Democrat-allied groups release opposition research on House GOP investigators ahead of new Congress
(National Sentinel) The Republican Party is going through a bad week. The first major test for the party this fall’s election season came Thursday afternoon in the special election for Congress in New York’s 14th Congressional District. There, Democrat Sean Eldridge defeated his Republican opponent by a margin of less than 1 percent.
The result came as a surprise to many political observers, who had pegged the race for the Republicans, former New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, just days before the special election. But the GOP, which was heavily outspent by the progressive left, had been expecting Mark-Viverito, a longtime liberal, progressive, and even socialist, would prevail in the district.
A few days before the election, then-New York Governor-elect Andrew Cuomo, who had previously been a harsh critic of Trump, said Mark-Viverito would be his choice to represent the NY-14 seat in the New York State Senate.
On election night, Mark-Viverito, who had only recently been elected into office as the state’s speaker of the state Senate, won the popular vote by a mere 0.1 percent. Meanwhile, a third Democrat candidate for the seat, businessman Joseph Saladino, defeated his Republican opponent for the seat by a 3 percent margin.
In the days before Election Day, however, Democratic-aligned groups aligned with the party were looking at the race and the other potential congressional special election races for seats in the House, a result of redistricting to take effect after the 2018 elections. These groups analyzed the race, made public in a lengthy, well-researched, and well-documented report, and put the final results of the election in the context of other races that had taken place in the days and weeks leading up to the election.
The report, authored by Democratic operatives Michael Del Moro and Michael Briggs, lays out four propositions that they argue were met by the race. The first, cited as the �