Reform Rep Didn't Know Party Existed Until They Asked Him To Run

LOWER EAST SIDE — Jeff Kurzon wasn’t planning on running for Congress in 2018 until New York State Reform Party Secretary Frank Morano reached out to him in an email after the party’s primary in June.

“He said, ‘Jeff I would like to talk to you about New York’s 7th Congressional District.’ I didn’t know what the Reform Party was, I didn’t know who he was. But I said okay,” Kurzon recalled.

And that’s how Kurzon, a Democrat who ran in the last two Democratic primaries, ended up on the ballot to represent New York’s 7th Congressional District.

The district encompasses the Lower East Side and parts of Brooklyn and Queens. Kurzon is running against the Democratic incumbent U.S. Rep. Nydia Velazquez and Joseph Lieberman, the Conservative Party candidate.

Kurzon has little chance of winning, as he lost to Velazquez in both the 2014 and 2016 primaries.

He said that his commitment to getting money out of politics has stopped him from seeking out campaign contributions from corporate entities or political action committees — leaving his coffers with just $6,000 while Velazquez, a 26-year incumbent, raised more than $900,000 by late September, according to a Federal Election Commission report.

Even the fact that Kurzon’s name is on the Reform Party ticket is unusual: he didn’t run in the party’s primary in June but was instead retroactively nominated by the party’s leadership in July.

Morano said the party found Kurzon by reaching out to all of the candidates who had previously run for the seat. “He was the one we were most enthusiastic about given his reform message,” Morano said.

The Reform Party is relatively unknown and only has 30 registered members in New York’s 7th Congressional District. Morano said the party wasn’t able to find a primary candidate for the district.

The party, however, decided to hold a primary anyway, Morano said, because it wanted its members to be able to vote, which would’ve otherwise been impossible given New York’s closed primary system that stipulates voters can only vote in their own party’s primaries.

Morano said that for this reason the Reform Party decided to hold a write-in primary that was open to both its own members and unaffiliated voters.

This resulted in a tie where the two leading write-in candidates, Nydia Velazquez and Suraj Patel, received just 17 votes each. According to press reports, the tie meant the race was voided and permitted the party leadership to choose the candidate, so Morano reached out to Kurzon.

Kurzon said his lack of familiarity with the Reform Party and his Democratic Party affiliation didn’t stop him from embracing the nomination.

“Put my name on the ballot and I’m going to do my best to win,” Kurzon said.

Photo courtesy of Ethan Stark-Miller