Stewart-Cousins Looks to Fend Off Challenger in 35th Senate District Matchup

Khristen Kerr doesn’t shy away from a challenge.

Kerr, the Republican candidate in this year’s 35th state Senate District race, is taking on Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D-Yonkers), likely the second most powerful woman in New York, for the second consecutive election in a reliably Democratic district.

Kerr may have lost in 2022 by 30 points, but she has the distinction of being Stewart-Cousins’ only opponent in the past decade.

“I feel that New York is going in the wrong direction and I think there needs to be positive changes made, so that’s really why I’m running,” said Kerr, an Elmsford resident and an electrical engineer. “She had been unopposed since 2014, so I felt somebody should at least be challenging her in the election.”

For many years Kerr was a Democrat, but left the party in 2019 because she felt that the party no longer represented her values. Stewart-Cousins’ ascent to Majority Leader has coincided with the affordability crisis, a spike in crime, bail reform laws that have made people feel unsafe and several billion dollars allocated to address the migrants that have streamed to New York, she said. That money could have been better spent elsewhere, according to Kerr.

She said New York should not be a sanctuary state and Westchester shouldn’t be a sanctuary county.

“We’re running out of resources and that’s contributing to our taxes going up because these are our tax dollars,” Kerr said. “We didn’t vote for that.”

For her part, Stewart-Cousins touted her leadership for nearly the past six years, pointing to how the legislature secured full Foundation Aid funding for public schools after a more than decade-long battle.

The state has also addressed affordability with reducing middle-class income taxes to their lowest rates in about 70 years and expanding child tax credit eligibility, she said.

Stewart-Cousins said the state has also invested several hundred million dollars to help keep people in their residences and to create more affordable housing. In the current budget, $50 million was allocated for legal services to prevent foreclosures, $40 million for the Homeowner Protection Program, which helps those who are in danger of losing their homes, $150 million toward creating more affordable housing and $75 million to build public housing outside of New York City.

“So, I’ve done a lot. I continue to do a lot,” Stewart-Cousins said.

Kerr said there should be incentives for developers and large companies to build basic residences that are affordable for working class New Yorkers. There also needs to be more creative approaches, such as incentivizing large corporations such as Amazon that open up facilities in the state to build housing.

The challenger is adamant that the state’s bail reform efforts have been a failure. There has been a rash of repeat offenders for crimes such as as shoplifting or property offenses. Many stores have had to hire their own private security, which hurts their bottom line, Kerr said.

“When you have little to no consequences for your bad actions, you’re going to continue, and these are, for the most part, career criminals who are taking advantage of the system,” she said. “It’s not a high school kid just shoplifting a backpack or something that they need.”

Judges must be allowed to use greater discretion when they see offenders who return multiple times and to be able to set appropriate bail, Kerr added.

Stewart-Cousins pushed back on an erroneous notion that state Democrats defunded the police. Furthermore, crime in Westchester County has continued to decline.

“Crime, according to any standard in the state, in the county, even locally, is down and I did not defund the police,” Stewart-Cousins said. “That is absolutely not true.”

She also emphasized common-sense gun legislation that has been passed by the legislature, including red flag laws, banning automatic and semiautomatic rifles and bump stocks and organizing gun buyback programs throughout the state.

Stewart-Cousins said a priority of hers is making sure state roads are properly maintained and to provide funding to municipalities to help fix local roads.

“I will continue to bring, again, resources and my own ability to bring capital to make sure we do as much as we can to rebuild the roads,” Stewart-Cousins said. “It’s a statewide issue, it’s not just ours, but I will continue to fight for more money.”

The candidates have far different views on Proposition 1, which proponents argue would guarantee equal rights in the state constitution in a wide assortment of categories, including for age, sexual orientation and disabilities.

Kerr said she fears that it would allow medical procedures to be done on minors without parental consent, and she believes that biological males could infiltrate girls’ sports.

“It may sound like it’s an equal rights perspective, but it’s actually taking away (rights),” Kerr said. “It’ll cause harm to children.”

Kerr also said in New York the need to protect abortion is unnecessary.

“I don’t think it’s going to be illegal at any time in New York, and I certainly would not vote to make it illegal,” she said.

Stewart-Cousins stressed that she is an enthusiastic supporter of Proposition 1. There were many Americans who for years believed that Roe v. Wade was settled law, but that turned out to be wrong with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 overturning of that law.

“What this will do is protect our right to abortion, in addition to updating the constitutional protections that we have in New York State,” Stewart-Cousins said.

The Majority Leader said she hopes to continue serving the residents of her district and the state.

“I’m very, very proud at what I’ve done and continue to do,” she said. “I work with everybody and I care about all of my constituents.”