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It is a painful and deeply consequential piece of irony that those who understand the system the least are often the ones most committed to transforming it. Perhaps that is why so many young people are drawn to Dana Balter — she doesn’t understand the system either.

It’s difficult to argue with her intentions. Balter wants to be a liberal force for justice in an unjust conservative structure. She is also not the first to run on this platform, and the results are never what the voters hope for.

Balter is, in many ways, your standard progressive candidate. She supports Medicare-for-all, a $15/hour minimum wage and student loan forgiveness, among other things. The common denominator, typical of the leftist platform, is that these types of policies rarely actually serve the people they claim to want to help.

Minimum wage hikes, for example, could lead to higher unemployment among low-skilled workers, a conclusion shared by the Congressional Budget Office, which projects up to 3.7 million lost jobs as a result of a $15 minimum wage. Medicare-for-all and student debt forgiveness both sound attractive to young people, but rarely do they consider the additional tens of trillions of dollars that taxpayers would be expected to cough up.

For many, incumbent Katko is not the preferable candidate because of ideological reasons, but because he has the sensibility to take a step back and consider the feasibility of these proposals. He is a realist above all else and knows when to stick with the GOP and when to reach across the aisle. It’s why Katko was one of two New York Republican congressmen who voted against repealing Obamacare without a suitable replacement.

It is also why Katko, a long-time critic of President Donald Trump, decided to endorse the president in his re-election. While that endorsement has invoked the ire of many within his district, those critics fail to consider the drastic decline in unemployment levels in central New York under the Trump administration, owed largely to his economic policy.

Arguably the largest selling point of Balter over Katko is that she wants to take “big money” out of politics. Of course, that selling point is dependent on her supporters not doing their research. Balter’s campaign might proudly proclaim their intention to overturn Citizens’ United, but they leave out the part where Katko wrote an actual constitutional amendment to that same effect.

They can slander Katko as the bought-out boogeyman all they want, but it does not change the fact that Balter has accepted comparable sums of money between 2018 and 2020 from big business. In fact, the only tangible difference between the two in this regard is that Balter wants to suspend the salaries of congressmen who fail to pass budgets, something which would actually give more power to the wealthy elite in Congress who can withstand that financial loss.

In the race for NY-24, Katko is the only true representative of the working class. Just look at Balter’s list of donors and you’ll find her most ardent supporters are her former colleagues — wealthy academics at Syracuse University who stand isolated from the realities of working class America, and their students, who largely have yet to experience the world for themselves.

The dynamic of this election is not as much between “Republican and Democrat” as it “what works and what has never worked.”

Augustus LeRoux

History, International Relations, ’23

Published on October 29, 2020 at 12:22 am