Dem$ feel confident
Eye ’16 elex with full coffers
ALBANY — With more than a year left before the crucial elections to determine which party will control the state Senate, the Democrats are in their best financial position in years. The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee this week will report having raised more than $800,000 over the past six months.
More importantly, the debt-free Dems will report having nearly $700,000 on hand as they prepare to again try to wrest control of the Senate from the Republicans — in a presidential year that always inflates Democratic turnout in New York.
By comparison, during the same July filing period in the last nonelection year in 2013, the Dems reported raising $717,241 for the 2014 election but only had $2,534 left in the bank. On top of that, the campaign committee still had $665,000 in outstanding debt.
Two years before that, another presidential election cycle, the Dems’ account was $11,199 in the red and carried $2.3 million in outstanding liabilities.
“The successful restructuring, and getting our house in order, brings us to a point where we’re poised for incredible success,” said Senate Deputy Minority Leader Michael Gianaris (below), the Queens Democrat who chairs the campaign committee.
Currently, the 63-seat Senate is ruled by a GOP majority conference made up of 32 Republicans and one Democrat — Sen. Simcha Felder of Brooklyn. The GOP is also aligned with the five-member Independent Democratic Conference.
With 25 members, the mainline Dems would need to pick up seven seats to win full control of the chamber — or one or two seats, depending on what Felder does — to at least be in a position to strike a co-governing deal with the Independent Democratic Conference.
The recent illegal strike at the Hudson Yards construction site by the New York City District Council of Carpenters has thrown major uncertainty over the long-term fate of a controversial 421-a affordable housing tax credit program for developers.
The program was extended in June by Gov. Cuomo and the Legislature for six months to give the Real Estate Board of New York and the city’s labor unions time to reach a deal on required wages for construction workers. If a deal is reached, the program will be extended until June 2019.
But after the carpenters’ walkout, which came despite there being a project labor agreement in place forbidding strikes and ended only after a judge ordered them back to work, the Real Estate Board raised the issue to state lawmakers, asking they urge the unions to negotiate in good faith over the 421-a program, a source close to the situation said.
“Who in their right mind would let the unions and (the Real Estate Board) decide the fate of 421-a?” the source said. “It’s just a very bad move.”
Rather than vacationing with his family out West for eight days, Mayor de Blasio would have been better served heading upstate and spending some private time mending fences with state Senate Republicans in their districts, a Democratic activist suggested.
“If he was serious about his job, he would try to work with these people instead of antagonize them,” the Dem said. “What’s amazing is the guy has managed to antagonize both the Senate and Assembly in a year.”
Said de Blasio spokeswoman Karen Hinton: “This is hardly worth addressing, except to say it’s nonsense and silly politics.”
Surprised at the unusual deal Cuomo cut with the Senate Republicans to delay implementation of a major part of his legacy gun-control SAFE Act, Democrats and liberal activists say the move came at a time when the governor should be trying to heal the rift with the progressive wing of the party — not exacerbate it.
“It’s a really bizarre thing to do,” said one legislative Democrat. A Cuomo spokesman noted the governor recently took left-friendly actions like naming Attorney General Eric Schneiderman as a special prosecutor to investigate police killings of unarmed civilians and signing into law a bill requiring tougher campus sexual assault policies.