Democrats declare victory in historic fight for State Senate

Nov. 07--ALBANY -- Democrats come January will seize control of the state Capitol after Republicans Tuesday night suffered major losses in key state Senate races, forcing a flip in the partisan leadership of the 63-member house after a century of GOP domination.

The defeats put the Democrats, a majority of whose ranks come from New York City and its close-in suburbs, in command of the state Assembly, the Senate and, with his re-election Tuesday, in the governor's mansion following Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's third term re-election victory.

Democrats stunned Republicans by winning seven seats now held, or previously held, by Republicans. One contest in the lower Hudson Valley was still being counted as of sunrise Wednesday, but the Republican was trailing there. Democrats also held onto all seats they occupied during the current legislative session.

The results mean a sea change is coming to Albany as the Democrats pushed the Senate Republicans into the lowly and powerless position of the political minority. Further, while most years see two or three battleground contests, the 2018 Senate races had 10 or more that broke the sweat of its participants. The term "razor thin" to describe the years of GOP majority status has been replaced by the "solid" majority won by Democrats on Tuesday.

Democrats have vowed quick action come January on a number of policy items, from abortion rights expansion and early voting in elections to legalization of recreational marijuana.

Democrats needed a net pickup of only one seat to assume control of the Senate's majority. Going into Election Day, Republicans and Democrats each had 31 seats, but the GOP was kept in power with the vote of a renegade Democrat from Brooklyn.

With several of her candidates having won or leading in districts long controlled by Republicans, the leader of the Senate Democrats at 11 p.m. declared victory for her party.

"The voters of New York State have spoken and they have elected a clear Democratic majority to the State Senate," said Senate Minority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a Westchester County Democrat who is set to become the Senate's leader in two months.

Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan, meanwhile, seemed to be conceding.

The Long Island Republican called the results "disappointing," and added: "This election is over, but our mission is not. Senate Republicans will never stop advocating for the principles we believe in or the agenda that New Yorkers and their families deserve."

Within a couple hours after polls closed at 9 p.m., the end of the GOP's Senate reign was clear. The sole Republican from Brooklyn, incumbent Senator Martin Golden, saw an early lead slowly evaporate through the night and he lost to Democrat Andrew Gounardes by a 1,000-vote margin with 63,000 votes cast in that race.

In the Hudson Valley, the numbers turned sour for the Republicans, too. In an Orange County-based district with an open race, the Democratic candidate, Assemblyman James Skoufis defeated Republican opponent Tom Basile by more than 6,000 votes.

In another open seat in the Hudson Valley, Democrat Jennifer Metzger, a councilwoman in a small town in Ulster County, beat Republican Ann Rabbitt, the Orange County clerk. In Dutchess County, incumbent GOP Senator Sue Serino, a real estate broker, narrowly defeated her Democratic challenger, Karen Smythe, thanks to hundreds of thousands of dollars pumped into the district by a Realtors' Super PAC working to help Serino.

One Westchester County-based district is still too close to call because 4 percent of districts have not yet closed down the vote count, state election board records showed at 7 a.m. today. GOP incumbent Senator Terrence Murphy was 2,100 votes behind Democrat Peter Harckman.

But the big story for the Democrats came on Long Island, where Republicans only two years ago held all nine seats. By Wednesday morning, it appears just three Republicans will be representing the island's three million residents come January when a new session starts in Albany. It was a remarkable night for Democrats there considering the mighty hand the Long Island Senate Republicans have held in Albany. Since the 1990s, it has boasted of having three of the last four Senate GOP majority leaders come from Long Island, including Flanagan and the recently convicted Dean Skelos, who is heading to prison after getting nabbed in a corruption scheme with his son.

In Long Island's eastern half in Suffolk County, which two years ago backed President Trump in his election two years ago, Democratic county legislator Monica Martinez defeated Assemblyman Dean Murray in a long-reliable GOP district whose incumbent left Albany this year to return to the U.S. Navy.

In Long Island's Nassau County, Democrats beat back a challenge against a freshman senator, John Brooks; Republicans invested heavily in that seat as part of the retain-the-Senate plan.

In Western New York, all Republican senators kept their jobs, though some with margins of error more narrow than they've enjoyed in past elections. In the Albany area heading north, Senate Republicans kept their jobs or won open seats, including on GOP candidate who was running against an ex-aide to Cuomo.

Besides that effort not working for the Republicans, three GOP incumbents, including the powerful heads of the Senate education and health care committees, were heading to defeat in counting still underway early Wednesday morning. By sunrise, Democrats appeared to have picked up six of nine Long Island seats. Flanagan, the GOP leader, won his seat, but he returns to office where his membership in Albany's Albany's three-men-in-a-room power structure will be shuttered.

In Another Nassau race, incumbent Sen. Carl Marcellino, the education chairman, lost by nearly 10,000 votes to Democrat James F. Gaughran, a lawyer and former Suffolk County legislator. Millions of dollars were pumped into that contest.

Senator Kemp Hannon, a Nassau County Democrat, was trailing Democrat Kevin Thomas by 1,300 votes. But by 6 a.m. Wednesday, the state election board reported all machine ballots in that race had been counted.

Freshman Senate Republican Elaine Phillips of Nassau County, too, lost to a Democrat, Anna Kaplan, a North Hempstead councilwoman.

Precisely how many seats the Democrats will end up with was still to be determined in final counting overnight or perhaps with paper ballot counting in the weeks ahead, but they will have a solid majority of likely 35 or more members.

The races, and money, were focused heavily on Long Island, Brooklyn, the Hudson Valley and Syracuse areas, where Republicans -- except one race -- were on the defensive. The Republicans also found themselves having to engage heavily in five districts that had been safe GOP seats until their officeholders announced their retirements this year, thereby creating open seats that are more of a toss-up. In the Syracuse area, both parties were waiting to see if a longtime GOP stronghold could be upended by John Mannion, a public school teacher running with the deep financial support of the state's biggest teachers union; Republicans held onto that seat via the election of Robert Antonacci, the Onondaga comptroller.

The Senate has been dominated by Republicans for the better part of 100 years. A brief, two-year takeover by the Democrats in 2009 was marked by chaos, a bloodless coup, infighting, big tax increases and big chunks of dysfunction. Democrats today bristle at the comparison to that period, saying most of the Senate Democratic membership joined after 2010 and that they will be far more disciplined that what was witnessed during those two years.

Senate Republicans went into the final weeks of the races with a number of disadvantages from two years ago, when the GOP last successfully held onto power despite a pitched battle between the parties.

First, they no longer had Cuomo providing cover for them. Cuomo did much to protect the GOP's Senate power base over the years, none more notably than in 2012 when he broke a campaign vow and let the Republicans draw the Senate district lines during the once-a-decade redistricting process. The GOP drew the lines to try to blunt the state's increasing march to the Democratic side, given witness by the ever-expanding enrollment of Democratic voters over Republicans.

Cuomo was served well by the Senate GOP. They gave in to him on a host of left-leaning issues, including marriage equality rights for gay people and one of the nation's strongest gun control laws. They also helped him draw a line between himself and Assembly Democrats, who would have moved far to the left of Cuomo, especially on fiscal policies.

Cuomo many times thanked Flanagan and his predecessor, the since-convicted Dean Skelos, for a host of major deals he struck with the Republicans over the past eight years.

That all changed after the state budget was wrapped up in April, when Cuomo, facing a Democratic Party primary from a challenger on the left, stepped up efforts to unify warring Democrats that had been split into two factions for much of his tenure as governor. Cuomo worked with the smaller of those factions, called the Independent Democratic Conference, which had a power-sharing deal with the GOP.

Since the spring, the IDC evaporated, and nearly all of its members won't be returning to Albany in January after suffering defeats during the September primaries at the hands of candidates far to the left of them.

One of the chief issues in the overall Senate races -- from upstate to the Hudson Valley -- became not a person but a place: New York City. Republican candidates sought to highlight with their constituents that a Senate Democratic takeover would firmly put lawmakers from New York City -- just by the numbers -- in control of the 63-member chamber.

"It's to upstate's detriment if New York City leadership is in control of all the branches of government," Sen. Patrick Gallivan, an Elma Republican, said recently.

But Democrats dismiss those worries.

"We are very, very clear that New York State is one state and that it is important that we grow the economy throughout the state ... I'm not entertaining pitting one part of New York against the other," Senate Minority Leader Andrea-Stewart Cousins, a Westchester Democrat, said in an interview last month.

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