State Senator Timothy Kennedy, a Democrat, won the Empire State’s special election to fill retired Democratic Representative Brian Higgins’s seat in Congress, according to a projection from Decision Desk HQ.
Kennedy defeated his opponent, Republican Gary Dickson, in New York’s 26th Congressional District for the seat, which was anticipated to remain in Democratic hands. Still, the race drew scrutiny as the GOP grappled with a razor-thin majority.
Local officials from both parties selected both candidates as their respective nominees for the special election. With his win, Kennedy will serve the rest of Higgins’s unexpired term.
Higgins resigned from Congress this past February after serving for nearly two decades in the House, citing growing dysfunction and the “slow and frustrating” progress in DC. He is now president and CEO of Shea’s Performing Arts Center in Buffalo. The longtime lawmaker was among those members of the House who announced that they would not seek reelection amid frustration with events taking place on Capitol Hill.
The New York District that Kennedy will now serve runs along the Niagara River, including the cities of Buffalo and Niagara Falls. A 2022 mass shooting that occurred in Buffalo prompted Kennedy to champion gun safety legislation in the New York State Senate.
Kennedy’s contender, Dickson, was the first Republican elected as a town supervisor in decades in West Seneca.
According to the New York State Board of Elections, Kennedy will serve the rest of the year in Higgins’s seat but will also be on the ballot this November to run for a full term in the House.
The election was held as, across the state in Manhattan, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, former President Trump, is on trial. In the first of Trump’s four criminal indictments to be presented before a jury, he faces felony charges of falsifying business records with a hush money payment made during the 2016 election cycle.
Senator Kennedy, sworn into office in 2011, has served in various aspects of New York politics since and has fought to ensure that the state receives its share of funding and state resources. After being named Chair of the Senate Transportation Committee in March 2019, he delivered $100 million for the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority (NFTA) to fund a five-year capital plan for the maintenance and improvement of the Metro Rail.
As Chair, Senator Kennedy sponsored multiple pieces of legislation, including installing cameras on school buses to catch drivers who broke the law and jeopardized student safety by passing stopped buses. He also led a comprehensive limo safety reform package to strengthen industry standards and better protect New Yorkers who use alternative transportation. He also launched the passage of Jackie’s Law, which protects victims of domestic violence from GPS stalking.
As a lifelong Western New York resident, Senator Kennedy grew up in Buffalo, where his parents raised him and his four siblings. Tim attended St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute before earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in occupational therapy at D’Youville College. As a licensed occupational therapist, Tim has spent his entire career working to help people, which he now utilizes in his work in politics.
