Democrats flipped eight GOP-held seats to give Dems 39–24 majority in the Senate and control over the Governor, Senate and Assembly. This sets up the Legislature to start putting long-blocked bills in front of the Governor for his signature. How progressive is Cuomo? We should soon find out.
In the absence of polls, campaign finance data is a poor substitute, but it’s what we have to work with. Before the election, my reading of the data led me to estimate that as many as nine GOP-held seats would flip. Eight is a great outcome.
What’s less clear is whether or not the campaign finance data provides a way to predict which races would flip. Here are the results of the 14 races I tracked:
The composition of the NY Senate in 2019 will look like this:
How times have changed. In 2017, the NY Senate looked like this:
Congrats to everyone who worked on this outcome! Kudos to all the candidates, to organized labor and especially to the grassroots groups without whom this wouldn’t have been possible.
