Antonio Delgado (politician)


Antonio Ramon Delgado is an attorney and politician from the state of New York. A Democrat, he serves as the U.S. Representative for New York's 19th congressional district. The district includes most of the southern and eastern suburbs of the Capital District as well as the majority of the Hudson Valley and Catskills regions. It contains much of the territory that was once represented by current U. S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. He is the first person of either African-American or Hispanic descent to be elected to Congress from Upstate New York.

Early life and career

Delgado was born in 1977, in Schenectady, New York, to Tony Delgado and Thelma P. Hill. He is of African-American and Puerto Rican ancestry. He attended Notre Dame-Bishop Gibbons High School and played for the school's basketball team. He then enrolled at Colgate University and played for the Colgate Raiders men's basketball team alongside future Golden State Warriors player Adonal Foyle. Delgado graduated from Colgate in 1999 and earned a Rhodes Scholarship to study at The Queen's College, Oxford, from which he received a Master of Arts degree in 2001. In 2005, Delgado graduated from Harvard Law School.
After law school, Delgado moved to Los Angeles in 2005 and worked in the music industry. In 2007, Delgado released a socially conscious rap album under the stage name "AD the Voice." He then worked as a litigator in the New York office of the law firm Akin Gump.

U.S. House of Representatives

In the 2018 elections, Delgado ran for the United States House of Representatives in. He defeated six other candidates in the Democratic Party's primary election and faced incumbent Republican John Faso in the November 6 general election.
During Delgado's campaign, he criticized Faso for his votes against the Affordable Care Act. Faso, alongside the Congressional Leadership Fund and the National Republican Congressional Committee, launched attacks on Delgado's former rap career, commonly referring to Delgado as a "big city rapper." The New York Times Editorial Board condemned the attacks as "race-baiting."
Delgado won the general election, receiving 132,001 votes versus Faso's 124,408. He was sworn into office on January 3, 2019. He is only the fourth Democrat to represent this district and its predecessors since 1913, and the first Democrat to win a full term in the district since Gillibrand represented what was then the 20th District from 2007 to 2009.

Committee assignments

Personal life

Delgado married Lacey Schwartz in 2011. Schwartz made Little White Lie, a documentary film for PBS in 2015, examining being biracial. They have twin children and live in Rhinebeck, north of Poughkeepsie. He is tall.