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By Vanessa Ogle
Brooklyn Daily
Sometimes history doesn’t repeat itself.
Incumbent Assemblyman Steven Cymbrowitz defeated repeat challenger Ben Akselrod in the Sept. 9 Democratic primary by more than double the margin he received the last time the two tangled at the ballot box.
Cymbrowitz (D–Sheepshead Bay) beat Akselrod by more than 530 votes this year, after scraping by with a scant 244 in the 2012 primary.
Cymbrowitz was so certain of his victory that he packed up his party shortly after 11:30 pm, when about 87 percent of the votes were tallied.
“Based on the numbers, we’re confident we will win,” Cymbrowitz said.
Akselrod clung to hope late into the night, saying “It is not over until it is over.”
As the results favoring the incumbent continued to trickle in, one of Akselrod’s supporters still claimed a moral victory.
“Right now we are behind, it doesn’t mean we are behind morally,” said Ari Kagan, the party’s district leader in the 45th Assembly District.
The campaign was particularly heated this year.
Cymbrowitz said Akselrod was “insensitive” to observant Jews because Akselrod issued subpoenas to residents on Cymbrowitz’s nominating position hours before sundown on the Sabbath. Akselrod then accused Cymbrowitz of trivializing the Holocaust when he used it to justify spending campaign money in a Munich gift shop.
Last week a flyer showing Akselrod hand-and-hand with an Hispanic evangelical pastor identified the mustachioed pastor as Palestinian and falsely claimed that Akselrod supported a Palestinian state.
Cymbrowitz’s campaign denied any responsibility for that flyer, but happily claimed credit for a mailer that remined voters of a 2012 Akselrod gaffe in a mailer that warned about skyrocketing crime in the “negrohood.”
Cymbrowitz became an assemblyman in 2000 after his wife, Assemblywoman Lena Cymbrowitz, died in August 2000. Before Akselrod began campaigning in 2012,Cymbrowitz typically ran unopposed.