Patrick Timmins is not the famous one in the race to replace Jerry Nadler. He is not a Kennedy. He is not George Conway. He is not a sitting Assemblymember with Democratic club backing. He has not been the candidate most likely to pop up in glossy mailers, debate round-ups or breathless campaign coverage.
But he is on the ballot for New York’s 12th Congressional District. And, after watching W42ST profile the six candidates who have dominated most coverage of the race, he did what any under-covered candidate with a working email address and a sense of timing might do.
He left a comment. “I love Laura’s story,” Timmins wrote under our recent profile of Laura Dunn. “Maybe someday Phil O’Brien will give Patrick Timmins a shot.” So, with less than a week to go before the June 23 Democratic primary, we did.
On Wednesday evening, W42ST joined Timmins on the campaign trail outside an early voting site on 10th Avenue, where he stood in a blue suit, green tie and matching pocket square, handing out flyers to anyone willing to take one. Then we sat down with him for a beer at The Waylon, the 10th Avenue bar where the ceiling is low, the flags are plentiful and the candidate was happy to explain why he thinks he has been underestimated.
“I’m here in the flesh,” he said, as voters drifted past the early voting station at John Jay College annex. “They’re not.”
That, more or less, is the Patrick Timmins campaign pitch: no celebrity surname, no super PAC, no army of consultants — but a man in a green tie, standing outside polling places, trying to turn last year’s surprise vote total into this year’s congressional upset.
Timmins, a lawyer and adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, was born in Washington Heights, grew up in what he describes as a blue-collar Irish family connected to Inwood and the Bronx, and says his grandparents settled in Hell’s Kitchen after arriving from Ireland.
“My family’s from Inwood, and blue-collar family, eight kids,” he said. His father, he said, was a cooper — a maker of barrels and boxes — tied to the old Fulton Fish Market economy before cardboard cartons and the move to Hunts Point changed the trade.
Timmins’ own path went from Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx to Manhattan College, then law school, after time in the seminary and an early public service job managing a 17-bed homeless shelter for men and a public shower on the Bowery.
He became a Bronx assistant district attorney in the late 1990s, working on gang assault and murder cases involving the Bloods and Latin Kings. After leaving the DA’s office, he spent years representing retired union workers with asbestos cancer, including electricians, operating engineers, transit workers and others who developed mesothelioma after a lifetime of work.
“All the while doing that, as when I left the DA’s office, I was offered a job at John Jay, where I still teach today,” he said. “So I’ve been in kind of like fighting for people from the beginning.”
Timmins first appeared on many Manhattan voters’ radar last year when he ran against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in the Democratic primary. He lost, but he did not disappear. He received nearly 69,000 votes boroughwide, a number that he now treats as evidence that his campaign is not starting from nowhere.
“I was the lone Democratic opponent to Alvin Bragg,” he said. “I wanted the people at least to have a primary.”
He argues that a large share of those votes came from within the current NY-12 boundaries, including Hell’s Kitchen. W42ST has not independently verified his district-level and neighborhood-level breakdown, which would require election-district mapping. But the broader point is central to how he sees the congressional race: while most of his rivals are better known in political circles, he says he has already asked Manhattan voters for their support — and tens of thousands gave it.
“I’ve got a base in the 12th Congressional District,” he said. “I don’t have a lot of money. I spent what I did have on the Bragg campaign. But I had a base, so I jumped in.”
The jump came late, around January, into what had already become a crowded race. The Democratic primary to replace Nadler has been one of the most closely watched congressional contests in the city, with Assemblymembers Micah Lasher and Alex Bores, attorney and commentator George Conway, Jack Schlossberg, Laura Dunn, Nina Schwalbe, Christopher Diep and Timmins all competing for the nomination.
In that field, Timmins has spent much of the race outside the main spotlight. Some forums used fundraising thresholds or other criteria that left him off the stage. Some media coverage, including ours, focused on the candidates who appeared to have the most visible campaigns, fundraising, institutional support or public profile.
Timmins does not pretend that has not irritated him.
“I want to find out from you why I was pushed off to the side,” he said at The Waylon, not angrily, but directly. “Not that you’re thinking that way, just the way these things came in.”
It was a fair question. W42ST is used to looking up at much larger outlets and wondering why neighborhood stories sometimes reach The New York Times before the people who live around the corner. Timmins, in his own way, is making the same argument from inside the ballot: who gets treated as serious, and who decides?
For him, the answer is too often money. “I wish that we started even, and then see where we would be today,” he said. “But it’s not that way, and so I don’t cry over spilled milk. I just hit the ground, run, work, show myself, speak, get out there and see what happens.”
His campaign is low-budget and old-fashioned. He hands out palm cards. He visits early voting sites. He talks to people on sidewalks. He wears the same green tie and pocket square often enough that he hopes voters will start to recognize him.
“I visit every early voting spot that we have right now,” he said. “When you show your face and they know me, my green tie and green kerchief, I hope they say, ‘oh, that’s the guy’.”
Timmins’ politics do not fit neatly into the conventional lanes of the primary. He calls himself a “radical pragmatist,” a phrase that sounds like something workshopped in a campaign consultant’s office until you hear him define it. He is not running primarily on impeaching Donald Trump. In fact, he thinks Democrats are spending too much energy talking about that.
“All six of these people, they’re all in about impeaching Donald Trump,” he said of his better-known rivals. “That’s not a platform.”
Timmins says Democrats should focus instead on housing, immigration, healthcare, Social Security, energy and the cost of living. He supports adding dental and vision to Medicare, argues against taxing Social Security benefits and says Congress needs a serious affordability agenda for both renters and co-op owners facing rising maintenance fees.
On immigration, he has proposed what he calls a “blue card” for undocumented immigrants who have been in the country for at least 10 years and have no criminal history, giving them legal status and a long path toward naturalization. “We’re going to have to do something on immigration,” he said. “You can’t deport 20 million.”
On housing, he has an idea he calls “Z housing” — studio apartments aimed at Generation Z New Yorkers who are being priced out of Manhattan before they ever get a chance to build a life here. He points to Manhattan Plaza, the subsidized housing complex for performing artists on W43rd Street, as inspiration.
“My wife’s an actress, and down on 43rd Street, you have the Manhattan Plaza, which is for artists and actors,” he said. “What I’ve come up with is that I want to have Z housing for Generation Z, because they’re priced out. They can’t get that great opportunity of working in Manhattan with all the people and the connections.”
Hell’s Kitchen, he said, is exactly the sort of neighborhood where that should be explored. “I’d like to see Z housing in Hell’s Kitchen,” he said. “This is the place to have it.”
He also signed the US Term Limits pledge, supporting three two-year terms for House members and two six-year terms for senators. That position, he said, is tied to his belief that too many congressional seats become generational property. “I don’t want generational seats,” he said. “We need an organic, robust new turnover. We need a lot of fresh blood.”
Timmins is not shy about drawing contrasts. One of his campaign cards describes several of the male candidates in the race as the “four horsemen of impeachment,” a line that is unlikely to endear him to those campaigns but is in keeping with his view that the race has become too focused on Trump and not enough on what a freshman member of Congress could actually pass.
He says he wants bipartisanship — a word that can sound almost quaint in a Democratic primary in Manhattan, but one he repeats without apology. “I’m not afraid to talk about bipartisanship,” he said. “We need it. The best bills in the history of this country were bipartisan.”
Whether that message can break through is another question. AARP and Gotham Polling have projected that somewhere between 70,000 and 85,000 voters could decide this primary, slightly below the nearly 90,000 ballots cast in the bruising 2022 contest between Nadler and Carolyn Maloney. In a crowded field without ranked-choice voting, the winner will not need anything close to a majority.
Timmins knows that math. It is why he keeps returning to his 2025 DA numbers. It is why he thinks the race is “pretty open.” It is why he believes that if enough voters recognize his name from last year, or meet him outside a polling site this week, the long shot might not be as long as it looks. “With eight people in, chances versus last June when I ran, you need fewer votes,” he said. “The more people that are in, the fewer votes you need.”
After the beer, Timmins walked back toward the early voting site near John Jay. He scouted where he was allowed to stand, made sure he was not too close to the entrance, then crossed the street and resumed the work. “Timmins for Congress,” he called out, flyers in hand. Some voters kept walking. Some took a card.
This, in the final days, is his campaign. Timmins is a candidate who believes he has already been dismissed once too often and is trying to make the most of what political consultants call earned media and what everyone else calls showing up.
