The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
Leading Off
●NY-Gov, NY State Senate: Republican state Sen. John DeFrancisco has finally put his ailing gubernatorial campaign out of its misery—and decided to terminate his long political career, too. Earlier this week, eight different county GOP chairs switched their endorsements from DeFrancisco to Dutchess County Executive Mark Molinaro, giving Molinaro the support of 75 percent of delegates to the party's convention next month, DeFrancisco initially declared, "I'm still in the race." But on Wednesday, he decided to suspend his campaign, though he added, "[I]f the GOP committee members reconsider before the Republican Convention, I will be available."
Campaign ActionAnd he definitely won't be busy doing much else. On Thursday, sounding frustrated about his inability to enact "fundamental change," DeFrancisco declared he wouldn't seek re-election to the seat he first won in 1992. DeFrancisco is an influential figure in the Republican caucus, serving as deputy majority leader since 2015, so if he's calling it quits, that's a worrisome signal for the GOP. His Syracuse-area seat won't be easy to hold, either, since it voted for both Hillary Clinton (50-45) and Barack Obama (55-43).
And DeFrancisco is in fact the second upstate Republican to bail this week, following state Sen. Kathy Marchione, whose announcement reportedly "stunned" local party leaders. Marchione entered the legislature after beating incumbent Roy McDonald by just 99 votes in the 2012 GOP primary—a challenge she undertook because McDonald was one of four Republicans in the Senate who'd voted to legalize same-sex marriage the year before. Marchione's district is considerably harder than DeFrancisco's, since it voted for Donald Trump 49-46, but it did go for Obama by a 53-45 margin four years earlier.