Races to Watch: A GOP Seat at Risk in Upstate New York
The general election campaign for the open seat in New York's 26th congressional district is still largely defined by the rocky primary season that preceded it. Former businessman Chris Lee ran unopposed for the Republican nomination in the district that covers parts of seven counties across a broad swath of upstate New York between Rochester and Buffalo, giving him a substantial financial advantage. As of the last official reporting on August 20, he had about $750,000 on hand, including $470,000 from his own pocket. Meanwhile, his Democratic opponent, environmental lawyer Alice Kryzan, had to compete in a bruising primary contest and reported having just $95,000 on hand.
Despite the fact that Kryzan is spending a lot of her energy making up this financial deficit, the tough primary fight was to her advantage. She was the dark horse against two other Democrats — an Iraq war veteran who had the backing of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and a millionaire who'd previously run against the district's retiring Congressman, Republican Tom Reynolds. After Kryzan's opponents fired off a series of nasty television attacks ads, she produced a brilliantly effective one showing two men engaged in a brawl near a park bench. In the ad, Kryzan appears in the foreground and says, "Boys, take it somewhere else." The high-road message was widely credited with turning the primary in Kryzan's favor, and she ended up with 41% of the vote.
The primary scuffle also helped Kryzan's name recognition and she emerged better known than her opponent Lee, a key advantage in a contest between two political neophytes. Still, the primary battle hasn't made it easy for Kryzan to consolidate Democratic support. Neither of her former Democratic opponents has endorsed her, and one remains on the ballot as the Working Families Party candidate. The party has signaled that it intends to endorse Kryzan, but the local Republican party structure is challenging the constitutionality of changing the name on the ballot.
(See a gallery of campaign gaffes here.)
The key to winning the general election, as that jockeying indicates, will be unaffiliated voters and third-party voting lines on the ballot; the latest reliable poll, sponsored by a local television station and released Sept. 26, put Lee ahead of Kryzan 48-37, with 8% saying they would vote for other candidates and 7% undecided. The district has traditionally leaned Republican, with about 180,000 registered Republicans compared to about 140,000 Democrats, but it also includes more than 90,000 independents, along with nearly 30,000 registered third-party voters. In the 2006 election, incumbent Reynolds won with just 52% of the vote — and 14% of his votes came from the Conservative party line. His challenger got 16% of his votes from the Working Families Party and Independence lines. This year, Republican Lee has the Independence line, which should be a significant boost to his chances.
As the opposite party of the incumbent, Kryzan — like Barack Obama — seems poised to benefit politically from the current turmoil on Wall Street. With the help of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, she has been blasting Lee for refusing to state whether he would have voted for Congress' $700 billion bailout bill. (Kryzan says she would have voted yes; Lee says the bill was "necessary," but an "embarrassment" because it was loaded with so many pork barrel projects.) Upstate New York and the rest of the Rust Belt has been hit particularly hard by the economic downturn, with the region still reeling from the loss of manufacturing jobs over the past several decades. It is fertile ground for anti-corporate sentiment, and Kryzan is tapping it to attack Lee, who is running on his business background; he worked for his family's business, an engineering and technology firm from which he made millions when it was sold to an international conglomerate in 2007. Kryzan says her work as an environmental lawyer means she's poised to help create green-collar jobs in Western New York; she has painted Lee as an irresponsible deregulator, making the tone of the race feel very much like the presidential contest between John McCain and Barack Obama.
Lee has tried to turn the tables on Kryzan, painting her as a liberal candidate who would raise taxes. And she is not immune to anti-corporate attacks. Some of the harshest criticism Kryzan faced in the primary season was for working as a lawyer for the chemical company responsible for the Love Canal disaster of the late 1970s and early 1980s in Niagara Falls. The candidates are set to debate a few times before Election Day, and the negativity will surely be on display. Kryzan is used to the harsh tone from the primary season, but this time she faces a well-financed opponent gunning squarely for her, and she may have a harder time staying above the fray.
(See a gallery of campaign gaffes here.)