When the Working Families Party made public their internal debate on whether to endorse Cuomo or someone else for governor, I mostly believed that Cuomo should get the endorsement. The rationale was that the worst case scenario would be an Astorino victory, resulting from a WFP spoiler a la Nader 2000. The view from here in the Hudson Valley is that Astorino was and is looking for any and all strategies to depress the Democratic vote come November. Splitting the vote would be helpful for Astorino. Also, Astorino appears to have made sure to quash potentially hotly contested local races which might bring out Democratic voters. At the outset, my fear of an Astorino victory ruled my thinking.
My conclusion now is different. The difference is Cuomo’s acceptance of the Independence Party nomination. I think that while the WFP will garner the necessary 50,000 votes to keep a ballot line, they are likely to finish in 6th place. If so, the line will be of little value in elections for the next four years. Cuomo’s acceptance of the Independence Party line, provides the space for voters who want to either vote for him or against Astorino and don’t want to vote on the D line. The anti-corruption voters will have no where to go except for the Green Party. Similarly suburban parents concerned with the privatization of public schools (Common Core and charter schools) have no significant champion for their cause. The rationale to vote on the WFP line is just not very strong.
On the other hand, if the current polling would hold up until November, a strong, well funded third candidate on the left might very well have finished third (meaning getting more votes than Cuomo on the IP line and more than Astorino on the C line). That would make WFP real estate on New York ballots for the next four years very valuable.
As a chair of a town Democratic committee in the Hudson Valley, one of my jobs is to recruit good candidates for local government and to help move good candidates along to higher office. It’s about winning elections. Given New York’s fusion voting system, additional ballot lines are often necessary to win contested races. If I am right about the layout of the 2015 through 2018 NY ballot, my candidates will be forced into seeking the Independence Party line. This just moves the NY political process toward more corruption, as both the left and the right are forced to keep funding the Independence Party, which does nothing but sit in an easy chair collecting money from everyone. The side that chooses not to play that game will, in many elections, lose. Thanks, Mr. Cuomo.
So the powers that be in the WFP apparently believe that endorsing the likely winner, even if he is no friend to working families in NY, is their best play. On one level, it’s good that we have greater assurance that Astorino has little chance to eek out a victory. But at what cost? The Independence Party is not only preserved but made more important. We lose any chance of meaningful debate about important issues (corruption, education, energy/environment...) in this campaign. Mostly, it becomes more difficult for good Democrats to win elections east and north of NYC from 2015 until at least the next gubernatorial election in 2018.