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Daily Point

A new ballot storm to track

After an election run-up already rocked by disruptive litigation over redistricting, an upstate judge is due to decide in the coming days whether mail-in ballots already sent in statewide for the upcoming election should be voided — and what could then happen if they are. State Supreme Court Justice Dianne Freestone could upend new laws that have expanded absentee balloting. “It could be a real mess because people have already voted," warned Blair Horner of the New York Public Interest Research Group.

The chaos and doubt stem from an openly partisan strategy from Republicans and Conservatives — to stem any advantage Democrats could yield by taking steps to encourage or ease the use of mail-in ballots. GOP chairman Nick Langworthy last month condemned state Democrats for sending absentee ballots to enrollees in advance of the election with the box pre-checked for COVID-19 concerns as the reason for the mail-in. Langworthy called this dishonest but stopped short at the time of calling it illegal.

The Republicans are challenging the new state law that has mail-in ballots counted as they’re returned rather than after Election Day, which used to be the practice, and which delayed counts. The GOP is also challenging another new law that anyone afraid of getting COVID can claim “temporary illness” as one of several justifications for voting absentee.

It’s just another legal drama in a cycle full of them — with the potential to become the highest-stakes one yet this late in the process.

— Dan Janison @Danjanison

Talking Point

How close is CD4?

By some reckonings, New York’s 4th Congressional District should be a solid bet for Democrats in November. It has been held by Democrat Kathleen Rice, who is not running for reelection, since 2015. The district, whose maps were only lightly changed after the census, featured a 57.3% vote share for Joe Biden in 2020, versus 42.7% for Donald Trump, according to estimates from the Center for Urban Research at The CUNY Graduate Center. That would be the highest Biden share of any of the Long Island congressional districts.

But that’s not the way CD4 is being seen on the ground, for multiple reasons:

• The news website Axios reported this week that the National Republican Congressional Committee is spending on coordinated ads with GOP candidate Anthony D’Esposito, a noteworthy use of resources in a district that went comfortably for Biden in 2020.
• In general, D’Esposito, a Hempstead Town board member and former NYPD detective, is seen as a smart recruit for the party. His law enforcement background has made him a prime vehicle for the crime focus that has been key in the race this year: A statewide Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday listed crime as the most urgent issue for New York likely voters.
• Laura Gillen, who had a stunning victory in the race for Hempstead Town supervisor in 2017 as the first Democrat to win the job in more than a century, is looking to keep blue a House seat that has been in Democratic hands since 1997. But that time span obscures the fact that the seat was held by two popular incumbents: Rice, a former Nassau County district attorney, and Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband was killed by a gunman on the Long Island Rail Road.
• The district’s voter registration has 80,000 more Democrats than Republicans. But that advantage is muddied by the 140,000 voters who aren’t members of a party, a relatively high number that can affect the result, especially in nonpresidential years.

One glimpse of why observers should look deeper than the Biden-Trump numbers: In the Five Towns, home to lots of right-leaning votes, Biden came in at 37.9% versus Trump at 61.1%. Republican Bruce Blakeman — at 63% — did better than his fellow Republican in his takedown of Laura Curran in the 2021 county executive race. And the 2021 race for district attorney, featuring Democratic State Sen. Todd Kaminsky, was even more lopsided in the Five Towns: Kaminsky got just 34.5% versus Republican Anne Donnelly’s 65.5%. Kaminsky was tarred in that race for voting in the 2019 budget for bail changes, an issue that has hardly died down.

— Mark Chiusano @mjchiusano

Pencil Point

The real fright night

For more cartoons, visit www.newsday.com/nationalcartoons

Final Point

Cuomo will take your questions

Just as polling in the first New York gubernatorial election in several cycles without Andrew Cuomo’s name on the ballot has Democrats clutching their pearls, word comes of the former governor’s debut Thursday of his new podcast “As a Matter of Fact.” He says in a promo for the weekly podcast that he will deliver “the unvarnished truth about our nation’s political crisis.”

The lineup of Cuomo’s guests is an unusual mashup but ones that might all agree, just like the host, that the Democratic Party is a bit messed up. Cuomo resigned in August 2021, past the midpoint of his third term, rather than face impeachment in the State Legislature ostensibly over claims that he had harassed multiple women, and he wasn't helped by the fact he was losing control over a state party that was moving to the left.

Quake Media will host the podcast. In the debut episode, Cuomo will chat with financier Anthony Scaramucci, who once raised money for Barack Obama but then found his way into the Donald Trump administration where he was fired after 10 days as communications director.

The other guests are veterans of the Bill Clinton era — political strategist Mark Penn, who went on to advise Trump, and public policy guru Elaine Kamarck, who wrote in February that the Democrats made a fatal mistake in cutting themselves off from the working class.

Cuomo also will answer listener questions “each week on topics that matter to them,” according to Quake.

Cuomo told the news website Axios that he wouldn’t rule out a return to politics. “Down the road, we'll figure it out," he said in an interview.

"I am a Democrat," he said. "The question is of identity for the Democratic Party … I do believe we have an extreme left, that in many ways deals in the ideal, rather than in the real, but I am a progressive Democrat."

— Rita Ciolli @ritaciolli