To my New York friends:
If you are like me, you face a strange dilemma this Tuesday.
You know our awful governor Andrew Cuomo is a manipulative, lying control freak, who shut down an investigation into corruption in Albany before it could finish its job (and prevented it from looking into anything touching his own administration), and, as The New York Times recently reported, who previously botched and then covered up his own mishandling of the Hurricane Sandy crisis. He’s nothing like his father, having recently declared that liberals are against any raising of taxes on the rich because that would be “confiscation.” I could go on…
But I’m going to hold my nose and vote for him on the Working Families Party line*, not because I in any way support him, but because I want the WFP to keep its ballot line—which is the source of much of its power. And we need at least 50,000 votes to do so. So your vote matters.
Some of you may be attracted to voting for Cuomo on the new “Women’s Equality Party” that Governor Cuomo started this summer. Please don’t. It’s a sham. It’s not a coincidence that the new party’s initials “WEP” and just one letter off from the WFP. Cuomo created this thing to try to siphon votes away from the WFP. Here’s a photo that shows what he really thinks of “women’s equality.”
He hates the Working Families Party with a passion because it is the only institution in NY that has challenged him and had the power to extract concessions from him that address progressive concerns. (For example—the WFP got Cuomo to promise to campaign for a Democratic-controlled state Senate. Imagine that, a Democratic governor who had to be forced to make that promise.)
I’m sure some of you are thinking, didn’t the WFP get played by Cuomo last May, when it decided to endorse him rather than run its own candidate, namely Zephyr Teachout, on its line? I think you are right, the party’s state committee made a strategic mistake. Though, in fairness, they could not have known how terrific Zephyr would be on the campaign trail.
Unfortunately, Zephyr isn’t on the ballot this Tuesday, or I’d certainly be voting for her (and her running mate Tim Wu). So what to do?
Some of you may be considering voting for Howie Hawkins, who is running (again) for governor on the Green Party line. I can understand that choice—the Greens, on paper, represent a real alternative politics. But ask yourself—what has the Green Party of NY actually done between elections?
Since its founding in 1998, the WFP has won increases in the state minimum wage, the passage and extension of a “millionaire’s tax,” reform of the Rockefeller drug laws, paid sick days, an end to the abuse of stop and frisk, even living wage legislation in Westchester and an affordable housing ordinance in Yonkers. It’s also been central to the election of a progressive majority on the New York City council. And it’s been an active, vital home for the often-siloed progressive organizations of this state to come together and pool their energies. It’s not perfect, but it’s an institution that many of us have fought to build and one we can’t afford to lose.
So, hold your nose, vote for the bastard on the WFP’s line. It matters.
*For those of you who may need a refresher on the WFP and how third-party ballot lines work in NY, here you go:
In NY, the old system of “fusion” or “cross-endorsement” was never outlawed. That is, until the late 1800s across America, parties could “fuse” around a common candidate, have their votes tallied separately on each line, but the candidate would get the total. That system actually enabled a robust multi-party system (in fact, it’s partly how the US’s one successful third party, the Republicans, made it out of minor party status). And in the late 1890s, the two major parties started outlawing it, in order to stamp out the rising Populist Party. But in NY the system was never outlawed, allowing us to have a number of smaller parties going back decades, like the Conservatives, the Liberals, Right to Life, etc.
In 1998, a bunch of labor unions, ACORN and Citizen Action, plus some progressive politicians, got together and created a new party, Working Families, and managed to get 50,000 votes (the threshold required by state law) for Peter Vallone (a hack who was also the Democratic nominee against George Pataki) on their new line. Having done that, they then got the benefit of having an official line on the ballot (i.e. not having to petition for each candidate they might endorse) and have used that quite effectively over the years to leverage progressive power.
The WFP was actually the most successful offspring of an earlier effort called The New Party which tried to revive the practice of fusion all at once by seeking a Supreme Court ruling overturning fusion bans as violations of the First Amendment right of association. The New Party lost that case (shockingly, the Supremes found the protection of the existing two-party system to be enshrined by the Constitution even though political parties are mentioned nowhere in that document), but since the rise of the WFP in NY the idea has taken hold and there are now WFP efforts in several other states as well—but none as advanced as in NY.
Way more details to be found in my book “Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America.”