She Spent Nearly $600,000 on Her Council Race and Lost. Was It Worth It?
If nothing else, Elizabeth Lewinsohn’s failed bid for a New York City Council seat highlights two great needs: housing and idealistic candidates.Last December, Elizabeth Lewinsohn, a longtime TriBeCa resident, entered the Democratic race to represent her district in New York’s City Council, eventually raising and spending far more money than any of the other 216 people running for the Council. Of the $568,665 her campaign put toward securing the Democratic nomination in a district that covers the bottom tip of Manhattan, $522,000 came from a source with whom she was intimately acquainted: Elizabeth Lewinsohn.The return on investment did not inspire; she effectively spent $72 per vote and lost by 20 points to the incumbent, Chris Marte.City Council races typically generate little civic interest or remarkable dispersions of cash, one of the reasons that the race, which could be seen as a referendum on development, wound up on the radar of people who might have ignored it. Over the past 25 years, only one other campaign, to elect a Stanford-educated lawyer named Kevin Kim, spent more money on a Council bid. Running for a seat in Queens in 2009, he won the primary and then lost to a Republican in the general election.But the scale of Ms. Lewinsohn’s self-financing seems unprecedented in a contest of this kind. She opted out of the city’s matching funds program, which would have limited her spending. The prospect of a political novice beating an incumbent seemed daunting to the point of impossible, she told me, had she kept within the constraints of public financing, which cap spending for primary campaigns to $228,000.To put her gambit in perspective, the former hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson donated just under $15,000 toward his own failed bid to become mayor. Out of four candidates in the Democratic primary for the First District, Ms. Lewinsohn ranked second, despite outspending Mr. Marte, the son of a bodega owner, by nearly $400,000 — roughly the tab she would have run up had she taken the 7,905 people who cast ballots for her to the Odeon for a plate of steak tartare and a glass of Bordeaux.While the paperwork she filed with the city’s Campaign Finance Board identifies her as a “homemaker” (she is married to Jonathan Lewinsohn, an investment manager), Ms. Lewinsohn is, in fact, a quietly accomplished public servant, a graduate of Yale Law School, a former director of policy for the Police Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau, a member of her local community board for 12 years now and a co-founder of Gotham Park, a revived public space under the Brooklyn Bridge.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More