Almost a year after the waters of superstorm Sandy transformed New York City’s coastline, the storm has shifted the city’s electoral landscape.

City Council candidates Carlos Menchaca, John Lisyanskiy, Richard del Rio and Lew Simon are part of a list of aspiring politicians in coastline districts who are seeking political success by touting the valiant role they played during the hurricane’s emergency response.

“In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Carlos stepped into the void and worked day and night…to coordinate response efforts,” reads the website of Brooklyn City Council Democratic primary hopeful Menchaca, who marshaled a small army of volunteers in Red Hook.

Carlos Menchaca is running to unseat City Council incumbent Sara Gonzalez in Brooklyn. Photo courtesy Carlos Menchaca campaign

In recent months, Menchaca, a 32- year-old Mexican-American, has emerged from relative anonymity to being a threat to 10-year incumbent Sara Gonzalez, whom he accuses of having been missing in action during Sandy.

Gonzalez’s campaign disputes that claim. “It’s just completely inaccurate,” said spokesman Jake Oliver. “The councilwoman was in Red Hook. She was helping service her constituents before, during and after the storm, coordinating efforts with city agencies, with nonprofits, getting people blankets, space heaters, food, the type of things they needed.”

Like Menchaca, Lisyanskiy, del Rio and Simon have successfully wrapped their political races in a Sandy-derived aura of sanctity.

Lisyanskiy acquired the reputation of being a fired-up emergency responder by distributing goods to the residents of Coney Island’s Amalgamated Warbasse middle-income co-op complex from what he calls on his campaign website “a makeshift operation out of my car.”

“Having helped in the initial recovery efforts myself, I know that Sandy recovery assistance will be essential for our community,” he told The New York World. Lisyanskiy is running in District 47.

And the website for downtown Manhattan District 2 candidate del Rio speaks of the pastor’s leadership during Sandy, under the headline “Courage to Rush in.”

In Queens, Simon is the subject of a glowing blog post touting the “Sandy hero” as running neck-and-neck with his rival in District 32, Eric Ulrich, according to “rumors of an in-house poll.”

Their pitches vary, but these candidates’ tactics have in common is success in recruiting a political base in record time by anchoring their campaign in a Sandy narrative.

Their success so far has been even more evident given their sometimes low public profiles, according to political consultant Steven Stites, who advises Lisyanskiy’s Republican opponent in the election, Andy Sullivan.

“These guys were not very well known, and Sandy was the biggest story of the year,” he said.

“If I was working for Menchaca, that is what I’d talk about; I’d say we’ve been ignored, by city government, by the press, by our councilmember: when we needed her, where was she?”

Menchaca and del Rio had not previously held the kind of local positions, such as on community boards, that typically give politicians the base of supporters to launch a political career.

Menchaca and Lisyanskiy worked as aides to City Council speaker Christine Quinn up until Sandy, a role that typically offers limited opportunities to shine under the limelight. Menchaca also worked on economic development for Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz.

Del Rio, a lifelong pastor who describes himself as a “political outsider,” acknowledges that his electoral support hinges in part on his work during Sandy.

“There’s a lot of people who got to know me during Sandy,” he said in an interview. “It has expanded my base.”

As for Simon, he is no stranger to primary voters in the Rockaways, where he has been a district leader for 18 years. Still, the politician’s scorecard of three defeats in two council and one Assembly race shows a certain lack of support.

Then Sandy shook up the political reality of the districts of these Sandy-propelled politicians. A look at the most recent campaign finance data points to the splash the four candidates have made with their Sandy-focused campaigns.

As of July 15, all had pocketed most donations from voters living in the areas of their district that Sandy scarred most. Menchaca had ramped up $80,000 in donations as of mid-July, an amount that puts him in competing position to his incumbent rival, who has raised $114,000. Both Menchaca and Gonzalez will see these funds swell after their certification to join the city’s public matching fund program.

Most of these donations came from residents living the coastal section of Red Hook that was devastated by Sandy – Gowanus Canal and Red Hook.

In contrast, Gonzalez has been building a war chest on contributions by residents of areas largely spared by Sandy – voters in Sunset Park and Borough Park for the most part.

Lisyanskiy’s donor map shows the same pattern, with the democratic hopeful nearly monopolizing donations from residents in Coney Island.

Mainland voters in Bensonhurst and Gravesend, meanwhile, by and far favored the primary race’s other two serious contenders, Todd Dobrin and Mark Treyger.

Del Rio has prompted more donations from the Lower East Side – the area where the candidate worked during Sandy – than his rival, the incumbent Rosie Mendez.

And District 32 candidate Simon obtained virtually all his donations from Sandy-ravaged Rockaways and Broad Channel. His opponent, Ulrich, is for his part almost exclusively funded by voters in Howard Beach and Ozone Park — on the mainland.

Donors to these races who were interviewed unanimously said that it had been the candidates’ relentless work during Sandy that persuaded them to donate to their campaigns.

Forty-two-year-old Danielle Vidals, a Red Hook resident, said she was without a home for six months after her two-story townhouse was flooded.

In May, she handed Menchaca’s campaign her first contribution ever to a City Council race – $10 she gifted the candidate via his website.

“Carlos was in the thick of it,” she said, adding that she appreciated him checking on her from time to time.

“It sounds terrible, but it’s sort of like when I’m riding the subway: my criteria to give money is that you have to make me laugh, touch me in a way,” she said. “I feel the same way about the politicians.”

Speaking about the incumbent candidate, the councilmember Sara Gonzalez, Vidals echoes Menchaca’s complaint that she was not a presence in the neighborhood during the disaster. “I feel that her focus was not toward Red Hook during Sandy,” she said.

For Andrew Reeves, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis, the races are unfolding as he would expect.

In 2011 study on the short-term effects of natural disasters on presidential and gubernatorial elections, Reeves and his coauthor found that voters inevitably punish incumbents for severe weather events, and reward those politicians who provide aid or make declarations to that effect.

“These natural disasters and in particular superstorm Sandy offer a pop quiz in leadership,” he said. “Those politicians who are perceived to do a good job are potentially looking at reaping some electoral rewards, while those who are not perceived to have done a good job are going to get blasted.” 

Correction: An earlier version of the story indicated that John Lisyanskiy had not served on a community board. He served on Community Board 13.