‘RED’-DY TO RUMBLE
Man. GOPer’s long-shot bid to unseat Gilly
Chele Farley is no sacrificial lamb. “I’m certainly not doing this as any kind of token effort,” the Republican said of her long-shot campaign to unseat two-term Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand this November.
“I took a year out of my life. I’ve put my own money in this. I would not do that unless I thought there was a real path to victory.”
This first-time candidate does not lack for confidence.
Torrents of stats and proposals tumble from the Manhattan mother of three as she makes the case for sending a New York Republican to the Senate for the first time in two decades.
The GOP’s tax plan, she says, “turned out to be a good bill for the country, it just hurt New York.” And that’s because the blue states are too blue for their own good.
“Senate Republicans admit there was nobody at the table to represent the high-tax states,” she said. “There are no Republicans in the Senate from California, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut — not a one.”
It’s just one example, Farley said, of how Gillibrand’s resistance tactics against the Trump administration have backfired on her own constituents.
“Kirsten Gillibrand sat on her hands and said, ‘Oh, it’s a bad tax bill, I’m doing nothing.’ Which is ridiculous,” Farley said.
Farley, 51, honed her own negotiating skills in a 28-year Wall Street career that she launched after earning two in- dustrial-engineering degrees at Stanford University.
A Senate stuffed with attorneys could put her pragmatism to good use, she thinks.
“I bring a different mindset of actual accomplishment, of looking at the facts and the figures,” she said.
Her top goal in the Senate would be to claw back much of the $60 billion a year that New Yorkers send to Washington, partly through her idea to let renters deduct their monthly housing costs from their taxes, like homeowners do.
“It’ll make a huge difference,” she said. “There are 4 million renters in New York state . . . people who want to save for a down payment, but can’t build wealth because the rent is too high.”
The concept helped earn Farley the endorsement of another novice politician who came up through the business world.
“Honestly, on the merits, you should win,” President Trump told her in front of a roomful of Republicans at an upstate fundraiser in August.
But while Gillibrand had $18 million for her campaign as of June 30, Farley had not broken the $1 million mark.
“When you actually look at Kirsten’s record, she’s put forward at last count 306 bills and only one has passed into law,” Farley said.
“And it was a bill to rename a post office.”
Gillibrand has agreed to meet Farley for a single debate Oct. 21 — her sole acknowledgment of the GOP campaign against her.