Chris McKenna | LoHud | June 27, 2024
“I think I ran a campaign that was very grassroots-oriented,” Latimer said. “I did a lot of personal campaigning. I was in every corner of the district in the Bronx as well as Westchester. I met voters where they were, in a variety of settings.”
Latimer’s margin of victory stood at 17 points on Wednesday afternoon with some Westchester election districts yet to be counted, according to state Board of Elections counts. More than 30% of Democratic voters in New York’s 16th Congressional District had cast ballots in a contentious, big-spending contest between a second-term progressive and the more centrist political veteran who took him on….
Latimer counters that critics are exaggerating money’s importance in the race. Yes, it played a role, but both candidates had enough funding and outside support to reach voters, he said. And after a while, he asked, who was really paying attention any longer to the repetitive commercials and blizzard of mailers?
“My message got out. His message got out,” he said. “He may not have as much money as I had available to him, or independent expenditures, but you knew who Jamaal Bowman was. He was not an unknown quantity.”
Latimer also pointed out that an internal poll by his campaign showed him leading Bowman by “high single digits” at the outset, long before any outside groups launched ads. For him, that proved the infusion of money had only a limited effect on a race that already was his to win.
“I started out with a lead before dime one was spent,” he said.
