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A vote that counts
A day or two ago, I got a robo-call from Bill Clinton, followed closely by Senator Chuck Schumer. Not telling me to vote for Barack Obama, but telling me to vote for Joe Addabbo. "Who?" you're probably asking, unless you live within two miles of me.
The State of New York has, like most states, a bicameral legislature. The Assembly has a Democratic majority at the moment, and the Senate has a narrow Republican majority. My state Senator, Serf Maltese, is a Republican, who's been in office for twenty-odd years and wasn't even challenged for re-election for most of those years. (He runs a stereotypically Republican, low-taxes-and-tough-on-crime platform.) Then in 2004 a relative unknown Democrat named Albert Baldeo decided to run for the seat. He got no support whatsoever from the Democratic Party, but came within a whisker of beating Maltese. So the party decided "maybe we should run against this guy after all." In 2008, Baldeo tried again, but the party machine heavily supported City Councilman Joe Addabbo in the spring, Baldeo withdrew from the primary and agreed to support Addabbo.
Then things got serious. Both candidates are getting lots of financial support from their parties, and probably from out-of-state contributors, because this election and one or two others could flip the State Senate to a Democratic majority. Together with our Democratic Governor, that could mean a lot of Democratic initiatives actually passing that have been bottled up in the Senate for years. In the past few weeks, we've gotten dozens of flyers, about a dozen robo-calls, a couple of telephone push polls, and two or three door-to-door canvassers, from both candidates saying increasingly shrill and implausible things about one another.
I've never had the experience of casting a Presidential vote that mattered, since I've never lived in a swing state when a Presidential campaign came around. It feels weird that this time my state Senate vote, as one of tens of thousands of voters in the district rather than tens of millions, is much more important.
The State of New York has, like most states, a bicameral legislature. The Assembly has a Democratic majority at the moment, and the Senate has a narrow Republican majority. My state Senator, Serf Maltese, is a Republican, who's been in office for twenty-odd years and wasn't even challenged for re-election for most of those years. (He runs a stereotypically Republican, low-taxes-and-tough-on-crime platform.) Then in 2004 a relative unknown Democrat named Albert Baldeo decided to run for the seat. He got no support whatsoever from the Democratic Party, but came within a whisker of beating Maltese. So the party decided "maybe we should run against this guy after all." In 2008, Baldeo tried again, but the party machine heavily supported City Councilman Joe Addabbo in the spring, Baldeo withdrew from the primary and agreed to support Addabbo.
Then things got serious. Both candidates are getting lots of financial support from their parties, and probably from out-of-state contributors, because this election and one or two others could flip the State Senate to a Democratic majority. Together with our Democratic Governor, that could mean a lot of Democratic initiatives actually passing that have been bottled up in the Senate for years. In the past few weeks, we've gotten dozens of flyers, about a dozen robo-calls, a couple of telephone push polls, and two or three door-to-door canvassers, from both candidates saying increasingly shrill and implausible things about one another.
I've never had the experience of casting a Presidential vote that mattered, since I've never lived in a swing state when a Presidential campaign came around. It feels weird that this time my state Senate vote, as one of tens of thousands of voters in the district rather than tens of millions, is much more important.
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