Rachel May, a different kind of upstate Democrat
The IDC-slaying state senator is showing that you don’t have to be a moderate to win.
By KAY DERVISHI
State Sen. Rachel May never planned to run for office, and when she finally did, she didn’t expect to win. The Syracuse resident spent her entire career in higher education, while dabbling in progressive political activism. But she decided to challenge seven-term incumbent state Sen. David Valesky in 2018 because he belonged to the Independent Democratic Conference, a group of Democrats that caucused with Republicans. Despite a deal that reunified the IDC with the mainline Democrats in April 2018, May was one of six successful challengers to the eight ex-IDC members and the only victorious one outside New York City.
Three years later, she is leading the state Legislature’s efforts to deal with the impact of COVID-19 in nursing homes. As chair of the Committee on Aging, she co-led hearings into the state’s policies that may have driven outbreaks in long-term care facilities, and she helped spearhead a major nursing home reform package passed by the state Senate in February.
She’s also been one of the major voices responding to revelations that Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration obscured the extent of COVID-19-related deaths in nursing homes. Since then, amid a bevy of other scandals, including sexual harassment allegations, May has called on Cuomo to resign.
May believes her leadership represents a shift for upstate New York. Upstate Democrats no longer need to run to the right to win elections and deliver for their districts – both the rural and urban parts. Before her 2018 victory, there were only two other upstate Democratic state senators aside from Valesky: state Sens. Timothy Kennedy and Neil Breslin. Last year, five upstate Democrats were newly elected to the state Senate, bringing the total of upstate Senate Democrats to eight and helping to deliver a supermajority for the party in the upper chamber.
“I think there’s a misperception that when Democrats are living in an area that’s surrounded by a lot of Republican-controlled areas … Democrats in those areas are more likely to turn conservative,” May said. It’s the opposite, she said: Democrats get feisty.
Of course, May’s biography isn’t typical of a feisty politician. With a master’s degree from Oxford and a Ph.D. from Stanford, she began her career in academia, working as a professor of Russian language and literature at Stony Brook University on Long Island and Macalester College in Minnesota.
But she pivoted to learning more about ecology and sustainability after moving to Syracuse in 2001. She went on to become the director of sustainability education at Syracuse University, leading initiatives to incorporate sustainability into courses throughout the university.
Although she had never run for office before 2018, she was no stranger to politics and government. When she was growing up in Belmont, Massachusetts, her father was a historian and her mother was an aide to a state representative in Massachusetts. She spent one summer when she was 12 or 13 helping her grandfather, a civil rights activist, prepare materials for a case about desegregating the Los Angeles city school district. “That was radicalizing for me,” she said. “I started to understand a lot more about racial discrimination in our country but also about the legal and political and social activism dimensions of how you could make change or not make change.”
She spent years volunteering on various Democratic political campaigns, which she continued doing in Central New York, including for former Democratic Rep. Dan Maffei. May joined local progressive activist groups created in response to former President Donald Trump’s election in 2016, such as the CNY Solidarity Coalition and Uplift Syracuse.
May and other progressive activists began to direct their energy toward unseating the IDC and Valesky in 2017. She was among the constituents who gathered outside Valesky’s Syracuse office in May of that year to hold a faux funeral for legislation on single-payer health care and voting reform that failed to pass. “We think it’s just wrong that Republicans are calling the shots in the Senate,” May said then to WRVO, a local NPR affiliate.
Maurice Brown, a founding member of Uplift Syracuse (Editor: and NYPAN member), said much of that year was spent trying to pressure Valesky into supporting the implementation of early voting in New York. After they failed to sway him into backing the legislation, they focused on having a candidate take him on in the primary. “We spoke about it as a group,” Brown said. “And it made the most sense that Rachel should have been the candidate because she’s so qualified in so many ways.”
But May and others also looked for other possible candidates to recruit, as she dealt with some initial hesitancy running for office. She never considered herself a natural politician. “I’m really a pretty shy and introverted person, and I can’t remember people’s names to save my life,” she said. “The prospect of actually having to go to big political events and things was terrifying to me, but I’m getting used to it.”