It's not getting the attention that the NY-29 race between Fighting Democrat Eric Massa and Randy Kuhl is getting, and probably with good reason (Massa's looking much more likely to win), but there's some tentatively good news today from NY-25, where there now won't be a primary to divert attention from the main show in November.
Paloma Capanna, who was behind in the race for the Democratic nomination, dropped out of the race today, and she did it with the kind of grace and class we should expect from all our candidates. (Joe? Joe? You listening?)
Here's the PDF of Capanna's announcement today, in which she had a lot of nice things to say about
Dan Maffei, who now gets to focus all his energies on running against nine-term GOP incumbent Jim Walsh this fall.
How nice? This nice:
I learned from him, he learned from me, and both of us stayed focused on our goal: to defeat Jim Walsh.
Maffei still has an uphill battle against Walsh, who's using all the advantages of incumbency as hard as he can - constituent mailings, about five times the TV budget Maffei has.
But he's got a few things going for him that Capanna didn't have. The 25th is another one of those goofy gerrymandered upstate districts, encompassing much of the Syracuse area but stretching 70 miles or so to the west to take in a few of the reliably Republican eastern suburbs of Rochester. (Until 2002, those towns used to be in Louise Slaughter's district, and Walsh is still something of a new face on the Rochester end of the 25th as a result.)
Capanna, who's a family lawyer in one of those Rochester suburbs, never had the name recognition of Maffei, who's from Syracuse. And Maffei's a former aide to Pat Moynihan, with superior party connections that netted him the endorsement of most of the county Democratic parties, including the one in Rochester.
There was really no loser here. Capanna made the most of her low-budget campaign, including a made-for-TV bicycle ride across the district to collect petition signatures, and I hope she'll be back to run for something else soon.
Make no mistake about it, Maffei still has one hell of an uphill battle. Walsh won something like 90% of the vote in 2004. But there's been at least one promising poll that puts Maffei within striking distance, and if he can afford to run TV advertising in both Rochester and Syracuse, he just might have a shot.
I'm sure Louise (who faces only token opposition) and Eric Massa (who's going to pull off his race against Randy Kuhl) would appreciate the company in Washington next January.