Stuart Amoriell stepped up and won't stand down
Anger at Trump policies spurred him to run
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At a huge financial disadvantage, busy with running a restaurant and the father of two school-age daughters, Stuart Amoriell leapt into the NY-21 congressional race last December out of anger.
“It’s part of my history of bad decisions,” he said with a laugh when I asked him why.
“I was livid,” he said, referring to his reaction last fall when a valued kitchen employee, Emanuel Salcedo, got picked up by ICE and pressured into self-deporting back to Venezuela.
“I was angry and I’m still angry,” he said.
Amoriell and I were sitting at a table in Spot Coffee on Friday. He is 50, passionate and animated, his words spilling out rat-a-tat when he talks, hazel eyes gleaming and face occasionally flushing pink.
“These people are not criminals,” he said, mentioning another local couple, Evangelos and Agnes Karagiannopoulos, owners and operators of The Greeks restaurant in Lake Placid. Their life was upended in December when Agnes was grabbed by ICE, held in Texas for weeks, then deported to her home country, Indonesia.
She had been checking in with authorities, following the requirements of immigration law.
“She was doing the process in good faith,” Amoriell said.
“Always in school, we learned about atrocities of the past, and you wonder, what would I have done? Now you can answer that question, because we’re going through that now. That is where we are,” he said.
Where Amoriell is in the lead-up to a June 23 Democratic primary is many months of exposure and at least $2 million behind Blake Gendebien, a St. Lawrence County dairy farmer.
Gendebien was chosen early in 2025 by the chairpersons of the Democratic committees in the 15 counties in NY-21 as their nominee for an anticipated special election.
That election was canceled when Congresswoman Elise Stefanik failed to get the job of U.N. ambassador Donald Trump had promised her. Gendebien switched his focus to the midterms and continued his campaign.
The head start has given him time to amass a large amount of money and name recognition. As of March 31, he had received a little more than $4.6 million and spent a little more than $2.4 million, according to Ballotpedia.
Amoriell had received about $112,000 as of March 31 and spent about $95,000 of it. He has put in tens of thousands of dollars of his own money, he said.
“This has been painful,” he said. “I really wanted change.”
He has taken a couple of calls from Lynne Boecher, chairwoman of the Warren County Democratic Committee, who would prefer he wasn’t running, he said.
She asked him why he wanted to be a spoiler, he said.
“I’m not a spoiler. It’s a contested election. It’s part of democracy,” he said.
“She said, ‘I think Blake would be really good for us in Washington.’ I said, ‘You know what, Lynne? I don’t. If I did, I wouldn’t be in, I’d be running a restaurant.’
“There’s an idealist component there that’s not really practical. But that’s how great things happen,” he said.
He believes moving toward the middle to try to win over some percentage of Republican voters is a mistake.
“From a strategy standpoint, he’s just not firing up the base,” he said, of Gendebien. “You need every Democrat to show up. You have to make the argument in detail. That’s how you get the independents.
“If you don’t believe you can win the election by campaigning on our values, how do you think you can legislate that way?”
A political novice who enjoys debating differences, he has been surprised by the ferocity of reactions he’s experienced as a candidate.
“I enjoy engaging on the issues. I don’t enjoy the hatred,” he said.
A photo he posted online from an Adirondack Pride event this winter at Whiteface with a message that celebrated diversity drew “hundreds and hundreds of hate-filled comments,” he said.
“It literally brought me to tears. To some degree, I lost hope,” he said.
The episode convinced him government must be proactive.
“It’s not enough to stay out of it. Government has an affirmative obligation to protect people’s rights,” he said.
He is heartened the Trump administration’s march to authoritarianism has woken up millions of Democrats.
“If there is a silver lining, it is engagement. I think we are where we are because people got complacent. … We win by running on issues, not by trying to be strategic and watering down issues,” he said.
After an hour and a half, 12 pages of scrawling and a hand cramp, it was time to go. Amoriell gathered his laptop and was off. Outside, I spotted him on the other side of the street, his swift steps matching the speed of his conversation.
Whether he will be quick enough to catch the farmer with a more measured pace remains to be seen.
I like Stuart Amoriell. I like Blake Gendebien. I'll be really happy with either one on the ballot. And I'll continue to beat my we-really-need-ranked-choice-voting drum.
Thank you for giving Mr. Amoriell “air time” in this Front Page column today. Though out-financed and unknown to many of us, his determination to fight for the rights of innocent people who have lived by the rules of immigration agencies, yet lost their rightful place in our society, is an effort to be admired and duplicated throughout our county, district, state and country.
It’s alarming to read that our Democratic Party Chairwoman chose an insulting and demeaning approach to Mr. Amorell’s candidacy, labeling him a “spoiler” for staying in the process where voters are supposed to have the right to decide who they prefer as a candidate. It reeks of the good ol’ boy back-room politics occurring in the town of Queensbury Board. Way too many women in the GOP regime running our country have sold their souls to be in positions of political power. We don’t need not-so-subtle intimidation by a woman in our local Democratic Party leadership position.