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WPCNR LETTER TICKER. November 12, 2013:

Dear John:

A few thoughts on a couple of the election races.

For County Exec:  Noam clearly was running a race for Nita’s (Lowey’s) seat.  I’ve spoken to people on his campaign team and they agreed with my advice from the time he got the nomination, run on local issues.  Astorino has plenty of mistakes and flaws to lose in a county with as large a registration gap as we have here.

Hit him on the losses in funding for Social Services, fights with the unions, the dysfunction with the Board.

But Noam seemed to think that his advisors in DC (District of Columbia)  knew more than those of us here and ran on strictly national issues; important yes, but not going to resonate for CE (County Executive).  The race was his but he seemed to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.  Look for this to be close to a death knell for his future elective career outside of New Rochelle.

Here in White Plains, the Republicans have no chance of winning any race at all (just like the Democrats back when I was growing up here in the 50’s and 60’s) until they can attract any candidate who has a public personality like Bob Hyland, their last candidate who actually had a chance of winning.

The local party is all but nonexistent, their leadership has all but disappeared since Frank Cantatore left as chair.  The Democrats know all of this and just let insiders have all the spots because they know that all they have to do to win is put up someone who is breathing.

As long as there is no (even halfway) effective opposition to them they will continue to put up the favored few and keep real, new ideas out of the public eye.  They seem to favor keeping control of WP as more important than actually doing something to benefit the citizens of WP.

Other than the two above, I really did not follow other elections as much as I have in the past.