June O’Neill, St. Lawrence County Democratic Committee chair, was named co-chair of the Democratic State Party in 2006, and became the sole chair in April, after Dave Pollack’s resignation.
Looking forward to the fall elections, she took some time to reflect on strategies for November, pushing her 62-county effort and her work as chair to increase enrollment, funding, visibility and candidate recruitment.
“The only way to eat an elephant,” she said, “is one bite at a time.”
What follows is an edited tran scri pt.

The Capitol: Did the State Committee’s 62-county party idea come out of Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy?
June O’Neill: It partly came out of that, and it partly came out of the fact that I am from an upstate, rural area and know that we have to be strong everywhere in order to keep winning elections. I think it’s the unique role of the party to be concerned with races all the way up and down the ballot.

TC: St. Lawrence County is so much different from Erie County, from the Bronx. With Democrats hoping to gain the majority in the State Senate by winning seats in so many corners of the state, how will the party remain unified?
JO: We’re really one state. In another life, I was part of Mario Cuomo’s cabinet, and I was director of the Office of Rural Affairs. It was the first cabinet-level office of its kind in the country, and I know that it’s not that the problems are different necessarily between urban and rural areas. It’s that the solutions need to be different.  

TC:  Do you think those differences might lead to party infighting over legislation?
JO: I don’t know that it’s necessarily infighting on the legislation. The problem is that in a state as large and diverse as New York, one size does not fit all. The trick is that making sure that when we look at legislation, that we’re concerned about the fact that it’s going to have the intended effect everywhere. So, for example, in my county, whenever a law or regulation is passed that says, “in order to do this, you must go over there,” whether it’s the motor vehicle bureau or for unemployment insurance, it immediately becomes a problem for large areas of the state where there isn’t public transit.  There are different challenges in different parts of the state, and I think, frankly, that as Democrats we do a better job of being mindful of those challenges.

TC:  Are there any elections in New York that you think are particularly interesting, that perhaps others have not been paying as much attention to?
JO: At the Congressional level, we have the Tom Reynolds and the Jim Walsh seats that are open, and in both of those cases, the Democratic candidates ran two years ago and came within a whisker of defeating the then-incumbent, and did it without a lot of help from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the State Committee or, frankly, anybody else. Those have now become top-tier races. And now we have the Fossella seat, which is of course in play, and the DCCC has already moved that in the Red-to-Blue column.

TC: Sen. Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic nomination. Has the absence of a New Yorker in the White House made Washington ignore or more slowly respond to New York’s needs or issues?
JO: Hillary is still our junior senator, and of course we have Chuck Schumer as our senior senator. It’s very hard to ignore one, never mind both, of them when they are strongly advocating on our behalf. And they’ve done a terrific job in spite of the fact that we’ve had a deaf ear in the White House in the past eight years.

TC:  Are there any issues with a specific impact on New York State that you think should be addressed by Congress or the next president?
JO: Well, I think they absolutely have to do something about energy. And I think the issue that Pat Moynihan brought to the floor, the fact that historically New York State has paid more in federal taxes than we’ve received back in aid.

TC:  Who do you see as some of the up-and-coming leaders within the party?
JO: We have people from all over the state. For example, Long Island, which used to be solidly Republican, we’ve got the legislatures, we’ve got both county executives. This past November, we picked up a lot in Dutchess County—I believe we have the legislature there for the first time in 40 years. We elected a district attorney right in Rensselaer County, which is Joe Bruno’s home county, over his hand-picked candidate. In Monroe County, we’re now within one seat of taking the legislature.

TC:  There has been a lot of debate about preserving the Electoral College. You were an elector in 2004 and will be again this year. Has the experience of being on the inside of that process changed your views of it?
JO:It really didn’t. It was very exciting. I think we established that I was the first person from St. Lawrence County to ever have been a member of the Electoral College. It was really an honor, coming from such a rural part of the state, and I understand that I’m only the second person from a rural county to ever chair the state party. … It’s just that in recent years because of the disputed results of the presidential elections the role has been highlighted. The same is with the superdelegate role.

TC:  Your former co-chair, David Pollack, resigned from that position in early April. How did your duties, or the duties of the state chair, change?
JO: The duties have changed to the extent of event coverage. Dave graciously volunteered to be our new voter outreach coordinator. And he’s still a very good Democrat. We’re still working together on voter outreach, because that’s critical. This is going to be a tight presidential race nationwide. We obviously have to do our part. We’re also in a strong position to help other states by sending volunteers, perhaps into Pennsylvania, to do some voter registration. We’ve had lots of people in New York volunteer to do phone calls into other states. They did it in the primary, and they’ll do it in the general election, as well. New York has a critical role to play, and we need to make sure that our base, our new Democrats and the people who are just sick and tired of the mess that the Bush administration has gotten us into are going to get out to the polls and translate to help all of those down-ballot races which are so critical.

TC: Are there any differences in the way the office is being run now, with only one person at the top as opposed to two?
JO: Well, Dave’s title was co-chair, but according to the party rules, we were not co-chairs. So, in terms of administration and so forth, no, there isn’t any administrative change. It’s mostly a function of being able to be in two places at one time, and so forth. Dave is still, as I said, a volunteer helping us with new voter outreach and actively involved with the blogs and helping to get our Facebook up—I’m on Facebook.

TC:  Are you a Facebook addict?
JO: I was an addict the minute that I signed up for it. There’s so much going on right now between the elections and the convention—they’re totally consuming us. I get my Facebook messages on my Blackberry.