CHENANGO COUNTY—The results of New York's 22nd Congressional District had the all too familiar buzz of a battleground race as close-call figures poured into local election offices on Tuesday.
Incumbent Richard Hanna—who began serving in Congress in 2011—chose not to seek re-election in 2016, leaving his seat open to a cast of new faces seeking the D.C. seat.
Among them, Claudia Tenney (R), Kim Myers (D), and Martin Babinec (Upstate Jobs Party) are all competitors in the heated race to the general election slated for Nov. 8.
Tenney defeated George Phillips and Steve Wells in the Republican primary, while Myers faced no primary opponent at the primary polls that went well into the evening Tuesday.
Tackling her primary opponent—businessman Steve Wells—in the three-way primary for New York’s 22nd congressional district, Tenney claimed 41 percent of the vote to Wells’ 33 percent. It's been hinted that when all is said and done, Tenney could end up winning by a spread of more than ten percentage points once absentee ballots are counted.
Tenney has long been branded as a conservative underdog, recently denouncing New York's “establishment” GOP for spending more than a million dollars against her in the primary to try to keep her out of Congress.
But it wasn’t the vetted rank-and-file alone who opted for an alternate candidate. While Tenney clinched the nomination for the twenty-second, Chenango County election results indicate that residents who went to the polls favored Wells by a margin of more then 20 percent, taking 776 votes to Tenney's 636 in the County.
Double-digit leads in Herkimer (53 percent), Oneida (56 percent) and Oswego (52 percent) counties was all it took for Tenney to pull slightly ahead after virtual tie in Madison county and a string of second-place nods among Broome, Chenango, Cortland and Tioga voters.
Tenney is now poised to square off against Democrat Kim Myers, daughter of the Dick’s Sporting Goods founder, in November’s general election.