Zephyr Rain Teachout (/ˈtiːtʃaʊt/, born October 24, 1971)[1] is an American attorney, author, political candidate, and professor of law specializing in democracy and antitrust at Fordham University.[2]
On November 15, 2021, Teachout again announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for New York State attorney general,[8] but suspended her campaign after the incumbent, James, who had been running for governor, instead ran for reelection. Teachout endorsed James when she announced the suspension of her campaign.[9]
On January 24, 2022, the New York State attorney general's office appointed Teachout as a special advisor and senior counsel for economic justice.[10]
Teachout is also an actor who has performed in many plays at the Unadilla Theatre in Marshfield, Vermont, directed by Bill Blachly,[16][22] appearing as Katherine in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost in 1994 and as Imogen in Shakespeare's Cymbeline in 1995. She played Winnie in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days in 2012 and 2019.[16] In 2013, Teachout was Lady Utterwood in George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House.[23] In 2019, she played Anne in Florian Zeller's 2012 play The Father.[24][25]
Teachout volunteered at Occupy Wall Street, where she encouraged the movement to focus on the importance of decentralized power, citing the ideas of James Madison, and worked to educate activists in corporate law and policy.[2][26][27]
Teachout faced off against incumbent Andrew Cuomo and comedian Randy Credico in the Democratic primary election on September 9, 2014. In July 2014, the Board of Elections received objections from Harris Weiss and Austin Sternlicht challenging Teachout's New York residency.[32] She first ran for the Working Families Party nomination, but lost to Cuomo. His margin of victory was much smaller than expected, especially since the Working Families Party traditionally cross-endorses the Democratic Party candidate.[33]
Teachout then announced that she would run for the Democratic nomination.[34] Her running mate was Tim Wu, a Columbia University Law School professor who coined the phrase "net neutrality".[35][36][37] Their platform called for a rollback of Cuomo's tax cuts for the wealthy, investment in transportation and broadband infrastructure, a statewide fracking ban, an end to high-stakes testing and fair funding for schools in both under-resourced and affluent school districts, restoring voting rights to convicted felons, and support for the NY DREAM Act and anti-corruption measures, including public financing of elections to reduce the power of corporate donors and affluent political insiders.[2]
Their campaign raised $800,000, a small amount for New York state politics.[38] Four days before the primary, polls showed their likely voter share at 26%, in line with the predictions of political professionals.[39]
Teachout and Wu lost to Cuomo and his running mate, former U.S. RepresentativeKathy Hochul, in the primary on September 9, 2014. Although Teachout was only expected to receive 26% of the vote (based on polling days before the election), she received 33%.
Teachout served as treasurer for Cynthia Nixon's campaign for governor of New York until May 2018, when she announced she was running for attorney general of New York in the 2018 election.[53] At the time Teachout was pregnant, expecting a child in October, one month after the primary and one month before the general election.[54] On August 19, 2018, The New York Times endorsed Teachout for state attorney general. Its editorial board members argued that she would be the ideal candidate to hold both President Trump as well as the state government to account.[7]
On September 13, 2018, Teachout lost the Democratic primary for attorney general to Letitia James, receiving 31% of the vote to James's 40.6%.[55]
2022 Attorney General campaign
On October 29, 2021, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced her candidacy for governor in 2022. Teachout had previously announced that if James ran for governor, she would run again for attorney general in the Democratic primary.[56] On November 15, Teachout announced her candidacy on her Twitter account and at a press conference in Downtown Brooklyn. Her campaign was supported by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig.[57] James ended her campaign for governor, and decided to run for reelection for New York Attorney General; on December 12 Teachout suspended her campaign for attorney general and endorsed James.
Senior counsel for economic justice
On January 24, 2022, the New York State attorney general's office appointed Teachout as a special advisor and senior counsel for economic justice.[10] In a tweet, she wrote that she would take a leave of absence from her position at Fordham Law School.
Political views
Teachout was among the minority of Democratic congressional candidates who endorsed Bernie Sanders during the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries. She was also among the first candidates Sanders endorsed.[58] He subsequently endorsed her for attorney general of New York in 2018,[59] and Teachout endorsed him in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.[60] In a January 2020 opinion column in The Guardian, Teachout wrote that Sanders's Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden had "a big corruption problem" arising from his relationships with donors over the course of his Senate career. Sanders apologized to Biden for the article, saying: "It is absolutely not my view that Joe is corrupt in any way."[61][62][63]
While running for Attorney General of New York, Teachout pledged that she would use the power of the office to sue Trump for violating anti-corruption laws and to force him to divest from his businesses.[69][70]
Electoral history
2014 New York gubernatorial Democratic primary[71]
Teachout is married to Nicholas S. Juliusburger, a software company executive. They live in East Harlem, Manhattan.[74]
In October 2018, Teachout and Juliusburger were expecting their first child. Teachout used footage of her receiving an ultrasound in a campaign advertisement.[75][76][53][77]
Teachout, Zephyr; Streeter, Thomas, eds. (2007). Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope: Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. ISBN9781594514845. OCLC1100703254.
Teachout, Zephyr (2014). Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN9780674050402. OCLC900727926.
Teachout, Zephyr (2020). Break 'Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money. New York: All Points Book/St. Martin's Publishing Group. ISBN9781250200891. OCLC1112261337.
^"Zephyr Teachout". emilyslist.org. Archived from the original on August 21, 2016. Retrieved August 20, 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)