Today, with early voting underway and Election Day approximately one week away, the Association of New York State Young Republican Clubs (NYSYR) announced the launch of a new digital campaign targeting two of the most vulnerable State Senate Democrats who are up for re-election this year: Queens’ Toby Stavisky and Central New York’s Rachel May.
As part of the initiative, the NYSYR has unveiled RealTobyStavisky.com and RealRachelMay.com, which aim to educate voters about the lawmakers’ respective records on public safety and other issues.
Stavisky, who has represented Senate District 16 in Queens since 1999 and is now seeking re-election to a 13th term in Senate District 11 following the state’s re-districting, is among those in the state legislature who’ve been dismissive of the impact that the bail law, passed by state lawmakers in 2019, has had on crime. In a recent interview, she told the Queens Chronicle that she did not believe there was a clear picture as to how bail reform has affected the crime rate. In May, a report published by THE CITY questioned Stavisky’s residency, with one unnamed constituent accusing her of living outside of the district, “about seven miles away,” for the past two years. Stavisky was also the focus of a recent New York Post report regarding her government Twitter handle, @TobyStavisky, which had liked a series of obscene tweets, including hardcore porn.
Earlier this year, the NYSYR endorsed Stavisky’s opponent, a 24-year-old Young Republican from Queens named Stefano Forte. If elected, Forte would be the youngest person ever elected to the State Senate.
May, who has represented Senate District 48 in Central New York since 2019 and is seeking re-election to a third term, is also among those who’ve been dismissive of the ramifications of the state’s bail law. She contends that the bail law has actually reduced crime, despite there being limited evidence that validates such. May was also a participant in disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s cover-up of nursing home deaths. In a leaked audio recording from a virtual meeting between Cuomo Chief of Staff Melissa DeRosa and several legislative leaders, including May, the senator was caught downplaying the significance of the scandal. She would later go on to obstruct multiple attempts to investigate the role that several top Cuomo administration officials, including the governor himself, might have had in under-reporting of nursing home death data and the cover-up that followed. In March, May was lambasted for her actions at a climate change rally in Albany where she gleefully held a banner depicting an airplane labeled ‘climate change’ pointed at two buildings resembling the World Trade Center towers.
Earlier this month, the NYSYR endorsed May’s opponent, a former television news anchor who currently serves in the Onondaga County Legislator named Julia Abbott.
“At this critical moment in time, educating and informing voters about the individuals representing them in government can have a tremendous impact on the quality of laws and the legislators who write them,” said NYSYR Chairman Peter Giunta. “In fact, over the past four years, we’ve seen what careless, lazy, and irresponsible legislating can result in — like New York’s “Green Light Law,” which at first mistakenly allowed non-citizens to automatically register to vote before being corrected, or the 2019 “Bail Elimination Act,” which has been blamed for a spike in crime and was tweaked in 2022 following two years of intense public outrage. The bottom line is that these mistakes impact the lives of everyday New Yorkers and elected officials owe it to their constituents to get it right the first time.”
Giunta continued: “Toby Stavisky and Rachel May are, without a doubt, in the toughest re-election battles they’ve ever faced. It just goes to show that, whether you’ve held office for 24 years like Stavisky, or for four years like May, the electorate has a breaking point. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing right now in New York, where Republican candidates are surging in places where they’ve struggled to gain traction in the past, despite the fact that Democrats outnumber Republicans 2:1 statewide. This is all the consequence of a radical agenda supported by out-of-touch career politicians like Stavisky and May. Quite frankly, they did this to themselves.”