Adam Bojak

I am an attorney here in Western New York. I’m on the assigned council program here in Erie County for family court; we’re the family court equivalent of a public defender. Through that job, I see poverty all day, every day.

In my spare time, for about ten years, I’ve been trying to provide legal services and advice to tenants and even some homeowners who are facing housing issues, on a completely pro bono basis. I’m trying to step in and help them avoid court. Because once you end up in housing court, it’s probably already too late.

My wife and I live on the West Side of Buffalo. We’ve got two kids, two and four years old. We’re getting crushed by the bills, just like everybody else. Our daycare bill is astronomical. It’s easily our largest monthly expense. And hearing about these pilot programs for universal childcare across the state — downstate — but not here is frustrating, because the one thing that I can say from the work that I’ve done is that working-class people are all facing the same problems.

I don’t care if you live in New York City or Buffalo, you’re facing the same issues: affording your groceries, affording your rent, affording your utilities. These things are all shared problems; they’re all intertwined.

Adam Bojak

It’s that firsthand knowledge. It’s being on the ground, seeing the squalor and the unsanitary conditions people are forced to live in . . . and I do mean forced, because I have done a lot of work with people who are in public housing. And that public housing is old and decrepit and underfunded.

When you see what people have to live with on a daily basis, it makes your skin crawl. And they have no control over that themselves — they pay their rent on time every single month, and nothing gets better.

Knowing what those conditions actually look like gives me the ability to focus on what I know will fix those issues, and I also have relationships with those housing organizers to fall back on. The one thing I do want to be clear about is that I’m not trying to swoop in and say I have all the answers. It’s important to be listening to the people in the neighborhoods, in these buildings, because they know what they need where they live.

Adam Bojak

The simple answer is Bernie Sanders in 2016. When I started to hear things from Bernie, when he was running against Hillary Clinton, I thought, “Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.” And he was speaking in a way no one’s ever spoken before. Why couldn’t we all talk like this? Why was he saying things that nobody else wants to talk about?

That’s when I heard about DSA for the first time, and I joined up pretty much right after that. I said, “If these are the people who are fighting for the things that Bernie’s talking about, I want to be a part of that.”

I’ve been a member ever since. I was on the steering committee for a little while and have headed up various committees during my time. I had to step back when my kids were born in 2022 and ’24, but now that they’ve grown up a little bit, I’m getting really involved again.

Adam Bojak

It would be enormous. Right now, we have a decent bloc of socialists in office, but we want to grow this movement across the entire state, from west to east. I think that once we are successful in this race, then we can say, “Okay, it’s not just a ‘bohemian New York City’ trend or something like that. This is what working-class people across the state of New York want. This is what they’re excited for. It’s the mass movement of the political program that speaks to their everyday issues.”

It would show that what we’re doing is serious. And what we’re doing is going to bring transformational change to working-class people, whether you live in Buffalo or Long Island. That’s what gets our team excited about what we’re doing and why I think this statewide slate that we put together is so important because the coordination and cooperation are what’s going to get more of us into Albany to make that difference.

Adam Bojak

Right after we announced, I had people downstate like Assembly Member Sarahana Shrestha (and I consider her downstate) reaching out to me and saying, “Hey, let’s talk.” We had just announced, and they already wanted to talk about what we could accomplish together because it’s such an exciting time.

We’re talking about coordinating for canvassing, coordinating for fundraising. We might go down to New York City and hang out there for a weekend, knock doors with them, have a fundraising event. There are other candidates across New York looking to do the same thing. You come here one weekend, we’ll bring our team out there next weekend, and we can win this for each other.

It’s something that really sets us apart from the other campaigns. This is not just about one person trying to get into office; this is about all of us working together. We have a strong volunteer base that’s independent from everything else and they are fighting for something new, something exciting, something different.

Adam Bojak

Our campaign has a lot of support from people from a variety of backgrounds. We do have some endorsements from the left and progressive groups — we have backing from the Working Families Party. We have some local elected officials as well as DSA members who are endorsing us.

But then we have union endorsements that no other candidate has. So there’s International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 2104, which represents workers at the Niagara Falls power plant. There is United Auto Workers Region 9, which covers a lot of Western New York. We have Workers United, which is very well known for its work [unionizing] Starbucks, but it covers so many other areas and workers here in Western New York.

So we have those endorsements from organized labor, and it’s exciting because at this point, we are the campaign of the working class; we are the campaign of organized labor. And I’ve talked to leaders in other local unions here who are saying, “We can’t wait to endorse you.”

That momentum is very real. We’re stitching together a coalition that I think the Democratic Party has lost over the years: labor and renters and even some upwardly mobile professionals like me, who are just more class-conscious than they used to be.

Adam Bojak

Buffalo is one of those chapters that has ridden the roller coaster. When I joined, we had an enormous chapter. We had big meetings; people were really excited, riding that high from Bernie, and then even in 2018, we were taking out the Independent Democratic Conference downstate — that was really fun; everybody was invigorated. Then 2020 hit, and we lost that momentum because of COVID-19 and a variety of other reasons.

In 2021, with India Walton, we were back up. We started to ride that high again; people were joining in droves. Then after that general election loss, the momentum kind of dissipated again. And now we’re on our way back up again.

What we’re doing with this campaign is different than the ones before. We are building a lasting, durable infrastructure that won’t have to go up and down on that roller coaster, and we’ll be establishing ourselves for the future.

Adam Bojak

It’s people who are working on this campaign right now who have done campaigns before, but we’re also building the knowledge base that we might not have had before. When I first tried to run for this seat when it was open in 2020, we were unable to knock a single door. We had just started to ramp up everything that March and then the whole world shut down. We were not able to build that infrastructure to survive the shutdown.

Then in 2021, Buffalo DSA was not the main driver of the India Walton campaign. It was certainly a big part of it, but we weren’t building that base of knowledge that could be taken into the future. But this campaign is certainly doing that, where the campaign manager is the Electoral Working Group chair, my comms director is the other electoral cochair, and my field director is a cochair of the chapter.

We’re building knowledge that can be passed along, and we’re also bringing up new people who can fill roles and learn more so that this will certainly not be the last time. We’re already thinking about future races where we haven’t always been in a position to do that before.

Adam Bojak

I think the 2021 primary with India is a very good example. People were so desperate for something new, something exciting, something that didn’t sound like they were being spoon-fed the same old nonsense from the local party establishment. So we caught them napping in 2021.

We have a really good opportunity here to bring something new to Western New York. Also, we are getting very good feedback at the doors, whether it is in the city of Buffalo, where we know we have a good base, or in Hamburg, where we’ve never actually tried before. It’s a pretty purple suburb, but we’re getting good responses from voters down there. Because, like I was saying earlier, it doesn’t matter where you live. If you’re a working-class Western New Yorker, you’re facing the same problems. We’re the only campaign who’s going to be speaking to those in a way that resonates.

Adam Bojak

As DSA members, we’ve always been addressing the idea that this is just capitalism working as it’s intended.

All these awful things that people see on a daily basis, they might not tie it back to that, but we as socialists understand. Now it’s just laying the whole system bare: that it is simply there to take money out of working people’s pockets and funnel it upward into the pockets of the rich. People are seeing that on a daily basis now.

Adam Bojak

It’s very bad here. Buffalo’s a border town, and ICE operates here; CBP (Customs and Border Protection) operates here. We had an action outside the ICE headquarters downtown during the St Patrick’s Day Parade because it’s renting office space down there [and] we want them out of our city. And when I talked to the voters at the doors, I have not heard anybody say, “Oh no, I don’t really care about that.”

When you’re canvassing in the city, as far as my personal firsthand experience goes, people are universally on the same page as us: “F-ck ICE,” right? Even out in Hamburg, talking to suburban people, they have a similar position.

Adam Bojak

I go back to our campaign motto, which is we want a healthy, housed, affordable New York. I am trying to fight for the extension of tenant protections up into Western New York, because for whatever reason, they only cover selected counties downstate. Other municipalities can opt into those, but it’s been an uphill battle to do that. This should be a universal program because universal issues need universal solutions.

There’s so much we can do around housing, especially here in Western New York. And it is an issue in both the suburbs and the cities. I’ve worked with tenants all across this region — we don’t have to be in an urban setting to have housing issues.

The city of Buffalo is in dire financial straits, tens of millions of dollars in debt — maybe even more than that, depending on who you’re talking to. And we saw that Governor Hochul tried to step in recently and give money to the city, but it’s going to take a lot more than that to rescue Buffalo.

So I feel very strongly as a city resident that we have to be doing everything possible because there are no more federal funds coming to plug these budget gaps that the city’s relied on for years. It’s time to tax the rich in the state of New York so that cities like Buffalo don’t go into receivership and get a hard-control financial board.

Adam Bojak

Another thing I’ve always felt strongly about is getting dark money out of politics. There’s this new movement to redefine corporations at the state level, because they are state creatures, to remove their ability to just dump money into our elections. I know there’s a ballot measure out in Montana recently to do that. We can certainly do that at the state level in the New York legislature and just say, “Corporations, you are no longer allowed to do this.”

That’s something that I would love to do. That’s just one of the many things we could do to protect democracy in New York.

We also have a huge barrier to entry in politics. I would love to bring ranked-choice voting statewide; I would love same-day registration and voting. We have one of the most difficult political calendars, as far as you having to change your party affiliation extremely far in advance in order to vote in the primary. The list is pretty long when it comes to parts of our state democracy that I would love to change.