Liberal Party of New York
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The Liberal Party of New York was a minor American political party active only in the state of New York. Its platform supported a standard set of center-left policies: it favored abortion rights, increased spending on education and universal health care.
Its most recent party head was Ray Harding.
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.
At their founding, the Liberal Party had conceived a plan to become a national party, with former Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie as its national leader and candidate for Mayor of New York in 1945. However, Willkie's unexpected death later in 1944 left the Liberals without any truly national figures to lead the party.
The Liberal Party was 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 was generally to cross-endorse the nominees of other parties who agree with the Liberal Party's philosophy; only rarely did the Liberal Party run its own candidates. By supporting agreeable candidates and threatening not to support disagreeable ones, the Liberal Party hoped 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 generally endorsed Democratic candidates, this was not always the case. The Liberal Party 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 declined in influence following the 1980 election. Its 1998 candidate for governor, Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey Ross, received less than two percent of the vote. The party endorsed Hillary Clinton's successful campaign in 2000, but this did not revive its fortunes. 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 most recent executive director was Martin Oesterreich.
In 2005, the New York Daily News reported that incumbent New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a liberal Republican who favors abortion rights and same-sex civil unions with rights equivalent to those of marriage, was seeking to revive the Liberal Party -- and thereby run on a "Republican/Liberal" ticket -- in an effort to win over Democratic voters in the overwhelmingly Democratic city. Mayor Bloomberg was re-elected in 2005. However, nothing came of these rumors. In 2006 for the first time since the early 1940s, there was no Liberal candidate for Governor.
The symbol of the New York Liberal Party was the Liberty Bell.
[edit] See also
- Liberalism
- Contributions to liberal theory
- Liberalism worldwide
- List of liberal parties
- Liberal democracy
- Free Libertarian Party (FLP) of New York
