NY-SD01: State Senate Dems' political arm targets Palumbo (R) in new ad buy
The state Democratic Senate Campaign Committee isn’t just looking to defend the party’s supermajority in the chamber – it’s looking to go on the offensive and flip some seats as well. With that in mind, the state Senate Democrats’ cash-flush political arm is spending six figures on a new ad trashing Republican state Sen. Anthony Palumbo in a bid to help Democratic challenger Sarah Anker.
The race for the 1st State Senate District has flown somewhat under the radar thus far. The Suffolk County seat has long been held by Republicans. Former state Sen. Kenneth LaValle represented the district for decades. He retired at the end of 2020, and Palumbo – then a member of the Assembly – won the open seat to replace him, besting Democratic first-time candidate Laura Ahearn that year by just under 3 percentage points. Palumbo won reelection by a much more comfortable margin in 2022, defeating Democrat Skyler Johnson by nearly 12 points. (Two years later, Johnson ran for an overlapping Assembly seat and lost in the Democratic primary.)
This year, Democrats are running Anker, who unlike the other two recent candidates, already has a long electoral track record. She has served in the Suffolk County Legislature for over 12 years, winning seven elections to hold onto that seat before she was term-limited out of office last year.
The new ad paid for by the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee will run both on television and online. It takes aim at Palumbo without explicitly naming Anker, knocking the Republican for votes he took both as a state senator and during his time in the Assembly. Palumbo was still in the Assembly in 2019 when Democrats finally gained control of the state Senate and passed the Reproductive Health Act, which codified Roe v. Wade and updated the state’s decades-old abortion laws. Palumbo voted against the law. The ad also criticizes him for voting against gun safety bills that Democrats have passed largely along party lines in recent years. “State Sen. Anthony Palumbo is getting too comfortable in Albany, and forgetting who he’s supposed to work for,” a voiceover in the ad charges.
https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2024/10/state-senate-dems-political-arm-targets-palumbo-new-ad-buy/400433/?oref=csny-category-lander-featured-river