https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-republican-tries-to-beat-the-odds-in-new-york-1540594559
Not since 2002 has a Republican won statewide office in New York. Keith Wofford, a 49-year-old African-American Harvard Law grad who is running for attorney general, just may be up to the task. His candidacy is a long shot in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1, and an Oct. 1 Siena College poll had him 14 points behind Democrat Letitia James. But then Mr. Wofford’s entire life has been a long shot.
Mr. Wofford grew up on Buffalo’s gritty East Side, where his father held a union job at the local Chevrolet plant and his mother worked odd jobs. Leaving high school as a junior to attend Harvard on a scholarship, Mr. Wofford ended up working as a bankruptcy lawyer in Manhattan. Earlier this year he took a leave of absence from law firm Ropes & Gray, where he is a partner, to make his first foray into politics. Despite his underdog status, Mr. Wofford has attracted a stream of donations. He has more cash on hand than Ms. James and is blasting TV ads across the state in an 11th-hour bid to shock the political world.
A Wofford victory would be more than a storybook ending; it would also be a gut-punch to the legal strategy of the Trump “resistance.” Since President Trump took office, Albany has been the nucleus of a litigation campaign against the White House. Former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman—who resigned in May after the New Yorker reported he had physically abused women—had appointed himself the administration’s chief legal antagonist. In 2017 alone, Mr. Schneiderman took more than 100 legal or administrative actions against the administration and congressional Republicans.
