UPDATE: With absentee ballots counted, Rachel May has solidified her lead over State Sen. David Valesky in the Democratic primary for the 53rd State Senate District.
While the Oneida County absentee ballot totals were not yet available, May had increased her total by 501 votes to 8,514, while Valesky earned 518 more from Onondaga and Madison counties, bringing his total to 7,925.
With the absentees counted, Valesky issued the following statement:
Rachel May isn’t celebrating yet, but she’s confident her 8,013-to-7,407-vote lead over State Sen. David Valesky will hold even after the absentee ballots are all counted.
“It’s still fluctuating at this point, but my understanding is that it would be pretty miraculous if the absentee ballots were all to break in his direction enough to make up for the difference,” May said.
In a surprising upset, May defeated the seven-term incumbent in the Democratic primary Sept. 13. She hasn’t officially declared victory, and Valesky hasn’t yet conceded.
“First, I’d like to congratulate Rachel on a spirited race,” Valesky said in a statement provided to Eagle Newspapers. “Obviously, the count is very close, but there is a process to ensure that every vote is counted. That process starts today. As that progresses, I’m going to consult with my family to see what the next step is.”
If Valesky has lost the primary, he will still appear on the ballot on the Women’s Equality Party and Independence Party lines. He has not yet decided if he will run on those lines alone.
While the Onondaga County Board of Elections reported that it had received nearly 700 absentee ballots, the Madison and Oneida County boards’ absentee totals were not immediately available. The boards of election will begin counting absentee ballots next week. It could take several weeks to tally them all.
May, coordinator of sustainability education at Syracuse University, was the first candidate to challenge Valesky in a primary in his 14-year career in the State Senate. She said she mounted the challenge because of Valesky’s affiliation with the Independent Democratic Caucus, a group of eight Democrats that formed in 2011 and allied themselves with Senate Republicans in Albany. Though the IDC disbanded earlier this year, of eight former members of the IDC to face primary challenges Thursday, six lost their seats.
“The IDC was formed initially to combat some corruption at the top of the Democratic Party in the Senate, but very quickly those corrupt people were gone and the IDC continued,” May said. “I think it really became a way that Republicans were working to just retain their control of the Senate… Voters were still sending a majority of democrats to Albany, so what they had to do was co-opt a few democrats to help them retain their power.”
She called it a “betrayal” of Democratic voters.
“I felt like we needed our democracy to be located here and the voters’ will to be heard when their elected officials got to Albany,” May said.
She called Valesky “cynical” for continuing to work with the IDC.
“It was assuming that voters wouldn’t pay attention,” she said. “It was sort of taking the voters for granted, and I felt like at this moment in our democracy, we can’t put up with that. We really have to stand for a democracy where everybody’s vote matters and where we really want as many people to participate as possible.”
May said she felt that was why her primary campaign was successful. She said she and her volunteers knocked on more than 4,000 doors and allowed people to feel heard.
“I really think we’re at a moment where people feel like our democracy is very fragile and they don’t want to just be targets of big money campaigns sending lots of ads and robocalls their way,” May said. “They want to feel like they’re participants in our democracy. I really think that that was key to them.”
May said the primary process has also awakened her to the problems with New York’s election laws. She said she’s now shifted the top priority of her campaign from healthcare for all—which she still considers incredibly important—to election reform.
“It just came out to me how broken our election system is, and I heard it from people all over the district that they were frustrated with that, too,” she said. “And the fact that we had a Thursday primary with the doors open at noon and closing at 9, and two primaries in the summer — people were really angry about that, and I think we have to make it easier to vote in New York.”
Assuming May is correct and Valesky doesn’t take enough absentee votes away from her, she will face Republican Janet Burl Burman in November for the seat. She said the message of her campaign won’t change.
“I think what I’m talking about — healthcare for all and good schools and good jobs — these are things that resonate with people across the political spectrum and I think we can make that case,” May said. “One thing I did hear from people is that they are tired of politicians who try to say what they think people want to hear. They want to know what you stand for and I have been talking about the things I stand for and I’m going to keep doing that. I’m not going to suddenly become a different person because I won the primary.”
The 53rd district includes all of Madison County, the Oneida County towns of Augusta and Kirkland, the Onondaga County towns of Cicero, Fabius, Lafayette, Pompey, Salina and Tully and the city of Syracuse.
