Democratic Candidates Win Big in Dutchess County

Newly reelected County Comptroller Dan Aymar-Blair talks to voters at the No Kings Rally Waryas Park Oct.18. Aymar-Blair is one of the Democratic candidates who was successful in an off year election. Photo courtesy of Clara Masters.

Dutchess County elected a majority Democratic county legislature for the first time in 17 years on Nov. 4. This victory is a part of the overall success of Democratic candidates in the county in an off-year election.  

Out of the 25-seat legislature, there are now 15 Democrats and 10 Republicans. This allows Democrats to pass legislation without Republican votes, but they do not have a veto-proof majority. 

“The last time we had a majority was 2008, and that was only for one term; the time before that, when the Democrats were in power in the legislature, was 1970,” said Michael Dupree, chair of the Dutchess County Democratic Committee (DCDC). 

Dupree credits the success partially to the quality of the candidates running this year.

 “We ran a record number of candidates for county legislature, which is why we picked up five [seats],” Dupree said. “And they were good, quality candidates. These are people who boned up on the issues, affordability in particular.” 

Also successful were incumbent County Comptroller Dan Aymar-Blair and County Court Judge-elect Kara Gerry. Both won at least 55 percent of the vote and are members of the Democratic and Working Families Parties. 

Aymar-Blair was elected last year in a special election, so he had 10 months on the job before the election. He believes this experience helped prove to his constituents that he is an effective leader. 

“My experience and how I spent the year demonstrating my vision for this role by actually delivering on it, I think resonated with people,” he said.

Aymar-Blair also thinks his outside perspective gives him the ability to look at the county’s spending impartially and serve the people more authentically as comptroller. 

“You need to know what you're doing, and you need to be uninfluenced and independent while you're doing the work. You can't have ties to the processes or the policies or the people. You need to look at things with clear eyes,” Aymar-Blair said.

With the DCDC, Dupree worked with Aymar-Blair and the various other Democratic candidates to help organize volunteers for their campaigns to canvas and phonebank. 

“We knocked 58,000 doors this year. In 2023… we knocked 23,000, so you can see what the difference in the effort really was. I've never had so many candidates who were willing to continue to meet voters at their doors,” Dupree said. “They wanted to show, basically, that the Democrats are not dead, that we are a viable party and that we can show how to govern.”

This allowed candidates to better understand the issues that matter to voters this election cycle. 

For rural areas in District 19, one of the major issues discussed while canvassing was delayed responses and rising costs of Emergency Medical Services (EMS). Therefore, the new legislator, Chris Drago, campaigned on improving this issue by trying to make EMS a shared county responsibility. 

“I felt like our candidates were very clear in identifying the problem, speaking to the problem in an authentic way, and then also putting forward policy prescriptions that they felt could help,” Aymar-Blair said. 

A typical off-year election in Dutchess County draws around 70,000 voters. The current numbers available show that over 73,000 people voted this year. 

“Republicans showed up in a way that we are accustomed to seeing in the local elections. But Democratic turnout was much higher and gave us a much bigger advantage this year,” Aymar-Blair said. 

Dupree started to suspect a large wave of support for Democratic candidates this election while canvassing and talking to non-party-affiliated voters.

“A lot of the people not enrolled in a party were actually saying … ‘I can’t vote for a Republican right now,’” Dupree said. “So I knew over the summer that the tide was turning toward us.” 

Aymar-Blair credited part of the dissatisfaction with the local Republican party to the national political climate.

“There's a real hunger right now for transparency,” Aymar-Blair said. “And the best guess I have is that's a reaction to this kind of fake news era of interpreting reality.”

Dupree emphasized the importance of on-the-ground organizers to channel the anti-Republican sentiment. He has attended multiple “No Kings” protests and talked to potential voters.  

“While there was an anti-Trump wave, that was clearly in New Jersey, Virginia, around the country, you had to have a good field operation,” Dupree said. “You had to have good candidates for people to say, people to say, that's who I'm going to vote for. And we had all of that.”

Though Aymar-Blair thinks anti-Trump sentiment is a component in the success of Democratic candidates, he also believes it shows a larger shift in Dutchess County politics. 

“The truth is, Dutchess County politics is just catching up to Dutchess County,” he said. “I mean, people here want to see things done in a different way, in a more humane way, and it looks like they're voting that way now too.”