Stec leading NY-21 Conservative Party preferences
PARTY PREFERENCE
The Conservative Party Executive Committee will be meeting with Stec, Assemblyman Chris Tague (R-Schoharie), and Liz Joy, a conservative speaker and writer from Glenville, in the coming days.
'The Party could get behind any one of those three candidates, but Senator Stec remains the Party preference,' O'Reilly said. 'The Conservative Party has informed GOP leaders that it hopes to work with them to advance one of these three. Discussions are ongoing.'
The special election will be held to fill the congressional seat that will be vacant when U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik resigns to become U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
VOTE NEARING
A U.S. Senate confirmation vote is expected to be held around April 2, according to multiple national news reports.
Unlike a regular election, there is no primary in a special election.
Party chairs in the 15 counties in the 21st Congressional District select the nominee.
All three of the Conservative Party's acceptable candidates are also seeking the Republican nomination, and were on a list of 11 finalists Republican leaders announced earlier this month.
State election law allows candidates to run on multiple party lines and combine the votes received on all lines in the tabulation.
Conservative party leaders have said they hope to run the same candidate as the Republican party.
The Democratic candidate is Blake Gendebien, a farmer from Lisbon, in St. Lawrence County.
The Gendebien campaign announced March 19 that it has raised more than $2 million since mid-December.
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Trump backed a scramble to redraw congressional seats in Texas. Michigan ‘not engaging'
Michigan is a political battleground, but the state will likely stay out of the redistricting war threatening to upend the congressional map ahead of the 2026 midterm election. In fact, Michigan's swing state status has yielded divided state government, essentially taking it out of a fight in which one-party rule is a kind of precondition for participation. The process of drawing new voting districts typically happens once every ten years following the decennial census. But a mid-decade redistricting shake-up began when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, called a special legislative session to redraw congressional districts in his state. President Donald Trump has expressed his hope that new lines will allow Republicans to pick up five more seats for Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has moved ahead with a plan to suspend the map drawn by his state's independent redistricting commission to ask voters to adopt lines that favor Democrats. Michigan has a redistricting commission similar to the one in California. Independent redistricting advocates have railed against politically skewed voting districts designed to benefit one political party, describing such gerrymandering as a way to distort election outcomes by letting politicians choose their voters instead of the other way around. In Michigan, voters passed a constitutional amendment in 2018 that wrested control of the redistricting process from lawmakers and put the pen in the hands of a group of randomly selected voters charged with drawing fair maps. Several factors mean Michigan is all but guaranteed to stay on the sidelines of the battle to control Congress by changing the map: legal safeguards protecting Michigan's citizen-led redistricting process, the partisan makeup of the state's Legislature, election timelines and a general disinterest among politicians to interfere. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said she has no interest in redrawing the lines. "We're not changing any maps in Michigan," she told reporters Aug. 20. "What's going on in Texas I think is an affront to democracy, and so it's understandable that you've got other states starting to have similar conversations about what's possible. We're not engaging in that here in Michigan." While the leaders of both major political parties in the state may not agree on much, they have one thing in common: neither is clamoring to see a new congressional map put in place before the 2030 census triggers the next redistricting cycle. Michigan Democratic Party Chair Curtis Hertel condemned Texas Republicans' redistricting push as a power grab and applauded Democratic governors for trying to fight the map with their own efforts to change their state's congressional districts. But Hertel said he's not calling on Michigan Democrats to try to follow in their footsteps, and he expressed pride in the redistricting process approved by Michigan voters to create fair maps. "I don't want to go back," he said. It also wasn't top of mind for Michigan GOP Chair state Sen. Jim Runestad, R-White Lake, who said he wanted to do more research on the redistricting fight playing out in Texas before commenting. In a follow-up call, Runestad characterized Newsom's redistricting push as a partisan endeavor in contrast to Texas, where he said lawmakers seemed to be focused on addressing concerns the U.S. Department of Justice raised about how their congressional map divided voters of color into different voting districts. Critics have characterized the department's allegations as a kind of pretext for partisan gerrymandering in Texas. Even if Michigan politicians wanted to try to take back control of the redistricting process now, they would have a steep hill to climb. Changing the process in Michigan would require an amendment to the state's constitution. With the support of two-thirds of members in both chambers of the Michigan Legislature, lawmakers could put forward a constitutional amendment asking voters to change the redistricting process again. But Michigan Democrats control the Michigan Senate while Republicans control the Michigan House, a composition that makes it highly unlikely lawmakers would come together across party lines to agree to such an amendment. Michigan voters could also propose a constitutional amendment, but no campaign has emerged to put redistricting back on the ballot to ask voters to essentially dismantle the redistricting process that they put in place. Even if it did, voters wouldn't have a chance to take it up until the November 2026 election. 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The Hill
15 minutes ago
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Democrats alarmed over new data showing voters fleeing to GOP
Democrats are sounding the alarm on new data showing they are losing voters to Republicans across the country. A devastating New York Times report Wednesday showed that of the 30 states that maintain voter registration records by political party, Democrats fell behind Republicans in all of them between the 2020 and 2024 elections. In total, Republicans added up to 4.5 million voters compared to Democrats, creating a huge hold that could set Democrats back for years. 'I think it should be an alarm' for the Democratic Party, said party strategist Eddie Vale. 'I think it's a real problem.' The new data comes as Democrats struggle to figure out how to get out of the political wilderness after losing the presidency to Donald Trump and control of both chambers of Congress to the GOP. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has found traction with attacks on Trump, mimicking the president on social media and energizing many in his party. 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The Hill
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Fiscal cliff looms as public media braces for Trump cuts
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Isgitt's organization is the driving force behind a philanthropic effort, known as the Public Media Bridge Fund, which has raised more than $26 million for stations at risk of shuttering in wake of the CPB cuts. 'For these at-risk stations, CPB typically sends about $55 million a year, just to these 115 that we've identified,' Isgitt told The Hill. He said the goal is to raise about $100 million over two years to help cover that gap for these stations, while exploring ways for them to become 'more sustainable over time,' including finding other sources of revenue or reducing expenditures. In total, a group of philanthropic organizations including The Knight Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Schmidt Family Foundation, all longtime backers of public media, pledged to commit nearly $37 million this week to provide immediate relief to public media stations at risk of closure following federal funding cuts. 'Local public media stations are trusted community anchors that connect people to vital news, culture and civic life,' Maribel Pérez Wadsworth, president and CEO of Knight Foundation said in a statement. 'This is an urgent moment that calls for bold action.' Public broadcasting stations have also seen a boost in donations in response to the cuts, with reports showing tens of millions of dollars in increased support in recent months. But advocates for public media say much more is needed to fill a more than $500 million hole for the coming fiscal year. Some say the void left by the closure of local public media stations would pose a risk to public safety and quality of life, particularly in rural communities. 'Like many people, I learned to read and count because of public media. It's the lifeblood of so many localities,' said Pete Loge, who teaches communications and media at George Washington University. 'Trump is a really good big national theatre and spectacle … the irony is a move like this is made to seem like it's attacking liberals, but it's actually harming a lot of Republican constituents.' The CPB said earlier this month it would begin an 'orderly wind-down of its operations' after the GOP-led Congress approved about $1 billion in cuts to the corporation, or combined funding previously made available for the organization for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. It also said this week that it 'no longer can absorb costs and manage the Next Generation Warning System (NGWS) grant program' as a result of the cuts to its operating costs. CPB partnered with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to implement the program. Congress currently has until Sept. 30 to pass legislation to keep the government funded into fiscal 2026, which begins Oct. 1, or risk its first government shutdown in years. Some on Capitol Hill are hopeful that lawmakers could still pull out a bipartisan fix to protect local stations, mainly in rural areas, that rely on funding from the federal government to operate. 'I think that the discussion around their decisions really was focused on national programming and concerns that people had about NPR and PBS, and I think that really what got missed in that whole discussion was the impact that this rescission was going to have on local stations,' Kate Riley, the president and chief executive officer for America's Public Television Stations (APTS), said. 'We've talked to a wide range of members, including many Republicans, who strongly support their local stations and recognize the essential role that their local stations provide in serving their community and their constituents, and are realizing now that this broad rescission has had some unintended consequences on their local stations,' Riley said. Funding for CPB was notably excluded in the annual funding bill for the departments of Labor and Health and Human Services that was passed by the Senate Appropriations Committee last month. The CPB said it marked the first time in more than five decades the funding had been left out. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (Wis.), the top Democrat on the subcommittee that crafts the annual funding bill, suggested funding for local stations could find bipartisan support in Congress, separate from the administration's efforts to dismantle CPB. 'A priority for most of the Republicans who have announced their support or their opposition to defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is that they have many small rural stations' Baldwin told The Hill. 'Their capacity to do private fundraising is very limited if you serve a very, you know, rural population with a small population, but they need it for emergency alerts and educational programming and local news. And so, I think that's where we're going to be able to come together.' But for some stations, the time crunch is tighter. NPR said multiple stations began their fiscal 2026 budget in July. Isgitt also noted that November, when many public stations would typically receive funding from CPB, will also be a critical time for other outlets. 'I don't know what cash flow or assets look like for every one of these stations, but you can be assured that, in the months after November, several stations will begin to fail, and then more will fail, and more will fail after that,' he said. 'It's going to happen. This is a cash-strapped industry.' Republicans said they had worked out a deal with the administration aimed at helping shield tribal stations from the cuts by repurposing other funds for the effort. But Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), a senior appropriator, has raised questions about the funding and noted that many stations in her state, which has a significant indigenous population, could still fall through the cracks because they aren't considered tribally-owned or serving tribal land. 'I have to figure out a way to maintain not just the tribal stations, because half of those stations are not tribal,' Murkowski told The Hill. 'They're pretty dang important, and so, yeah, I got to find a way. I don't know what the path is, but I'm working on it.' Native Public Media CEO Loris Tiller said the organization conducted a recent poll of 19 tribal stations so far that all said anywhere from 40-100 percent of their annual budget came from CPB funds. 'We also asked them whether staff layoffs will be necessary, and you can see that the majority of them are affirmative in that response,' Taylor said, while also adding she still doesn't have many answers about the administration's side deal with Senate Republicans to protect tribal stations. 'We just haven't heard anything about that. I don't know if it's moving,' Taylor said. 'I don't know where the money's coming from. The details haven't been forthcoming.' Advocates have also raised concerns about public stations at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) they say are at risk in wake of the CPB cuts. About a dozen NPR members are affiliated with HBCUs. Cuts to public media have long been on the wishlist of President Trump and conservatives more generally. The president earlier this year sent a special request to Congress to secure the cuts without Democratic support. Upon passage of the legislation, Trump cheered the measure on social media for cutting 'atrocious NPR and Public Broadcasting.' Many Republicans in both chambers share the same view, often singling out NPR and PBS, which receive some funding from CPB, for what they allege is political bias. About one percent of NPR's current operating budget comes directly from the federal government, compared to 15 percent for PBS, multiple outlets report. In the previous fiscal year, NPR received upwards of $13 million from CPB, the corporation's grants and allocations data shows. More than $70 million went to PBS, based in Arlington. At a hearing on Capitol Hill earlier this year, the CEOs of NPR and PBS faced an intense grilling from angry lawmakers over their editorial decision making and funding models. Other lawmakers have argued public media has been outpaced by major changes to the media ecosystem and the emergence of alternative news platforms. 'Because of technology today, I don't think there's a role for public radio anymore,' Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) said during a House Oversight and Government Reform hearing in March. In a statement after the Senate passed cuts to the CPB, PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger said the moves 'goes against the will of the American people, the vast majority of whom trust PBS and believe we provide excellent value to their communities.' 'These cuts will significantly impact all of our stations, but will be especially devastating to smaller stations and those serving large rural areas,' she said. 'Many of our stations which provide access to free unique local programming and emergency alerts will now be forced to make hard decisions in the weeks and months ahead.'
