Kim Smith came close to pulling an upset in the Democratic primary race for the Senate seat being vacated by Michael Ranzenhofer.
When thousands of absentee ballots from the June 23 special and primary contests were finally tallied last week, they fueled the always fascinating post-election analysis of vote gurus everywhere.
The geeks who dive into the post-election results find trends, pockets of strength and weakness and fodder for the next time around.
But it didn’t take a political scientist to uncover the surprise in the Democratic primary for the 61st State Senate District. Kim Smith, the former Monroe County Health Department official from the district’s far eastern corner, came within a whisker of pulling it off.
Jacquie Berger is well known in the district’s Amherst epicenter as a Council member and deputy supervisor and was declared the winner. But Smith came within 141 votes of surprising everyone, including the guy who writes the Politics Column each week and is supposed to know about such things.
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Erie County Democratic Chairman Jeremy Zellner attributes the strong Smith showing to two Amherst-based candidates splitting the Erie vote. Indeed, Williamsville businesswoman Joan Elizabeth Seamans scored votes after waging a decent campaign in 2018 against Republican Mike Ranzenhofer, the current senator who is retiring.
“It was two people from Amherst splitting the vote,” Zellner said, “and that made Kim an instant contender.”
But Smith thinks a lot of hard work on the ground (as much as pandemic strictures allowed) almost paid off.
“I was told we had no shot in hell of support in Genesee County, and that there would be no union support because my opponent (Berger) was associated with the unions,” she said. “But we worked hard and got the endorsement in Monroe County and Genesee County.”
An organizer for VOCAL-NY (Voices of Community Activists and Leaders) in Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, Smith put those skills to work.
And she did just fine in places such as Genesee, where she was told she would fail because she is a woman and Black.
“Not only did I get the endorsement, but numbers are going my way there,” she said at the end of a most surprising campaign.
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• Speaking of Zellner, the chairman is crowing that headquarters’ three endorsed candidates for the State Legislature – Berger in 61st Senate, Bill Conrad in the 140th Assembly and Jon Rivera in the 149th Assembly, all triumphed.
He also crows that the party’s endorsed candidates won for the second year in a row. To the extent headquarters was involved, he’s allowed.
• Western New York said goodbye last week to Frank McGuire, the businessman who died on Tuesday at 92 and whose influence was felt throughout the state.
McGuire will always be known for his Industrial Power and Lighting and McGuire Group companies, and for his stint as head of the Chamber of Commerce. But McGuire also loomed as a powerful force in Democratic politics, even though his one foray into the election game – for county executive in 1979 – ended in a landslide victory for incumbent Republican Ed Rutkowski.
Former Erie County Democratic Chairman Len Lenihan remembers McGuire as “cantankerous and generous at the same time.”
“I’d call him. He’d say: ‘You only call when you need money,’ ” Lenihan said last week. “Then he’d say: ‘How much do you need?’ ”
At one time, McGuire played on a big stage, especially when long-time ally Joe Crangle was state Democratic chairman. Few Western New Yorkers were as close to Gov. Mario Cuomo as McGuire. And when former Vice President Al Gore finally crossed the Peace Bridge following 9/11 after getting stranded for a few days in Toronto, he sought out McGuire to arrange a blood donation in Cheektowaga.
“He understood the business end, and he could make it happen on the political end,” Lenihan said. “Every community needs a Frank McGuire to make things happen.”
