On New York’s White Democratic Party Chair Comparing a Black Woman to a KKK Leader
Jay Jacobs is deeply embarrassing and has been a deterrent to good government for too long. It's time to get him out.
Politics

Jay Jacobs, the weakling leader of the New York State Democratic Party, made the puzzling decision this week to compare a young Black woman—incidentally (or not) the victor of his party’s mayoral primary in Buffalo—to American neo-Nazi David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, arguably the most infamously, violently racist American organization to ever exist.
Asked about his refusal to endorse India Walton, the dark-horse socialist candidate in New York’s second-largest city—and his choice instead to endorse her opponent, Byron Brown, the loser of the primary who is mounting a write-in campaign against Walton—Jacobs said, “Let’s take a scenario, very different, where David Duke… the grand wizard of the KKK, he moves to New York, he becomes a Democrat. He runs for mayor in the city of Rochester, which is a low primary turnout, and he wins the Democratic line.
“I have to endorse David Duke?” Jacobs went on, unfathomably. “I don’t think so.”
When he was correctly called out for this bizarre and offensive analogy, Jacobs took to the Party’s official Twitter account to defend himself, underlining the part where he said the scenario was “very different” (oh, okay) and the part where he continued, “Now of course, India Walton is not in the same category” (as David Duke, founder of the KKK, whose members literally raped and murdered Black women). He added his own little message about “what’s wrong with public discourse today”:
“People want to find something to be unhappy about, so they twist statements, or ignore statements, to make their argument,” he wrote.
In a separate statement to the Daily News, Jacobs lamented that “discourse today is like walking in a minefield.” He compared a black woman in politics to David Duke, but he’s the true victim here. Somebody get this man a Substack! Clearly, he’s got some fascinating thoughts on cancel culture he’d like to share with us.
Eventually, a full day and dozens of calls for his resignation later, Jacobs apologized and said he’d like to have lunch with India Walton after the election that he hopes she loses. Walton accepted his apology, because she is apparently a gracious and generous person.
I am not. I don’t give a shit about his day late, dollar short bullshit. Jay Jacobs needs to go. The fish rots from the head down, as the saying goes, and it’s time for a coup in the New York Democratic Party.
To be clear, David Duke never won a low-turnout election in Rochester. This is not a real thing that happened in New York, that would maybe make sense as a point of reference for a dark-horse candidate winning an election in this state. (Buffalo, actually, had a Conservative vehemently anti-abortion mayor who was a nominal Democrat, and ran as the nominee of the Conservative Party after losing the Democratic primary. Unfortunately, Jay Jacobs wasn’t around at the time to endorse him, but no doubt he wishes he could’ve.) To be even clearer, every time David Duke did run for office, he was publicly condemned by national and state-level Republicans (these were very different times than we live in today, obviously). To be crystal fucking clear, this was objectively one of the most offensive and simultaneously ludicrous statements that a human in Jacobs’ position could make, and it is deeply embarrassing for the leader of the Democratic Party of New York to have not only made it, but then used the Party’s public platform to defend it.