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Somewhat policy'ish, involving various consitutional caps on debts for local authorities. One is about extending the exemption for sewage-related projects from the cap for 10 years, another is about removing a disparity in the cap for different-size school disctricts (basically, districts with <125,000 people have 5% of real estate value constitutional debt gap, somewhat moderated by being able to exempt project with 60% of voters and various bigwig approving, while larger ones have 10% by statute).
What will be interesting to see in terms of state politics would be how the Working Families Party will do. They are a rather interesting form of a leftist 3rd party --- in New York, it's OK for a candidate to be listed as the candidate for many parties, so they tend to cross-endorce Democratic candidates they consider to be representative of their values (the party includes a lot of labor and similar groups). That helps build electoral strength -- i.e. in the last election, Carl McCall got a lot more votes for governor on their line than the Green candidate got total.
They also, however, ran a few candidates this year, challenging Democrats in "safe" areas, like very liberal parts of NYC. It would be interesting to see how they do this year, and how it'll affect their relation with the many liberals that are somewhat loyal Democrats; as there is a rather delicate balance there --- they seem to try to avoid the mistakes of the Greens and not tick almost everyone off by appearing to be a spoiler, yet also to be independent enough not to be a rubberstamp.
Locally, not too optimistic on the county executive race here (Monroe County, around the city of Rochester). Basically, the race is between the mayor of the city, and the county clerk. The former has made on many occassions realistic but likely unpopular statements --- like that some consolidation of city and local services can reduce overhead, and that balancing the county budget may require raising property taxes --- while the latter is running on feel-good (think "I am a uniter, not a divider", but with better pronounciation) stuff, and the idea that some magic efficiency gains can be found to balance the budget w/o increasing taxes or cutting services (and without a major rethink of how local and county and city governments interact). The county tends to lean Republican for county-wide races, but it went for Gore in 2000. (Can't really comment on state races --- Golisano carried the county for governor in 2002, but that's not surprising since he is the "favorite son"; and my knowledge isn't all that good).
The one race that's really worrying me is the DA race... Basically, the choice is between a Republican-turned-Democrat-to-run, and a clear-cut Republican. Sounds like no choice, eh? Well, there isn't an anti-death-penalty candidate, yes. But there is a choice between one who thinks it should be carefully considered in individual cases, and the another one that has made statements that read (at least to me) as effectively: "we should execute more people". It also scares me when a candidate for DA states that she would not be concerned with the rights of the accused. It's just scary that a person who doesn't seem to have a sense of justice could win such an office.
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