Metro

Rivals touting people over party in Staten Island’s fierce House race

Marty Cackowski stopped taking drags from a cigarette just long enough to hand congressional candidate Max Rose a Budweiser, crack open another for himself and deliver his opinion of Staten Island’s incumbent Rep. Dan Donovan.

“F- -k Dan,” Cackowski said with a twitch of his handlebar mustache, legs stretched out of the open door of his navy pickup truck parked on Bement Avenue. “I vote for the lesser of the two evils, so it doesn’t really matter what party ’cause they all suck.”

Like most Staten Islanders, Cackowski, a 61-year-old registered Democrat, usually votes Republican. This doesn’t faze Rose, Donovan’s Democratic challenger.

“It’s a matter of getting the job done,” Rose said, nodding.

At his West Brighton headquarters an hour earlier, Rose argued against the idea that a Democrat can’t win on Staten Island.

“People in this district vote for the person and not the party,” he said.

The 11th Congressional District, which includes all of Staten Island and a slice of southern Brooklyn, is home to the only competitive federal race the city will see in the coming midterm elections, when Rose and Donovan face off for the House seat. In the city’s other 11 districts, Democratic nominees and incumbents are heavily favored to win.

There haven’t been any public polls on this race, yet. But Rose and Donovan are equally convinced their own brand of “independence” — and willingness to work with both parties — will resonate with voters who don’t care much for political affiliation.

“There’s always a possibility that you can lose in any election,” Donovan told The Post. “Many people didn’t believe Trump was going to win, either.”

Donovan, formerly Staten Island’s district attorney, has been the city’s sole GOP Congress member since May 2015, when he won a special election after then-Rep. Michael Grimm resigned following a felony tax-fraud conviction.

Many Staten Islanders are Democrats on paper but routinely vote for Republicans. President Trump won Staten Island by 15 points in 2016, even when the borough had 43 percent more registered Democrats than Republicans.

Today the 11th has 200,410 Democrats and 117,983 Republicans, with 69 percent of all voters on the Staten Island side, according to April enrollment totals.

The island has had just one Democratic Congress member in the last 37 years. Democrat Mike McMahon, now the borough’s district attorney, served two years in Congress during President Barack Obama’s first term.

Like Trump, Donovan defied expectations when he easily crushed a comeback bid from Grimm in June’s Republican primary. One poll had Donovan behind 10 points, but he won by 25.

Still, emboldened by a “blue wave” of opposition to Trump’s agenda, national Democrats are hoping they have finally found a solution to the drought in the city’s most conservative enclave.

Rose, 31, is the first post-9/11 combat vet to seek office in the five boroughs. He supports raising taxes on the wealthy, spending millions of dollars more on infrastructure and requiring a criminal-background check for all gun sales and a ban on the sale of AR-15 assault rifles.

“I’m not going to DC with a partisan pitchfork in my hand,” Rose said. “I think back to some of the things Donald Trump ran on . . . If you put some of the xenophobic stuff aside, he ran on draining the swamp, he ran on infrastructure . . . That’s a Democratic agenda. And I’m ready to work with him on those things.”

Donovan has been knocked by diehard Trump supporters for voting against the Republican tax plan, as well as a replacement for Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

“I voted with the people of Staten Island and south Brooklyn 100 percent of the time,” he said.

Donovan, who turns 62 on Election Day, wants to reform ObamaCare and the tax code, increase funding for the Veterans Administration and cut taxes.

“I’m not going to get every vote,” he admitted. “But if people go beyond party registration, nobody wins on higher taxes.”

National Democrats have showered cash on Rose’s campaign, which Donovan’s team gleefully pointed out in a press release last Monday dubbing him “Nancy Pelosi’s handpicked candidate.”

Rose’s campaign took in $1.95 million by June 30 and only about 2 percent of donations over $200 came from Staten Islanders, according to filings.

Of the $1.82 million Donovan’s committee got by the same time, 12.5 percent of contributions over $200 came from Staten Islanders.

Rose is part of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Red to Blue program, which funnels money to candidates in districts seen as flippable. The day before the GOP primary, a mailer paid for by the DCCC encouraged Staten Islanders to vote for Grimm and “stand with President Trump at the polls.”

Donovan assumes this was because Dems saw the ex-con pol as easier to beat. He described the DCCC’s help as ironic, given Rose’s latest campaign ad attacks the Democratic establishment.

On a recent week back in the district, Donovan visited the home of Kathleen Wong, a Hurricane Sandy victim and widow who was paying about $4,500 for federal flood insurance despite recently elevating her home 18 feet. His office helped bring the annual payment down to $450.

“I always thought it was a cliche — ‘Call your congressman,’ ” Wong, a Republican, told Donovan. “Your staff and you are wonderful. I’m going to vote for you.”

Later, over Mexican food, Donovan told The Post: “My opponent next week will be doing shopping centers or whatever else he does. I’m working for the people.”

Ironically, Donovan had just lost a charity contest across the street at a ShopRite supermarket. Participants had four minutes to fill their carts. Whoever ended up with the highest-priced haul won.

Dan Donovan participates in the Help Bag Hunger Day event at a ShopRite in Staten Island.
Dan Donovan participates in the Help Bag Hunger Day event at a ShopRite in Staten Island.J.C. Rice

When the Help Bag Hunger shopping spree began, the congressman gamely tore past a slightly deflated Pillsbury Doughboy mascot and haphazardly threw age-defying makeup and diapers into his cart. He still lost to Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis.

While Rose emphasizes that he’s a political outsider who can do better than the “same old failed leadership,” Donovan touts his experience.

A Staten Island native, Donovan went to Fordham Law School after getting a criminal-justice degree from St. John�s University in his home borough. He was Staten Island’s district attorney for 12 years and the first Republican DA in the city in more than 50 years. Before that, he worked for the Manhattan DA and in Staten Island Borough Hall for Borough Presidents Guy Molinari and James Molinaro.

Although he served as deputy borough president to Molinaro, the two are now bitter rivals. During Donovan’s second campaign for DA in 2007, Molinaro endorsed his Democratic opponent and took out a full-page ad in the Staten Island Advance to blast his former deputy for recusing himself from a case involving Molinaro’s grandson.

Molinari and Molinaro both reportedly helped Grimm in his recent challenge against their former protégé.

The congressman now sees former Mayor Rudy Giuliani as a mentor. In the House, he is closest with Long Island Republican Peter King.

Donovan came under national scrutiny in 2014 when he was district attorney and a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict an NYPD cop in the chokehold death of Eric Garner.

Donovan lives in Grymes Hill with his girlfriend, Serena, and their 3-year-old daughter, Aniella Rose, who was born a week after he was sworn into Congress.

Max Rose grew up in Brooklyn and moved to Staten Island in 2015, when he got off active duty from the Army. He earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star in Afghanistan after his platoon’s vehicle drove over an improvised explosive device in April 2013.

He is still an infantry commander in the National Guard and took two weeks off the campaign trail in August for combat exercises with the 69th Infantry.

He got a history degree from Wesleyan University and a master’s in philosophy and public policy from the London School of Economics. Rose worked for the late Brooklyn DA Ken Thompson, whom he considered a mentor, and for Brightpoint Health.

Rose lives in St. George with his new wife, Leigh, a fashion stylist. They got married in March at the Flagship Brewery on Staten Island.

Rose says his favorite philosopher is Karl Popper, a Brit best known for arguing that anything can be proven true by the absence of evidence showing it’s incorrect.

In this race, there’s a lot of evidence a liberal like Rose can’t win on Staten Island.

Former Councilman Domenic Recchia Jr. (D-Brooklyn) lost by 12 points to Grimm in 2014 even though Grimm was under federal indictment.

Ex-Councilman Vincent Gentile (D-Brooklyn) lost the borough to Donovan in the 2015 special election by about 18 points.

And Donovan trounced Democrat Richard Reichard by 23 points in 2016.

But Rose said he doesn’t want to run in a district where voters are robotically partisan.

“God bless people who think about who they’re voting for,” he said.