Bowman, in Fight for His Political Life, Embraces the Left’s Star Power

He cracked jokes on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” spit verses with the rapper Cash Cobain and spent the weekend rallying with two of the left’s biggest names: Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Overpowered on the airwaves and behind in the polls, Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York is leaning heavily on national star power in a last-minute bid to alter the trajectory of one of the nation’s most hotly contested Democratic primaries.

The megawatt events drove home the sharp political contrasts between the congressman and his opponent, George Latimer. But they also demonstrated how the candidates are betting on two very different paths to victory, in a district split between wealthy suburbs and working-class neighborhoods, and among white, Black and Latino voters.

“This is a turnout race, y’all,” Mr. Bowman boomed at an event with Mr. Sanders on Friday in Hastings-on-Hudson, just north of his hometown, Yonkers. “This is not about persuasion. We got our people. They got their people.”

Instead of reaching toward Mr. Latimer’s supporters at the party’s center, Mr. Bowman, 48, embraced the left-leaning positions that helped make him a national figure. He denounced large corporations and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s record spending blitz against him, in hopes of increasing participation by progressives and voters of color.

Mr. Latimer, a middle-of-the-road Democrat and the Westchester County executive, ground toward the primary on Tuesday largely alone, with no tinsel or celebrity surrogates in sight.

He entered the race’s final days with enough confidence in his older, suburban base to repeatedly venture into Co-op City in the Bronx and Mr. Bowman’s own backyard, offering himself as a drama-free alternative to the two-term incumbent. With pro-Israel political groups pummeling Mr. Bowman with $15 million in negative ads, Mr. Latimer, 70, mostly played it safe.

When he offered a brief musical performance on Thursday to hundreds of seniors at Yonkers’s Ukrainian Youth Center, it was his own surprisingly smooth version of “On the Street Where You Live” from “My Fair Lady.”

The tune, evidently, was the message.

“This is everything about the difference between us,” Mr. Latimer said afterward. “I am the local guy. It seems counterintuitive if you look at our ages or demographics. But he is much more a person who has cultivated a national image.”

Mr. Latimer jumped into the race late last year, in large part because he was being urged by Jewish leaders to oppose Mr. Bowman’s outspoken criticism of Israel’s war with Hamas. But he has consistently highlighted local issues, knocking Mr. Bowman for voting against President Biden’s major infrastructure bills that promised to help rebuild roads and replace old pipes in the district, and for neglecting parts of the district with large numbers of white residents.

Mr. Bowman, the first Black person to represent the district in Congress, has bristled at the characterization and has lobbed accusations of racism at Mr. Latimer.

In recent days, Mr. Bowman has also sought to mix in levity. He jumped up and down as he rapped onstage at the concert that his campaign aimed at young voters in Port Chester, which is majority Latino. He shot hoops with young boys in the Bronx. Videographers wielding high-tech equipment captured footage for social media.

The rally with Mr. Sanders and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez on Saturday took place in the South Bronx, miles away from Mr. Bowman’s district. Groups like Sunrise Movement, the Democratic Socialists of America and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice all sent representatives despite the scorching heat, though relatively few identified themselves as voters in Mr. Bowman’s district.

“This election is not about Jamaal versus Mr. Latimer,” said Mr. Sanders, a Vermont independent. “This election is about whether the billionaire class and the oligarchs will control the United States government.”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez defended Mr. Bowman against accusations that his calls for a cease-fire and the end of American military aid to Israel made him anti-Israel or antisemitic.

“We know that the absolute leveling of Gaza is being paid for with the funds that are being kept from our health care, our schools,” she said. “We cannot support that anymore. We can’t. It’s not extreme. It’s not fringe. It’s not bigoted to want everybody to be protected.”

Mr. Bowman took a more confrontational tone, lashing out at AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby that has spent more money trying to defeat him than any third-party group has ever spent on a House race.

“People ask me why I got a foul mouth,” he said. “What am I supposed to do? You coming after me. You coming after my family. You coming after my children. I’m not supposed to fight back?”

He also accused his opponent of supporting what he characterized as a genocide in Gaza.

A spokesman for Mr. Latimer’s campaign fired back. “Jamaal Bowman’s divisive and dishonest attacks, combined with his antisemitic dog whistles, are why voters are turning against him in droves,” he said.

In a sign of how deeply the conflict has fractured the left, Saturday’s event attracted dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters angry that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, Mr. Sanders and Mr. Bowman had endorsed Mr. Biden while his administration continued to stand by Israel.

They beat drums and chanted through the politicians’ speeches, repeating “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no sellouts here” and “You’re a fraud, A.O.C.,” using Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s initials.

“These are the people who call themselves our allies,” said Nerdeen Kiswani, a founder of Within Our Lifetime, a pro-Palestinian group that organized the protest. “We are holding them to the standard that they set — that they claim to set — for themselves.”

The district is home to a sizable Jewish population, and there were signs Jewish voters were turning out to vote early in strong numbers, most likely good news for Mr. Latimer.

Teach Coalition, a group that advances the interests of yeshivas and other Jewish schools, spent $1 million over the course of the race to register 2,000 Republicans and independents as Democrats and then get Jewish voters to the polls. It appeared to be paying dividends.

The group estimated on Friday that Jewish voters had most likely accounted for 36 percent of all early votes cast so far, despite making up just 9 percent of the district’s total voter pool.

The coalition’s leader, Maury Litwack, emphasized that the turnout drive was nonpartisan, but he added, “Anybody looking at this race would say the overwhelming feeling of the Jewish community leans toward Latimer, versus Bowman.”

Mr. Latimer also seemed to be in good standing among the diverse group of seniors he met in Yonkers, who greeted him with applause. Many said they had followed his career for decades.

“He’s a unifier and not divisive,” said Susan Greenberg, a retired health care administrator from Hastings-on-Hudson. “It goes way back.”

Kenneth Diaz, a real estate agent in Yonkers and self-described “Bernie guy” who was at the luncheon, said the race had been “hard to watch.” He supported Mr. Bowman eagerly in the past and thinks he is right about the war in Gaza.

But Mr. Diaz said Mr. Bowman lost standing in his eyes when he pulled a fire alarm in a House office building last fall as he rushed to the Capitol. The false alarm sent Congress into chaos and resulted in a misdemeanor charge, one more embarrassing note for a country Mr. Diaz fears is losing its civility.

“It was a boneheaded thing to do,” he said. “I know why it was done, but still, it’s not befitting the position.”

Molly Longman contributed reporting.