Democrats around the state are making a vigorous attempt for control of the State Senate this year, and doing their best to tamp down on primary challenges.

Daniel Squadron is running anyway.

While State Sen. Martin Connor (D-Manhattan/Brooklyn) is legislating in Albany, Daniel Squadron is getting a head start on a primary challenge.
With six months until the election, Squadron, a first-time candidate, has made campaigning a full-time job in his attempt to mount a serious challenge to the 30-year incumbent.

“When you look at the change we need, the State Senate is really the center of it,” he said.

Thoughrefusing donations from corporations, political action committees and lobbyists, Squadron has amassed a war chest of over $200,000. Among his 350 donors are family members who have given him $17,700. Connor, on the other hand, shows a $38,217 debt as of the January filing, which he has attributed to a campaign finance board bookkeeping error.

Connor’s chief of staff, Martin Algaze, said that Connor’s focus is on his Senate work.

“He’s got a lot to do for the state” instead of starting a re-election campaign so early in the year, Algaze said.

Algaze added that Connor will take the primary challenge seriously and, when the time comes, hire campaign staff and open an office. But he insisted that this was not yet the time for politicking.

“The senator will be doing all the things he needs to do to run for re-election,” Algaze said. “We’re not going to march to [Squadron’s] time schedule.”

In 2006, affordable housing developer Ken Diamondstone received 45 percent of the vote in his primary challenge
to Connor. Diamondstone is reportedly mulling running against Connor again himself, which could potentially set up a fight for the Working Families Party nomination. Diamondstone carried that line in 2006, and Squadron is hoping to get it this year.

Squadron’s family moved into the district in 1900, and he now lives in Carroll Gardens. Though he may be young, he said, his roots in the district are deep.

“It’s the district where my grandfather was raised,” he said. “The area it covers, to me, feels like the center of the world.”

Squadron, whose neatly trimmed beard makes his 28-year-old face look a bit older, has been active in local politics for several years. In 2005, he was a field director for the mayoral campaign of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn/Queens) and communications director for the Transportation Bond Act.
These experiences, he said, taught him the importance of retail politics, and help explain why he has planned so much time for his campaign.

“One lesson I really learned is you have to work hard and introduce yourself personally to as many people as you can. And that’s what I plan to do,” Squadron said.

After the 2005 campaigns, Squadron moved to the political consulting firm Knickerbocker SKD and co-authored last year’s Positively American: Winning Back the Middle-Class Majority One Family at a Time with another former boss, Sen. Charles Schumer (D).

The ideas explained in the book, Squadron said, “show both a real idealism for big ideas that are also obtainable.”

He has started to craft a platform for such ideas on policy issues that affect the district. In rebuilding Ground Zero, which is in the Lower Manhattan portion of Connor’s district, he speaks of creating a construction schedule that benefits the city, the owner of the property and residents who are affected by the noise.

But whether talking about this, the constant struggle between development and affordable housing, or anything else, Squadron never strays far from the word “change.”

That, he believes, will be a good selling point in his State Senate race, and perhaps enough to put him over the top.

“When it comes to the broken culture of Albany,” Squadron said, “people don’t need a lot of convincing that we need a change.”