Joseph De Jesus
From Ballotpedia
This page was current at the end of the individual's last campaign covered by Ballotpedia. Please contact us with any updates.
Joseph De Jesus (Democratic Party) ran for election to the New York State Assembly to represent District 38. He lost in the Democratic primary on June 23, 2020.
De Jesus completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2020. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Joseph De Jesus was born in Bronx, New York. He received a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College and attended the School for International Training and the School for Field Studies. He also received an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.A. from New York University. De Jesus' professional experience includes working as an adjunct lecturer at Borough of Manhattan Community College. He has been affiliated with the Apogee Journal, No, Dear Magazine, Ridgewood Tenants Union, and RAGGA NYC Collective.[1]
Elections
2020
See also: New York State Assembly elections, 2020
General election
General election for New York State Assembly District 38
Jenifer Rajkumar defeated Giovanni Perna in the general election for New York State Assembly District 38 on November 3, 2020.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | Jenifer Rajkumar (D)  | 72.6 | 25,232 |
 | Giovanni Perna (R / Conservative Party / Save Our City Party) | 27.2 | 9,443 | |
| Other/Write-in votes | 0.2 | 66 | ||
| Total votes: 34,741 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Democratic primary election
Democratic primary for New York State Assembly District 38
Jenifer Rajkumar defeated incumbent Michael Miller and Joseph De Jesus in the Democratic primary for New York State Assembly District 38 on June 23, 2020.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Jenifer Rajkumar | 51.9 | 3,817 |
 | Michael Miller | 25.2 | 1,851 | |
 | Joseph De Jesus | 22.7 | 1,668 | |
| Other/Write-in votes | 0.2 | 12 | ||
| Total votes: 7,348 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Republican primary election
The Republican primary election was canceled. Giovanni Perna advanced from the Republican primary for New York State Assembly District 38.
Conservative Party primary election
The Conservative Party primary election was canceled. Giovanni Perna advanced from the Conservative Party primary for New York State Assembly District 38.
Campaign themes
2020
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Joseph De Jesus completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2020. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by De Jesus' responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
| Collapse all
Joey De Jesus is a poet and adjunct lecturer at Borough of Manhattan Community College. Joey is an avowed anti-capitalist and the only grassroots-funded candidate for AD-38 fighting for budget justice: to tax the 112 billionaires of New York to account for thieving off with the world's wealth to elevate the social safety net. Joey's campaign fights to restore tuition-free public education, for fare-free public transit, the #NYHomesGuarantee (to guarantee housing first policies to end homelessness and protect tenants and homeowners from displacement), NY Health Act and healthcare for all, to decriminalize sex work and marijuana (and generate revenue for frontline communities), to end punitive pedagogy in schools, invest in prison diversion and regard matters of criminal justice as matters of public health. Joey is the only candidate in this race to avow the Green New Deal and will fight for publicly-owned utilities and radical investment in urban agriculture and education. Joey is the only candidate in the race who believes in universal healthcare, housing and suffrage, who fights to decommodify and democratize our energy and the land.
Joey has received substantial praise for their poetry including a 2017 NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship, 2017-2018 Departmental Fellowship in Performance Studies at NYU, 2019-2020 BRIC ArtFP Project Room Commission is the author of "NOCT- The Threshold of Madness" (The Atlas Review, 2019) and HOAX (The Operating System, 2020).
- Joey's campaign is financed by the word and puts to practice the ethos of getting money out of politics because the word is forever more valuable than the dollar. Joey is the only candidate in this race to refuse money from millionaire and billionaire racists, landlords, and war profiteers because Joey is accountable to the People.
- Joey fights for universal healthcare, housing and suffrage, tuition-free education, fare-free transit, decarcerating and decriminalizing people, decommodifying and democratizing utilities, energy and land.
- We animate the dream.
As a candidate in Queens and coronavirus survivor, I am concerned about the ongoing wholesale genocide of working and elderly people around me. I am passionately anti-capitalist because capitalism desensitizes us to death. Our political leaders--and my opponents--care more about the fluctuation of crumbling markets than they do living beings. Unlike my opponents, I understand the first stock on Wall St. was flesh. Therefore, I am personally most passionate about decommodifying and democratizing the land and our energy and ensuring every New Yorker permanently-affordable dignified housing and Medicaid for All. Housing, healthcare these are human rights.
I am fervent about decommodifying land with a Tenants Right of First Refusal, and other measures to procure properties once they are listed for sale, removing them from the market toward permanently-affordable housing and community land trusts that serve community needs (urban agricultural spaces, worker-owned cooperatives etc...)
I look up to community activists, poets and artists, teachers, healers, nurses, my students. I find inspiration in people. Writers and thinkers I admire include Leila Ortiz, Hortense Spillers, Kazim Ali, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Myung Mi Kim, Nikki Wallschlaeger, Wendy Trevino, LaTasha N Nevada Diggs, Urayoan Noel, Kyle Dacuyan, Raquel Salas Rivera, Fred Moten, Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Juliana Huxtable, DonChristian Jones, Shanekia McIntosh Christopher Udemezue, Viva Ruiz... there are too many to name. I try not to exalt individuals and care about the milieu in which we all live and work and make. Of the departed, I especially enjoy the works of Edouard Glissant, Lucille Clifton, the legend of Anacaona, who led the Rebellion of the Caciques.
Fred Moten's The Undercommons
Christina Sharpe's In The Wake: On Blackness and Being
Jackie Wang's Carceral Capitalism
Sam Stein's Capital City
Denise F DaSilva's Toward a Global Idea of Race
Myung Mi Kim's Commons
I believe the qualities most important for an elected official include honesty, accountability, moral clarity, and tenacity. I believe our elected officials must practice anti-racism, not simply bristle and deny accountability for their racist or imperialist beliefs or actions. Elected officials must answer when called upon by cause for justice.
I am the only candidate in this race who demonstrates moral clarity on political issues and public accountability for the decisions I and my campaigners make. My experience as a poet teaches me to listen; I am open to criticism and understand criticism as an experience that emerges from a place of care. People care about the issues that impact their lives and act out when afraid or overwhelmed by the consequence of their silences.
I, much like my namesake, spend much of my personal life among people who have been foreclosed upon by the state. I disavow rugged individualist "bootstrap" mentality because I know we live and love in community. My proximity to the suffering of others and my own suffering for lack shape my tenacity for redistribution of material wealth hoarded by 112 billionaires.
While I am receptive to, and invite criticism and debate, I suffer neither racism nor queerphoia, which is to say, I don't tolerate it--I'm the first genderqueer candidate for State Assembly in New York. I'm the only candidate in this race to work toward the production of LGBTQ-inclusive BIPOC spaces.
I believe the core responsibilities for this office include being proactive about communicating widely and openly with residents in the district about the office's policies and political agenda. Our officials must be available for debate and disagreement, for hard conversations and criticism. We must assist in educating our residents about our rights and protections. We all want to improve the material quality of our lived conditions--the Assemblyperson's job is to assemble, therefore, the people toward our shared goal.
I want to improve the material conditions of our being and inspire LGBTQ BIPOC to pursue political office. There is no finer venue for the work of poets than the People's House. The Master of Fine Arts mill oversaturates a market competitive would-be teachers and artists who suffer from lack of professional fulfillment. Another way is possible if we imagine widely what it is we in our speaking and writing actually do.
I grew up not far from Amadou Diallo's home in Soundview. When I was a child, I placed paper to the ground and laid atop it. I asked adults to help me trace my body. I've always felt impacted by his death butI'd forgotten about this response to state violence until I discovered the piece I made in my mother's storage.
My very first job was working at the Cat in the Cream Coffeehouse at Oberlin College, I believe. I was a barista and events programmer while enrolled in undergraduate study.
Megan Thee Stallions Savage remix featuring Beyonce
I have struggled with self-care. I am not one to really invest time or energy intentionally into matters of self-care and I think it has hardened me in times when I need to practice calmness and sensitivity. A big part of working through this has been diminishing my ego and my caring for my own sensitivities and insecurities.
It can be beneficial yes, however my experience organizing and advocating change in the literary arts and publication primes me for the responsibilities of holding public office. I am, as a poet, editor and performance artist, already exceedingly comfortable and seasoned in being accountable to the public for my words, writing and actions.
The greatest challenge will be recovering from Covid-19. The state must to adopt socialist policies immediately to safeguard the well-being of New Yorkers from forthcoming climate disasters compounded by the pandemic, crumbling infrastructure, political negligence, consolidation of political powers, and disaster profiteering. Already the Governor has made severe cuts to public education, and then a few weeks later promised the Gates Foundation would help "reimagine" (privatize) our public education. Everything is at risk of being capitalized upon by billionaires.
Our current Governor thinks himself a king. It's repulsive. As a direct result of his negligence and dalliance, his politicking and favor for his wealthy donors, he refuses to raise revenue for the state by increasing taxes on the 1%. People die as a result. Ideally, our legislature would be enacting the measures it deems demanded by the People and the Governor wouldn't gate-keep or handpick which policies to which he'd like his name attached.
Absolutely. I have been communicating with fellow insurgent candidates to sharpen my knowledge about political process as an Albany outsider. I believe in transparency, accountability and openness.
Cities Committee
Energy Committee
Housing Committee
Libraries and Education Technology
Aime Cesaire.
No, I am not interested in running for a different political office. I felt the need to stage a poetic intervention in the legislation of laws and saw an opportunity in challenging Mike Miller.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
See also
2020 Elections
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on May 6, 2020
Current members of the New York State Assembly
Leadership
Speaker of the House:Carl Heastie
Representatives
District 1
Thomas Schiavoni (D)
District 2
Jodi Giglio (R)
District 3
Joseph DeStefano (R)
District 4
Rebecca Kassay (D)
District 5
Doug Smith (R)
District 6
Philip Ramos (D)
District 7
Jarett Gandolfo (R)
District 8
District 9
Michael Durso (R)
District 10
Steve Stern (D)
District 11
Kwani O'Pharrow (D)
District 12
Keith Brown (R)
District 13
Charles Lavine (D)
District 14
David McDonough (R)
District 15
Jake Blumencranz (R)
District 16
Daniel Norber (R)
District 17
John Mikulin (R)
District 18
Noah Burroughs (D)
District 19
Edward Ra (R)
District 20
Eric Brown (R)
District 21
Judy Griffin (D)
District 22
District 23
Stacey Amato (D)
District 24
David Weprin (D)
District 25
Nily Rozic (D)
District 26
District 27
Sam Berger (D)
District 28
Andrew Hevesi (D)
District 29
Alicia Hyndman (D)
District 30
Steven Raga (D)
District 31
Khaleel Anderson (D)
District 32
Vivian Cook (D)
District 33
Clyde Vanel (D)
District 34
District 35
Larinda Hooks (D)
District 36
Zohran Mamdani (D)
District 37
Claire Valdez (D)
District 38
Jenifer Rajkumar (D)
District 39
Catalina Cruz (D)
District 40
Ron Kim (D)
District 41
Kalman Yeger (D)
District 42
District 43
Brian Cunningham (D)
District 44
Robert Carroll (D)
District 45
Michael Novakhov (R)
District 46
District 47
William Colton (D)
District 48
District 49
Lester Chang (R)
District 50
Emily Gallagher (D)
District 51
Marcela Mitaynes (D)
District 52
Jo Simon (D)
District 53
Maritza Davila (D)
District 54
Erik Dilan (D)
District 55
Latrice Walker (D)
District 56
Stefani Zinerman (D)
District 57
District 58
District 59
Jaime Williams (D)
District 60
Nikki Lucas (D)
District 61
Charles Fall (D)
District 62
Michael Reilly (R)
District 63
Samuel Pirozzolo (R)
District 64
District 65
Grace Lee (D)
District 66
Deborah Glick (D)
District 67
Linda Rosenthal (D)
District 68
Eddie Gibbs (D)
District 69
Micah Lasher (D)
District 70
Jordan Wright (D)
District 71
Alfred Taylor (D)
District 72
District 73
Alex Bores (D)
District 74
Harvey Epstein (D)
District 75
Tony Simone (D)
District 76
District 77
Landon Dais (D)
District 78
George Alvarez (D)
District 79
Chantel Jackson (D)
District 80
John Zaccaro (D)
District 81
Jeffrey Dinowitz (D)
District 82
District 83
Carl Heastie (D)
District 84
Amanda Septimo (D)
District 85
Emerita Torres (D)
District 86
Yudelka Tapia (D)
District 87
Karines Reyes (D)
District 88
Amy Paulin (D)
District 89
J. Pretlow (D)
District 90
Nader Sayegh (D)
District 91
Steven Otis (D)
District 92
Maryjane Shimsky (D)
District 93
Chris Burdick (D)
District 94
Matthew Slater (R)
District 95
Dana Levenberg (D)
District 96
Patrick Carroll (D)
District 97
Aron Wieder (D)
District 98
Karl Brabenec (R)
District 99
District 100
Paula Kay (D)
District 101
Brian Maher (R)
District 102
District 103
District 104
District 105
Anil Beephan (R)
District 106
Didi Barrett (D)
District 107
Scott Bendett (R)
District 108
John McDonald (D)
District 109
Gabriella Romero (D)
District 110
Phil Steck (D)
District 111
District 112
Mary Walsh (R)
District 113
Carrie Woerner (D)
District 114
Matthew Simpson (R)
District 115
Vacant
District 116
Scott Gray (R)
District 117
District 118
Robert Smullen (R)
District 119
District 120
William Barclay (R)
District 121
Joe Angelino (R)
District 122
Brian Miller (R)
District 123
Donna Lupardo (D)
District 124
District 125
Anna Kelles (D)
District 126
John Lemondes (R)
District 127
Al Stirpe (D)
District 128
Pamela Hunter (D)
District 129
District 130
Brian Manktelow (R)
District 131
Jeff Gallahan (R)
District 132
Philip Palmesano (R)
District 133
Andrea Bailey (R)
District 134
Josh Jensen (R)
District 135
District 136
Sarah Clark (D)
District 137
Demond Meeks (D)
District 138
Harry Bronson (D)
District 139
Stephen Hawley (R)
District 140
William Conrad (D)
District 141
District 142
Patrick Burke (D)
District 143
District 144
Paul Bologna (R)
District 145
Angelo Morinello (R)
District 146
Karen McMahon (D)
District 147
David DiPietro (R)
District 148
Joe Sempolinski (R)
District 149
Jonathan Rivera (D)
District 150
Andrew Molitor (R)
Democratic Party (102)
Republican Party (47)
Vacancies (1)
