From The New Yorker
by Laura Parker
Tahseen Chowdhury, a seventeen-year-old student at Stuyvesant High School, isn’t into skateboards or video games. He spends his weekends running for New York state senator, in the September Democratic primary, against the incumbent, Jose Peralta. “It’s not that difficult,” Chowdhury said one day at the school, referring to his grassroots campaign. “All you need are competent people.” His team consists of about twenty advisers, most of whom have curfews. His treasurer, Tymur Kholodnyak, is seventeen. “He just read a bunch of books and figured out how to track our campaign donations and expenses,” Chowdhury said.
Chowdhury was preparing for a student-union meeting at school. He was dressed in chinos, a button-down checked shirt, and leather lace-ups. “I dress like this mostly because of the campaign,” he said. Then, after a pause: “But what I used to wear wasn’t much different.” With his chief of staff and his deputy chief of staff, he employs a debate tactic called “spreading,” in which he speaks at speeds of up to three hundred and fifty words per minute. “It’s supposed to help get the work done,” he said.
His start in politics was accidental. Last year, he ran for student-union president unopposed and ended up in an advisory role on the New York City Department of Education’s panel for educational policy. He assumed that he would actually get to influence the decision-making. “But the students were more like props,” he said. Annoyed, he proposed a bill to beef up students’ role on the panel, which is one of his campaign issues.
Chowdhury announced his candidacy in May, outraged by Peralta’s decision to join the Independent Democratic Conference, a group of Democratic senators whose views align with the Republicans’. “He claims he’s progressive, but I’m not O.K. with that deception,” Chowdhury said. He hopes to convince the working-class neighborhoods in District 13—Corona, East Elmhurst, Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, and Woodside—that Peralta is a Republican masquerading as a Democrat. Chowdhury grew up in East Elmhurst. His father works at a deli in Manhattan, and his mother delivers newspapers. “They don’t make much,” he said.
