New York Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn will not seek another term as Brooklyn Democratic Party chair, exiting after progressives flipped key seats and party leaders blasted her late rule rewrite.
The Post reported that Bichotte Hermelyn made the announcement Monday evening on NY1’s “Inside City Hall,” ending a six-year run atop the borough’s Democratic organization.
Her exit leaves control of the Brooklyn Democratic Party up for grabs after months of infighting, a last-minute push to expand the party’s governing board, and a primary wave that handed reform-minded Democrats enough district leader seats to threaten her hold on power.
Bichotte Hermelyn, who represents central Brooklyn in the state Assembly, cast the move as a personal choice and a success story.
“I’m now up to my next chapter in life, and I’ve served as the Brooklyn Democratic Party chair for over six years. And I’m very proud of what we’ve done. We’ve built a very strong organization,”
she said. She added that she is “just really excited” to leave the party “stronger, more inclusive, more transparent.”
She also said the executive committee will expand to become more inclusive. That framing lands after a very different fight over who gets to vote inside the party.
In the June Democratic primary in Brooklyn, the New Kings Democrats won a swath of 22 district leader seats. Those local party posts matter because they help set the direction of the organization and can decide who stays in charge.
That haul was enough to oust Bichotte Hermelyn if she had tried to hang on. Instead of a clean handoff after the votes, the old guard moved on the rulebook.
About a month before her Monday announcement, Bichotte Hermelyn pushed a last-minute change that would dramatically increase the number of voting members on the executive committee, from 42 to 68. Critics saw the packing plan as a way to dilute the new district leaders and keep her faction in control.
The proposed changes drew support and were adopted last month. The New Kings Democrats sued her over the rewrite and asked a Brooklyn Supreme Court judge to halt the move. The change still passed.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani opposed the plan in plain terms on Aug. 24. He did not treat it as routine housekeeping.
“I very much oppose these proposed changes, by the current Brooklyn Democratic Party chair,”
Mamdani said. He followed with the core charge:
“I oppose them because they are an attempt to circumnavigate the will of voters.”
He also accused the chair of trying to “circumvent the will of voters.” State Party Chair Jay Jacobs and New York Attorney General Letitia James slammed the eleventh-hour change as well.
Sen. Chuck Schumer tied the objection to the primary results already on the books.
“Given the clear results of the June Democratic primary in Brooklyn, the party should not change the rules in the middle of the game,”
Schumer said.
The sequence is hard to miss. Voters elevated a reform slate. Party leaders then tried to enlarge the committee that would blunt that result. Top Democrats, including the mayor and the state’s senior senator, said the timing itself was the problem.
The leadership fight sits on top of a longer money trail. An exclusive Post probe found that Bichotte Hermelyn, her predecessor Frank Seddio, and their allies collected $190,000 in campaign contributions and payments from more than 90 judges and judicial candidates since 2012, when Seddio took control of the local committee.
That kind of pipeline is exactly what good-government groups warn against. Ben Weinberg, public policy director at the watchdog group Citizens Union, put the institutional cost in direct language.
“The public’s confidence in the courts is undermined when judges appear dependent on party organizations for political support, endorsements, or advancement,”
Weinberg said.
In New York’s clubhouse model, party organizations still shape judicial paths through support, endorsements, and advancement. When the same machine that screens and boosts candidates also takes their money, voters are left to wonder who the system serves first, the public or the party.
Bichotte Hermelyn’s decision not to seek another term ends one chapter and opens another. She leaves after six years as chair, after a primary that empowered New Kings Democrats, after a rule change that expanded the executive committee from 42 to 68 members, and after public pushback from Mamdani, Schumer, Jacobs, and James.
She says she built a stronger, more inclusive, more transparent organization and is ready for her “next chapter.” The record shows a borough party still defined by factional warfare, late rule shifts, litigation, and a six-figure stream of judicial-world cash dating back more than a decade.
Control of the Brooklyn Democratic Party is now up for grabs. The reformers who won those 22 district leader seats will test whether the openness she advertised on television matches the power map she leaves behind.
When a party loses at the ballot box, then rewrites its own rules, then watches its chair walk away, voters get the real lesson: accountability came late, and only after the machine ran out of room to maneuver.
