WASHINGTON – Nate McMurray continues to fight hard to beat Rep. Chris Jacobs, his Republican rival, in the fall rematch of the June special election that Jacobs won by 5.3 percentage points – but that's by no means the only battle McMurray has been waging.
Since that June 23 special election, the Democratic congressional candidate has found himself in conflict with the top aide to Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, with the office of Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer and with his own top campaign aide.
One common thread – McMurray's Twitter feed – links all three of those conflicts.
On July 21, McMurray tweeted what Hochul's team viewed as a veiled personal attack on the lieutenant governor, which he deleted a day later.
Then on Aug. 1, McMurray tweeted and then deleted several posts criticizing Schumer for, in an interview, warmly welcoming Jacobs to Congress. One word from one tweet summed up McMurray's reaction: "Gag."
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In the following days, word spread in Democratic circles that McMurray's top campaign aide, Nicole Hushla Re, had quit. She's now back in the McMurray camp, but she acknowledged she was angry at the candidate about what he tweeted about Schumer.
Asked about all those conflicts, McMurray expressed no great remorse for his deleted tweets. In fact, he cited them as his best method for getting the attention of Democrats who might otherwise ignore him.
"You know, I'm not a prizefighter. I'm a street fighter, and I gotta get this stuff out there," he said.
Tweeting and deleting seems like a habit for McMurray, by far the most prolific tweeter among local politicians. Politwoops, ProPublica's database of deleted tweets, shows that as of Friday morning, he had deleted 385 tweets since the June 23 special election.
Many are similar to tweets he kept online. McMurray said he often tweets, looks at the wording and then decides to change it slightly.
But his tweets about Hochul and Schumer, while they have disappeared from Twitter, remain stuck in the minds of top local Democrats who saw them. They privately said they were shocked that McMurray would launch online attacks against two of the state's most prominent members of his own party.
'The old Congressman's husband'
For months, McMurray has railed against his former employer, Delaware North Companies, and its family connection to his Republican rival. Chris Jacobs is the nephew of Jeremy M. Jacobs, Delaware North's chairman, and McMurray – until this year a vice president at the company – has inveighed repeatedly against his former employer and its political connections.
But on June 21, he tweeted a reference to Delaware North that was at once veiled yet deeply personal.
"Chew on this... The new Congressman from NY27? His uncle lives next door to Trump at Mar A Lago. And his family employs the the old Congressman’s husband...who fired me! Yikes. Money. After we beat Trump, send me to DC to fight BIG MONEY in politics #Breakthemachine," McMurray tweeted.
The "old Congressman" is Hochul, who represented New York's 27th Congressional District – which McMurray is fighting to represent – in 2011 and 2012. "The old Congressman's husband" is William J. Hochul Jr., former U.S. attorney for the Western District of New York and currently senior vice president, general counsel and secretary of Delaware North. And the "fired me" phrase stems from the fact that Delaware North asked McMurray to take a leave from his job at the company amid his campaign earlier this year.
Asked why he published that tweet, McMurray said he was frustrated that Hochul had been doing online fundraisers for other Democratic congressional candidates from New York but that she had not done one for him.
Hochul's team was not pleased. A source close to Hochul said she was focusing first on helping female congressional candidates such as Tracy Mitrano, the Democrat challenging Republican Rep. Tom Reed in New York's 23rd District, and that Hochul – who publicly endorsed McMurray in June – would give McMurray the boost he was looking for in the fall.
Several sources said that tweet prompted a heated phone call between Hochul's chief of staff, Jeff Lewis, and McMurray, who then deleted the tweet.
"I decided to delete it because even though I think it's true and it's pertinent and I've tried to raise the issue number of times, at the same time I don't want to distract from the real enemy," which is his campaign opponent, McMurray said.
'Gag'
Schumer visited Genesee County for an event on July 31, and afterward, a reporter asked him about Western New York's newest congressman, who filled the seat of former Rep. Chris Collins, a Republican who has been sentenced to prison on insider trading charges.
“I’ll work great with Chris Jacobs and he will help us, I guarantee you,” the senator said, according to an account in the Batavia Daily News. “I haven’t talked to him because this is new ... but I will work with him and he’ll be great — a big improvement, I would say.”
McMurray saw that quote on the morning of Aug. 1, seethed and took to Twitter.
"Senator @SenSchumer, Maybe you shouldn’t cozy up so much to the most biggest, and most newly minted, Trump supporter in New York: Chris Jacobs. I know fundraising matters, but integrity matters more. And the people who support your fight against Trump here don’t appreciate it," McMurray tweeted.
A few minutes later, McMurray quoted Schumer in full and simply added the observation: "Gag."
That prompted a call of concern from Jordan Nicholson, a Schumer staffer, who asked McMurray to take down those tweets.
McMurray quickly did just that, but in a phone interview on Friday, he insisted that his concern about Schumer's comments was well-founded.
"It wasn't just me that was mad," McMurray said. "I got lots of people that were saying: 'What is wrong with this guy?' "
The episode, then, seems to be a smaller-scale version of the one that occurred when Schumer praised Rep. Pete King, a Republican from Long Island, upon King's announcement that he was retiring from the House. The liberal Twitterverse erupted at Schumer, who prides himself on his willingness to work with Republicans and who often speaks in the fulsome bipartisan tone that was more common in Washington decades ago.
The episode didn't appear to do fatal damage to the relationship between the Senate's top Democrat and the congressional candidate from Western New York, though.
Schumer last week once again endorsed McMurray, just as he had done twice previously. Schumer called McMurray "a fighter" who would take on the Trump agenda, and McMurray said he was proud to accept Schumer's endorsement.
'Mad at Nate'
The week after McMurray's talk with the Schumer aide, rumors started circulating in Western New York Democratic circles that McMurray's campaign team was in open rebellion, and that some aides – including campaign manager Hushla Re – had left the campaign.
In truth, only Hushla Re had left in anger, and she did so only temporarily, telling people the weekend of the Schumer dust-up that she didn't work for McMurray anymore.
She quickly rejoined the fold, and in an interview last week, explained what happened.
"Frankly, I was mad at Nate that day," she said, noting that while she was unhappy with Schumer's comments about Jacobs, too, she disagreed with McMurray's decision to go public with his pique.
"Nate and I sometimes disagree with the delivery of things, but at the end of the day I wouldn't still be working with him if I didn't think he was effective," Hushla Re said.
To hear McMurray tell it, that disagreement was nothing unusual.
"I have a hard-driving way of doing things, including Twitter, and some of the staff doesn't like it, and we have fights about it," McMurray said.
And when asked if he ever thinks about changing his shoot-from-the-fingertips approach to Twitter, McMurray replied: "Every day. There's many times when I've said: 'I'm giving up Twitter,' but at the same time. I know I'm dragging people out to the polls. So it's like a double-edged sword, right?"
McMurray has 19,300 Twitter followers – 5,000 or so fewer than Rep. Brian Higgins, a Buffalo Democrat, but just as many as Reed, the Southern Tier Republican.
Besides, tweets don't just grab the attention of voters, McMurray added.
"Also, let's be honest: Would Senator Schumer's staffer have ever called me if I hadn't tweeted about it?" he asked.
