The Liberal Party of New York is a minor American political party active only in the state of New York. Its platform supports a standard set of center-left policies: it favors abortion rights, increased spending on education and universal health care.
The Liberal Party was founded in 1944 as an alternative to the American Labor Party, which had been formed earlier as a vehicle for leftists uncomfortable with the Democratic Party to support Franklin Roosevelt. Despite enjoying some successes, the American Labor Party was tarred by the perceived influence of communists in its organization, which led David Dubinsky of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, Alex Rose of the Hat, Cap and Millinery Workers , and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to leave in order to found the Liberal Party as an explicitly anti-communist alternative. In the 1944 elections, both the American Labor and Liberal parties supported Roosevelt for President, but by 1948 the two parties diverged, with the Liberals nominating Harry S. Truman and the American Labor Party nominating Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace.
In 1944, the Liberal Party had conceived a plan to become a national party, with former Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, whose liberalism had resulted in his splitting with the Republicans, as its national leader. However, Willkie's unexpected death later in 1944 left the Liberals without any truly national figures to lead the party. Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt had also wished to establish a national Liberal party in order to break away from the conservative Southern wing of the Democratic party. Roosevelt was unable to pursue this plan, however: he was in poor health throughout the 1944 campaign and his death in 1945 ended this ambition.
The Liberal Party is one of several minor parties that fulfill a role almost unique to New York State politics. New York law allows electoral fusion – a candidate can be the nominee of multiple parties and aggregate the votes received on all the different ballot lines. Several other states allow fusion, but only in New York is it commonly practiced. In fact, since each party is listed with its own line on New York ballots, multiple nominations mean that a candidate's name can be listed several times on the ballot.
The Liberal Party's primary electoral strategy is generally to cross-endorse the nominees of other parties who agree with the Liberal Party's philosophy; only rarely does the Liberal Party run its own candidates. By supporting agreeable candidates and threatening not to support disagreeable ones, the Liberal Party hopes to influence candidate selection by the major parties. Other currently active parties pursuing a similar strategy in New York include the Conservative Party, the Working Families Party, and the Right to Life Party .
While the Liberal Party has generally endorsed Democratic candidates, this has not always been the case. The Liberal Party has supported liberal Republicans such as John Lindsay and Rudolph Giuliani for mayor of New York City and Jacob Javits for U.S. Senator, and independents such as John B. Anderson for president. In 1969, Lindsay, the incumbent Republican mayor of New York City, lost his own party's primary but was reelected on the Liberal Party line alone. In 1977, after Mario Cuomo lost the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York to Ed Koch, the Liberal Party endorsed Cuomo, who proceeded to again lose narrowly in the general election.
The Liberal Party has declined in influence since the 1980 election. Its 1998 candidate for governor, Betsy McCaughey Ross, received less than two percent of the vote. After a very poor showing in the 2002 gubernatorial election when former Clinton Cabinet member Andrew Cuomo abandoned his campaign before the election, the party lost its automatic place on the ballot and ceased operations at its state offices. Another hurdle to the efforts to reestablish the Liberal Party is the formation in mid-1998 of the Working Families Party, a party that enjoys, as the American Labor and Liberal parties did in their prime, strong union support. The Liberal Party's current executive director is Martin Oesterreich .
Liberal Party candidates in 2002
Symbols
The symbol of the New York Liberal Party is the Liberty Bell.
See also
External links
Last updated: 05-23-2005 05:46:16
