House - NY 22nd - Anthony Brindisi

DONATE to his 2020 campaign via his website

Democrat elected in 2018 in district in central New York state - Utica area

video clip: "Anthony Brindisi for Congress"

Democrat Anthony Brindisi, then a three-term State Assemblyman from Utica, in 2018 defeated first-term Republican incumbent Claudia Tenney, an ardent Trump supporter. The margin of victory was 1.8%. The central/rural NY 22nd district runs from the Pennsylvania border to Lake Ontario. Trump won it by 15 points in 2016.

Anthony, a lawyer and former school board member, was one of five Democrats called the “young guns” for their 2015 role in helping depose Democrat Sheldon Silver as Speaker of the NY Assembly, following his arrest on corruption charges. In the Assembly, Brindisi had increased educational funding to lower-income school districts, bolstered apprenticeship programs, and increased job training. He vocally opposed GOP efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

Brindisi was endorsed by End Citizens United, a grassroots PAC dedicated to defeating 20 Republican senators and representatives who took corporate PAC money, including Tenney.

In 2018 Tenney was described by Politico as “a lightning rod who’s made few friends in Albany or Washington” and who “is embracing Trump as tightly as she can”. Tenney’s predecessor in Congress, Republican Richard Hanna, endorsed Anthony in 2018, saying Tenney was “wrong for the district.”

Tenney is running in the 2020 Republican primary, and is likely to be Anthony’s opponent again in November – Trump recently endorsed her once again. In Congress Tenney voted with Trump 94.6% of the time. In her view, “The science of climate change is not determined. It’s not certain.” She voted to gut the Affordable Care Act and to defund Planned Parenthood. Her environmental record was terrible – a 6% score from League of Conservation Voters. After the Charlottesville violence by white supremacists, Klansmen and neo-Nazis, which left one dead and 19 injured, Tenney agreed with Trump, saying: "I think what the president is trying to say is, that there's fault to be found on both sides. And I think that there is fault to be found on both sides."

Anthony is serving on the House Agriculture and Veterans Affairs committees. He kept a campaign promise to be accessible, holding 13 open-forum public town hall meetings across his district in 2019. He has been praised for his work as a congressman, for example the editorial board of the Utica Observer-Dispatch wrote in August 2019: “Like Hanna [Republican Richard Hanna, the district’s congressman until 2017], Brindisi’s not into all the behind-the-beltway baloney that too often blurs the things that really matter to us. His priorities, like Hanna’s, are doing what’s best for the people in the 22nd District, not trying to curry favor with the Washington bigshots who live in another world. And like Hanna, Brindisi spends a lot of time traveling throughout his district listening to the people who elected him - and those who didn’t. As he says, he represents everyone.”

Outside spending in the 2018 Brindisi-Tenney race hit $13 million, the most in New York and seventh in the nation. Anthony is an excellent congressman for his district, and a prime target of Trump and the Republican Party in this election. We need to do all we can to support his campaign and prevent this district from returning to a far-right Republican.