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Senate candidate Chele Farley visits Watertown

Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Chele Chiavacci Farley answers questions during an interview on Tuesday at the Watertown Daily Times office in Watertown. (Photo — Sydney Schaefer, Watertown Daily Times)

WATERTOWN — Chele Chiavacci Farley, the Republican candidate running against U.S. Sen. Kirsten E. Gillibrand, D-N.Y., has never held a political office — but she thinks her experience in the private sector will help her negotiate a better deal for New York state than Gillibrand.

“They feel she’s been absent,” Farley said of the residents she has spoken to.

During an editorial board meeting on Tuesday at the Times office, Farley said she is focused on jobs and opportunities.

“Jobs — this is what I hear about absolutely everywhere,” she said. “A million people have left New York since the last census.”

Farley thinks that the federal government can help reverse this trend by not taking as much funding from New York.

Her primary platform issue is returning the billions more that the state pays in taxes to the federal government than it receives in services.

“We lost $40 billion in 2016; we lost $48 billion in 2017,” she said. “New York should get its share.”

To do this, she wants to use her experience in the finance industry — she worked for Goldman Sachs before moving to her job at Mistral Capital International — to negotiate line-item funding of infrastructure projects in New York in federal spending bills, going project by project to bring tax dollars back.

“We’re going to try and put them all in,” she said of the thousands of projects across the state, giving New York a better shot at funding as negotiations inevitably pared back the number of projects actually funded.

She also wants to reduce the amount of federal taxes New Yorkers are paying in the first place, especially those in New York city’s high-rent environment.

“I’ve put forward a federal tax deduction for renters,” she said.

She has based her deduction on the amount a homeowner can take as a tax break on a mortgage. She estimates someone with the maximum allowable mortgage of $750,000 will be paying a $3,700-a-month mortgage payment, so she proposes a $3,000-a-month deduction for renters.

Farley has a long road to victory — she said she is 15 points down in the last poll and trails her opponent significantly in fundraising.

Farley has over $800,000 in funding, including $235,000 she has contributed, according to the political funding site Open Secrets, but Gillibrand has well over $18 million.

Still, Farley thinks being a Republican senator from a Democratic state who can work across the aisle will help the state get more done.

“My husband is a Democrat; he was the one who encouraged me to do this,” she said. “I think it makes a lot of sense to have a Republican senator working with the minority leader,” Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y.

Farley said her focus is less on national partisanship than what is good for New York.

For example, she says she will support President Donald J. Trump when his policies support New York, which she thinks they largely do, and oppose him when they do not.

For upstate farms that use immigrant — and sometimes undocumented immigrant — labor heavily, she thinks there should be some kind of seasonal work permit.

“You’ve got to make some kind of accommodation,” she said. “All those [undocumented] workers would love to work legally and pay taxes instead of looking over their shoulders.”

She thought there should be a better guest worker program, although she was vague on the details, and supportive of some process for immigrants working illegally now to pay a fine and get working papers.

An area where Farley cleaves a little more closely to the president is that she does not want to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, unlike her opponent.

“I’m not in favor of abolishing ICE; I do think ICE needs to follow the rules,” she said. “ICE is just enforcing the law.”

If people do not like the laws, Farley said, that is on lawmakers, not enforcement, to change.

On another contentious federal issue, the tariffs that have drawn retaliation from China, Europe, Mexico and Canada, Farley said she could see why the Trump administration has implemented them. Referring to her experience in the private sector, Farley said negotiations need to be updated periodically.

“I have deals that are 20 years old that are amended five or six times,” she said. In renegotiating NAFTA, “We got a deal with Mexico, I hope we’ll get a deal here with Canada soon.”

Farley said that the tariffs were necessary after negotiations failed.

“We’re trying an approach and we’ll see if it works, but I won’t write anything off until we see if it works,” she said.

Asked about dairy policy, Farley said her campaign was preparing a white paper.

As for one of the most hotly partisan issues in Washington right now — the hearings on Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh — Farley largely demurred.

“I will be interested to see the testimony,” she said, although she expressed concern over what she said was a lack of due process.

“Lots of people have to say this happened,” she said. She referred to Democratic Sen. Al Franken who resigned after a photo of him posing as if groping a sleeping fellow comedian was followed by stories of him inappropriately trying to touch or kiss women.

“We saw those photos of Al Franken, and I figured there had to be a lot more, and then he resigned,” she said. “You look at those photos, and you go, those are some juvenile, puerile photos, but it’s like — is that a reason?”

Ultimately, though, Farley’s main argument is that she can do more in the two Senate terms she says she’ll limit herself to than Gillibrand has been able to.

“My opponent actually, I think, has a lot of good ideas, but she can’t get them through,” Farley said.

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