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On a Sunday in late April, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand rose to speak at a church in Harlem. Although the pastor introduced her as “one of this nation’s leading senators,” Gillibrand received only polite applause as she stepped to the pulpit — the kind that might greet a little-known lawmaker who only recently ascended to higher office.
In fact, Gillibrand has represented New York in the U.S. Senate for 15 years, during which she has had a lifetime’s worth of political ups and downs — winning the passage of major laws on gun trafficking and military sexual assault, embarking on a failed bid for president and now coasting to what should be an easy re-election to a third full term in November.
But she remains low-profile in her home state. A May poll found nearly one-third of New York’s registered voters had no opinion of her, a remarkable result for someone who will likely end up serving at least 21 years in the Senate. Gillibrand’s reputation among New York’s political class has remained largely the same as when she was first appointed in 2009: a policy-heavy politician, skilled at fundraising but unknown in wide swaths of the state, distant from its New York City power center and seemingly uninterested in courting political activists or press attention.
Gillibrand shows no intention of retreating to the backbenches, though, and is poised this year to play a bigger role for New York Democrats than she has in a long time. In the Senate, she is in the middle of high-profile pushes to regulate cryptocurrencies and expand paid family leave; on the campaign trail, she defied long-running retirement rumors — unfounded, she says — and, thanks partly to her formidable fundraising, deterred any would-be primary challengers despite speculation that she might be vulnerable.
And she has a more urgent task in the coming months. In November, New York Democrats, despite their grumbles over Gillibrand’s visibility, will be counting on her — the only statewide incumbent on the ballot — to help lift the fortunes of the half-dozen swing-district Democrats whose races might decide control of the House of Representatives. She will be lending her name and pocketbook to a new “coordinated campaign” aimed at winning those seats, serving as a co-chair along with Gov. Kathy Hochul and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
“I’m not necessarily a headline-getter for our state. I would give that role to Sen. Schumer,” Gillibrand said in one of three interviews over two months for this profile — acknowledging the all-too-constant comparisons she gets to the ever-present Senate majority leader. “But I do really good work.”
‘Parochial perspectives’
In person, Gillibrand is self-assured and polished, friendly but without the high-octane extroversion one might expect from someone who not long ago sought to be president. Seated at a table inside a lounge at a Midtown hotel where she was holding court on a recent afternoon, New York’s junior senator grew animated when talking about legislation but seemed disinterested in questions about herself and her career arc, imploring a reporter not to “get stuck in the earliest days.”
But she was willing to revisit the day in January 2009 when she, a young upstate congresswoman, was instructed to catch a flight to Albany and learn whether Gov. David Paterson had chosen her for a life-changing appointment to the Senate. Whatever the outcome, Gillibrand was told she would need to stand behind the winner in a show of solidarity.
“We didn’t know I was picked,” Gillibrand recalled. “It was always a long shot.”
In fact, she had already won over Paterson, who chose Gillibrand from the crowd of better-known New York political figures vying to fill the Senate seat being vacated by Hillary Clinton. What set Gillibrand apart in her interviews, Paterson recalled recently, was her willingness to talk about the policy issues she wanted to tackle in the Senate, rather than playing up her fundraising prowess or chances of beating a Republican in November.
“I didn’t want to hear all that political talk,” Paterson said. “She was a lot more comfortable being herself.”
Gillibrand was hardly the novice that some accounts at the time described. Descended from an influential Albany political family, she was already plotting her eventual runs for office while working as a Manhattan lawyer in the early 2000s. After what one magazine article later described as a “carefully calculated” move back upstate, she upset a Republican incumbent in a high-profile House race in 2006, drawing national attention.
But the Senate appointment was a new kind of challenge. The first few weeks, Gillibrand said, were “like drinking from a firehose — it was everything, all at once, aimed right at your face.”
“You just had to be calm, patient, thoughtful, and realize it’s going to take time to introduce yourself to the whole state and that there would be a lot of criticism along the way,” she said. In those early trips around the state, she had to make frequent stops to nurse her infant son.
One of the first people Gillibrand sought out after her appointment was the Rev. Al Sharpton, who recalled being stunned by the new senator’s willingness to take questions for more than an hour from the attendees at his Saturday morning civil rights rally.
“No one, before or since, has done that. And I’ve had everybody,” Sharpton said. He has continued to ally with Gillibrand on efforts to end cash bail and combat police misconduct and said the senator “rarely makes a big move without checking in.”
Gillibrand speaks with the frankness of someone accustomed to achieving her aims through dealmaking, not mass mobilization. Unlike so many question-dodging politicians, she can be startlingly open about the political realities of her job. Asked about her much-publicized leftward shift on issues like gun control and immigration since she gave up her right-leaning House district, she makes no attempt to chalk them up to an ideological awakening. Instead, she said, it was her own lack of experience that drove her to adopt those “parochial perspectives.”
“If I was a more mature politician at the time, I don’t think I would have felt that I had to be so representative on those issues,” she said.
She is similarly direct about the role she played in pressuring Minnesota Sen. Al Franken to resign in 2018 after seven women accused him of sexual harassment. Gillibrand was the first Democratic senator to call on him to step down — although dozens of others quickly followed suit — and the subsequent anger among Democratic donors over Franken’s swift downfall was seen as a contributor to the failure of her five-month presidential campaign.
Gillibrand said she has no regrets about the stand she took — she was working on an effort to curb harassment in Congress when the scandal broke, and felt she would have been a hypocrite had she stayed silent. Perceptions of sexual misconduct vary by generation, she said, and “a lot of voters do not think harassment is a big deal.”
“I don’t think I could do it differently. I wish I didn’t get burdened so much, or punished so much,” she said. “I probably could have protected myself more, if I was really thoughtful and strategic about it. I didn’t think I needed to.”
‘More thorough than people think’
On an afternoon in April, Gillibrand could be found inside a sleek computer lab at St. John’s University in Queens, seated at the head of a table surrounded by students and a few city officials. She was there to urge the students to apply to the Cyber Service Academy, a scholarship program linked with the Department of Defense that she created in 2023 after a legislative push aimed at countering threats from China and Russia.
“What would it take to get you into public service?” she asked the students, taking notes on their answers. A few minutes later, asked what advice she would give to prospective federal workers, she was pragmatic: “Don’t smoke pot if you want to serve,” she said, “and don’t make threats online.”
The visit was quintessential Gillibrand: a policy that seemed crafted in a boardroom at the Pentagon or the Capitol, brought home to her constituents in New York and announced not in a headline-grabbing press conference but on a quiet college campus.
Gillibrand is proud of her fairly prolific legislative record in recent years, largely targeting big national issues. Thanks in part to her ability to work with conservative Republicans, she has managed to pass bills making gun trafficking a federal crime, providing benefits for military veterans exposed to toxic burn pits, and giving new legal protections to victims of workplace sexual harassment.
Many of her ongoing pushes are with strange political bedfellows: South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham is her top partner on an age discrimination bill; Missouri firebrand Josh Hawley is working with Gillibrand to ban stock trading by members of Congress. For someone who has served in Congress long enough to remember a very different Republican Party, Gillibrand can be surprisingly blasé about the GOP’s transformation at the hands of Donald Trump.
“President Trump, unfortunately, is a little cynical,” Gillibrand said, lamenting his role in tanking a delicate immigration deal in January. “The good news is, I have not found the Republicans that support him have adopted a do-nothing posture.”
But Gillibrand’s national focus, and willingness to collaborate with right-wingers, holds less appeal for some in New York. Camille Rivera, a political strategist in the city, said few people in progressive circles see her as an ally.
“I think they see her as a moderate,” Rivera said, pointing to Gillibrand’s staunch support for Israel throughout its contentious military campaign in Gaza. “I think progressives are looking for her to be more localized, taking stronger positions around housing.”
Gillibrand defends her record in New York, pointing to a 2022 analysis that ranked her ninth out of 100 senators for the amount of money she steered toward her home state. But the perception of Gillibrand as being disconnected from the city has become an article of faith in political circles, and may persist as long as she serves alongside Schumer, the gregarious Brooklynite known for showing up at the smallest of ribbon-cuttings.
“She gets a bad rap sometimes because people say they don’t see her around. But the people saying that live in New York City,” said Paterson, who remains proud of his appointment. “In the upstate region she’s seen a lot more, and they really like that.”
For a while, that discontent was channeled into intense speculation that Gillibrand might not run for re-election, which quieted only after she announced her campaign in early 2023. Those rumors, which swirled for months, had been “largely led by people who wanted my position,” she said with a laugh. She did not name any suspects, but New York City Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had been widely seen as a potential primary threat, and she did little to dispel the rumors before her office announced cryptically that she was “not planning” to challenge Gillibrand.
Gillibrand called the retirement rumor “wishful thinking,” describing a musical-chairs scenario of vacant offices that would be a bonanza for candidates and consultants alike. “A lot of people who were positioning themselves, either to run for Senate or run for attorney general or run for governor, all loved this rumor, because if one person moved up, other people might move over, and then there might be that one spot they want.”
The speculation was fueled partly by confusion over Gillibrand’s own place of residence: She and her husband listed their Hudson Valley home for sale in 2020 and described plans to move to the North Country, far upstate. Ultimately, though, she purchased her childhood home in the city of Albany, where she now lives for a portion of the roughly six months she is able to spend outside of Washington.
“It gives us the opportunity to take long walks in the woods,” Gillibrand said. The move has also let her two sons, ages 20 and 16, spend more time with Gillibrand’s mother, now in her eighties. (Gillibrand’s husband Jonathan, a former venture capitalist, now works for the State Department.)
Some New York City power brokers have no qualms about Gillibrand’s downstate ties. Kathryn Wylde, president of the pro-business Partnership for New York City, said Gillibrand has evolved during her tenure from a “clear upstater” into “a very sophisticated operator in New York City and Washington.” Gillibrand’s staff point to fruitful friendships with Schumer, Sharpton, Brooklyn congresswomen Nydia Velazquez and Yvette Clarke, and Gov. Kathy Hochul, a fellow upstater who was herself thrust into statewide office.
Indeed, despite constant chatter about a primary challenge, no threat to Gillibrand has ever materialized. One sure factor is her prodigious fundraising — her political action committee had $10 million on hand as of March, and recent donors have included Broadway executive James Nederlander and real estate developers Scott Rechler of RXR and Jeff Blau of Related.
It’s hard to square her high-powered donor list with the conventional wisdom that Gillibrand lacks connections in the city. More accurate, perhaps, is that she has cultivated the relationships that matter.
On that front, Sharpton said, “She has probably been more thorough than people think.”
‘Not quite ready’
Would Gillibrand ever run for president again? She hasn’t ruled it out, she says — but she would only launch a campaign if she felt she could really win.
“I think the country is not quite ready for a woman president in a lot of ways,” she said. “I’d have to have a much higher stature, and I think the country would have to be a little more ready for it.”
Joe Biden’s campaign considered Gillibrand for vice president in 2020, she said, a fact that went unreported at the time. But the vetting never went further than a few interviews “early in the process” and submitting a list of recommenders, she said.
For now, Gillibrand’s focus is on her re-election, where she will be heavily favored against Republican Mike Sapraicone, a former police detective. Arguably more important, Gillibrand will help lead the Democratic Party’s statewide coordinated campaign, which aims to boost swing-district House candidates through unified messaging, get-out-the-vote efforts and millions of dollars in fundraising.
“I’m the only person running statewide, so I felt I had a responsibility but also an opportunity to help them,” she said. Gillibrand believes the campaign could have the side effect of reminding New Yorkers she exists — since she ran no TV ads during her 2018 campaign, many voters have not seen her face in 12 years, partly explaining her low name recognition in polls.
“I’m going to work hard to fix it,” she said. “I’m going to spend the money I’ve raised on good, thoughtful ads around the state about the good, bipartisan work that we’ve done.”
Gillibrand hopes the campaign will raise as much as $8 million, with plans to open over a dozen field offices and focus on outreach to communities of color and college students. But early perceptions still reflect Gillibrand’s low profile — the campaign is widely seen as Jeffries’s baby, and one well-connected political consultant told Crain’s they were unaware that Gillibrand was even involved.
Whatever mixed opinions she faces at home, Gillibrand shows no intention of changing her style after winning another term this fall. Six more years in the Senate will raise her chances of scoring a leadership position, and she describes herself as probably “next in line” to chair the powerful Armed Services committee. Often, Gillibrand repeats her personal outlook like a kind of mantra: “Common-sensey and bipartisan, but progressive.”
The ground-level appeal of the Gillibrand approach was on display once she began speaking at the Harlem church in April. After her modest reception, Gillibrand got the congregation rolling once she started rattling off quotes from Scripture.
Gillibrand’s aides say church speeches are among her favorite engagements, and the senator found her groove as she used a passage about the “armor of God” as a metaphor for passing bills.
“When I’m just about to pass a really important piece of legislation, something that’s going to help lots of people, is when all the criticism comes,” she said, drawing whoops from the crowd. “You were just about to do that big thing and people who don’t want that big thing done are going to fight you down. Put up your shield of faith, it will protect you.”
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Nick Garber , 2024-05-30 11:48:06
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