Caban is at 39.6%, Katz with 38.3%.
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Tiffany Cabán, the 31-year-old public defender endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is on the verge of a stunning upset in a Queens district attorney's race that could dramatically impact the direction of criminal justice reform in America.
With 98 percent of the vote reporting, Cabán held a razor thin 1,229 vote lead over Melinda Katz, the borough president backed by the same Queens Democratic machine that Ocasio-Cortez crushed one year ago. Katz has refused to concede, waiting for absentee votes to be counted.
Cabán's startling performance may not only redefine criminal justice reform but also New York's once ossified, hierarchical political scene. Bold leftists are ascendant, with groups like the Democratic Socialists of America evolving from a curiosity to a preeminent vote-getting force in the city.
"When we started this thing, they said I was too young. They said I didn't look like a district attorney," Cabán said Tuesday at her raucous election night party. "They said we could not build a movement form the grassroots. They said we could not win. But we did it, y'all."
"I am a 31-year-old, queer Latina public defender whose parents grew up in the Woodside Housing projects," she continued. "And I decided to run. I ran because for too long, too many communities in Queens hadn't had a fair shot in our criminal justice system."
Cabán's platform was unapologetically progressive in a borough that was once defined by Archie Bunker, the irascible conservative of "All in the Family" fame. Cabán campaigned as a "decarceral" prosecutor, promising to oppose the construction of new jails, ending cash bail, decriminalize sex work, and put far less people in prison. Richard Brown, the longtime Queens DA who died in May, was her polar opposite, a tough-on-crime ex-judge who continued to prosecute low-level offenses like turnstile hopping and refused to set up an internal unit to review wrongful convictions.
Queens is county of over 2 million people, big enough to be one of the five largest cities in America. Brown held the office since 1991. A competitive election for the incredibly powerful post had not been waged in over a half century.
Katz's platform would come to mirror Cabán's, though her campaign invested in a bevy of TV and digital ads portraying the young public defender as an out-of-touch radical. One Facebook ad even targeted Cabán for playing basketball with voters in the predominately black neighborhood of Jamaica.
Even if Katz somehow survives, the old guard of New York politics has suffered significant damage. Crowley's loss last year stunned the Democratic establishment. This time, many of them were mobilizing to avoid a repeat. A new party boss, Representative Gregory Meeks, took over from Crowley, and Governor Andrew Cuomo threw his full weight behind Katz.
It took Ocasio-Cortez to drive once machine-friendly politicians into Cabán's camp, like the deputy leader of the State Senate, Michael Gianaris. More Democratic power brokers in New York are likely to cozy up to democratic socialists in the future. In a city that once re-elected Republicans like Rudy Giuliani, the political shift is palpable—in one generation, unabashed leftists are set to rule.
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There were about 1,200 votes between them.
Whoever wins is poised to become the first female Queens DA.
There are about 3,400 uncounted paper ballots — including affidavit, absentee and military— and they can't be tallied until July 3, according to the Board of Elections.
