State Assemblywoman Claudia Tenney last week was elected to represent the NY-22 Congressional district, after defeating two challengers in a contentious race to succeed retiring Rep. Richard Hanna.
After all the votes were counted throughout the district — which encompasses Chenango, Cortland, Madison and Oneida counties, and parts of Broome, Herkimer, Oswego and Tioga counties — Tenney, a Republican, won with 120,777 votes, or 44 percent, over Democrat Kim Myers, who had 103,955 votes, or 38 percent of the vote. Third party candidate Martin Babinec received 32,303 votes, or about 12 percent of the vote.
“I am humbled that the voters of the 22nd Congressional District have placed their trust in me to represent them in the Congress. I am grateful for each and every vote, for all of my supporters and to have the opportunity to serve. This is among the highest honors of my life,” Tenney said in a released statement. “I will provide an independent voice in Congress for the middle class families, small businesses, family farms and regular hard working people who simply don’t have a voice in Washington. I will work to rebuild New York’s manufacturing economy, stop bad trade deals, secure the border, rebuild our military and protect our veterans.”
Meyers and Babinec both thanked their supporters in released statements.
“I’m proud of the campaign we ran. We fought the good fight with honesty, integrity and truthfulness every day of the past nine and a half months,” Meyers said.
“I knew that running as a third party candidate would be an uphill climb — but that was made all the harder by the establishment political machinery that actively worked against our campaign. I am proud of the positive, issue-based campaign that we ran,” Babinec said.
Within the greater Cazenovia area, Tenney and Meyers split the victories, with Tenney winning Nelson and Fenner, and Meyers winning Cazenovia by more than 100 votes, according to the Madison County Board of Elections.
Within Cazenovia’s six voting districts, voter participation was above 70 percent, according to figures obtained from the three Cazenovia polling sites.
NY-22 Congressional election votes by the numbers
Cazenovia
Claudia Tenney — 1,414
Kim Meyers — 1,532
Martin Babinec — 244
Nelson
Claudia Tenney — 440
Kim Meyers — 392
Martin Babinec — 64
Fenner
Claudia Tenney — 392
Kim Meyers — 271
Martin Babinec — 58
