Hakeem Ran Up Huge Margin In Southern Brooklyn

Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries soundly defeated Charles Barron 72 percent to 28 percent yesterday with broad support throughout Central and East Brooklyn. But he appears to have really clobbered Barron in the southern tier of the district, which includes Coney Island, Seagate, and Brighton Beach,  helping Jeffries run up his bigger-than-expected margin of victory. Assemblyman Alec Brook-Krasny gushed at the returns from election districts at several poll sites that he was monitoring, where the Jeffries camp reported dominating voting totals of 44-0, 16-0, 32-2, 23-0, and 115-2.”The numbers are amazing- I’ve never seen such numbers in my own district,” said Brook-Krasny at the Jeffries election night party. “He’s a great candidate, a natural leader, very balanced with a cosmopolitan perspective who really looks at the world from different people’s eyes. And we have an oppponent, Charles Barron, who is totally the opposite. The Russian-speaking community is totally for Jeffries.”

A week before Election Day, Russian Jews held an “emergency” press conference denouncing Barron and rallying support for Jeffries, citing concerns about prior Barron statements seen as anti-Semitic. The Sephardic Community Federation also spent at least $15,000 sending out mailers and running newspaper ads targeting Barron.

Jeffries campaigned off Mermaid Avenue on Tuesday afternoon and saw no Barron presence at the polling site.

“Bedford-Stuyvesant and Coney Island were the district’s so-called battlegrounds, but I campaigned in Coney Island and got an enormously positive response,” said Jeffries, yesterday afternoon in Fort Greene. “Even in East New York we did well.”

There’s also a sizable black population in Coney Island beyond the Russian-American vote, but over nine in 10 voters in the area overall cast their ballots for Jeffries, according to his campaign.

“The voters for Coney Island encapsulated what we saw, and what the vote totals show that the residents of the eighth congressional district want- and what they want is a serious legislator,” said Jeffries spokeswoman Lupe Todd. “When you see numbers like that, it shows how hungry the electorate is for a serious discussion on the issue that affect their day-to-day lives.”