This gave the rest of the country another opportunity to look at New York state politics and say, “Huh?” Several quirks within New York’s political culture, mainly the institution of electoral fusion, whereby a single candidate can appear multiple times on the ballot endorsed by multiple political parties, are to blame for this situation. Also in play is a law that was passed in the 1940s to deal with another insurgent socialist congressional candidate. The kicker is that this scenario might repeat itself when New York has its next primary in September. (Oh, in case you didn’t know: There’s going to be another primary in September.)

Fusion: A brief, weird history

Prior to the 1890s, electoral ballots, as we know them today, didn’t exist: Voters would drop a piece of paper into a box that was placed at government-specified polling places. People could write their choices out longhand at home, but most submitted preprinted ballots handed out by political parties instead. Multiple parties could — and often did — endorse the same candidate, making electoral fusion the norm in the nineteenth century. During an era where political parties were more about community identity and patronage networks than about coherent ideologies, a Democratic candidate, for example, could broker a deal to tap into the small but fervent Populist Party’s voter pool.

At the end of the century, though, a shift to the so-called Australian ballot system that we know today occurred, where voters were given an identical ballot at a polling place that listed all the candidates for each office and then could choose one in secret. This transformation upended the American political system in many ways, one being that it gave state and local governments the ability to set the rules about who appeared on ballots, and allowed them to set up the system by which the parties choose their candidates. And in many states, the big parties aimed to put an end to fusion voting. As one Republican state legislator in Minnesota put it, “We don’t propose to allow the Democrats to make allies of the Populists, Prohibitionists, or any other party, and get up combination tickets against us. We can whip them single-handed, but don’t intend to fight all creation.” But in 1911, a Court of Appeals struck down an attempt to legislate away fusion in New York, which remains one of only eight states where fusion voting persists. 

Old-time socialism

In the 1940s, New York’s establishment took another stab at reigning in fusion voting. At the time, anyone could run in any party’s primary or in multiple party primaries, in fact. Congressman Vito Marcantonio, an East Harlem socialist, identified as a member of the American Labor Party, which was widely viewed as a Communist front; but he routinely won Democratic and Republican primaries in his district during his six terms in office, much to the displeasure of those parties’ leaders. In response, the New York legislature passed the Wilson-Pakula Act, which forbade candidates from seeking a party’s endorsement unless they were enrolled as a member of that party or had gotten the blessing of the party’s leaders.

Now, big party candidates court third-party leadership to secure an endorsement, and to ensure they can appear on the ballot in more than one place. The goal for a third party, as explained in a paper published by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU’s Law School, is usually not to run an opposing candidate, but to act as a sort of a loosely allied pressure group that steers a candidate’s ideology toward one end of the political spectrum.

Unlike some other minor parties, the Working Families Party, founded in 1998, does not nominate candidates via primaries, but rather through an internal endorsement process that progressive candidates are urged to apply for. In order for things to play out as intended, third parties like the WFP have to successfully predict who the major parties are going to nominate — often easy enough to do thanks to the strength of political machines. The candidates the WFP endorses are mostly Democrats, and even “establishment” New York Democrats like Crowley are progressive enough to get the WFP thumbs-up, as party founder Dan Cantor notes in a Daily News op-ed he wrote to apologize for not backing Ocasio-Cortez.

An establishment candidate ending up on the third-party line while the insurgent has major party backing is pretty much the opposite of what everyone wants. And indeed, the WFP has urged Crowley to withdraw from its ballot line. The problem is that this turns out to be much easier said than done.

Stuck on the ballot with you

If Crowley were in Texas, for example, he could get removed from the ballot just by making a request in writing. But New York’s rules are more strict; he has to invalidate his candidacy somehow. In this instance, Crowley could accept the WFP’s nomination in a different race that he knows he won’t win. (Rick Lazio did this when he lost the 2010 GOP gubernatorial primary to Carl Paladino after he had already secured the Conservative Party nomination.) He could also register to vote in another state; like many members of Congress, he maintains a home in the Northern Virginia suburbs, so the WFP is actually urging him to register to vote there.

Gerald Benjamin, director of the Benjamin Center at State University of New York at New Paltz, says he suspects the system is set up this way to prevent political parties from swapping out candidates on a whim, possibly in defiance of primary voters.

At any rate, Crowley is on the record as not wanting to either fake-run for some other office or pretend-move to Virginia, saying he sees both as dishonest. (His third option, dying, similarly lacks appeal.) And so Crowley will be on the ballot in November. But since he’s not actively campaigning, nobody seems to think he imperils Ocasio-Cortez’s candidacy. But these convoluted threads are just the prologue to another, more important big fight: the gubernatorial election.

Nixon’s the one…maybe

The WFP endorsed Andrew Cuomo in both his previous gubernatorial races, but the relationship between him and the party has never been warm, exactly. In 2010, he only agreed to accept the party’s endorsement if they signed off on his proposed budget, which included cuts to the unionized state workforce. But by 2018 he’d attracted enough labor allies to convince several big unions to pull their support for the WFP. He also essentially created the Women’s Equality Party out of thin air, and many suspect he chose the name to confuse voters. Not surprisingly, the WEP endorsed Cuomo this year.

Meanwhile, the WFP endorsed Cynthia Nixon. But despite her insurgent politics, Nixon isn’t planning on taking the fight to November if Cuomo defeats her in the September primary. Instead, it appears the WFP plans to run her as a candidate for state assembly against Democrat Deborah Glick — whom Nixon would then campaign for, not against.

The reasons for this move have to do with the high stakes for the gubernatorial election. Despite the bad blood all around, neither Nixon nor the WFP particularly want to see her serving as a spoiler that throws the race to Republican Marcus Molinaro. But that outcome seems unlikely. The real issue is the future of the WFP. In order to maintain its place on the ballot in New York, a party needs to receive at least 50,000 votes for governor. Nixon might be able to pull this off as a third-party candidate; but in order for the WFP to guarantee the votes it needs, it may be necessary for them make peace with Cuomo if he wins the primary. Polling currently has him as the heavy favorite. If the WFP needs a lesson on what might happen if Nixon is on the ballot in the general election, the party need only remember 2002, when Cuomo abruptly quit the race for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination after securing the Liberal Party endorsement. In the general election, Cuomo failed to win 50,000 votes as a Liberal and sent that venerable party into an effective demise, ironically helping solidify the WFP as the third-party voice of the left.

Cuomo will no doubt set a steep price for accepting the WFP’s endorsement. And as Nixon’s camp has pointed out, Cuomo has received the endorsement of the WEP and the Independence Party, so he’ll still be on the ballot if he loses the Democratic primary, and he’s made no signal that he’ll bow out gracefully. Things could still get weird.

Hosted by WBEZ anchor Jenn White and produced by Colin McNulty, an American who spent several years making documentaries for BBC Radio, Making Obama is a deeply reported and researched and dramatically paced look at Obama’s early career. But simply as a listening experience, it’s a feast: deeply layered but never cluttered, weaving together crowd noise, interviews, White’s voiceover, and music. The musical choices are spare but well-selected, including snatches of hits that end after just a few seconds to stay within fair use, sometimes to great dramatic effect, as with the foreshortened snippet of “Orinoco Flow” that accompanies an old Obama colleague recounting the future president listening to Enya all the damn time. Making Obama is produced, in the manner of a major-label rock album, as opposed to the no-budget indie approach of most other podcasts.

There is merit to thinking that this sort of thing used to have another name: radio. But according to McNulty, “We were never thinking about broadcast — at all.” Speaking from his office, he and White have the kind of easy, sharp back-and-forth suggested by their work. “You just have to keep people engaged and listening to it, because they will stop,” he says. White elaborates: “With podcasts, people really want to move through a journey with you as an experience that I think is different from how people listen to radio. It changes the way you think about how people are listening along. They’re not going to miss an episode unless they decide not to finish listening to the podcast.”

Making Obama is twice as long as its predecessor, 2016’s three-part Making Oprah, partly because that series was so much more successful than White or McNulty anticipated. Making Oprah, says McNulty, broke down neatly into the Eighties, Nineties, and 2000s. “In doing the Obama preparation, we discovered six pretty well-defined chapters; we knew the appeal was big enough that it would justify six full hours.” Adds White: “We had to tell that story with that degree of detail — especially talking about politics in Chicago, it required a little more in terms of the narrative arc.”

Even without his childhood, his college years, or the presidency — Making Obama concerns itself strictly with the Chicago years — it’s quite an arc. Obama arrived in Chicago in 1985 and worked as a community organizer for three years; twenty years (and Harvard Law) later, he was elected president.

The series makes clear that Obama’s rise was both improbable and inevitable — and could only have happened in Chicago, a point made by the president and, in a cascading stack of quotes at the end of the final episode, about twenty interviewees. The first episode deals with Obama’s life as a community organizer — a job often made fun of by his political opponents (we hear Sarah Palin, of all people, mocking him for it during the 2008 presidential campaign), because, as White notes, its ground-level grunt work doesn’t afford the kinds of photo ops so important to many career politicians. It’s also straight advocacy work; Obama had his sights set on making bigger changes — which meant compromising more than the average community organizer was prepared to.

After moving back east to get his law degree from Harvard, Obama had been inspired to return to Chicago by Harold Washington, who in 1983 became the first African American mayor of a U.S. city the size of Chicago (at that time the second largest in the country); much of the second episode (splendidly titled “Chicago Politics Ain’t Beanbag”) concerns Washington’s epoch, as well as providing an overview of the city’s political history. About five minutes into episode two, we hear Washington announcing his run on a mini-cassette acquired from a reporter on the scene. (Washington’s righteous anger and firm commitment to progressive change — “I approach this job just like any masterful surgeon,” he said of the Chicago backroom dealing he opposed: “When you have to cut out a cancer, I cut it out with no emotion. Get it out!” — are especially tonic in a political atmosphere overloaded with double-talk.) But politics in Chicago, entrenched in the favor-trading Democratic “machine” of Richard J. Daley, have always had serrated racial edges — intra-racial edges, too, which applied doubly to a rookie politician with light skin, a Hawaiian upbringing, and an eager mien.

Nevertheless, Obama was ready to campaign. About sixteen minutes into episode three, Carol Anne Harwell, campaign manager for his 1996 run for state senate and the MVP of this series, describes her initial reaction to Obama: “He was born in Hawaii — whaaaa? —you know, that kind of thing.” He was hazed by his black Illinois senate colleagues, but when State Senator Rickey R. Hendon called Obama out on the floor for not voting with him, a seriously heated Obama invited Hendon into the break room, away from cameras, and got to “a little pushing and shoving — men acting like kids,” says Hendon recalls. Donne Trotter, yet another senator, reports that he finally “got between them and said, ‘We can’t do this.’ ”

Equally intense is the account of Obama’s sole political loss, to ex–Black Panther Bobby Rush in a 2000 run for Congress. Rush’s deeply rooted popularity with black voters in Chicago’s South Side proved the upstart’s undoing. Rush’s voice is labored — he beat salivary cancer ten years ago — but there’s no misunderstanding the tone behind his unstinting belief that Obama was a front by white bosses to unseat him. When White asks Rush how he felt after his win, his answer is simple and damning: “Victorious.”

After dusting himself off following his defeat, Obama readies himself for another go — episode five details how he won over the allies who’d help back him in his 2004 race for U.S. Senate, including Valerie Jarrett, a powerful attorney who became Obama’s senior advisor in the White House. When she and Michelle Obama tried to talk Barack out of running again after his loss to Rush, he persuaded them otherwise. As Jarrett recalls: “In the space of about two and a half hours, we all went from, ‘Don’t do this,’ to, ‘What a great idea!’ ”

One of the great archival finds of Making Obama comes in episode four (around 39:30), with “Blackout,” a radio ad targeted to Chicago’s black stations during that 2000 campaign. “He’s making the case for all of these things he’s done while in the state senate,” says White. The ad featured an African American couple whose lights go out, as was happening inordinately on the South Side at the time. At the end, following a bit of Obama speechifying, White recalls, “There’s a group of maybe five people trying to give this rambunctious cheer: ‘YAAAY!’ I said, ‘I think one of these people is Barack Obama.’ ”

“We can’t verify that that’s Obama,” McNulty makes sure to note.

“When you listen to that ad, and then you listen to the ads that David Axelrod produces for his U.S. Senate race — the difference in the sophistication, the professionalism, is telling,” says White.

According to McNulty, an even funnier vault find occurs in the podcast only as a snippet: a disastrous Obama radio appearance to promote his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father. “The guy keeps mispronouncing his name the whole time: Barrick Obama,” says McNulty. “Somebody calls in and says, ‘I don’t know what this is about, but there’s a lot of noise in my neighborhood with the boom boxes and all that.’ It’s completely separate from the topic of Obama’s book. You hear him really struggling to engage with this person.

“Then a phone call happens later. I realized that voice was [Harwell]. She didn’t identify herself as his campaign manager. She says she was not his campaign manager at the time. I couldn’t tell if she was a plant or not, because the timing was kind of weird. It was funny to hear how ragtag the whole thing is. Him struggling during the interview is kind of sad, but it’s pretty revealing, just how different his life was ten years [before] he’s a United States senator.”

The Axelrod ads were where Obama first tried the slogan that would eventually help put him in the White House. In episode six, around minute nineteen, we hear the U.S. Senate campaign radio spot that introduces the slogan “Yes we can.” Obama worried it was too corny. “He turned to Michelle and said, ‘Mich, what do you think?’ ” recalls campaign manager Jim Cauley. “She had her chin in her hand and she just sort of slowly shook her head and said, ‘Not corny.’ ” His TV spots, Cauley says, made him go “from ‘Who?’ to The Man.” We later learn that Obama’s first draft of his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech was thirty minutes long, eventually cut to eighteen: “I struggled with that,” Obama says. “There were a lot of good lines in there that got put on the chopping block.” The excerpts of his DNC speech are still stunning, and its unbridled belief in a United States that had more in common than not, in the wake of everything that’s happened since Obama left the White House, now sounds almost unbearably poignant.

A Detroit native, White joined WBEZ two years ago. “I didn’t come to ’BEZ saying, ‘I’ve always wanted to do a podcast,’ ” she says. But then McNulty, who’d been hired as part of WBEZ’s expansion of its on-demand content unit, approached her to work on Making Oprah with him, promising, “It’ll be really easy.”

“He lied!” White says, laughing uproariously. “It was not easy, but it was a lot of fun. And professionally it made me rethink what the future looks like for me.” Podcasting gives her the chance to “be more responsive to what the story really needs, what it’s asking for, because we don’t have to be attached to hitting a certain time post. As a person who on the other side of my job has to watch the clock, I really enjoy that freedom.”

That playfulness exemplifies McNulty’s approach. At the BBC, he says, “I made a lot of shows called The Archive Hour, which was very sound-rich, tons of layering going on.” A good example of this approach at is purest can be heard on the McNulty BBC production Sounds Up There (2015), a narrator-less 28-minute exploration (that’s the word for it) of the first-ever space walks.

“I think the tradition of doing multilayered features for broadcast in the U.K. is pretty advanced compared to the two-way model here,” he says. With Making Obama, he says, the goal was “to be as comprehensive as possible, in the way of a novel, where it’s constantly switching between clips, and building and building and building something. There’s so many friggin’ podcasts out there, thousands of them, and in order to get out of the chaos of it, you have to have a really high bar for what this thing is. I kind of go big with everything.”

Written by Ed Morales, Illustrated by Omar Banuchi

To read the Voice’s complete coverage of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans six months after Hurricane Maria, click here.

Goldwater, the Republican candidate for president, was outraged, and eventually won a substantial libel judgment against Fact. But this was cold comfort considering his landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson. The archconservative’s legal victory did, however, chastise the headshrinkers, whose professional association ruled that, going forward, no public figure could be diagnosed long-distance. The “Goldwater Rule” decrees, in part, “it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination [of the subject] and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”

That a World War II vet and two-term United States senator from Arizona could be judged unfit to be commander in chief seems a quaint notion in contemporary America, led as we are by a businessman with a checkered financial history and zero government or military service. But there have been earlier questions about presidential competence. In 1987, according to the PBS program American Experience, incoming White House chief of staff Howard Baker was told by his predecessor that President Reagan was “inattentive, inept,” and “lazy,” and that Baker and his staff should consider invoking the Constitution’s 25th amendment. This stipulates, in part, that the vice president can become “Acting President” if he and a majority of the cabinet believe that the commander in chief is unable “to discharge the powers and duties of his office”— whether due to insanity, paranoia, debilitating disease, or what have you. However, the Great Communicator impressed his new chief of staff with sunny banter, and Reagan finished out his term with high public approval ratings, only to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1994.

Today, a much more public debate rages between psychiatric associations as to whether the Goldwater Rule should be lifted to enable professionals to probe the motives (and manias) of President Trump.

Recently, a group of concerned mental health professionals created an organization, Duty to Warn, that flouts the Goldwater Rule. Their homepage boldly proclaims them to be “an association of mental health professionals (and other concerned citizens) who advocate Trump’s removal under the 25th Amendment on the grounds that he is psychologically unfit.” The Duty to Warn group has also sponsored a newly released book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.

As America’s professional mental health experts continue to fight over the efficacy of a long-distance diagnosis of the POTUS, we do have an earlier example of an astral-couch session with another teetotaler of authoritarian bent — Adolf Hitler — which can perhaps give us insight into our current situation.

In late 1943, psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer was commissioned by the Office of Strategic Services to gather a team of compatriots and plumb the workings of the volatile Führer’s mind. A number of typos betray the haste under which “A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend” was compiled — in 1943, victory for the Allies was far from certain and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s government was seeking any way possible to divine what the madman across the water might do next. Despite often misspelling the subject’s name (“Adolph” rather than the correct “Adolf”), Langer and his team accurately predicted a number of Hitler’s moves as the war went south for him, including his suicide in Berlin as the “1,000-year Reich” collapsed, having lasted not much more than a decade. (They also spent quite a few pages speculating on rumors that Germany’s supreme leader was fond of having women urinate and defecate upon him.)

The report includes quotes from the Führer himself and others, as well as analysis from Langer’s team. Following is a sampling of Langer’s findings reproduced directly from a version of the report available on the CIA’s website (which is more legible than Langer’s hastily typed original). Also note that, where unattributed, the quotes come from Hitler himself.

It should be noted that there are differences (mostly in word choices) between Langer’s roughly typed original report and the later reformatted and illustrated CIA version, which apparently was based on Langer’s revised, declassified version. One example is the phrase “It would be analogous to curing an ulcer without treating the underlying disease,” in the original, which became, “It would be analogous to removing a chancre without treating the underlying disease” in the CIA transcription (pages 143 and 96 respectively).

Perhaps the most curious change comes in the report’s final paragraph. First, we have reproduced the CIA’s version, followed by Langer’s original typescript.

“He said to me, ‘You should think about running for D.A.’ And I said, ‘I’m not gonna go down that route,’” Gonzalez told the Voice from a sparsely furnished campaign office in Downtown Brooklyn.

“I just said, ‘We’ll talk about it when you get back.’”

Thompson would never get to have that conversation. On October 9, 2016, he died at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. He was fifty. Gonzalez, a career prosecutor with no experience leading an organization of any kind or speaking in front of city journalists, was suddenly in charge of one of the largest district attorney’s offices in America.

As the acting district attorney, and now seeking a full term, Gonzalez has all the trappings of an incumbent: a formidable fundraising lead, scores of endorsements from politicians and labor unions, and the ability to stage headline-grabbing press conferences. Thompson’s widow is supporting him.

What Gonzalez hasn’t done is ward off challengers, most of them ex-colleagues, in what is unquestionably the most consequential race in New York City this election season.

The Democratic primary for district attorney in overwhelmingly Democratic Brooklyn is not simply another campaign bunched in with a sleepy mayoral contest and various City Council races. It will determine the directions of the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people who come into contact with an enormous and often punishing criminal justice system. Kings County is one of the largest and most diverse in the entire country. If Gonzalez, forty-eight, triumphs next month, he will be able to chart a course that district attorneys in other cities will look to and follow.

“Brooklyn has become a leader nationally for its unwillingness to prosecute low-level cases and its bureau that looks at wrongful convictions,” said JoAnn Page, the president and CEO of the Fortune Society, a nonprofit that provides support to the formerly incarcerated.

Under Thompson, who defeated longtime incumbent Charles “Joe” Hynes in an acrimonious 2013 campaign, the Brooklyn D.A.’s office stopped prosecuting low-level marijuana arrests. It had already established a much-heralded unit to review wrongful convictions during Hynes’s transformative, though troubled, two-decade tenure.

In the Thompson (and now Gonzalez) era, the Brooklyn D.A.’s office has asked judges on twenty-three occasions to free defendants who shouldn’t be in prison. Fighting back against the Trump White House, Gonzalez has demanded that ICE agents stop making arrests at courthouses where, in his estimation, they’re also making witnesses and defendants afraid to appear in court. Along with D.A.s in three other boroughs, he expunged a backlog of decades-old warrants and summonses. In Brooklyn, there were 143,000.

Gonzalez grew up in Williamsburg and came of age in East New York in the 1980s, when the Brooklyn neighborhood was racked with violence. Shootings fractured the night. Crack cocaine was rampant.

“As a young boy, all I really saw in my community was violence. I wanted to accomplish something with my life, and the only thing I really knew was crime,” he recalled. “Growing up then, it was not just about the crime but about the dysfunction of the community, which included a significant distrust of law enforcement. I don’t know what made me believe that if I sort of got into the belly of the beast I would be able to make a difference — but I did.”

Gonzalez attended John Dewey High School on Coney Island, a long ride from the neighborhood, and secured a spot at Cornell. After graduating from the University of Michigan Law School, he came home in 1995 to take a job as an assistant D.A. under Hynes. He was so eager to work in Brooklyn that he drove across the country for the job interview.

Looming over the field of six Democrats is not only Thompson’s legacy, which every candidate is quick to celebrate, but what Hynes left behind. Four of five of Gonzalez’s opponents — Anne Swern, Ama Dwimoh, Marc Fliedner, and Patricia Gatling — worked for Hynes, who was first elected in 1989. Those close to Hynes say he expressed a preference for Gatling, a former top deputy in his office, but she has struggled to gain traction in the race. (Neither Gatling nor Hynes could be reached for comment.)

Hynes, now eighty-two, suffered a stroke last year and is registered to vote in Breezy Point, Queens, so his degree of involvement in the race is unclear, though a large segment of the Brooklyn legal world remains loyal to him despite the many controversies that dogged the end of his tenure.

Hynes was the rare district attorney in New York to lose an election because of a spate of wrongful convictions on his watch, a failure compounded by corrupt detectives he was seen to have enabled, as well as by his inability to combat sex abuse in insular but politically powerful Orthodox Jewish communities. He lost support in the black neighborhoods of central Brooklyn that often sway Democratic primaries, especially as he clashed bitterly with Thompson, who was seen as a trailblazer.

Yet Hynes reformed the institution, too, pioneering alternatives to incarceration programs that are now staples of D.A.s’ offices in other big cities. In a higher-crime era, Hynes stood out for not simply measuring his office’s success by the number of people he sent to prison. Page, of the Fortune Society, points out that Hynes helped open the Drew House, a residential rehabilitative program for nonviolent first-time offenders.

Despite his unquestioned bond with Thompson, Gonzalez did not campaign for him in 2013. When asked if he voted for Thompson, Gonzalez demurred. “I will keep my vote to myself,” he said. “That’s something that’s private.”

Dwimoh, who ran a lauded special bureau on crimes against children under Hynes and left the office after she was accused, in 2010, of berating interns, proudly backed Thompson in 2013. “I was the only one working on behalf of Ken Thompson to get him elected while the rest were working on behalf of Joe Hynes,” she said. “It’s time for Brooklyn to rebuild.”

All six Democratic candidates have platforms that, to various degrees, bolster Thompson’s work. Dwimoh, who would be Brooklyn’s first black female D.A., wants to enhance the conviction review unit and believes, as other critics have charged, that Gonzalez has failed to hold accountable the detectives and prosecutors who built cases that ruined innocent people’s lives. She would create a commission, independent of the office, on prosecutorial misconduct.

Both Dwimoh, running with the backing of her current boss, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, and Swern, a former top prosecutor under Hynes as well as a managing counsel for Brooklyn Defenders, support reducing the D.A.’s reliance on cash bail, though Swern is more willing to phase it out entirely. “I think cash bail should not exist where other means exist to assure defendants return to courts. I don’t believe in penalizing poverty,” Swern said. (Gonzalez is not willing to end cash bail, as the state of New Jersey has mostly done.)

The only candidate with lengthy experience as a defense lawyer, Swern wants to reform discovery laws that Gonzalez and other D.A.s have refused to permanently change. New York is one of only ten states where prosecutors may wait until just before a trial to share evidence. Gonzalez refuses to back legislation that would force prosecutors to turn over evidence much sooner, citing fears that witnesses won’t be properly protected.

“The rules of discovery in New York remain deeply problematic,” said Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the author of The End of Policing. “Defense attorneys are not getting potentially exculpatory evidence until the day before or day of a trial.”

Gonzalez’s fiercest critic, arguably, has been Fliedner, a prosecutor who worked with him under Thompson when the then-D.A. brought charges against an NYPD officer who, in 2014, shot and killed an unarmed black man, Akai Gurley, in a darkened stairwell. Thompson secured the conviction of the officer, Peter Liang, but declined to seek jail time, angering activists and Gurley’s family. Gurley’s aunt is backing Fliedner’s campaign.

“Eric Gonzalez was driving the decision that we shouldn’t seek jail time,” Fliedner said.

Another long-shot candidate, outgoing Brooklyn councilman Vincent Gentile, has attacked all of his opponents for working under Hynes, though he endorsed Hynes in 2013. Gentile once served as an assistant district attorney in the Queens office. “I’m the only one in the race who has the credentials, because I come to this job completely independent of the Brooklyn D.A.’s office,” Gentile said.

Swern and Dwimoh are the Democrats who probably pose the best, if still slim, chance of defeating Gonzalez next month. Swern, a Democratic district leader in brownstone Brooklyn, is a threat to pick off white progressives, while Dwimoh will compete for the black and Latino votes Gonzalez also needs in the central part of the borough.

The greater question, beyond the immediate jockeying, is how far the office will be willing to go to reshape a flawed criminal justice system and what role, in a time of historically low crime, a district attorney should play. “It’s a very interesting time to be district attorney, because they’re spending more time telling you who they’re not prosecuting rather than who they are,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College and a former prosecutor in the Brooklyn office.

If Gonzalez wins, reformers want to know how ambitious he will really be. Will he be simply coloring in the lines of Thompson’s legacy or pushing for more? In at least one instance, Gonzalez has shown a willingness to break with Thompson: He told the Voice he now supports the state attorney general’s office, instead of the local D.A., investigating cases of police killing unarmed civilians. Thompson bitterly opposed such a move.

Gonzalez, quietly, is also aware of the history he might make. If he wins, he will be Brooklyn’s first Latino D.A., and the only one statewide. As the campaign hits the home stretch, he often ponders this too.

“The community deserves to have someone who represents them,” he said. “I represent the American Dream.”