Josh Thompson, right. | joshfornewyork.com Booker disciple mounts longshot, education-themed challenge to de Blasio

While New York’s political establishment awaits a big-name challenger to Bill de Blasio, the mayor’s middling poll numbers and a swirl of federal investigations have already given rise to a crop of lesser-known hopefuls.

That group currently consists of a Republican preacher and former NFL player, a real estate broker with long ties to the city’s business community, and Josh Thompson, a 31-year-old education policy wonk who moved to New York City in 2014.


Thompson, who has served as an aide to a handful of pro-charter school Democrats, thinks he sees an opening on education.

“Why are we running for mayor?” he asked himself recently over coffee near City Hall. “Yes, we’re going to be the education candidate, there’s no doubt about that.”

He added that he also hopes to focus on homelessness and infrastructure, among other issues.

Only 37 percent of voters approve of how de Blasio has handled the city’s public school system, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll — one of several lackluster data points that suggest the mayor is limping toward his re-election race next year.

Sixty percent of voters said they are "not satisfied" with the quality of public schools, and 65 percent said the mayor should not retain complete control of schools.

De Blasio has also fought a long battle against the city's charter school networks, which has made him enemies among the deep-pocketed patrons of those schools, who could be open to a charter-focused challenger, after Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz announced last year that she would not run.

Thompson has yet to gain any traction with either group. His name goes mostly unmentioned in coverage of the race, and his campaign is currently in debt.

But Thompson and his fellow challengers believe the mayor is not unbeatable, in part because de Blasio received less than 300,000 votes in a relatively low-turnout primary in 2013.

“The fact is he's too beholden to a small world,” Thompson said. “I will say something about the mayor currently. I think he would be a great mayor of a small town of 260,000 people.”

WHAT HE LACKS IN RECOGNITION AND RESOURCES, Thompson is trying to make up for in youthful enthusiasm.

He is tall and athletic-looking, with a shock of curly brown hair and an ebullience that deliberately emulates one of his heroes, U.S. Senator Cory Booker, who was just 33 when he first ran for mayor of Newark, and was elected at 37. Booker ran both times as a champion of education reform, and received heavy backing from pro-charter donors.

Thompson went to high school in Newark, after he was recruited to play basketball at St. Benedict's Prep, and volunteered on Booker’s mayoral campaign while he was in high school, registering Newark residents to vote.

He said meeting Booker was a “pivotal moment that absolutely changed my life,” and he returned to work at the Newark Public Schools Advisory Board as as an education legal fellow, after graduating from Vermont Law School in 2010.

“We can debate Cory’s policies until we’re blue in the face, but I’d lay in front of a hundred buses and bullets for that guy,” Thompson said.

(Booker's office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Thompson's run.)

While Booker toiled as a councilman in Newark for years while plotting a mayoral bid, Thompson opted not to run for City Council in New York, after considering a run for Dan Garodnick’s seat when the incumbent leaves office due to term limits in 2017.

At 31, Thompson would be younger even than Booker during his first run, and the youngest New York City mayor since Hugh Grant, the 31-year-old Tammany machine candidate who served a single term in the city’s highest office starting back in 1889.

“I was there when people were telling [Booker] he was too young to be mayor,” Thompson said. “Again, I’m not comparing myself, but Thomas Jefferson was 33 years old when he wrote the Declaration of Independence.”

Thompson eventually followed De'Shawn Wright, one of Booker’s senior education advisers to Washington D.C., where he worked as a policy analyst in the executive office of Mayor Vincent Gray, as the city transitioned from the aggressively pro-charter school administration of Adrian Fenty.

"This is exactly what I would expect of Josh," said Wright, adding, "Josh has been someone who has worked for elected officials, and i think has worked incredibly hard behind the scenes. We’ve all been looking forward to the day that Josh would step out of the shadows."

Thompson described his role working for Wright as “overseeing the expansion of school choice in D.C.”

“A proud moment was when I stood up to members of my own party,” Thompson said of his pro-charter stance. “I’m a Democrat, but I’m an Obamacrat, I want to make that clear.”

He left Washington after just eight months for Bridgeport Connecticut, where he worked as the deputy chief analytics officer for former Democratic Mayor Bill Finch (who was recently tapped by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to head the New York State Thruway).

In D.C. and in Bridgeport, Thompson found himself in the middle of battles over charter schools.

Finch, inspired by a meeting with Bloomberg’s former schools chancellor Joel Klein in 2012, pushed a mayoral control initiative that would end local school board elections. The initiative, which had the backing of Michelle Rhee, Michael Bloomberg, and the local Democratic party, narrowly lost.

Thompson described school choice as “a fundamental right.”

“Americans want choice in everything that we do,” he said.

Thompson moved to New York City in January of 2014, and, despite having supported Bloomberg, said he was initially impressed by de Blasio’s progressive vision.

“I heard some of his progressive rhetoric and was a fan of it, and then I was looking for something progressive in action, and then there’s Bill Bratton appointed, so I immediately started having questions about, was it just rhetoric, or is that who he is as a human being?” he said. “On affordable housing, of course I’m a fan of Bill de Blasio. But who in New York City doesn’t want more affordable housing? That’s a layup. Who in the world doesn’t want universal pre-kindergarten. That’s a layup.”

IF THOMPSON HAS SERIOUS EDUCATION experience, he is still struggling to be taken seriously by the city’s political establishment.

His name has not been included in any early polls of de Blasio challengers (the most recent of which showed the mayor handily beating Comptroller Scott Stringer and former Council Speaker Christine Quinn).

Bradley Tusk, a former adviser to Mayor Michael Bloomberg who is actively canvassing for a challenger to de Blasio, said Thompson was too green to win his group’s backing.

Thompson’s fundraising has yet to draw any significant support from the big-money donors who back charter causes.

His campaign raised just $28,032 in the previous six months, and spent just over $50,000, leaving it with a net balance of negative $22,920. (Among the notable donors to Thompson were Kerry Kennedy, who gave $100, and a $50 donation from C.J. Macklin, an account executive at BerlinRosen, the consultant group that represents de Blasio’s campaign, who donated when Thompson was still considering a Council run.)

De Blasio reported raising more than $1.1 million over the same time period.

Thompson does have the support of a relatively new group called Run For America, which was founded by Thompson’s campaign manager to encourage millennial candidates to run for public office. The group has garnered a fair amount of press attention, but it has yet to notch any notable victories and its PAC reported just $253 in cash on hand at the end of July. One of the group’s former operatives, Szelena Gray, was hired by the de Blasio campaign last April to serve as its chief operating officer.

Thompson suggested the fundraising he has undertaken in his most recent role — as the executive director of a teacher-development group called New Leaders for New Schools — was more meaningful than the mayor’s fundraising.

“I’ve been spending my last couple of years raising millions of dollars for the children of New York, and he’s been spending his last couple of years raising millions of dollars to try to get himself re-elected,” Thompson said. “I’m very proud of the dollars we’ve raised, and I’m very confident that we can continue to do both — continue to raise money for the children of New York and with our message and our rhetoric and what we believe as a team.”

This story has been updated to clarify that C.J. Macklin of BerlinRosen donated to Thompson when he was still considering a Council run.