PRE-RELEASE: Molinaro's Gambit

Growing pains of Tivoli's kid mayor

NOTE: Paid subscribers to the Hudson Line usually get articles 48 hours in advance, but given I have been upstaged in the realm of New York politics by other news, I am keeping release of this confined to the weekend. 24 hours from this article’s release, (9am Saturday, September 28th) it will be unlocked for all to read free of charge.

I can’t tell you when exactly I met Marc Molinaro. My best guess would be either when the Walkway over the Hudson opened when I was 6 or the annual Dutchess County Fair around the same time. I couldn’t tell you if I knew he was a politician or just an unusually gregarious man, but what I do know is I cannot remember a time when I was not at least vaguely aware of him. I’d wager this is the case for most who like me grew up in Dutchess County in the 2010s.

Everywhere in the country has politicians who engross themselves in that hyperlocal circuit, but Molinaro was a whole different beast. Every time there was a spare block of time and a new shop opened, a class graduated, or a stretch of rail trail was opening, he was there. When he couldn’t be, he found alternatives. The thumbnail for this article is a letter I and every other Dutchess County senior graduating from high school in 2021 got, a Comic Sans kudos to us for making it through COVID and beginning our adult lives. Not photocopied or auto-penned, hand signed.

Molinaro won his first election at age 18, became mayor of his hometown at 19, defrocked a decade-long incumbent assemblyman at 30, and was county executive at 36. In that last role, he routinely overperformed Democrats by double digits. In 2018, Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand won Dutchess County by 14.8%. As an at the time popular Andrew Cuomo cruised to victory on the same ballot against Molinaro’s doomed, underfunded gubernatorial run, Molinaro won Dutchess by 7.0%. While Molinaro lost to Cuomo by 24 points statewide, he actually overperformed Lee Zeldin’s 2022 gubernatorial run in 23 upstate counties, including being the last Republican to win now solidly blue Schenectady and Columbia counties.

Molinaro today is a first-term backbencher in the GOP’s razor-thin House majority. He lost his first competitive race ever in a special election for Congress, only winning the district’s portion of Dutchess which excluded the most blue cities of Poughkeepsie and Beacon by a mere 3 points. He won the general election by an even slimmer 1.56% in the most favorable electoral environment for the New York GOP since the 1990s. His new district contains none of Dutchess County, where he cut his teeth as a politician for over half his life, including numerous electoral overperformances deep into the Trump era. The congressman who proudly stated he did not vote for Trump only 6 years prior has endorsed him this cycle, and with less than two months to go rapidly careens towards what looks more likely by the day: at age 48, Marc Molinaro may soon be out of office for the first time since he was a teenager.

All this begs the question: what happened?

“Eventually, I would like to be in position to run for President. That would mean I would have to be a Senator, or Governor.'”

— 19-year-old Marc Molinaro, shortly after his election as mayor of Tivoli

Molinaro’s story, like that of many in the Mid-Hudson (though most will not admit it), begins much further downstate. Born in Yonkers in 1975, his parent’s divorce and single mother’s financial hardship found him in a far rougher Beacon than exists today and even further up the river in 1989.

Tivoli, population 1,035 in 1990 and 23 people smaller now, is a prototypically Hudson Valley village. Nestled in the northwest of Dutchess County between Route 9G and the Hudson River, Tivoli isn’t a one traffic light town— it’s a zero traffic light town, unless one is semantic enough to count the blinking yellow lights at the corner of 9G and Broadway installed just a few years ago. It is postage stamp sized at 1.55mi², most residents live along either Broadway or Montgomery Street unless they live in a small development behind Tivoli Park.

An older Victorian brick building sits along Broadway. A historic marker coins it the “Watts De Peyster Fireman's Hall.” It has always held dual purposes, initially it doubled as a firehouse and the village government’s offices, but with a new firehouse being built in 1986 the other half is now the village library. These village offices are where Molinaro found himself between his election to the Board of Trustees at age 18 and his resignation as mayor to become an Assemblyman at age 32.