Tenney gets first challenger for Congress in 2026 -- Democrat Kastenbaum of WNY
In an announcement shared on Wednesday, Kastenbaum said she would seek to focus on "kitchen table" issues like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, rural healthcare, veterans services, education and workforce shortages in the district, which stretches from Jefferson County to Niagara Falls, largely following the southern shore of Lake Ontario.
"Our rural hospitals and nursing homes depend on Medicaid funding to serve our communities," Kastenbaum said. "Our farmers need workers who are willing to do the essential work of feeding America. Our veterans deserve the services they've earned through their honorable service. These aren't partisan issues — they're neighbor issues."
Kastenbaum has retired from running her company, Pinnacle Manufacturing, and currently serves as a trustee on the SUNY Genesee Community College board.
Kastenbaum has been slowly rebuilding her political presence in the district, launching a series of town hall events across the district with the group "Concerned Citizens NY-24", a nonpartisan community group that aimed to host community forums across the district after the start of the Trump administration.
In an interview Wednesday, Kastenbaum said she started organizing that forum with other politically-minded people in western New York to provide a forum for local residents to discuss their thoughts on federal policies and actions, and to better understand the scope of what was going on. Kastenbaum had invited Tenney to attend the nonpartisan forums, but the Congresswoman did not take her up on the offer, and has not hosted a town hall of her own in the district in months.
Kastenbaum said it was her experience with the health care system that pushed her to run — she cared for her father and then her husband, former Seinfeld cast member Hiram Kasten, before they died, and said she found the health care system very difficult to successfully move through.
"I thought, if I'm having these problems, other people must be too," she said.
Kastenbaum said she wants to pitch a stable rural health care system, and said that Republican actions in Washington are doing the opposite. She pointed to the "One Big Beautiful Bill," President Trump's keystone legislation package that includes major cuts to Medicare and Medicaid that are likely to push thousands of Americans off of the government-sponsored health insurance program. Kastenbaum said that bill is going to rip health coverage away from thousands of NY-24 residents, push regional hospitals into financial ruin and make quality of life worse.
"I don't know why Claudia Tenney supports this," she said. "She doesn't see what it's going to do to her constituents. She's never here to hear from them."
Kastenbaum said she has experience running in a heavily Republican district like NY-24, referencing her previous campaign in NY-27 back in 2016. In that race, she carried 32.8% of the vote to then-Congressman Chris Collins 67.2%.
Kastenbaum said she has seen concerns among area Republicans just as much as from Democrats about the direction the country is taking and the priorities the GOP is pursuing in D.C., and she said she thinks there's bipartisan backlash to what's being done. She said the results of the "One Big Beautiful Bill," which House GOP members were debating throughout the day Wednesday, will give local voters a lot more to be mad about.
Kastenbaum has been touring the district to meet with local county Democratic committee chairs, and said she's met all of them. She said there are other candidates planning to announce their campaigns in the coming days, and there's likely to be a primary election for the Democratic party in NY-24 this year.
Her advantages, she said, are business acumen, a long history in the district as a native born and raised in Batavia, experience in local politics and a passion to fight.
"I decided I had to fight, and the best way to do that is to run," she said.
As of Wednesday, Kastenbaum and Tenney are the only two candidates to have filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for the seat — Kastenbaum has not recorded any financial information yet because her campaign is too new, but Tenney reported that she has raised $638,790 since January of this year, and has spent $312,046.
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