Fifty-Five Votes
What does it mean to lose an election by 55 votes? Tiffany Cabán lost a District Attorney race in 2019 — and in that loss, helped build a movement that would transform New York City.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Some filler words and false starts have been removed. Archival audio clips are noted where they appear.
This victory belongs to every single grassroots organizer, every working parent, every mom—
When I saw that AOC was running I went to a canvas in Astoria Park.
There are three lawyers in Astoria: Sweeney, Reich and Bowles—
I did a lot of the same doors over and over and over and people were like, I’m so sick of seeing your face… like, go away…
Once Joe Crowley was beaten, a lot of people understood: he was not the only one.
With a margin that narrow, your mind goes to a thousand decisions that you made that could have maybe… you know, when it’s 55 votes, it’s like, if it hadn’t rained that Saturday…
I think every single person was like, well, if I just done like four more shifts throughout the six months—
How do you lose an election by 55 votes?
I mean, if someone had put a pen mark on the side or if there was a penny in the envelope that the ballot came in… or a paper clip, or something like that, this person’s choice got thrown away.
In June 2019, a 31-year-old public defender named Tiffany Cabán lost the race to become Queens District Attorney. She fell short by just 55 votes — out of 90,000 cast. For months afterward, everyone who worked on that campaign would ask themselves the same simple question: What else could I have done?
This is the story of that loss. Of those votes. It’s the story of how they got so close. And what you learn from losing when you do everything right. Welcome to The People’s Republic of Astoria, Episode 3: Fifty-Five Votes.
It’s November 6th, 2018. Shawna Morlock is dancing in LaBoom nightclub in Queens. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has just won her general election, and after spending three nights a week for six months knocking on thousands of doors, Shawna is exhausted. She’s thinking about her bed. Her four-year-old daughter waiting at home. Maybe sleeping for a year. Then someone tells her there’s another race. Another fight. Another impossible campaign to win.
Literally the night that we won the general election for AOC’s race, I remember like dancing with someone and I was like, I can’t wait to go home and just like sleep for a year. And then the person was like, no, no, no sleeping. We have a district attorney race to win. And I was like, what?
Around the same time, a 31-year-old public defender named Tiffany Cabán was getting five text messages that would change her life. Rapid-fire.
“Dude.” “Run for DA in Queens.” “Let’s make it happen.” “You’ve got the vacation days.” “Let’s go.”
It was her friend Alana. She’d heard the 86-year-old Queens district attorney was finally retiring. And she thought her friend Tiffany would be perfect for the job. Cabán thought her friend was just joking. At least, at first. But a week later, they were at Maxwell’s in Tribeca, filling out a candidate questionnaire for the Democratic Socialists of America. AOC had just shown the world that you don’t need political connections or money to win. Just people willing to knock on doors. They were gonna give it a try.
I was introduced to Tiffany Cabán pretty early in 2019.
The race to replace Queens District Attorney Richard Brown would test whether the model that had elected AOC in Astoria could work all across Queens. 2.3 million people, 140 languages spoken. Gentrifying neighborhoods in the west, homeowners in the southeast. New immigrants, longtime residents. Queens was a tapestry of different communities, with different politics. If a democratic socialist public defender could win here, it would prove AOC wasn’t a fluke. And it would break the Queens machine for good. But first, they had to get on the ballot.
So initially, we almost didn’t even make it onto the ballot, which was really not Tiffany’s fault. So DSA swooped in, you know, towards the end and was like, okay, let’s make sure that we get this on the right track. You’re building the plane as you’re flying. [Laughs.]
The campaign was broke. Dysfunctional. By April, the first two managers were already out. Cabán didn’t take a leave from her public defender job until March — she couldn’t afford to lose the health insurance. They started with less than a thousand dollars in the bank. Then Luke Hayes showed up.
You know, I heard about Cabán. I remember touching base with their campaign early on, like February, and nothing came of it. They reached back out again in, I want to say late March, April. You know, they just needed things to get tightened up. And from that, I joined, I believe in the beginning of April with the Cabán campaign.
Luke was in his 30s, and he’d just come off a successful State Senate race in the Bronx. He knew how to run a field operation. He knew how to build a campaign from nothing. What he didn’t know? How do you do payroll when there’s nothing in the bank?
I remember my first two weeks — the first kind of not panic attack, but just like anxiety — was just to make payroll. At that point I was not thinking about, what’s it going to look like in June when this happens? More: okay, we have a limited amount of cash on hand. I was just thinking, how can we raise enough money to pay for staff? And then if things go well, maybe we can pay for some lit or a mail piece.
While Luke was trying to figure out how to keep the lights on, Shawna was back out on the streets. But this time, something inside her felt a little different.
I wouldn’t have called myself a socialist in 2016, even though Bernie did. My own politics have gotten further left since I moved here.
It’s funny, the first time someone called me comrade — [Laughs] in 2019 — it was like a little strange and I was like, okay, sir? I grabbed my turf and left. But yeah, the DSA culture really like dove in deep for Tiffany. I started really getting involved in DSA through Tiffany’s campaign while we were canvassing. And getting to learn myself too through that whole process. It was really informative for me personally — like, I grew up in the South.
Tiffany Cabán was not your typical District Attorney candidate. Her parents grew up in a housing project in Queens; she’d spent her career as a public defender, representing working class New Yorkers against the very system she’d be charged with running if she won.
She’s definitely like a brawler, you know. In the depths of her soul, she is just a person who is like, never gonna shy away from a fight. It’s for good and bad sometimes… she’s just a human being like everybody is. She’s a good lawyer.
In her candidate questionnaire, Cabán described herself as a “queer Latina public defender from South Richmond Hill, Queens running on a platform of transformative justice.” She promised to decriminalize substance use disorders, and to decline to prosecute recreational drug use and sex work. Cabán wasn’t just running against one person. She was running against an entire system. It was the same system AOC had taken on the previous year.
Her opponent, Melinda Katz, was a career politician and the former Queens Borough President. When she threw a fundraiser at a steakhouse for her district attorney campaign, Andrew Cuomo was the special guest. Landlords, lobbyists, labor leaders all arrived. She secured the endorsement of Gregory Meeks, a congressman who’d taken over as head of the Queens Democratic Party. She also had the endorsement of 32BJ and 1199 SEIU, powerful local unions. She had the entire machine. Cabán? She had the Democratic Socialists of America.
DSA had developed a deep bench of activists, like 26-year-old Zohran Mamdani, who had just lost a state senate race in Bay Ridge and was now helping run field operations across southeast Queens. They had volunteers willing to climb staircases and knock doors — but what they lacked was money in the bank.
Tiffany was dialing for dollars and was just like not bringing in, you know, a ton of money per hour. So when we shifted more to these grassroots fundraisers and growing our list and getting endorsements, that really helped build out this network of small donors.
One month before the election, everything changed. May 22nd, 2019: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorses Tiffany Cabán. Immediately, money pours in. Thousands of dollars. Then other endorsements — Elizabeth Warren first, then Bernie Sanders. In the final three weeks, Cabán raised over $200,000 — mostly in donations under fifty bucks.
Once one thing catches on, others catch on. So all of a sudden it was, oh, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders want to endorse. And then it was like, well, we should reach out to other presidential candidates. See if they want to jump in. So it was cool to all of a sudden see it pop. All of a sudden emails and raising money, getting all these volunteers — all of a sudden you’re like, there’s a lot more activity going on.
In the final four days, over a thousand volunteers knocked on 120,000 doors stretching across Queens. The machine had money. The machine had power. The machine had the entire political establishment. But they didn’t have people willing to climb five flights of stairs in the summer heat to talk to strangers about criminal justice reform. They didn’t have Shawna.
My child had like gone into kindergarten. So I had a little more time. So it was really within just a few months. You know, the electoral cycles really don’t stop here. I did the same two or three shifts a week for her for a long time, too.
June 25th, 2019. Luke Hayes wakes up at 5 AM.
So election days in general tend to be very long. [Laughs.] And I think there’s kind of this excitement and build up to it. You wake up at 5 a.m. just to kind of get ready for the day. And the first few hours of election day are just drinking a lot of coffee, chewing your fingernails and being like, oh man, 14 more hours till close?
All day, Luke’s watching the reports come in. Base areas — western Queens, places they needed to crush it — the numbers look good. Really good.
I remember the first inclination I thought something good could happen was… the areas where we wanted to run up the score, we were hearing like all these great reports. And then we’re getting pictures of non-base areas — in areas like eastern Queens where we weren’t expected to do well — where the polling location was pretty sleepy. And I was like, oh, maybe something’s happening. Maybe this is actually going to come together.
It’s 9 PM. Polls are about to close. Luke walks from the campaign office to LaBoom, a nightclub on Northern Boulevard in Woodside, Queens. It’s on a loud, trafficked street — there’s a Home Depot, a car dealership — trucks and taxis roar toward the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan. Inside, the crowd is building. The anticipation is electric.
I remember walking over from the office to the election night party and on my phone, just religiously refreshing and checking. Is this actually happening? Is she actually going to be winning the vote after election day? The party was already going. By the time we got there, the party was already going. I remember arriving there and already seeing there was a crowd outside the door. There was just a very festive atmosphere.
Eventually, the numbers start coming in, precinct by precinct. And Tiffany Cabán is winning.
So I remember getting there and nothing was official yet. I think we had just pulled into the lead, you know, as the counting was coming in.
By the time all the Election Day votes are counted, Cabán is ahead by 1,100. But there’s a problem. There are 3,300 absentee ballots sitting in envelopes in the Bureau of Elections office in Middle Village. And no one knows which way they’re gonna break. Luke and the campaign team go backstage with Tiffany. They have a decision to make.
I remember being backstage with Tiffany and their staffers and just thinking through, well, do we declare a victory tonight? You know, what do we say?
Do you go out there and tell a room full of exhausted volunteers that you’ve won — when you don’t actually know if it’s true? Or do you hedge? Play it safe? Wait and see?
So that was one of the considerations — do we make a victory statement without the official certification of BOE? And the choice was made. I think the correct one — that we won tonight. Which was true. We had won on election day.
Tiffany Cabán walks out on stage and the crowd goes wild.
You know, when we started this thing, they said I was too young. They said I didn’t look like a district attorney. They said we could not build a movement from the grass roots. They said we could not win. But we did it, y’all.
The vibe in there was amazing. I remember the chants of like DSA, DSA — just booming chants of DSA—
—and it was really… ecstatic.
For Shawna, for Luke, and all the volunteers, this was what it felt like to give everything you had. To risk failure — and try anyway. Me? I’d voted that morning, and gone home.
Shawna goes home that night, ecstatic, content, believing it’s over. Thinking they’d won.
I was told that it’s almost impossible for the absentee ballots to come back and to be so overwhelmingly towards Katz that we could possibly lose. So I was especially upset just because I had heard that — oh, statistically this can’t possibly happen.
But Luke Hayes doesn’t go home celebrating. While everyone’s cheering in the nightclub, Luke is backstage on his phone. Calling lawyers. Making plans.
While you’re hearing all this cheering from the crowd outside, I’m backstage on my cell phone, calling around to lawyers being like, okay, this is what’s going to happen. We need you for this — negotiating all that — because I want to wake up the next day and be ready for the continuation of the next battle on ballot and recount.
Because Luke knows something Shawna doesn’t.
You know, the realization too, that there were a lot of absentees out there and that that was not going to break well for us. It was like, “if she gets this percentage and this,” and it was like a little bit of like, this could go south. The margin was very close.
Going home that night, I knew I was gonna have to wake up early and go to the BOE — the Queens BOE — the next day.
The Board of Elections is in the Metro Mall of Middle Village. It’s the kind of place that only feels like New York City to people who really live here. A giant behemoth of a building, set awkwardly across an old graveyard. Almost aggressively forgettable; iconic in its drabness.
You’re on the rooftop of this giant strip mall with like a Lane Bryant and a Buffalo Wild Wings. It was really hot, I remember being really sweaty, with like the city in the background — and this is where the BOE is. Almost like thinking out loud, am I in a Twin Peaks episode?
It’s the morning after the election. Luke shows up with City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer and a handful of volunteers. Security won’t even let them in.
I remember about seven or eight of us were trying to get into the BOE through the rooftop entrance and getting stonewalled by security. They’re like, we can’t allow anyone in. And Jimmy Van Bramer was like, I’m a council member. And the guard was like, I’ve got to check with my boss. Everyone was tired. Everyone was hot. Like, where is this going? What are we doing here?
Eventually, they get inside — and watch the lead disappear.
That was a death by a thousand cuts. Each day, it was like, oh, the margin shrank from 1,100 to 800, you know, whatever it was.
Overwhelmingly, the absentee ballots are breaking for Katz. They’re older voters. Homeowners. The machine. Within days, the lead is gone. At the end of counting, Melinda Katz is ahead — by just 20 votes. Now, a manual recount must begin.
I remember just building out the team and kind of figuring out what our plan was for the recount because it was new territory for almost everyone. Realizing we need people to witness and be in the room while they were recounting the ballots. So at that point, some other folks stepped in to kind of run the recount process and oversee that. At that point, you need lawyers and people that know election expertise. Not someone who’s like “here’s a canvassing script, and how you can train people on it.” [Laughs.]
It would take more than a month. 10 AM to 7 PM Monday through Fridays. Saturdays from 10 to 4. Tens of thousands of ballots, each counted by hand. For Katz, this isn’t new. Her lawyers — Sweeney, Reich, and Bowles — they’re the same attorneys who’ve defended the Queens Democratic machine for decades. They know every rule. Every technicality. On day one of the recount, Frank Bolz objects to a Cabán ballot. The tone is set.
Shawna volunteers as an observer. She watches the lawyers fight over every ballot. Every mark.
So there were legal observers, you know, lawyers for both sides. There were volunteers like myself. And then the lawyers were at each table contesting certain ballots.
“If someone had put a pen mark on the side, or if there was a penny in the envelope that the ballot came in, or a paper clip or something like that, this person’s choice got thrown away.”— Shawna Morlock
I mean, if someone had put a pen mark on the side or if there was a penny in the envelope that the ballot came in, or a paper clip or something like that, this person’s choice got thrown away. Even when it was a very clear, you know, choice that that person made.
Cabán’s lawyers argue that 114 ballots were thrown out for bad reasons — technical errors that shouldn’t disqualify them. The judge sides with Katz.
And I understand that the rules are there for a reason. Like there just has to be a line to what is considered legal or not. But seeing some of the more petty things that were rules that tossed out people’s ballots — it was just really disheartening, you know, as a good government type. It bothered me a lot.
For a week, Shawna keeps showing up. Watching the lawyers duke it out.
People were kind of at each other’s throats for sure, you know, both sides. So it was a fight to the end.
Eventually, the recount finishes. More than a month after Election Day, more than a month after Tiffany Cabán declared victory at LaBoom, the Board of Elections certifies the results. Melinda Katz would be declared the victor. The margin would be just fifty-five votes.
There was this very kind of tedious process involved with the whole recount that was exhausting and anxiety producing all at once.
When you lose by just 55 votes, every decision will haunt you. Every door you didn’t knock. Every shift you skipped.
“With a margin that narrow, your mind goes to a thousand decisions that you made. When it’s 55 votes, it’s like, if it hadn’t rained that Saturday or Sunday with a canvas, maybe we could have gotten that.”— Luke Hayes
With a margin that narrow, your mind goes to a thousand decisions that you made that could have maybe… you know, when it’s 55 votes, it’s like, “if it hadn’t rained that Saturday or Sunday with a canvas, maybe we could have gotten that. If we had maybe put out the mail piece a day earlier, or this endorsement had happened a day earlier,” you know, just every decision gets magnified. Because with 55 votes, I mean, you can really look in a thousand different directions. That was, I think, the hardest part for me. Part of you is just like, how did we get so close?
I think every single person was like, “oh well, if I had just done like four more shifts throughout the six months,” you know, like, and maybe not — I personally would have gotten 55…
Shawna and Luke still think about neighborhoods they didn’t canvas hard enough. Doors they never knocked. Mail they didn’t send.
You could look really in so many different directions and there’s a lot of things I will own — like, should have gone canvassing in certain neighborhoods sooner. You just go through so many different things that you should have done and it’s frustrating and it’s hard.
We focused incredibly hard on western Queens. Maybe if we had expanded the universe just even a little bit more and, you know, gone a little harder in central Queens or southeast Queens, northeast Queens…
But here’s what happened after they lost: In 2020, Melinda Katz — now Queens District Attorney — she adopted almost every reform Tiffany Cabán campaigned on. She ended cash bail requests for most misdemeanors, and created a conviction review unit in Queens. The same progressive platform that had seemed too radical in 2019 had become official policy by 2020. Cabán had lost the election, but her ideas had won the race. And in 2021, she would run for city council in Astoria. This time, she’d win easily, and become one of the most progressive members of city hall.
So it’s been nice to see the sort of progression and growth that even with losses on electoral campaigns, it wasn’t all for naught.
People were really hungry to get involved. And I’m one of thousands of people out here that really saw an opportunity. And once that door was cracked, we just wanted to kick it open.
When Cabán ran for DA, I voted for her. After Trump, I was voting in every election, no matter how small. It was a point of pride for me, back then. I felt like I was really doing my part.
For six months, Shawna and Luke gave an election in Queens everything they had. Their time, their energy, their effort. Their hearts. They’d fail anyway. And what had that failure earned them? How about a district attorney from the old machine, running her office like a 31-year-old democratic socialist? How about 30,000 votes for a public defender running on radical change? Or even better — how about perfecting a new model for electoral organizing that would soon start notching wins citywide?
They didn’t lose that election alone, Shawna and Luke. They lost it with hundreds of other organizers and activists. They lost it with new friends, people who they’d stay in touch with to this day. Because even in loss, they were building something: a grassroots movement, an army of activists that stretched from Rockaway to Astoria, through the five boroughs and beyond. They’d still lose. But they weren’t afraid to lose, anymore. Not really.
Once you win that first one it’s like blood in the water. It’s just like… you have to keep going. Once you win that first thing, you chase that… You chase that same feeling forever.
You know, Covid hits — it hits all of us. You know, you could hunker down and let it pass you by, or you could step up and fight for something new.
Let my comrade Cody know about it and we kind of took over this — what is now this Tuesday bread pickup — where we estimate that on a good day we’re picking up 400 pounds of bread.
See you next time in the People’s Republic.
You’ve gotta be ready!
Chapter 04: Four Hundred Pounds
Read Transcript →Written, narrated, and produced by Tim Donovan.
Music by Pyrosion, used under Creative Commons license. Full licensing details available at peoplesrepublicpod.com.
Special thanks to Alice, Daisy Larom, and Sarah Noe. Thanks to Shawna Morlock, Luke Hayes, and all the guests who shared their stories.