FINE ACCUSES FARKAS OF ENGINEERING SCHLEIFER AMBUSH

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June 1, 2020

By Barrett Seaman–

Having first announced her decision to retract her endorsement of the pledge to divest of all pharmaceutical stocks if elected, calling it a “cheap shot” that effectively amounted to an ambush of rival candidate Adam Schleifer, Allison Fine went further, using her daily email to some 5,000 supporters to call the pledge a “political ploy” that was “cooked up by another candidate, Evelyn Farkas.”

Farkas campaign manager Wellesley Daniels denied that her candidate singlehandedly engineered the pledge, which initially resulted in all but Schleifer signing. She called it “a group effort.” No other campaign has confirmed that Farkas or her staff played a leadership role in the effort to isolate Schleifer.

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In her email message, Fine repeated the assertion she made to The Hudson Independent that the statement was “not reflective of my values of fairness and decency.”

“My real complaint,” she added, “is with the lack of campaign finance reform and the role big money is playing in this race, in all races, and I let that frustration spill over.”

If the goal of the pledge episode, however awkwardly presented, was to raise public awareness of Schleifer’s immense personal wealth and the political advantage it has given him in gaining voter recognition, his rivals believe that it is working. It won’t stop him from flooding cable channels and mailboxes with campaign ads, they concede, but it will make voters measure their recognition of his message against the means by which he is getting it out.

A poll, the only public one so far, conducted at the turn of the month, had four candidates within three percentage points in the mid-teens, as opposed to an “undecided vote of 38%. Those four, in descending order, were David Carlucci, Evelyn Farkas, Adam Schleifer and Mondaire Jones, ranging from 17% down to 12%. The remaining three, David Buchwald, Allison Fine and Asha Castleberry-Fernandez, were in single figures.

Background conversations with various campaigns suggest that Carlucci, the State Senator from Rockland County who was once feared because of his perceived hold on voters west of the Hudson, has slipped (the aforementioned Data for Progress poll notwithstanding). With little money left to spend and no major endorsements, they say he no longer evinces the fear he did early in the race.

The endorsement competition appears to have narrowed down to Farkas, with an impressive phalanx of national security experts and political figures behind her, and Mondaire Jones, who recently scored a trifecta of progressive endorsements—Elizabeth Warren, Anastasia Ocasio-Cortez, and most recently Bernie Sanders. The 2020 Democratic presidential runner-up said this of Jones: “His campaign platform aligns with many of the same issues that were at the center of my campaign for president, including Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, and criminal justice reform.”

All seven campaigns now await word from the Editorial Board of the New York Times, whose endorsement could come this week. How much impact that will have in an election in which many voters have already mailed in ballots is an open question, as is voter turnout in the June 23^rd primary.

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