Friends - The results are in and we've come up short in the race for State Senate.
I want to first congratulate Terrence Murphy on a hard fought victory
and wish him and his family all the best.
Most importantly,
I want to thank the countless number of people who have supported the campaign
whether by volunteering, contributing, etc. – there are well over
a 1,000 such individuals, and please know how incredibly humbling your
support has been. I only wish I could have delivered for you by giving you the victory you
worked so hard for.
But please know that the issues that we stood up for—raising the
minimum wage, passing the Women's Equality Act, common sense gun safety
laws, campaign finance reform—
these issues matter and we should be proud to have been part of a campaign
that championed them. I'm certainly proud of our wonderful campaign staff that worked so
hard over the past few months. I'm proud of the endorsements we garnered,
from the newspapers of the district (Journal News, Poughkeepsie Journal)
to well-respected organizations such as the AFL-CIO, Sierra Club, League
of Conservation Voters and many others. I'm proud of our debate performances
where we stood up for our values and positions. I hope you're also
proud of our effort.
Many will rightfully ask –
what happened? I expect that others will do lots of number crunching in the days to
come, but two things jump out at me.
First, there was clearly a national Republican wave that was evident everywhere
in the State. One only has to look at other competitive state senate races
to see very similar results – put simply, this year stunk for Democrats.
Second, the last two weeks have seen an avalanche of independent expenditure
spending against me and other state senate Democrats. Millions of dollars
were being spent on broadcast TV and radio ads accusing me of pretty much
everything under the sun – many of you probably heard or watched
these ads. Millions in a State Senate race! While we worked hard to get
our message out and had a robust media operation ourselves, the size of
this ad buy against us was gigantic and it clearly had an impact on the
results. The folks that funded these ads are primarily NYC real estate
entities and NYC charter school advocates – to me, and this is just
one example among many, there has never been a stronger case for campaign
finance reform.
But that issue, and others, will be for others to wrestle with in Albany.
For me, I plan on spending as much time as humanly possible with my family
and figuring out what's next for me. Christine and I very much appreciate
all this kind notes and text messages – despite this election not
going the way we wanted, we have so much to be thankful for in our lives.
For starters, for those of you who don't know, come February we are
expecting our second child (Samantha will have a brother!). And certainly,
the campaign has forged some tremendous friendships that we look forward
to continuing.
Again, thank you for all of your support. And, whatever you do, please
keep fighting to make our communities stronger!
Best –
Justin Wagner