The Democratic strategy in the state’s best bellwether county will likely provide a test of how useful their anti-Trump line of attack might be in November. | Getty In Senate special election, Democrats seize on a 2016 DeVos donation

ALBANY — A special election to fill a state Senate seat in Westchester may seem an unlikely vehicle for anti-Trump sentiment. But supporters of Democratic Assemblywoman Shelley Mayer are trying to turn it into something of a referendum on the president.

They're criticizing Republican Julie Killian for accepting money from Dick DeVos Jr., husband of President Donald Trump's controversial secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. Killian received a $1,000 contribution from DeVos in 2016, when she ran unsuccessfully for the very same Senate seat.


The campaign in Westchester may offer a glimpse of the strategy Democrats will employ in the fall, when the entire Legislature is up for election.

“It is extremely concerning that Julie Killian has taken campaign cash from the DeVos family,” Andy Pallotta, president of the pro-Mayer New York State United Teachers, said in a statement to POLITICO. “Even before Betsy DeVos became Education Secretary, she and her husband were well-known for their attacks on public education. Now, [she] is trying to take away local control from our school communities by advocating to arm teachers.”

“If Killian cares about our schools, she will return her DeVos cash,” said Senate Democratic spokesman Mike Murphy.

A POLITICO/Morning Consult poll conducted last year found that DeVos was the least popular member of Trump's Cabinet.

The attempt to tie Killian to Trump has become a common refrain in advance of the April 24 vote.

“It is a strategy that works, and I think that we’re seeing that in that local race,” said Jeanne Zaino, a professor of political science at Iona College. “A strategy ... that gets out the really energized and animated base is certainly something that can sway an election when turnout is that low.”

One notable example of this strategy came when Gov. Andrew Cuomo attended a rally for Mayer on Sunday. The first 200 words of the governor’s 2,000-word speech were spent introducing people. Cuomo then spent nearly 1,300 words attacking Trump and the “conservative zealots” in Washington who “drank the same Kool-Aid,” hitting on their views on immigration, taxes, sexual harassment, guns, organized labor and the environment.

Toward the end, Cuomo turned to Mayer's campaign and why giving Democrats control of the Senate is important. But rather than pointing to state issues — like abortion rights or campaign finance — that Democrats typically highlight when arguing why Republican control of the chamber is bad, the governor kept his focus on the GOP in Washington.

“This is a race that is going to have us push back on all these value attacks that Washington is sending our way,” Cuomo said. “And this is a race that is going to say to the nation, ‘I don’t care what Washington says we should believe. We know who we are. We know what we believe. And we’re going to stand up and fight for it, and New York is going to lead the way.’”

Republicans, meanwhile, have largely stuck to a strategy that seemed to work for Democrats in the last competitive special election for a Senate seat — making the race a referendum on corruption in Albany.

Mayer worked for the Senate during the tumultuous two years during which Democrats held power in 2009 and 2010. And like the vast majority of Democrats in the Assembly, she stood by former Speaker Sheldon Silver after he was criticized for mishandling a sexual harassment case and was revealed to be a subject of an unrelated federal investigation.

“This is exactly what happens when the New York City political bosses and radical special interest groups get behind a flawed candidate like Shelley Mayer,” Senate Republican spokesman Scott Reif said. “They want to focus on Washington instead of the fact that she supported the use of taxpayer money to cover up sexual harassment and abuse in the State Assembly, she approved of seating Hiram Monserrate in the State Senate even though he slashed his girlfriend in the face and caused a wound so deep it required 20 stitches to close and she wrote the law that sent $373 million in Westchester’s state school aid to New York City.”

The Democratic strategy in the state’s best bellwether county will likely provide a test of how useful their anti-Trump line of attack might be in November.

The seat that Mayer and Killian are competing for was vacated last year after its prior occupant, George Latimer, was elected county executive. Latimer made Trump an issue from the night he won the Democratic nomination for his new post. He repeatedly pointed to rumors that Republican incumbent Rob Astorino had been considered for a Cabinet post, highlighted Trump ally Robert Mercer’s financial support for Astorino and ended his campaign with an advertisement that said the incumbent “copies every word” of “the Trump playbook.”

“I was stunned at the impact it was having,” said Zaino. “Beyond the polling that we did, we found that when you talked to people on the ground, you found that people who had been going door to door, Republicans and Democrats alike, the mood of the electorate was all about Trump. It was all about D.C. That’s all just a few months ago.”

It might be a bit more difficult for the strategy to have the same impact this time around, as Killian’s ties to Trump are more tangential than Astorino’s, and the special election will be held on a date with fewer extraneous factors that might influence turnout. But that doesn’t mean it won’t work.

“It’s [a strategy] that Democrats are going to continue using,” Zaino said. “It’s worked in other parts of the country and it’s worked in New York, specifically in Westchester.”