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Liberal Party of New York
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The Liberal Party of New York is a minor American political party that has been 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.
As of 2007, the Liberal Party's most recent chairman was former New York City Parks Commissioner Henry Stern. Its most recent vice-chairman was Jack Olchin. Its executive director is Martin Oesterreich.
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The Liberal Party of New York is a minor American political party that has been 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.
As of 2007, the Liberal Party's most recent chairman was former New York City Parks Commissioner Henry Stern. Its most recent vice-chairman was Jack Olchin. Its executive director is Martin Oesterreich. Prior to Stern taking over as chairman in 2004, the Liberal Party's longtime leader was Raymond Harding.
The Liberal Party was founded in 1944 by George Counts 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 City 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 and the Working Families Party.
While the Liberal Party generally endorsed Democratic candidates, this was not always the case. The Liberal Party supported Republicans such as John Lindsay and Rudy Giuliani for mayor of New York and Jacob Javits and Charles Goodell 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. Liberal Party candidates played the role of spoiler by being the possible cause of the defeat of Democrat Frank D. O'Connor in the race for governor in 1966 by naming Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr. as its candidate in the race against incumbent Nelson Rockefeller; and again in 1980 when it endorsed Javits (who had lost in the Republican primary for United States senator to Al D'Amato). In the general election for Senator in 1980, it was assumed that Javits took Jewish votes away from Elizabeth Holtzman, the Democratic candidate, as they both lost to D'Amato.
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 Rodham 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 administration 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 labor union support. The Liberal Party also suffered allegations of corruption and of abandoning its liberal roots in favor of a system of patronage and nepotism - Harding relatives were given appointments in the Giuliani administration, and it was argued that it was a quid pro quo deal, since Giuliani is not generally considered a "liberal" by New York City standards. In 1999, The New York Observer called it an "ideologically bereft institution more interested in patronage than in policy." The Working Families Party became a new place for liberal voters to spend their votes, and it did not help that the Green Party, another left-wing organization, also expanded greatly at the same time. After the surge in Working Families Party voting, the Liberal party failed to qualify for automatic ballot status, which robbed it of its inherent political power.
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.
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