Surprising perhaps nobody, the eccentric local unsigned rapper and recurring political candidate Paperboy Love Prince appeared last month in City Hall, now wearing a suit and now covered in clown makeup. Prince was running for mayor all over again.
“My campaigns never stop, I’ve been running for office every year since 2019,” Prince told me when I recently reached them by phone. Prince says they have a new platform they are going to unveil this time around, heretofore not advanced in previous Democratic Party primary runs in respective races for the mayor’s office, city council, the presidency and in U.S. Congress.
“New York City statehood,” was on their mind now.
Prince tells me that they have already actively teasing the idea online, tweeting late last year “I have some better ideas for the 51st state,” in response to the news Trump was airing aspirations toward acquiring Canada following last year’s election. Prince told me that their plans are similarly ambitious, in their own way.
“We would maybe take some of Long Island, some of Westchester, and Yonkers and all of that would be included as well,” Prince tells me. “This is something I’ve been talking to New Yorkers about before Donald Trump brought up trying to bring in Canada and Greenland…If we were a state, we would have the actual power we deserve.”
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsI have some better ideas for the 51st state 🙂 … also Canada would need to be like 3 states at least https://t.co/hCHyglwiqO
— Paperboy Prince for NYC Mayor❤️😍❤️ (@PaperboyPrince) December 26, 2024
As it happens, Prince is not the first colorful political outsider to make a novelty run for mayor pitched on a platform of separating the city from far-away Albany. It was a focal point in the 1969 candidacy of Norman Mailer, the popular novelist who had been convicted earlier that decade of stabbing his then-wife. Mailer, who also ran for the Democratic Party nomination, had made the notion of a 51st state prominent in his “New York Gets An Imagination — Or it Dies” campaign, complete with campaign pins that read “Free New York City.” The journalist Jimmy Breslin, who ran a corresponding campaign alongside Mailer for the then-existing position of City Council President, would grouse that “the business of running this city is done by lobster peddlers from Montauk and old Republicans from Niagara Falls.”
Mailer’s campaign would end up winning a little over 40,000 votes, coming it at 5%. This was enough for the Bronx politician Herman Badillo, who would have been the city’s first Puerto Rican-born mayor, to blame Mailer for his narrow third place loss in the free-for-all Democratic primary to challenge Republican mayor John Lindsay, then facing mounting unpopularity over his handling of a fifteen-inch blizzard that killed 42 people. The more conservative Mario Procaccino, then the city’s comptroller, would win the primary, run a notoriously bad campaign, and then lose to Lindsay, who was running on a third party line after the Republican Party ditched him too. It was, perhaps, the most unusual mayoral election until this one, which could see the once-disgraced Mario Cuomo sweep into the race and potentially challenge Eric Adams, whose declining political fate has seemingly changed course with each changing week.
The idea of leaving the state has lived on, nevertheless, pushed sometimes by the New York Times columnist Clyde Haberman, who once used the occasion of Mailer’s death to complain that “finances aside, precious little of consequence is fully in the hands of the mayor and city council.” Mailer himself apparently later abandoned the idea, Haberman reported, but it had taken root with Peter Vallone, then a city councilman in Astoria, who told Haberman “it’s ridiculous to watch our mayor continually be forced to ask permission from people who represent farmers on the Canadian border.” He wanted to “create a commission to study the concept,” though this would never come to be. Vallone is a county judge now.
Paperboy Love Prince told me that they didn’t quite have the details going yet about how they are going to make any of this happen. Their website still directs to their presidential race, which had resulted in Prince’s “wish-granting genie”-like appearance at New Hampshire’s Lesser-Known Candidate Forum, among the 40 or so people who put themselves on the presidential primary ballot there. All of that will be set up soon enough, Prince tells me.
How much power any mayor would have to create a new U.S. state is objectively dubious. If asked, Prince would likely not do better than echoing Mailer himself, who once told a curious New York Times reporter that “the precise impossibility of our candidacy creates the possibly of obtaining a 51st state quickly if we were to win.” It’s easy to see Prince adopting a campaign of this kind of magical thinking. (A mayor could put the matter to a referendum, but it’s hard to imagine Republicans agreeing to adjust the balance of their razor-thin Senate majority. As a political movement, this could align Prince narratively with longrunning efforts in Puerto Rico to make that island the country’s 51st state, something people there regularly vote on all the time, to general political indifference in Washington D.C.)
Putting the issue in front of voters could still be interesting, at least politically. The movement to create a separate city out of Staten Island, an objectively more modest goal, landed some 65% of voters there in 1992, but never went anywhere in either Albany or even city hall. Nevertheless, it is credited by some with driving 20,000 more people out to vote for Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral win that same year. Instead of letting the island go, Giuliani made the ferry there free and closed the Fresh Kills dump. One wonders if Prince pushes the statehood idea in order to register as larger signifier for collective exasperation in the city toward the faraway rule of the Buffalo-born Kathy Hochul.
Prince, of course, tells me that they are also running on all the other things they have always been running on, described at one point by the New Yorker writer Eric Lach at one point as “housing for all, a two-thousand-dollar-a-month universal basic income, reparations for Black and brown people in compensation for the war on drugs, and replacing the N.Y.P.D. with “a love team.”” It was a mix of platforms, pulled from post-George Floyd DSA pamphlets and Andrew Yang talking points, though Prince personally maintains they had been first to the basic income idea.
“I’m 99% sure I have more followers than everybody that’s running for mayor right now,” Prince says. They have 48,000 on Instagram at the moment. Zohran Mamdani, the Astoria assemblyman positioning himself as the race’s progressive alternative to Adams, has around 45,000. Jessica Ramos, also from Queens and doing the same, has a little under 20,000. Comptroller Brad Lander sits at under 9,000.
Prince’s last mayoral candidacy, however, landed just about 3,964 votes. Their challenges to vaguely powerful incumbent Democrats over the years has not made Prince a popular figure among local polticos, who tend to pointedly ignore Prince’s efforts. Not all politicians ignore them, however; in their previous mayoral race, they did an event with Kathryn Garcia, the Sanitation Department commissioner who came within a percentage point of beating Adams. (The city’s “ranked-choice” ballot, which debuted that year, had opened the door for competing candidates to campaign together.)
Prince declines to tell me what they think of any of the other candidates running against Adams, perhaps keeping the lane open for doing this again with whoever rings. Their political postures lean anti-establishment, anti-authority; online, Prince has been a loud opponent of Kathy Hochul’s congestion pricing scheme, which they have described as a way of taking “more from the working class.” They suspect that leftists “will eat [Zohran Mamdani’s] campaign alive,” according to another Twitter post, in reference to the DSA-endorsed run from the Astoria assemblyman, whose people have been quietly making moves in Bushwick in recent weeks. “This is my opinion as a political consultant, not as a candidate. As a candidate I wish nothing but love and prosperity to all,” writes Prince.
“I have to make myself the clown to expose the true clowns,” Prince tells me about their move to ditch the genie getup for a full-on clown mask. “There’s definitely some Joker vibes there. I loved the Joker movie but this is real life.” (Prince says they haven’t seen the new one yet.) Out in Bushwick, over on Myrtle Avenue, Prince still maintains a presence as consistent as their varying political campaigns, where they opened a vintage store they call the “Love Gallery,” packed inside a former pawnshop. Sometimes, Prince can be found with a cohort of colorfully dressed-volunteers operating at various events out of a short metallic school bus. Prince claims to command an army of volunteers that eagerly follow their various moves. “I don’t have an exact number. I’ve barely even put out a lot of info about this campaign and we’ve already got a lot of folks who are excited. It’s a lot of people. I’m always surprised at people who are surprised that we have any support,” says Prince.
“Five and a half years is longer than most businesses in the city get to exist,” Prince says. When they are not running for office, they say they use the space to shoot promotional campaigns for Target, Meta, Red Bull, Adidias and Gucci, “to name some of the ones on the top of my head,” Prince says. They also do charity work and continue to self-release music. Their announcement last month, carried in Politico’s “New York Playbook” blog, had arrived with the release of a “Love Freestyle,” though Prince tells me to listen, instead, to a record they put out late last year called “that one friend that’s too woke” to get a sense of where they’re at. More recently, Prince put out the topical record “Cuomo Stay out of the Mayors Race.” Amid the current politicking surrounding the mayor, Prince has taken the position that Adams should be kept around for voters to reject in the June primary.
Prince tells me that there’s going to a new album for this race too, one they plan to call “The Campaign About Nothing,” à la Seinfeld. If not an artist at quite the popular stature of a Norman Mailer and largely avoided by the city’s aspiring political classes, Prince tells me that they did once tour with Azalea Banks, a few years before they landing in Bushwick and turned to running novelty political campaigns.
“We did a 30-city tour back in 2017-2018 and that was dope because I got to meet a lot of the queer community around the country,” Prince recalls. “I actually just talked to her a week or two ago, we still keep in contact. We do have some unreleased music [together] that I’m hoping one day will come out.”
Top photo courtesy of Paperboy Love Prince.
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