He Who Must Not be Named
What one state Senate race can tell us about the future of the Republican Party
Karim Elsammak was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to two naturalized U.S. citizens, and grew up in Puerto Rico, Dallas, Arizona, and New York. From a young age, he knew he wanted to be a pilot, and attended Aviation High School in Queens, where he started an Air Traffic Control and Flying club. Even in high school, he began developing his political opinions. His parents voted for Democrats, but he leaned a little more conservative. As a senior at Aviation High, in a guest blog post for a site devoted to flying, he wrote about how he found many of his classmates lacking in the initiative they would need to get ahead. Upon graduating, he went directly into the aviation field, receiving his pilot’s license and eventually becoming captain for a U.S. passenger airline, though he did not wish to say which one. He also volunteered on a campaign for state Senator Marty Golden, representative for the 22nd District, in southern Brooklyn. Earlier this year, he joined the newly re-formed Brooklyn Young Republicans’ Society and became its board chairman. A short while later, at the society’s winter conference, he announced his candidacy for Golden’s old seat — a seat that Golden had narrowly lost to Democrat Andrew Gounardes amid the anti-Trump wave of 2018.
Elsammak, who is just 25, presents himself as a new kind of Republican — or, rather, an old kind. “I’m trying to restore the Republican reputation in New York,” he told me last month. He has standard Republican policies — for example, citing the fatal stabbing of a friend whom he’d mentored in his piloting career earlier this year outside a bar in Bay Ridge, he said he opposed bail reform. “It’s insane to me that this is what’s going on in terms of safety,” he said. He wants to increase technical, career-based education in public schools and says we should temporarily reopen the Keystone Pipeline to ease energy prices. “I paid $10 for a stick of deodorant!” he told me. “The Oreo cookies are $7 here in New York. Can you afford to keep buying Oreo cookies at $7, $8, $9, $10? I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t buy Oreos anymore.” He claims the current, relatively mainstream Democrat Gounardes is a socialist. But Elsammak also seems to want to distance himself from some of the Republican Party’s recent excesses. “My goal is not to be extreme,” he said. “My goal is to be practical.”
The 22nd District encompasses a swath of south Brooklyn that includes Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Bensonhurst, Bath Beach, and a portion of Borough Park — traditionally white, working-class areas that used to vote solidly Republican, but have been getting bluer in the last decade as younger voters move there in search of lower rents. The district split its ticket in 2012, supporting Barack Obama for President but Marty Golden for state Senator, and then went very narrowly for Donald Trump in 2016 while re-electing Golden to the state Senate seat. (District-level results were not released for 2020.) Now the seat may be up for grabs again.
Elsammak’s opponent in the Republican primary, Vito LaBella, is more in the current mode of Republican Party politics. A former transit police officer who in 2020 faced backlash for being a vocal proponent of Blue Lives Matter while sitting on his local education council in Brooklyn, LaBella has campaigned on promises to fight back against Critical Race Theory and to zealously enforce Kendra’s Law, a state law that facilitates forcible treatment for people with mental illnesses. The legislation has been criticized by mental health advocates as a counterproductive approach that infringes on people’s civil rights.
LaBella’s team has recently attacked Elsammak for employing on his campaign someone who also works at the Brooklyn Board of Elections. In a letter sent to the inspector general at the New York City Board of Elections, the LaBella campaign argued that this was against New York City election rules. The letter accused members of the Brooklyn Board of Elections of “gross abuses of power,” highlighting conflicts of interest between the board and members of the Kings County Republican Party (also known as the Brooklyn GOP). They also accused Elsammak of lying about his endorsement status, claiming he did not appear before the GOP’s endorsement committee for an interview.
But despite their many differences, there is similarity between the two campaigns: while running in a Republican primary in 2022, neither mention the most famous Republican in America, Donald Trump.
According to many analysts, the contemporary Republican Party is divided from within; there is the old, more moderate section of the party, and the radical Trumpist wing. Many date this schism to the tumultuous Trump presidential campaign and his subsequent presidency. But according to political columnist E. J. Dionne, in his 2016 book, Why the Right Went Wrong, the division inside the party long predates the arrival of Donald Trump. Dionne points to a different controversial politician, one who never sat in the Oval Office.
“The condition of today’s conservatism is the product of a long march that began with a wrong turn, when first American conservatives and then the Republican Party itself adopted Barry Goldwater’s worldview during and after the 1964 campaign,” Dionne writes. Goldwater was a five-term Arizona senator from 1953 to 1965 and 1969 to 1987, and the Republican presidential nominee in 1964 who failed to beat out the incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson. But his campaign promises and Senate position were enough to create a legacy.
Goldwater opposed the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; called for nuclear war against the “Godless” Soviet Union; and actively rejected the New Deal coalition. During his presidential campaign, Goldwater did not shy away from accusations of extremism, but instead celebrated them. “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” he said in his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican Convention. “And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” He went on to warn that “any who do not care for our cause” didn’t belong within the GOP body.
According to Dionne, the extreme rhetoric of the Goldwater campaign was a watershed for the modern Republican Party. “Moderate and liberal Republicans were pushed out,” he writes, “and alternative understandings of conservatism were rendered illegitimate.”
The reshaping of the Republican coalition took place gradually and over a long period. In the last thirty years, however, the party has seen a fundamental shift; between 1995 and 2015, the number of Republicans who identified as “very conservative” jumped from 19 percent to 33 percent. Dionne cites George W. Bush as a Republican who initially undertook a modernization attempt, where he superficially preached “compassionate conservatism.” But soon enough he abandoned this; Karl Rove, Bush’s deputy chief of staff and senior advisor, later stated that modernization proved to be a less-effective political tactic than rallying the conservative faithful. In 2014, Bush’s former speechwriter, David Frum, wrote that the American right had “veered toward a reactionary radicalism unlike anything seen in American party politics in modern times.” Dionne argues that this ongoing radicalization of American conservatism is the reason behind America’s dysfunctional political sphere.
“Compromise becomes impossible when it is equated with selling out principle,” writes Dionne. “The opposing party’s legislative achievements are neither accepted nor reformed.”
He describes the Republicans as an “unapologetic ideological party,” citing Pew Research from 2014 that found 67 percent of Republicans identified as conservative and 32 percent described themselves as liberal or moderate. In the same study, 34 percent of Democrats said they were liberal, while 63 percent identified as moderate or conservative.
These numbers have only increased since then, as News Gallup polls from 2020 suggest 75 percent of Republicans now consider themselves conservative, and only one in five describe their views as moderate. Ideological leaning has also risen in Democrats, as 51 percent identified as liberal and 35 percent described themselves as moderate.
This national polarization has made its way to the local level. In Ohio, a Republican Senate primary revealed a stark divide within the party. In a three-way race between Ohio state Senator Matt Dolan, former state Treasurer Josh Mandel, and author and venture capitalist J. D. Vance, Mandel was leading the polls until Trump endorsed Vance in April. While all candidates shared intense opposition to the Biden administration, they differed on economy, immigration, and foreign policy. Vance’s campaign mirrored that of the rising far right, in its opposition to visas that permit the temporary hiring of immigrant workers. He also argued against further American involvement in Ukraine. Vance was backed by three of the most polarizing Republicans in office: Senator Ted Cruz, and Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. Dolan, who Politico described as the “lone candidate who refused to toe the Trump line,” was also tough on immigration but supported the immigrant work visa. His campaign was described as “traditional conservative,” reflecting the old Republican establishment of big business. The race was seen as a referendum on Trump’s current status in the party. On May 3, less than three weeks after Trump’s endorsement, Vance secured the nomination with 32 percent of the vote, proving that the former President could still deliver votes.
Ross Barkan, a journalist who covered New York City politics for a decade and also ran — and lost — in the 2018 Democratic primary for the 22nd District Senate seat, said that there has been a marked change in New York politics after 2016. “Before Trump, a lot of the Republican identity in New York was, I would say, organized around opposition to Obama and opposition to liberals,” he said. Since 2016, he says, a lot of the focus has been on Trump.
“In New York, Trump among Republicans has real popularity,” said Barkan. “He is not popular broadly with the population, but within that party and within the people who vote in primaries, Trump definitely is someone they still look to. His identity, and his brand, and his views, and his lies are all part of the Republican Party now.”
One result of this, in a purple district like District 22, is that Trump can be ruinous for Republican candidates. “You used to have a lot of Democrats who maybe in the past voted for Marty Golden, or who never voted before, who now are like, ‘My god, I’m in Brooklyn, New York, and I have a Republican representing me,’” said Barkan. This, along with a minor scandal around numerous speeding and parking tickets that Golden had racked up over the years, may have been the cause of Golden’s loss to Gounardes in 2018. It may also help to explain why Trump is not a subject ever mentioned in the 2022 Republican primary in District 22.
I hate the word conservative because it makes you sound radical,” Karim Elsammak told me. “I am conservative, yes, in a lot of my views, but I’m not far right. You’ll never hear me say an election was stolen, you’ll never hear me say any of these crazy COVID conspiracies. I stay away from anything characterized as a conspiracy.”
Elsammak was clearly referring to some of the popular themes of the Trumpist right — from the origins of COVID to the results of the 2020 presidential election. But accusations of a conspiracy have also come Elsammak’s way from the LaBella camp.
The letter sent by LaBella campaign representatives to the inspector general accused Elsammak of employing a Board of Elections employee and of lying about his status as the Kings County GOP candidate. The accusations are hard to evaluate. The Brooklyn GOP does seem to have endorsed Elsammak, for example by retweeting a Brooklyn Reporter article labelling Elsammak as their backed candidate. The conflict-of-interest charge is more complicated. The LaBella campaign argues that the Board of Elections employee, David Sepiashvili, should not be in a position of authority on a campaign since he works at a place that will be charged with supervising said campaign.
“Mr. Sepiashvili is not merely advising the Elsammak campaign, he is directing it and in charge of its day to [day] operations,” read the letter. “That Mr. Elsammak has as his campaign manager a full-time Brooklyn Board of Elections employee with a substantial personal stake and financial incentive in the outcome of an election in which he is tasked with administrating, calls into question the integrity of the electoral process.”
The letter concludes with a request for an independent monitor to be installed during the GOP election in the upcoming months.
The Board of Elections Executive Office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on whether employees are permitted to work on political campaigns.
In an email exchange, the New York City Department of Investigations confirmed that they had received the letter but did not wish to comment on whether further action would be pursued.
Elsammak for his part declined to comment on the accusations on the record, and sought instead to focus on his hopes for the seat and his hopes for the future of the country. He indicated a wish that the ideological temperature be lowered. In general, aside from the letter, for the first two months of the campaign the sides mostly stayed in their corners and tried to emphasize why they should be chosen as the Republican nominee.
“People should be voting for the candidate, not the party,” Elsammak said. “People should be voting for practicality, not based off of emotions. So if you want to vote for a Democrat for the Assembly, but you want to vote for a Republican in the Senate, and a Republican for the governor’s seat, that’s great. You should vote for whoever is practical and what makes sense.” He was describing a practice known as “ticket splitting,” one which has become increasingly rare as the parties move further apart and hatred between them continues to grow.
I t is hard to tell where the Republican Party is going. Trump is its most dominant figure, and politicians inside the party who oppose him — such as Senators Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski — have been accused of disloyalty. Nonetheless, there are occasional glimmers of rebellion against Trump’s leadership.
Last November, two longtime Fox News commentators made headlines when they announced their departure from the network. Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg attributed their resignations to the ongoing fabrications and conspiracy theories spewed on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Cofounders of The Dispatch, a center-right online publication, the duo feared Fox’s dedication to Trump and the public violence that could erupt as a result.
“It’s not an easy [decision] to leave a TV contract,” said Ryan Brown, a reporter at The Dispatch. “But they put their principles above a lot of other worldly things, and we respect the hell out of it.”
Created in 2019, two years prior to Goldberg and Hayes’ departure from Fox News, The Dispatch was developed in response to the increasingly blurred lines between political journalism and political organizing. In the publication’s manifesto, the duo describes modern political parties as “competing brands willing to change their products based on whatever sell this quarter.” As party power declines, media organizations have “moved in to fill the void,” according to the manifesto. The publication is rooted in conservative principles, while recognizing that the issues raised are true across the ideological spectrum but most worrisome on the right. “We don’t apologize for our conservatism. Some of the best journalism is done when the author is honest with readers about where he or she is coming from, and some of the very worst journalism hides behind a pretense of objectivity and the stolen authority that pretense provides,” write Goldberg and Hayes. According to Brown, the publication is driven by a focus on expert opinions, regardless of the expert’s political stance.
The Dispatch was launched one year after The Bulwark, founded by well-known neoconservative writer and editor Bill Kristol, and similarly devoted to finding a place for conservatives who are opposed to Donald Trump.
Two days before the January 6 Capitol riots, The Bulwark published a piece by Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt outlining the difficult task that comes with being an elected official: telling your constituents the truth when you know it’s not what they want to hear. According to Holt — a proud Republican who has garnered attention for his consistent condemnation of Trump — serial accommodation has corroded public trust and is at the forefront of the public disappointment in government.
On April 6, Holt and Kristol discussed the polarization in American politics during an event put together by 92nd Street Y in New York City. Both men share the same critique of the former President, and believe there are a number of Republican candidates across the nation who maintain similar concerns, but fear denouncing Trump’s behavior on account of appearing disloyal and losing the Republican vote. During the event, Holt blamed the current electoral system for the extremism we’re seeing in politics today.
“We let American politics get dominated by this 10 to 15 percent of people at the extremes, at both extremes, and they are giving us this perception that we are so polarized,” said Holt. “It’s people who go to Trump rallies, it’s people sending five dollar daily donations to AOC [Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]. They’re dominating American politics, but they shouldn’t be because they’re not actually that numerically large.”
To Holt, there are two ways in which we can overcome the dynamics of a closed partisan primary process. The first is to rewire the electoral system, which many would argue is past the point of return. The second, and objectively more attainable process, is to have a credible Independent candidate thereby rejecting the need to run through the Republican or Democratic primary and subsequently answering to that subset of voters first.
Ross Barkan, the politics reporter who campaigned in the 22nd District Democratic primaries in 2018, echoed Holt’s concern with the current political system, calling it the “least equipped” format to handle polarization, compared to that of a parliamentary system where there is “more cooperation.”
“Trumpism was a double-edged sword for the GOP, it actually strengthened them in some ways and weakened them in other ways,” said Barkan. Trump’s inability to win 50 percent of the vote in either election was a sign of weakness; his ability to dominate national headlines was a strength.
The question of how long Trump will continue to keep his hold on the party is an interesting one, and could at least partly be decided in the upcoming Republican primaries across the nation. Some Trump-endorsed candidates, Barkan pointed out, are “not necessarily front runners.” According to Barkan, if they all lose, or a lot of them lose, Trump’s hand in the party could slightly weaken. However, the polarization that has come to exist between left-leaning and right-leaning voters, is here to stay. It has become too fixed a part of people’s political identities. “I don’t see how that reverses itself,” Barkan said. “At least for a little while.”
But nothing is forever in politics, Barkan went on to say. No one expected a man named Barack Obama to become president, and neither did anyone expect the emergence of a former reality TV show star. “Ten years from now, will Trump have the same hold on the party?” Barkan said. “Maybe not. Maybe the 2020 election and a lot of other stuff will fade from view. It probably will. I think there’s a lot of Republicans who would like it to fade from view. But as long as Trump is around, that can’t happen.”
While the Elsammak and LaBella campaigns continued to contest the district, they agreed on one thing: new boundaries for the district, drawn up by the Democrat-dominated legislature in Albany, which added two left-leaning neighborhoods to District 22 while eliminating some right-leaning ones, should be scrapped. A recent court order has done just that, postponing the Republican primary to August. Now the campaigns can return to battling one another.
On a recent late-night Twitter spree, just hours after J. D. Vance won the Republican nomination in Ohio, the usually very disciplined Elsammak account allowed itself a bit of anger at his (Trumpian) opponent. At 3:20 a.m., it retweeted a video from user @Gustavo56951227, who has one follower and four tweets, all of which target LaBella. @Gustavo56951227 used a video of viral TikToker Mohammad Rajab Wali, a bald heavyset man famous for his “Joe Biden Wake Up” video, dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough.” “How @AndrewGounardes would feel if @VitoLaBella4NY beats @karim4ny in the primary,” @Gustavo56951227 tweeted, suggesting that Gounardes would celebrate, because LaBella would be such an easy opponent in purple District 22. Elsammak’s Twitter, in the middle of the night, couldn’t help but agree. “True I suppose,” his account wrote above Gustavo’s video-tweet. “Voters should note that I’m the endorsed GOP and Conservative candidate for a reason. Mr. LaBella doesn’t stand a change [sic] against AG in a general.” It was an uncommonly aggressive tweet, but, in keeping with his unifying message, Elsammak’s campaign had deleted it by morning. But apparently not before LaBella’s camp saw it.
The two campaigns spent the next morning sending — and, often, deleting — tweets targeting one another. LaBella’s account, @Vito4NYSenate, called the retweeted video racist, though why exactly was not clear. It went on to accuse Elsammak’s team of setting up the @Gustavo56951227 account.
Elsammak wrote back to say that he did not manage his own Twitter account, denied that Gustavo was his campaign’s creation, and accused LaBella’s campaign of spreading lies. A short while later, Elsammak’s account extended an invitation to settle this tension over the phone. A follow-up Tweet from @karim4ny stated that the two had a “pleasant and professional conversation,” until Elsammak realized that during the call, someone from LaBella’s account sent out another tweet, reiterating Elsammak’s role behind Gustavo.
“Interesting how I was on the phone with Vito when this tweet was put out,” wrote Elsammak. “Whoever this is, please hand the phone back to Vito.” He went on to say that LaBella was able to “see past the lies and nonsense,” and called on LaBella’s staff to do the same. LaBella’s account pounced back, claiming Elsammak “PROFUSELY apologized” for the posts and blamed them on his own staff.
While neither candidate admitted fault, the two have put down their Twitter fingers, at least for now. But with the primary still three months away, the conflict within the 22nd District Republican Party is far from over.
