“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.)

But suddenly, Reyna had felt the call of serving another mildly ceremonial political post. In the primary on June 28th, Reyna will be running opposite Kathy Hochul’s pick for the separately-elected deputy spot on her gubernatorial ticket. When her campaign had started in January, it had seemed like a fool’s errand – the once lieutenant governor was both mildly popular and, perhaps more urgently, already occupied the lane of moderate career politician, as long as most voters could forget that she hailed from the opposite side of the state. Hochul had even hand-picked a state senator from Harlem named Brian Benjamin to run against Reyna, a bit of geographic political strategy that would have curbed Reyna’s chances even more if Benjamin hadn’t later been arrested on charges of taking campaign contributions from a real estate developer in exchange for grants of state funds. (He has plead not guilty.)