A couple of months ago Blue America urged Eric Kingson, a nationally known Social Security expert and advocate and a professor of Social Work at Syracuse University, to run for the upstate NY congressional district centered around Syracuse, NY-24.
New York's 24th Congressional District-- basically Syracuse plus a chunk of central New York from Oswego to the Finger Lakes to Rochester's eastern suburbs-- turned blue in the '90s. The PVI is D+1 and Obama beat McCain 56-42% and then beat Romney by an even greater margin, 57-41%. The Democratic congressman, Dan Maffei, was a wishy-washy New Dem who never embraced core progressive values and tended to vote with the GOP on crucial roll calls too frequently for grassroots Dems to countenance.
