There was a cluster of candidates, handlers, and campaigners on the corner of First Street and Seventh Avenue in front of Artisanna, the store that sells furniture from exotic places, urging Park Slopers to vote at PS 321.
For most of the day there were more candidates, handlers and flyer people than voters from what I could tell.
"Did you vote yet? This is Park Slope," one man said as he thrust a ShawnDya Simpson flyer in my face. The race between the two women running for Surrogate Court Judge seemed to be all anyone was talking about.
On the corner of 2nd Street, a man was saying "ShwandyaLevine, SawndyLevine" so fast I thought, "What an interesting name." Nancy Levine was the name of a candidate for another judgeship.
Inside the school, PTA parents were selling baked goods at the tradition primary day bake sale. "Lately, it’s been a lot of Entemann’s at the bake sales," a friend told me. "But everything looked very homemade there."
Must be the new kindergarten parents.
At 7:30 p.m. ShawnDya Simpson was standing on the corner talking to a voter, still hopeful that she could get enough votes to beat Diana Johnson, her rival.
But it was State Supreme Court Justice Johnson, who won the Democratic nomination for a Surrogate’s Court judgeship with 60% of what must have been a small number of votes.
In November Johnson will face Theodore Alatsas, a lawyer, who is running on the Republican and Conservative Party tickets.
If she wins, she will be the first African American Surrogate Court Judge.
