This year’s midterm elections present a unique challenge for people who are not strongly attached to a specific party. The Republicans seem to have built their entire national brand around full-throated support of President Donald Trump’s agenda, while the Democrats have taken a starkly opposite tactic in opposing Trump at every turn. Consequently, this will be one of the most polarizing elections in modern memory — perhaps even more polarizing than the election that swept Trump into office in the first place.

So if you find yourself in the middle of these two divergent messages, re-electing Rep. John Katko (R-Camillus) is a good place to start.

As of right now, FiveThirtyEight lists Katko as a roughly five in six favorite to win re-election over his Democratic opponent Dana Balter, a visiting assistant teaching professor at Syracuse University. A July poll showed Balter with a narrow lead, which brought money flooding in from across the country to support the challenger’s upset bid.

But Katko has withstood the barrage, because central New York trusts him.

When Katko was first elected in 2014, Trump was a celebrity, not a politician. At the same time, Katko promised to work across the aisle and advocate for policies that appealed to everyone. He has kept that promise, even in the new era of partisanship brought on by Trump’s election.

Out of 26 current representatives from New York, Katko has been the most independent of his party in terms of his voting record. He broke with the Republican leadership on several key votes, including the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Balter’s campaign has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to tie Katko to Trump, but it hasn’t worked. Katko led by 14 percentage points in the most recent poll of the district, and he won comfortably in 2016 despite the district supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton for president.

Activists on both sides are trying to make this election about Trump, but he’s not on the ballot. Katko is.

And, unlike Trump, Katko doesn’t share this laser-focus on national issues.

Katko’s campaign said one of Katko’s proudest moments in Congress was the passage of the bill he introduced, the Stop the Importation and Trafficking of Synthetic Analogues Act.

“Inspired by the story of Oswego mother Teresa Woolson, who lost her son Victor to synthetic drugs he purchased legally, I introduced the bipartisan SITSA Act to arm law enforcement with the necessary tools to crack down on these dangerous substances,” Katko said in a statement provided by his campaign. “Moving forward, I will continue in Congress to take steps to help Central New York combat the heroin and synthetic drug epidemic.”

Of course, there are some people who are so opposed to Trump that they cannot support anyone from his party. To those people, I would say that we don’t know who will control the House of Representatives after these midterms. But whoever it is, central New York will always need a representative that will be an independent leader and accomplish things at the federal level that make life better here.

Katko was doing that before Trump was elected, and if we let him, he’ll keep doing that when Trump is gone — whether that’s 2020 or 2024.

Balter, for her part, is a great candidate. She’s a credit to her party, SU, and central New York, and would be a good representative, as well. But at the end of the day, she’s promising — backed up by zero political experience — to do what Katko has already been doing for four years. As the old saying goes, “don’t fix what ain’t broke.”

James Pezzullo is a public relations major. His column appears biweekly. He can be reached at jpezzull@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @JamesPezzullo.

Published on November 4, 2018 at 7:55 pm