Party insiders are divided by next year’s race for county executive, primaries for state Senate and Assembly seats and succession plans in a handful of Common Council seats.
News and analysis by Geoff Kelly, Investigative Post’s political reporter
Erie County Democrats are at war with one another.
It’s not the rank-and-file voters who are splitting into camps.
It’s the campaign operatives, the holders of patronage jobs, the elected officials and committee members.
They’re at odds over who the party will support to succeed Mark Poloncarz as county executive when that office is on the ballot next year.
They’re divided over the June primary race between Jeremy Zellner, the party chairman, and Jon Rivera for the 61st District state Senate seat.
In the City of Buffalo, party factions are jousting for committee spots with an eye on controlling party endorsements in next year’s Council elections.
Some of the tension surfaced this week in the form of allegations that Niagara District Council Member David Rivera engaged in “a pattern of harassment, intimidation, trespass, and coercion” aimed at convincing candidates for party committee in the Niagara District to drop their challenges to incumbents.
WGRZ’s Nate Benson was first to report the story, which began circulating on Friday. The aggrieved parties filed complaints with the city’s ethics board, county election officials and Council leadership.
There’s a lot of context here and a byzantine cast of characters. I’ll try to keep it simple.
David Rivera, a city lawmaker since 2008, is the father of Assembly Member Jon Rivera, who this year is running in the Democratic primary for the 61st District state Senate seat. That’s the office Sean Ryan vacated the first of the year, when he was sworn in as mayor of Buffalo.
Jon Rivera’s opponent is Zellner, the Erie County Democratic Party chair who in February won a special election to finish Ryan’s term, which runs through the end of the year. Zellner and Rivera are competing for a full two-year term that’ll begin next January.
Jeremy Zellner, left, and Jon Rivera.
Most party leaders in the district — which includes much of Buffalo’s West Side, the City of Tonawanda, the towns of Amherst, Grand Island and Tonawanda, as well as the villages of Kenmore and Williamsville — are lining up behind Zellner, their longtime chair. Organized labor is mostly with Rivera.
It’s a bitter contest between previously allied factions. The Riveras and their West Side political operation for years have been loyal supporters of Zellner and Democratic headquarters.
Now, Jon Rivera claims, Zellner is trying to punish his family and their allies by means of proxy candidates for party committee seats in the Niagara District. Zellner denies it.
Drama in the Niagara District
Elections for party committee seats are rarely contested, but last week multiple slates of candidates filed nominating petitions to take on incumbents in 10 of the West Side election districts David Rivera represents on the Common Council — about half the Niagara District.
(Committee members generally run in pairs. Each election district in the county gets two of them. They elect party officers and sometimes have a say in endorsing candidates for public office.)
Incumbent committee members facing challengers include both David Rivera and Jon Rivera, as well as other members of the Rivera family. Wence Valentin, president of Local 774 of the United Auto Workers — which endorsed Jon Rivera in the Senate race — got an opponent, too. There’s a challenger in the election district represented by Bryan Ball, president of the Stonewall Democrats of Western New York. Stonewall hasn’t endorsed anyone yet.
The challenger, Stephen Olsick, told me in an email Wednesday his target is not Ball but Eric Walker, Ball’s fellow committee member.
“There is no conspiracy by ECDC or anyone else regarding these committee races. We are all deeply rooted in the community,” Olsick wrote.
Many of the challenges were organized by Alex Burgos, a party activist who in January announced his candidacy to succeed Jon Rivera in the Assembly. Rivera is forsaking reelection; he can’t run for both offices at once.
Burgos dropped his bid in February and threw his support behind Karen Hoak of Hamburg, who has the Democratic endorsement. The Riveras aren’t saying so publicly, but they prefer attorney Adam Bojak, a city resident. (Bojak also has a challenger for his Niagara District committee seat.) The third candidate is Kevin Deese, a city resident whose husband hails from Hamburg — giving him connections to the two biggest communities circumscribed by Rivera’s 149th Assembly District.
Burgos is reportedly interested in running for the Niagara District Council seat — or at least having a say in who has the party’s support — should David Rivera decline to run for another term next year, as many expect him to do. If Burgos’s candidates win their election districts, they’ll wield influence over that.
Burgos recruited candidates and filed their nominating petitions, but Jon Rivera claims Zellner is behind the Niagara District committee races. He said Zellner is punishing the father for the sins of the son — namely, having the temerity to run a primary challenge against the party chairman.
“The fact that Chairman Zellner would run challenges to the president of the Stonewall Democrats of WNY, the UAW regional president and a group of Latino committee people speaks to the divisive nature of his candidacy and his tenure,” Rivera told me on Monday.
He called Zellner “unfit to lead.”
Zellner’s camp fired right back.
“Jon Rivera loves to make accusations about backroom deal-making in politics, but he and his father seem to have a real problem with anyone choosing to run for office when they didn’t hand pick them,” Morgan Hook, a spokesperson for Zellner, told me in an emailed statement on Tuesday.
“And then threatening those candidates on their doorsteps — all of it caught on video — is beyond the pale.”
Hook said Zellner “has no role in these committee races.”
Three surveillance Ring camera videos from the same house were circulated to members of the news media last Friday, purporting to show David Rivera intimidating a constituent. To my eye, Rivera doesn’t come across as threatening.
It’s hardly unusual for party operatives and elected officials to try to talk prospective opponents out of their races — or to check the validity of signatures on nominating petitions.
Still, there’s a power imbalance at play — a city lawmaker asking a constituent to curtail political activity. Three challengers to the Riveras’ committee members signed papers to drop out before Monday’s deadline to do so.
Olsick, the Burgos slate candidate, claimed in an email that the Riveras “most certainly engaged in the conduct outlined in the complaints.”
Howard Johnson, the Democratic commissioner for the Erie County Board of Elections, told WGRZ’s Benson the charges were “very serious.”
Take that with a grain or two of salt.
Johnson, a party vice-chair, landed the $146,000-per-year commissioner’s post in December courtesy of Zellner, who gave it up to run for the Senate seat. Prior to working for the elections board, Johnson was an Erie County legislator. In 2019, he was appointed, not elected, to the seat previously held by Barbara Miller-Williams — who that same year was appointed, not elected, to the office of city comptroller.
So Johnson owed that job to the party chairman, too.
The bigger picture
There are also contested committee races in the Ellicott District, whose current representative, Majority Leader Leah Halton-Pope, is headed for the state Assembly in January.
There are a few more in the North District, whose representative, Joe Golombek — a city lawmaker since 1999 — is contemplating retirement.
In Cheektowaga, Town Supervisor Brian Nowak is running a mini-insurgency against the town’s party leadership, who are Zellner loyalists.
Much of this jostling and jousting is inside baseball — of little interest to the average voter who engages with politics once, maybe twice a year.
However, there’s another rift among Democrats potentially of greater importance to county residents: Who will the party support as successor to Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz?
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Poloncarz, currently in his fourth term, will not seek reelection next year. He wants Lisa Chimera, his deputy county executive, to take his place. Chimera — a former county legislator and Town of Tonawanda board member — doesn’t have great countywide name recognition. The Poloncarz administration has been trying to change that, putting her front and center at public events.
Her competition is Erie County Comptroller Kevin Hardwick — once a Republican, now a Democrat — who has talked openly about his interest in the job. Hardwick’s position gives him a higher profile than Chimera, and he has cross-over appeal that might give him an edge against whomever Republicans put on the ballot.
Party insiders are split over who should get the nod. Several told me Poloncarz’s imminent departure and Zellner’s focus on retaining his Senate seat have left the party rudderless. Many are sitting on their hands for now, in hopes either Hardwick or Chimera will bow out and spare the party a bruising primary.
“Everything feels unmoored,” one of those insiders told me.
posted 16 minutes ago – April 17, 2026