A volunteer named Lissa Regnier, wearing a Black Sabbath T-shirt and a standard-issue blue face mask, came into the gallery. “Want to get the line going?” Regnier asked. “Yeah, let’s do it,” Prince replied, getting up. Outside, the people in line stepped forward, pulling wire handcarts or carrying bags. The volunteers handed out pineapples, celery, peaches, kale, onions, potatoes, carrots, and green plantains. “Pineapples go mad fast,” Prince said. The M train rumbled on the elevated tracks overhead. When a garbage truck screeched to a halt, Prince made the garbagemen wait while volunteers piled empty cardboard boxes high on the curb. Prince, still wearing the gold turban, then chucked the cardboard into the back of the truck themself.
I watched the food distribution happen from the top of the gallery steps. The election would be over in less than a week, and, although perhaps only four of the thirteen names on the ballot were still considered “viable,” the race was an undeniable jumble. It was difficult to talk of favorites or front-runners, with no candidate registering in the polls as the top choice of even twenty-five per cent of likely voters—and likely voters were themselves less than twenty per cent of the city’s population. Prince had little institutional support, a negligible number of endorsements, no government experience. And yet, was any other candidate in the race using their Wednesday morning more productively? When most of the produce was gone, Prince appeared beside me, looking glum. “My girlfriend just broke up with me over text,” they said, shaking their head. “They call politics a relationship killer.”
Prince was born David Porter, Jr., and grew up primarily in Maryland and New York. Their grandfather, the late Bishop Wilbert S. McKinley, founded a Pentecostal congregation in Brooklyn in the nineteen-sixties—it currently occupies a graceful brick building on a corner of Classon Avenue—and Prince’s parents are both devout churchgoers. Prince began rapping as a teen-ager, participated in student programs on Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C., and organized regular shows called Hip Hop Yoga Live as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland. “The concept was a rap show at Moses’ house,” they said. In 2017, the Harlem rapper Azealia Banks signed them to her record imprint. Prince began thinking of music as politics, and of listeners as persuadable votes. “One of the reasons I got into politics,” they said, “is I was doing sold-out shows.” In 2019, they recorded “Andrew Yang: The Album,” seven songs in support of Andrew Yang’s long-shot Presidential bid, whose ideas around universal basic income had inspired Prince. That same year, they said, while onstage at the House of Yes, a Brooklyn concert venue that was once an ice warehouse, they declared their intention to run for Congress.
Outside the Love Gallery, Prince led me toward the Love Tank, a spray-painted shuttle bus—the kind you might take from an airport terminal to a rental-car center—which the campaign uses as a hangout spot and official vehicle. Inside, the candidate took a seat near the back, placed a bong between their knees, and answered a few questions. In public, Prince is brash, and often recites their lyrics and catchphrases—“Ha ha, Paper! Yeah!” and “It’s . . . our . . . time!”—but in person they were reflective about their campaign style. “I’m a pretty clean-cut-looking guy,” they said. “I could shave. Put on a suit. A nice suit. And keep the same messaging. I could maybe do better. It’d be an impressive thing. I mean, I went to college, I graduated. I got good grades. Had high-profile internships. Have great recommendations. Travelled the world. Gotten awards from prestigious places. Given lectures. I could ride that kind of respectability as a way to run for office—and a lot of people do, and I’m not knocking that—but, for me, it’s, like, I imagine myself as an artist, doing this. I get to bring so many more things in because of the way I’m doing it. I truly get to be my full self. I pied, like, three mayoral candidates in the face. Now I got people from all over the city hitting me up, like, ‘Yo, can you pie me in the face?’ No, literally. I shouldn’t have, like, D.A. candidates hitting me up, like, ‘Yo, you got any more pie?’ ”
At times, Prince’s voice rose, and they slipped into grandiosity, talking of a revolution that was “dormant because I want it dormant.” Their professed politics align with many of the goals of the far left, and they spoke of feeling shunned by the more robust and disciplined organizations that have supported new-left candidates in recent years. Citing the fourteen thousand votes they received in the Seventh Congressional District race, and the fact that only two of their opponents in the mayoral race—Adams and Scott Stringer—have won elections in the city before, they argued that they had a comparatively strong “proven voter base.” They talked earnestly about the difficulties of campaigning, of how hard even getting one’s name on the ballot was without lawyers or paid staff. They said that the “amateurism” of their approach was intentional, intended to appeal to people who normally don’t participate in politics. People who dismissed their campaign as a stunt didn’t see all the work they did behind the scenes. “Part of what I do is clean up cardboard all day,” they said. “Imagine if I had an eight-million-dollar campaign budget?”
