Santos has 'fried' CD3 seat

Daily Point

GOP prospects in a special election called 'zero'

On Wednesday, Nassau County Republicans held a nationally watched media scrum to solemnly demand the resignation of Rep. George Santos. But only a few days earlier, a local meeting of the Queens Village Republican Club featured a blunter bit of political talk from Vickie Paladino, a well-known city councilwoman and ally of her county’s chairman, Tony Nunziato.

As a matter of short-term strategy, Paladino delivered a very different view from that of Nassau chairman Joe Cairo. She warned that if Santos quits, and a special election is called, “I’m going to tell you right now the chances of a Republican taking this seat are zero. It’s nuclear. It is zero. He fried the seat.”

“I say let him keep his seat for the next two years and let the people decide, because if this goes to a special election, we will have [Democrat] Robert Zimmerman, who is as far left as you want to take it,” she said. “And we will lose a valuable seat even though he will be stripped of all his committees — as he should be."

Paladino added: “He will be useless. But at least he will be a vote — a vote that I believe we will be able to count on.”

Nobody really knows now if there will be a special election or whom the candidates would be — let alone who’d soberly brand Zimmerman as hard-left. But in a 10-minute speech on Jan. 5, Paladino expressed deep personal disappointment that the persona of Santos, whom she knew for years as “Anthony,” turned out to be a facade and that he’s so clearly ill and troubled.

Nassau, with its dominant GOP organization, has a lion’s share of the 3rd Congressional District. The Queens Republicans have only their easterly strongholds such as Whitestone, Little Neck, Douglaston, and parts of North Flushing represented by Paladino. But if Santos can be said to have a residential base, it would be in Queens as it was when he ran for the congressional seat for the first time in 2020 and lost to incumbent Democrat Tom Suozzi.

As did Paladino, Cairo expressed regrets for not looking deeper than what Santos presented when deciding twice to back the fabulist’s nomination.

“Based upon the answers to the question, based upon the fact that he was recommended from Queens County, based on the fact that he submitted a resume with credentials, we supported his nomination,” Cairo said. “Obviously we have learned in the past few weeks that much of it was fabricated and untrue. We are now going to change our process. Shame on me for believing people … ”

What didn’t come up at either county’s GOP gathering was that everyone could see Santos’ hallucinatory dishonesty on full display early last year when he tried to duplicate Donald Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen from him. On Jan. 5, 2021, he stood before Trump supporters in Washington and declared: “They did to me what they did to Donald J. Trump.”

“They stole my election. For 13 days I was Congressman-elect … the first-ever, biggest upset for a Republican in New York City. And what did they do? When they were busy printing 280,000 ballots, in my district, and shipping them to Pennsylvania, they sneaked in a few for my opponent.”

Santos ended his speech that fateful day with: “Who here is ready to overturn the election for Donald J. Trump!”

— Dan Janison @Danjanison

Talking Point

Focus on Santos’ treasurer

Nancy Marks, the campaign treasurer and consultant who performed various roles for Rep. George Santos’ run for Congress, is on the outs with the Suffolk County GOP.

That appears to have started before the cascading revelations about Santos’ background. She had disgruntled party leadership dating back to at least the spring due in part to her work for insurgents running against the party’s candidates, two Suffolk political sources told The Point. Campaigns and consultants were told not to use her as treasurer, a service she had long provided to dozens of candidates and political committees in New York and other states. Among the candidates Marks worked for at some point were Robert Cornicelli, who launched a bitter struggle for control of the Smithtown Republican Party in 2019 and last year tried to take down Rep. Andrew Garbarino in CD2. Then there was her work for Judith Pascale, the longtime Suffolk County clerk who was dropped by party leaders in her last bid and lost a primary to Vincent Puleo in 2022.

One sign of the pressure on Marks might be seen in the case of Cornicelli, who hired Marks before his Smithtown race and continues to praise her work though he didn’t have her onboard for his congressional run.

“It’s very unfortunate that a woman who lost her husband to cancer related to 9/11 had been pressured not to take certain campaigns that would have helped to sustain her family because she felt that she would be blacklisted,” he told The Point.

Neither Marks nor Suffolk GOP chair Jesse Garcia could be reached for comment. But campaign finance records show that Marks, who was also former Rep. Lee Zeldin’s longtime treasurer and fellow Shirley resident, was not used in that role by Zeldin’s successor Nick LaLota, or by Garbarino, both Suffolk party-supported candidates.

In recent weeks, Marks’ work for Santos has come under deeper scrutiny, given her deep partnership with Santos and the wide range of her companies’ work for the GOP newcomer. That work included accounting, printing, and fundraising, as well as responsibility for campaign finance reports that in Santos’ case included questionable aspects such as a long list of disbursements just under the $200 documentation threshold.

— Mark Chiusano @mjchiusano

Pencil Point

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Final Point

Lottery a winning bet for New York?

With the Mega Millions jackpot projected to hit $1.35 billion for Friday evening’s drawing, the state’s CDI (cumulative daydreaming index) could be nearing all-time highs. What The Point is pondering, though, is just how much money the lottery actually brings in for New York, and where all that money goes.

The numbers are pretty impressive.

Since 1967, $78.7 billion in gambling revenue has come into New York’s coffers from the lottery and video gaming.

In the 2021-2022 fiscal year alone, gambling brought in $3.6 billion in revenue, all of which goes to fund education across the state. The breakdown of how much money is generated by each form of gambling or VLT location is fascinating, and so is the county-by-county breakdown of who gets what.

The lottery money isn’t actually distributed separately from other education funds, and since 1967, has more often supplanted education funding from the general fund than it has supplemented it. But even so, every dollar that goes to education from the lottery is a dollar that does not have to be raised through taxes.

The amount of gambling money each locale gets for education is simply its share of the gambling proceeds’ percentage of total state aid to schools.

For 2021-2022, New York City got $1,257,264,823 from the lottery. Suffolk was in second place with $270,015,864. Then came Monroe County with $176,438,061, Nassau with $172,704,552, and Onondaga rounding out the top five with $113,247,576.

And where did it come from?

The lottery proceeds included $968,386,546 from instant win “scratchers,” $119, 222,978 from the Mega Millions drawings that are top of mind this week, and just $28,828,297 from New York Lotto, the game that started it all 55 years ago.

As for VLT casinos, Empire City in Yonkers is the big winner, kicking $327,162,844 to the state, while Resorts World in Queens contributed $262,190,745. But the Resorts World number is deceptive, because its 1,000 machines there also generate the $123,447,383 that Nassau County OTB sent the state.

And Jake’s 58 in Suffolk was a big contributor, too, with $116,605,016.

And how much will come in when the three downstate casinos that gaming operators are battling over fling their doors open?

That’s the multibillion-dollar question.

— Lane Filler @lanefiller