Election day is around the corner, coming this Tuesday, November 4. Rockland’s congressional District 17 representative, Democrat Nita Lowey, has found herself in a tougher race than first anticipated. Chris Day, son of Rockland County Executive Ed Day, has shown himself to be a nimble and tireless political opponent, using digital media to offset Lowey’s huge campaign financial advantage to communicate his message.
Lowey has served 13 terms in Congress and is the senior democrat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, and is known for bringing home the bacon to her Hudson Valley constituents. Lowey has recently gone old school on Day with a series of expensive negative mailings that Day has called a “smear” and “outright lies.”
Political pundit Ryan Karben wrote that “seething suburban voters are threatening the re-election prospects” of Lowey, who Karben reported has spent one million dollars on this re-election campaign. Day has reportedly only spent $10,000 in the last expense cycle – but has still managed to gain traction against Lowey.
Day and Lowey face off in a live debate Wednesday evening on News 12 at 7 p.m.
Nervous Nita Spends $1M As Angry Suburbanites Sound Off by Ryan Karben
Seething suburban voters are threatening the re-election prospects of longtime Democratic Congresswoman Nita Lowey (D-Westchester/Rockland) and markedly constraining the margin of victory for Governor Andrew Cuomo. The vaunted Democratic get-out-the-vote operation will likely carry the day in the end, but it is battling some of the most pissed off people in America.
Last week, Siena reported that voters in the suburbs now believe the state is headed in the wrong direction by a margin of 53 to 40.
Even in economically challenged upstate, voters who believe things are in the state are going in the wrong direction only narrowly edge those with a positive view. And it’s a world away from New York City, where voters who believe things are going well outnumber those think they aren’t by a 20-point margin.
Suburban angst steams from a politically toxic brew of relentless property tax hikes, anxiety over diversifying schools and shock over seemingly ceaseless land development. Despite a Cuomo-enacted 2% cap on property tax increases, well-to-do retirees and new suburban homeowners both blame state government for property tax bills exceeding $15,000 a year.
As a result, the Governor has stitched together a motley coalition of upstate Republican business leaders, minority voters, GOP-averse women and Jews to withstand the bad luck wind.
Cuomo acknowledged last month that “A governor becomes a sort of barometer of the times, and these are troubling times; these are scary times.”
Battle royale in #NY17 as @NitaLowey spends it all to save her seat http://t.co/VFMmSJsiJ0 @dccc @GOP @NRCC @NJDC @RJCHQ @NYinDC @hillhulse
— Ryan Karben (@rkarben) October 27, 2014
Nervous Nita
Cuomo’s courting of upstate voters and careful tending to ethnic constituencies demonstrates just how methodically the governor’s campaign has prepared for what it always knew would be a real, if not fully competitive, race.
13-term Congresswoman Nita Lowey confers with Hillary Clinton in Washington, DC / Courtesy Karben Copy
But Cuomo’s longtime ally Congresswoman Nita Lowey was caught embarrassingly flat-footed by the suburbs’ shifting political sands and is struggling to retain the House seat she has held since 1988.
The nearly 2 to 1 Democratic enrollment edge in New York’s 17th Congressional district was supposed to protect Lowey from any credible challenge to her twenty-five year reign. Even as her district shifted north to include all of Rockland County, no one ever put Lowey on a congressional watch list.
But the terrain has been growing less friendly to Lowey for some time. In 2009, Astorino ousted the longtime Democratic county executive of Westchester. Last year, Rockland voters extended the Republicans’ 20-year hold on their county government, soundly rejecting the Democrat, a former Lowey aide. Democrats significantly outnumber Republican voters in both counties.
Lowey could lose. And she knows it.
Chris Day’s red pencil response to Nita Lowey mailer in the District 17 race.
Last week, her campaign launched a direct mail assault on her Republican rival, 29-year old Army vet and Yale grad Chris Day, who has never held elective office and can’t afford any campaign mailings.
According to the Federal Elections Commission, Day spent less than $10,000 during the last expenditure reporting period. He has run an intense digital campaign, with social media chronicling a fearsome campaign schedule.
Bizarrely, on the same day the region’s major media outlet, The Journal News, approvingly noted Day as a moderate Republican, Lowey mailed voters that “Day is affiliated with right-wing extremists” and has a “radical conservative agenda.” The literature smelled like a combination of fresh ink and desperation. Lowey’s challenge reflects a dangerous mix of the broader anti-incumbent, anti-Obama mood in the region and personal political missteps.
Helped dedicate 3 #Suffern parking lots to 6 local victims lost in 9/11 attacks. We must support victims’ families. pic.twitter.com/AUkHLlEaqS
— Nita Lowey (@NitaLowey) October 16, 2014
Lowey keeps a far lower profile at community events in the district compared with Eliot Engel, the Congressman who represented large swaths of the area until 2012 and was omnipresent despite his Bronx political base. And the wealthy Congresswoman has not connected with constituents in the Rockland County portion of district, where very rich candidates for public office are unusual.
GOP Congressional candidate Chris Day (r) congratulates his father, Rockland County Executive Ed Day, on Election Night 2013 / Karbon Copy
But ever since an August poll conducted for her campaign by the Global Strategy Group showed support for her re-election to be Pillsbury-dough boy soft, Lowey opened the spending floodgates in an all out effort to save her political hide. According to the Federal Elections Commission, Lowey is on track to spend over $1 million in just three months- an unheard of sum for a longtime incumbent in a district with 2:1 partisan advantage. Lowey even pulled Hillary Clinton off of a national fundraising tour for embattled Democrats for a Manhattan fundraiser.
The numbers tell the story: in the closing weeks of her 2012 re-election bid, Lowey sent $165,000 to the state’s Democratic Party to aid other candidates. This time, Lowey is spending it on herself. Her last financial filing shows nearly $400,000 in bills for a dozen direct mail pieces and television ads for her own re-election and not a dime for the state party.
Strangely, none of Lowey’s campaign mailers mention any issue specific to the Westchester/Rockland district she represents. And the Congresswoman remains far in the media background on the major issues facing her district, from the new cross-Hudson Tappan Zee Bridge to the fate of the nationally-known and troubled East Ramapo School District.
Lowey still has a loyal following in Westchester, despite the strong Republican vote that will be pulled out there by Astorino’s gubernatorial campaign. And Hasidic leaders in Rockland are giving her a reluctant blessing because of their dislike for her rival and his father Ed, who was elected Rockland County Executive last year on platform opposing that community’s growth.
Lowey should win.
But after this year’s bruising campaign, it’s likely her next term will be her last.
