Jan Ransom and Jeffery C. Mays

Tiffany Cabán was to be the Next Big Thing in the progressive movement, another candidate emerging from anonymity to upset an entrenched Democrat. She vowed to not merely reform the district attorney’s office in Queens, but to upend it.

Then just like that, her moment — along with her roughly 1,100-vote lead on primary night — disappeared after a count of paper ballots and then a lengthy recount, leaving her to deliver a concession speech last week that was at once anticlimactic and hopeful.

“I said stages like this were not made or built for people like me. And that has changed,” Cabán, a 32-year-old public defender, said last Monday night. “We build the stages. We create the spaces. We create movements. We drive change.”

And she sought to assure her followers that her work was not done. “You better believe I’m going to keep fighting,” she said.

Cabán, a democratic socialist, had drawn comparisons to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who campaigned with the first-time candidate, helping her raise money and her national profile.

They both ran against candidates favored by local Democratic Party leaders, but unlike Ocasio-Cortez, Cabán ultimately fell short, losing to Melinda Katz, the Queens borough president.

Cabán said she is weighing her next steps, acknowledging last week that she already has job offers from some current Democratic presidential candidates, though she declined to elaborate.

Other offers have come from criminal justice organizations, along with invitations to speak at conferences, and queries on whether she would want to write a book.

There is also the inevitable question of whether she would run for a different office, perhaps for the City Council, state Legislature or even Congress.

“The question of what’s next for Tiffany Cabán is a question of Queens politics,” said David Alan Sklansky, a professor at Stanford Law School. “If she’s interested in criminal justice advocacy, there are a lot of people interested in hearing from her. But she may have a political future.”

For now, Cabán said, she is open to nearly anything, except perhaps a 2021 bid for district attorney in Manhattan, where she worked as a public defender. “I want to stay rooted in Queens,” she said.

But she mentioned that her savings have run low, she has bills and rent to pay, and has been without health insurance — barriers, she said, that make it difficult to contemplate another campaign for public office without first considering her own needs.

“What we did was herculean,” Cabán said last week. “I came in with no name recognition, just a public defender doing the work on the ground, no establishment support, no money, no consultants. And we won in so many different ways.”

Her opponents, including Katz, tried to convince voters that she was unqualified for the job, and some said her progressive views on criminal justice went too far.

Cabán said that those progressive views were shaped by her experiences as a queer Latina New Yorker and as a public defender representing the indigent.

“Public defense work is certainly trauma work,” Cabán said in June, before the primary election. “And usually what brings you to trauma work is your own personal trauma.”

“Where I grew up, how I grew up,” she said. “I have had varying exposure to different things, including violence, unhealthy relationship dynamics and substance use disorder.”

Cabán grew up in a three-bedroom house in South Richmond Hill, Queens, a working-class neighborhood. Her father, Eddie Cabán Sr., had a union job as an elevator mechanic for Otis Elevator Co. He worked overtime so she could attend St. Francis Preparatory School, a Catholic high school in Fresh Meadows.

Her mother, Beatriz Cabán, was a stay-at-home parent known to many as “the neighborhood mom.” Parties were held in a small backyard behind their house where the family’s three dogs frolicked.

But even at a young age, Cabán said she understood that her father struggled with alcoholism, recognizing then, she said, that it “was a disease.” .. Cabán cycled in and out of inpatient rehabilitation facilities, including one in Minnesota when Cabán was 7.

“It was really hard,” Cabán said, acknowledging that, for her, there was “a lot of anger there, too.”

As a teenager in high school, Cabán worked odd jobs — a ball girl at the U.S. Open in Flushing Meadows, a waitress at an event hall — to help with the family’s bills.

As a young child, she wore the dresses with the matching bows that her mother picked out for her, but after kindergarten, she said, she was more of a tomboy. She gravitated toward sports, playing baseball and basketball with her brother and his friends, and made the second team of the All-City Softball Team in 2005 as a shortstop.

“My fondest memories,” her brother, Eddie Cabán Jr., said, “was standing back and seeing her exceed expectations when they told her she couldn’t.”

Cabán’s sexuality took shape later, in law school. She said she dated a few men in high school and at Penn State University, where she studied criminal justice and did advocacy work with LGBT groups. She returned to New York for law school, where Cabán said she met a woman whom she developed feelings for.

“I’m going to date some women,” she recalled thinking. Cabán said she found comfort in New York’s diversity and in “being unapologetically me.”

Back in New York, Cabán said she learned that her father was drinking alcohol again.

It was an all-too-familiar cycle for the family: Cabán said that her maternal grandfather, Nestor Nazario, a Korean War veteran who had earned a purple heart, was also an alcoholic, and was prone to being physically abusive.

Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, he often self-medicated, she said. Her grandmother, Iris Nazario, eventually left him, forcing Cabán’s mother to drop out of high school to help care for the family.

Toward the end of her grandfather’s life, Cabán said her family took him in, as he continued to struggle with alcoholism. She had a chance to get to know a different side of him. He played guitar, and made her laugh with fantastical war stories, like how part of his ear that was lost in battle was actually taken by wizards.

Her grandfather, she said, easily could have been one of her clients, in and out of the criminal justice system.

“Where were our systems in place to support him, so that he could support his family?” Cabán said. “Our district attorney’s office and justice system doesn’t take that kind of view or approach.”

After law school, she became a public defender, representing more than 1,000 clients in her career. Cabán punctuates her stories with tales of her former clients and how their trauma brought them into the criminal justice system.

Her unlikely campaign for Queens district attorney emerged from a discussion among three of her friends, who were trying to come up with someone willing to run as a progressive candidate. They quickly settled on Cabán, urging her to run in a series of text messages, reported in The New Yorker.

Cabán ended up as one of seven Democratic candidates on the ballot. Her early campaign faced management and fundraising struggles, but things soon began to pick up.

She earned the backing of the Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, and was endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez; two Democratic presidential candidates, Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont; and progressive-minded prosecutors like Larry Krasner, the district attorney in Philadelphia.

It was nearly enough to win the primary. But Cabán said she chose to view her narrow loss as a victory, suggesting in her concession speech that her candidacy “completely transformed the conversation around criminal justice reform in this city.”

From ending cash bail to limiting prosecution in most marijuana cases, Cabán said that she and her supporters helped define how criminal justice in Queens will be administered, even if she will not be the one to do it.

Krasner, who campaigned with Cabán, said that she was a “natural politician,” but hoped that she would someday become a prosecutor.

“A lot of politicians are jacks-of-all-trades, but people like Tiffany have been in the trenches doing the work,” Krasner said. “I would like to see her take that idealism and do something with it."

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/nyregion/tiffany-caban-future-queens-da.html" id="9a728999-639e-3bf2-a13b-dc26be24c906">The New York Times</a>.

Tiffany Cabán Was the Next Progressive Hope. Now What?

NEW YORK — She stood before a far smaller group of supporters than on election night, the euphoria slowly drained from the moment when victory had seemed assured.

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Jan Ransom and Jeffery C. Mays

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Tiffany Cabán Was the Next Progressive Hope. Now What?