Meet Rachel May, Syracuse’s next state senator

UPDATED: Nov. 29, 2018 7:13 p.m.

A little more than a year and a half ago, Rachel May came out of a meeting with then-state senator David Valesky that she found “very discouraging.” Somebody turned to her and told her to run against him in the next election, she said. 

“I laughed in their face,” she told her audience during a speech at National Organization for Women New York’s annual state conference on Nov. 17. 

May, 61, spent her life as an academic, caregiver and volunteer. She never saw herself in the public eye, she said at the conference. She used to be “paralyzed” in front of a microphone or camera. She developed the skills needed to navigate encounters with reporters and constituents when she began going to Toastmasters Orange Orators’ weekly meetings at Bird Library, which was part of a process of building a campaign. 

May would go on to upset incumbent Valesky in September’s Democratic primary. She would then defeat Janet Burman by more than 20 percentage points in the November general election for the state Senate’s 53rd District seat. The SUNY-ESF alumna will begin representing the district, which includes Syracuse University, in January.  

She’s a newcomer to the political arena, but May’s experience as SU’s sustainability education coordinator taught her about balancing systems — knowledge she aims to put to use in Albany. She’s also hoping to reduce some of the barriers that exist for first-time candidates so, in 2020, fresh faces like hers can work their way onto a ballot. 

The senator-elect is attending five to six community events a week between now and January, she said. At the CNY Regional Market’s Buy Local Bash on Nov. 19, the self-proclaimed introvert walked around for an hour, getting to know the area’s business owners and merchants. May sampled various food and drink items, browsed collections of clothing and crafts and stopped to speak with each vendor about their work.

May spent time speaking with dozens of vendors at CNY Regional Market’s Buy Local Bash on Nov. 19, including the owners of Farmer Street Pantry. Colleen Ferguson | Asst. News Editor

May campaigned on a platform emphasizing issues such as health care for all, campaign finance reform and an end to partisan gerrymandering, which is the drawing of districts to favor a specific political party.  

Her defeat of Valesky in September marked the first time that Valesky, who held the seat for 14 years, had been challenged by another Democrat in a primary. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.  

Burman, May’s Republican opponent in November, focused on fighting concentrated poverty, creating an equitable tax structure, lowering the costs of government and improving resources for education and farming. Burman did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story. 

May added that regardless of who people voted for at the polls, her campaign goal was just to get them to turn out. 

“My whole message was about opening up our democracy and encouraging people to vote whether they were going to vote for me or not,” she said. “I wanted to see a really big turnout. I feel like that’s when our democracy is working.” 

A first-time candidate, May said she encountered unexpected hurdles from the campaign timeline, like the voter registration deadline, which in New York is 25 days before the election.  

With a September primary, that deadline coincided with the time college students returned to campus, which was too late for students to change their address and register to vote, May said. She saw that she got “a lot of attention” in those last 25 days from the press as a candidate, but at that point, new voters couldn’t register. 

The deadline to file petition signatures to get on the ballot also coincided with the exact deadline to file campaign finance reports this year, May added. While raising money and collecting petitions may not be as much work for an incumbent, who’s been raising money for years, it took a lot of effort for a new candidate like May and her staff to juggle both these deadlines at once, she said. 

“When you run, you discover these things that … really are barriers, kind of subtle barriers that come up all the time that just make it harder for people who don’t have massive resources to get involved and run for office,” she said. 

Prior to her campaign, May had worked as SU’s campus sustainability coordinator since 2011. She officially left the job on Nov. 19, saying it would be too difficult to keep the job throughout the January to June legislative session as a state senator. 

May, who lives two blocks east of SU, expects to be present on campus when she’s not in Albany. She hopes to continue her involvement in local issues, especially those related to sustainability, she said.  

“I’m looking forward to being a senator for SU as well as for … a lot of the other important parts of the district,” she added. 

During her time as coordinator, May said she helped the SU Showcase evolve into a sustainability-oriented event with intensive workshops and speakers. One event was an activity in which a day’s worth of campus-wide waste was sent to the hauler’s site for students to dissect.  

May helped with other efforts on campus, such as divesting from fossil fuels and the Climate Action Plan, which would eliminate SU’s emission of greenhouse gases by 2040, according to its website. These initiatives make May proud of her time as campus sustainability coordinator, she said. 

She has asked to be on the Senate’s Energy, Environmental Conservation or Transportation Committees, all of which involve sustainability issues. It is important to have people on these committees who can look at the big picture and aim towards more energy efficiency and environmental responsibility, she said. 

“Sustainability is about systems thinking,” she said, referring to a problem-solving style of management that emphasizes looking at the way systems interact and work over time. “It’s about understanding the full systems and looking at those systems in a way that, if you’re trying to fix a problem in one part of the system, you’re making sure that you’re not making problems worse in some other part of the system.” 

This can apply to issues outside the environmental sphere, like health care, education or criminal justice, she added. One of her goals in Albany is to encourage her colleagues to look at the state government in a more holistic way, working across committees and seeing how issues affect different systems. 

About four years ago, May worked with Philip Arnold, chair of the religion department at SU and faculty member of Native American and Indigenous Studies, to write and execute a $90,000 grant proposal in collaboration with the Skä•noñh – Great Law of Peace Center.  

While Arnold was surprised May sought public office, he said her attention to detail, organizational skills, collaborative nature and willingness to work with different university and city constituencies — all of which were vital in the Environmental Protection Agency grant’s progression — will serve her well as a state senator. 

 “There aren’t a lot of academics willing to take on that rough and tumble world of politics,” he said. “I think she thinks that the condition of the country is just grave enough.” 

May began attending meetings with Toastmasters Orange Orators, which meets once a week in Bird Library, to improve her public speaking once she decided to run for office. Colleen Ferguson | Asst. News Editor

In 2001, the May family left St. Paul, Minnesota, and May’s tenured position as a professor of Russian Studies at Macalester College, to live in Syracuse. Her husband teaches philosophy at Le Moyne College. She earned a master’s degree in environmental communication from SUNY-ESF in 2003. 

“In the context of New York government, the fact that I have lived in three or four other states before I came here (gives me) a perspective that people who were born and raised here and never have lived anywhere else in their lives don’t have,” she said. 

Since moving to the area, May has gotten involved with grassroots urban forestry programs and served on local boards of Zoning Appeals, the Democratic Committee and the Onondaga County Resource Recovery Agency. 

Her daughter, Sophie May, 20, said in an email that she grew up going to a lot of community events in the area with her parents, including the annual Westcott Street Fair, local art shows and theater productions.  

 Sophie, a junior at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, said when her mother first brought up the idea of running for senator, she seemed hesitant. It felt like a distant idea because she had never run for any public office before, Sophie added.  

“It was definitely time for her to do something that would really make use of her amazing mine of political and social knowledge and her capability for hard work,” she said. 

Between now and January, May will hire staffers, do research for the committee she’s assigned to and continue to get to know the people she’s representing. May said she recognizes the importance of being out and about in the community to learn about the small city issues affecting a place like Syracuse, since the Democratic Party in New York is often seen as only caring about New York City, she added. 

May said she wants to make sure she’s staying in touch with people she represents. Now is a good time for that since she’s not in a session, she added.  

 “We miss having her around sometimes,” Sophie said, “but it’s definitely worth it to (see) that (she) has found her calling.”

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this post, Toastmasters was incorrectly associated with “campaign in a box.” Also, waste from Syracuse University’s campus was not taken to the sustainability laboratory.