I would vote for incumbent Republican John Faso if I lived in the Hudson Valley-area 19th Congressional District, but he has run a lousy campaign against Democrat Antonio Delgado.
It is eerily similar to a 2009 campaign in the 20th Congressional District by another former state Assembly minority leader, Jim Tedisco, against another neophyte Democrat, Scott Murphy. As this blog repeatedly pointed out back then, Tedisco's relentlessly negative ads were ineffective, because Murphy didn't have any political record. The Republican attacks on his business dealings backfired, sounding desperate and kind of silly.
I knew Tedisco pretty well at the time, having covered him for years -- hell, everyone knew him and knows him. Then still in the Assembly, now a state senator likely to be re-elected next week, he has served continuously in the Legislature since 1983. But he wouldn't listen to my criticism, pointing out that most of the negative ads were not his per se, but came from the National Republican Campaign Committee. And it's true that the campaign committees of both parties, based in Washington, pretty much exclusively fund negative ads full of distortions. Lovely trade, politics.
But negative ads are much more effective against a politician who has a record. So Tedisco wound up blowing a big lead and losing to Murphy. And Murphy, after acquiring in Washington a political record that could be attacked, went on to lose the next election to Republican Chris Gibson.
And now Faso and the NRCC are doing the same thing to Delgado that Tedisco did to Murphy. Those endless negative ads, mostly about Delgado's prior performances as a rapper, are as ineffective in 2018 as Tedisco's were in 2009, which helps explain why Delgado has risen in the polls and remains competitive, despite being manifestly the less qualified candidate. Unless Faso listens to PlanetAlbany (aka Cassandra) and changes his tune, he may be on the way out.
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