Republican Tague wins Assembly election
Republican Chris Tague has won the special election for the state’s 102nd Assembly District seat by 229 votes.
The result includes all valid absentee and affidavit ballots submitted in the five-county district, and Democrat Aidan O’Connor Jr. has conceded.
Tague received 8,872 votes to O’Connor’s 8,643. Third-party candidate Wes Laraway had 1,913 votes.
On Tuesday, the final absentee and affidavit ballots were counted in Schoharie County, netting Tague and additional 149 votes and O’Connor another 129. Laraway received another 94 votes.
“Well folks, it’s been a long few weeks while we ensured every single vote was counted, and I would like to say from the bottom of my heart, ‘Thank you,’” Tague said in a prepared statement. “With all the votes accounted for, I have, with your support and faith, come out ahead. Thank you for your vote and belief in me; it has been the most difficult and most humbling experience of my life.”
Tague also said he will be a full-time assemblyman and leave his 25-year career at Cobleskill Stone.
O’Connor, also in a prepared statement, said he wished Tague “the best for fulfilling the remainder of Pete Lopez’s term.”
Lopez, a Republican, vacated the 102nd District seat last fall when he became a regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He had been in the Assembly since January 2007.
Tague will serve out the remainder of Lopez’s twoyear term, which ends Dec. 31, and will have to run again in the November general election if he wants to keep the seat.
The 102nd Assembly District includes all of Greene and Schoharie counties; the town of Saugerties in Ulster County; the towns of Stockport and Stuyvesant in Columbia County; and parts of Otsego, Delaware and Albany counties.
At the end of April 24, the day of the special election, Tague, the town of Schoharie supervisor, led O’Connor, a Greene County legislator, by 288 votes, 8,547-8,259. Laraway had 1,809.