Politics are heating up on the local level, perhaps obscured by the national campaign.
Erie County Democrats endorsed Erie County District Attorney John Flynn for another term Thursday night.
"We obviously think John has done a tremendous job in the last four years, with a lot of the reforms that have been handed to him," said party chairman Jeremy Zellner. "He and his staff have done an excellent job of running the office and we feel he needs four more years to get these reforms locked in."
The party's executive committee also interviewed candidates for the state Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Michael Ranzenhofer and a candidate who wants to run against Sen. Patrick Gallivan, a race Democrats have skipped in some past years. Zellner did not identify the candidates, but said three women want to run for the Ranzenhofer seat and the individual who wants to run against Gallivan is also female.
Zellner said the new election calendar pushes picking candidates.
"What has happened is with all the election reform, the petitioning process has moved up. It is now that we will be petitioning starting Feb. 25, which is just in a few short weeks," Zellner said. "So we've got to get the process going to do interviews of candidates, do endorsements of candidates in order for us to be prepared to hit the streets with petitions."
Zellner said a lot of women are showing up this year for politics and campaigns, with a revived Democratic committee in Holland all women.
"We've seen a lot of people getting involved with the party and running for office since '16 and, yes, a number of them are women," he said. "We've got an entire town Democratic committee that was non-existent for 4 or 6 years that is now fully filled with women who are committee members."
