Can A Bushwick Pol Make It To Albany?

“I am one generation away from farmers,” Diana Reyna tells me during a quiet moment in the Bushwick poltico’s occasionally longshot campaign for the spot of being just one scandal away from running New York state.

She had already departed politics sometime ago, following a solitary term as deputy borough president – a position that had notably allied her with the city’s current political boss, Eric Adams. She still refers to him fondly by first name and, if she wins, it’s likely that characters of Adams’ political machine will have a new friend in Albany. She tells me it was the death of her father that had convinced her to leave the largely ceremonial role for a career as a minor lobbyist: first as a partner at a now-shuttered Brooklyn startup called Athena Consulting Group and then under her own one-person shingle, “Diana Reyna Strategic Consulting,” which she says worked with local contractors to “bring to the forefront their funding opportunities.” In her life as a politician, Reyna preferred to work quietly and largely inside the machine; she tells me curtly that her most recent work “has nothing to do with the race now.” (For what it is worth, according to ProPublica, Reyna’s company was able to score nearly $21,000 from the federal government’s PPP-payout program during the first year of the pandemic.)