Toby Ann Stavisky victorious in state Senate reelection over Yiatin Chu

Standing before a chatty crowd of a few dozen people at One Station Plaza in Bayside, Queens, state Sen. Toby Ann Stavisky declared victory in her race for the 11th state Senate District 11 with about 50% of the vote. Her Republican opponent Yiatin Chu received about 43% of the vote.

It was a slightly narrower margin of victory compared to her 2022 win over Republican Stefano Forte, which was a 57%-43% victory after redistricting.

“It’s not about my opponent, it’s about the people who came out and voted and I appreciate it,” Stavisky told City & State. “I’m proud of the campaign that I conducted.”

Stavisky said she was proud of herself for conducting a “positive” campaign and said important issues need to be dealt with in a “positive way.”

Chu confirmed to City & State that she had conceded, but didn’t confirm whether she spoke to Stavisky after the results were announced.

Redistricting completely shuffled this previously gerrymandered part of Queens, and a large swath of Flushing is no longer in Stavisky’s district. It also added a large chunk of northwestern Queens, where voters saw Stavisky’s name on the ballot for the second time. And Chu, a prominent education advocate, switched her party registration from Democrat to Republican in order to challenge Stavisky.

Campaigning on issues like education and public safety, Chu was hoping to ride the rightward shift of Asian voters to victory. She previously criticized Stavisky for supporting bail reform and was endorsed by the New York Post.

Stavisky is the chair of the state Senate Higher Education Committee and supports the preservation of specialized high schools and their gifted and talented programs. Both Stavisky and Chu are graduates of specialized high school Bronx High School of Science, and have both fought to preserve the admissions test required to get into specialized high schools. Black and Latino students make up about 65% of the city’s public school students, but Black students only made up 4.5% of specialized high school offers and Latino students made up 7.6%. Talks about removing the test centered around increasing diversity at the mostly white and Asian schools.

Last week, Chu said she was “glad I’ve been a part of (the) fight to keep the test.”