The Election is Over: Where do we stand?

Tuesday marked the end of the most unpredictable campaign cycle in recent memory. It broke with much of the conventional wisdom on electoral politics, baffling both pollsters and pundits. While many of us are focused on the new balance of power in Washington, we must focus on a different reality: more than ever before, it will be up to the states to lead on fighting climate change and protecting the environment. We are ready for that challenge and glad that the results of local elections in New York provide more than a glimmer of hope for continued progress.

In what was considered to be a change election nationwide, incumbents in New York held on to win their races across the board. A major theme of NYLCV’s campaigns was to protect incumbent clean water champions who went to the mat to pass the Safe School Water Act, protecting children from the dangers of lead poisoning at school. The return of, potentially, all our allies is good news.

Two of our endorsees for State Senate, Carl Marcellino and Michael Venditto are in races that are too close to call but they are both favored to win.  Elaine Phillips won a hotly contested open seat race in Senate District 7 and Tony D’Urso won an open seat in Assembly District 16. We are sad to see that Terry Gipson, Sara Niccoli and Diane Dwire came up short in their races, as they would have been strong allies for our cause.

In the end, we bumped up our endorsements to 117, we had another active year for our Political Action Committee, and we ended up with our best success rate ever at over 92%. NYLCV’s ultimate goal is to elect an environmental majority in both houses of the state legislature. On that endeavor, we still have more work to do. When we have the resources to make a big push in Albany, we get things done. We cannot count on much help on the environment from the federal government.  We need our environmental leaders at home to step up more than ever next year and we can only do that with your help. You can support our statewide advocacy work by taking our action alerts, taking the conversation to social media, working with our staff to craft op-eds and letters to the editor, and attending our events.

Here are the full results from our 2016 endorsements: