State Senate Dems’ political arm targets Palumbo in new ad buy

The state Democratic Senate Campaign Committee isn’t just looking to defend the party’s supermajority in the chamber – it’s looking to go on the offensive and flip some seats as well. With that in mind, the state Senate Democrats’ cash-flush political arm is spending six figures on a new ad trashing Republican state Sen. Anthony Palumbo in a bid to help Democratic challenger Sarah Anker. 

The race for the 1st State Senate District has flown somewhat under the radar thus far. The Suffolk County seat has long been held by Republicans. Former state Sen. Kenneth LaValle represented the district for decades. He retired at the end of 2020, and Palumbo – then a member of the Assembly – won the open seat to replace him, besting Democratic first-time candidate Laura Ahearn that year by just under 3 percentage points. Palumbo won reelection by a much more comfortable margin in 2022, defeating Democrat Skyler Johnson by nearly 12 points. (Two years later, Johnson ran for an overlapping Assembly seat and lost in the Democratic primary.)

This year, Democrats are running Anker, who unlike the other two recent candidates, already has a long electoral track record. She has served in the Suffolk County Legislature for over 12 years, winning seven elections to hold onto that seat before she was term-limited out of office last year.

The new ad paid for by the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee will run both on television and online. It takes aim at Palumbo without explicitly naming Anker, knocking the Republican for votes he took both as a state senator and during his time in the Assembly. Palumbo was still in the Assembly in 2019 when Democrats finally gained control of the state Senate and passed the Reproductive Health Act, which codified Roe v. Wade and updated the state’s decades-old abortion laws. Palumbo voted against the law. The ad also criticizes him for voting against gun safety bills that Democrats have passed largely along party lines in recent years. “State Sen. Anthony Palumbo is getting too comfortable in Albany, and forgetting who he’s supposed to work for,” a voiceover in the ad charges.

The 30-second advertisement also directs viewers to a website, also paid for by the state Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, that claims Palumbo “has betrayed Long Island families again and again.” The site provides relevant links to legislation and donation records referenced in the video. At least one piece of legislation goes back over a decade, with the website including Palumbo’s vote on the Women’s Equality Act in 2013. Palumbo has won several elections since voting on that and other bills Democrats are criticizing him for now.

The site also links to three omnibus budget bills that Palumbo voted against while claiming they were votes against specific policies or funding, when the legislation actually covered a plethora of issues. The minority party often votes against budgets as a statement against the overall agenda of the majority party, even if the broad bills may contain individual policies a member may support.

A spokesperson for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee wouldn’t say exactly how much it is spending on the ad buy, but described the amount as “significant.” The spending comes on top of the nearly $330,000 the committee has already allocated in support of Anker as of the end of September and the nearly $36,000 that it recently transferred directly into her campaign account.

The committee has plenty to spend, with $2.5 million still at its disposal roughly a month from the election. At its height this cycle, before it began investing money in key races, the committee had about $5 million in its account to help Democrats running for state Senate. As of the end of September, Anker has been one of the top three beneficiaries of the committee’s spending. She’s beaten out by Chris Ryan, who is running in the open 50th state Senate District in what is perhaps Republicans’ best opportunity to flip a seat, and by state Sen. Peter Harckham, a perennial target of Republicans. Spending for fellow candidate Yvette Valdes-Smith, who is running to flip a Poughkeepsie seat, wasn’t far off Anker as of the start of October.