The hottest story in New York politics right now is not the jockeying between Senators Clinton and Obama over fund-raisers for 2008 or between William Thompson and the other 2009 mayoral contenders. Instead it concerns a special election on Long Island scheduled for February 6 of this year in which a Democratic victory could narrow the Republican majority in the State Senate to a precarious 33 to 29. The Republican majority is already slender, resting as it does on the shoulders of such venerable yet aging Republicans as Serphin Maltese of Queens, who is 74; Frank Padavan of Queens, who is 72, and the majority leader himself, Joseph Bruno, who is 77 and under a federal investigation into his business dealings.

The battle of the moment pits the Nassau County clerk, Maureen O’Connell, a Republican, against a Nassau County legislator, Craig Johnson, a Democrat. Governor Spitzer, a Democrat, is naturally backing the Democrat. But what’s fascinating is that two of the unions with an interest in preserving the tax-and-spend status quo in Albany — Local 1199 of the Service Employees Union International, which represents health care workers paid for by the state’s bloated Medicaid system, and the Civil Service Employees Association, which represents, you can guess — are backing the Republicans.

Newsday ran an article about 1199’s move quoting the union’s executive vice president, Jennifer Cunningham, as describing Ms. O’Connell as “a very special candidate.” But the Daily News’s William Hammond reported that Ms. Cunningham was leaving 1199, in part to work as a lobbyist at Featherstonhaugh, Wiley, Clyne & Cordo. The Featherstonhaugh is James Featherstonhaugh, an Albany lobbyist who was partners with Senator Bruno in an upstate land deal that reportedly attracted the attention of the federal investigators.

All this is happening at a moment when Mr. Spitzer is going to need to wring substantial savings out of Medicaid to pay for the property tax relief, expanded health insurance coverage, and school aid that he has promised. It’s hard to believe that the Republicans in Albany would be the ones standing in the way of rationalizing the state’s notoriously wasteful and excessive Medicaid spending, but then again, they don’t call it the most dysfunctional state legislature in the country for nothing. Mr. Bruno has at times been a constructive force in terms of tax cuts and a gradual end to rent control, but when the public employee unions and the lobbyists are the ones trying to keep the Republicans in the majority in the state Senate, the Grand Old Party in the Empire State has a grand old problem.