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Democratic Conference Leader
Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins is the Majority Leader of the Senate Democratic Conference. She represents the 35th District, which includes Mount Pleasant, Greenburgh, and the City of Yonkers. Senator Stewart-Cousins is the first female leader of a legislative conference in the history of New York State.
She also serves as the Chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Rules. Before her entry into the State Senate, Senator Stewart-Cousins worked as a teacher, reporter, Westchester County legislator, and Community Affairs Director for Yonkers.
She is a strong advocate for human rights; quality education; accessible and affordable health care; and making government more efficient, transparent and accountable to all citizens. Senator Stewart-Cousins also has a strong record of advocating for the underserved and championing the needs of working families.
Chair
As Chair of the New York State Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, Mike Gianaris oversees all committee activities. He leads the effort to provide our candidates with the resources and infrastructure they need to wage winning campaigns.
Under Senator Gianaris’ leadership at the DSCC, Democrats took back the majority in 2018. In 2020, Democrats clinched the historic Supermajority and despite Democratic losses at other levels of government in 2022, under Senator Gianaris’ continued leadership of DSCC, Democrats were able to hold the Supermajority. Senator Gianaris also serves as Deputy Leader of the Democratic Conference, first elected to the Senate in 2010, representing the 12th District in Queens.
A child of immigrant parents, Senator Gianaris was born and raised in Astoria, Queens, where he continues to reside and represents the 12th Senatorial district.
He is the product of New York City public schools and graduated from Fordham University and Harvard Law School before setting his sights on a career in public service. In a city with millions of renters, Senator Gianaris always stands with tenants.In addition to consistently supporting better rent laws to abolish vacancy decontrol and preferential rents, he authored legislation to eliminate the often-abused Major Capital Improvements (MCI) and Individual Apartment Improvements (IAI) programs, taking on unscrupulous landlords like the Trump organization.
Due to the extremely low voter turnout numbers in New York State, Senator Gianaris wrote legislation for Automatic Voter Registration and sponsors bills to enact early voting and vote by mail so that everyone in our state can make their voices heard at the ballot box. Our state has many unfunded needs and too many misplaced priorities. Senator Gianaris continues to do battle against wasteful corporate welfare, including New York’s $3 billion giveaway to Amazon, to ensure actual priorities like truly affordable housing, better mass transit and improved schools are fully funded.
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