But if all this seems rosy for the Democrats, it must be noted that there are a few key factors make it an uphill battle for them. First off, Faso has tons of campaign cash and has outraised all but one of the Democratic candidates. Moreover, the Ryan poll showed that despite his low approval rating, Faso still runs competitive with Ryan and Delgado, two of the frontrunners. This might indicate that there is still a deep partisan or cultural divide keeping Republicans who disapprove of Faso from voting Democratic. Or perhaps it’s simply because those two, and most other Democrats, haven’t bothered to campaign in half the district.
A history lesson furthers the Democrats’ grim prognosis.
A graveyard for progressive hopes
2014 was a bad year for Democratic House candidates, but even national misfortunes to the tune of a 26-seat swing for the GOP pale in comparison to NY19 Democrats’ misfortunes. Democratic nominee Sean Eldridge, a New York City venture capitalist married to Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. The couple bought a $2 million house in the district just months before Eldridge filed to run. He faced off against Chris Gibson, a popular moderate Republican incumbent and a war hero, in the general election,. Eldridge was dogged by accusations of being a carpetbagger. Despite outraising Gibson 3 to 1, Eldridge, whose firmly progressive campaign focused more on national issues than local ones, was trounced by Gibson. Just two years earlier, Barack Obama had won NY19 by 6 points.
In 2016, NY19 deflated yet another progressive candidate’s opportunity flip the seat. Zephyr Teachout was a Fordham law professor who, like Eldridge, migrated from New York City to the Hudson Valley shortly before filing to run. She was defeated by Republican John Faso, a former State Assemblyman who had previously been the Republican nominee for New York Governor. Faso won by nearly 10 points.
The 2018 Democratic candidates seem confident that each of them can finally be the foil to the long string of Republican victories in NY19.
The Plucky Seven
The Democratic candidates in NY19 have more commonalities than differences. All identify as progressive, though some more so than others, and none have held public office. Moreover, all can reasonably call NY19 their home. With a lack of true policy diversity between candidates, the race has instead distilled into a clash of distinctive personalities and backgrounds. It can often be hard to tell who is in the lead, but based on fundraising, a few polls, public and private, there appear to be three frontrunners.Leading the pack by most measures is Antonio Delgado, a lawyer at the prestigious New York law firm Akin Gump who lives in Rhinebeck. Delgado carries with him an air of inevitability and exudes an Obama-like charisma that makes it feel as though he’s run in a thousand campaigns. An alum of Colgate, Harvard Law school, and Oxford University by way of a Rhodes scholarship, Delgado has an intellectual pedigree that rivals or even exceeds Obama’s. His energy, passion, and clear vision make him a solid candidate. His persona feels comfortable and familiar to voters in a time of fear and tumult, and brings with it the kind of achieving-the-American-dream story that has never gone out of vogue in the history of American political campaigns.
As of the latest FEC quarterly filing deadline at the end of March, Delgado has raised an astonishing sum of nearly $2 million in campaign cash–three quarters of which came from donations of more than $1,000–which he can deploy against Faso. His campaign believes this makes him the best positioned to defeat Faso, which is why a common refrain in his stump and the speeches of those endorsing him is, “he can win.”
Delgado’s greatest vulnerabilities come in the source of his fundraising and community roots. Delgado certainly has stronger roots than Teachout, having been born in Schenectady and educated at Colgate. He now resides in Rhinebeck with his wife, a longtime Kingston resident. But some have alleged that Delgado has built the bulk of his life outside the district, at Harvard and Oxford, then in Los Angeles as a hip hop artist and New York City working for Akin Gump. In addition, the fact that the bulk of his campaign funds come from high-dollar campaign donations, including well over $100,000 alone from employees of Akin Gump, has made him a target for progressives looking for campaign finance purity.
