the sound of a chorus made up of Broadway musical cast members -- singers with the passion and the vocal skill to bring down the house both in “Kinky Boots” and for Jesus Christ.
But Ashcraft doesn’t sing along. For her, Middle Church is “90% about the activism, and 10% about the religion” – but she does admit she’s become more open to Christianity since joining the congregation. For Ashcraft, involvement in the Church is a reflection of her commitment and involvement with the community – one of the cornerstones of her campaign.
“When I would go to Washington DC,” she says, “one of the things that I want to keep doing is to continue to be extremely open to the people of our community.”