Deborah Glick, who was first elected to represent Lower Manhattan in the State Assembly in 1990, is running for reelection this year. She is so popular and widely respected that the Republican Party has not bothered to nominate an opponent against her in tomorrow’s election. And yet, Ms. Glick is being opposed — albeit unwillingly.
“I have a pop-up general election in November,” Ms. Glick explained sardonically at a recent meeting of the Downtown Independent Democrats (DID) club. “I can’t call it a race, because the other person isn’t running.”
This was a reference to Cynthia Nixon, the actress and activist who waged an unsuccessful campaign against incumbent Governor Andrew Cuomo for the Democratic Party’s nomination earlier this year. Ms. Nixon lost that race, but did secure the gubernatorial nomination of the Working Families Party.
But that organization is facing a dilemma. Under State election law, it must win at least 50,000 votes for Governor if it is to remain on the ballot card for the next statewide election, in 2022. The easiest way to do this, the Working Families Party decided, was to drop Ms. Nixon as its nominee, and designate Mr. Cuomo, in the hope that several tens of thousands of people who planned to vote for him anyway would do so on the Working Families line, rather than under the Democratic banner.
Under New York State’s byzantine election laws, however, there are only four ways for a candidate to withdraw from the general election after being nominated by his or her party: to die, move to another state, commit a felony, or run for a different office. Since Ms. Nixon has done none of the first three, that left only the option of slotting her name in as a candidate for another post. For this maneuver, the Working Families Party selected Ms. Glick’s seat in the Assembly.
The group appears to have done this without Ms. Nixon’s consent. She has endorsed Ms. Glick for reelection, and has stated publicly that she has not the faintest interest in serving in the State Assembly.
When the Working Families moved ahead in spite of her objections, Ms. Nixon pointedly suggested that the State Democratic Party spend as much money helping Ms. Glick win reelection as it did circulating a mailer in September that falsely accused Ms. Nixon of anti-Semitism. This pamphlet blanketed heavily Jewish communities in the days before Rosh Hashana and the September Democratic primary that clinched that party’s nomination for Mr. Cuomo. (The Governor later disavowed any knowledge of the mailer, in spite of the fact that it was written and approved by a pair of his top aides.)
The New York State Democratic Party has evinced scant interest in following Ms. Nixon’s advice, and in any case, “I didn’t want the State party involved, after that abominable mailer,” Ms. Glick said at the recent DID meeting.
“There are many things wrong with our State election laws,” she continued, “starting with ridiculous times for registration, and no provisions for early voting. So it is a very minor, but incredibly irritating, quirk of that law that somebody cannot, after the primary, decline the nomination.”
“It’s confusing,” she observed. “People are saying, ‘I don’t understand, she’s not running, but her name is on the ballot. What does that mean” how does that happen?'” As a result, Ms. Glick is diverting to her own reelection bid (which is widely perceived to be a virtual certainty) time, effort, and resources she believes would be better allocated to projects like winning Democratic control of the State Senate.
“I’m not mounting a traditional campaign,” she said. “But it is a voter education campaign to inform people that Cynthia is not only not running, but she is also not interested in having anybody vote for her. It is costing several tens of thousands of dollars to provide that information to the public.”
“Obviously, this is something I’ll be talking to my colleagues about in January,” she said of the coming legislative session in Albany. “But I also have a very substantial legislative agenda, such as my Reproductive Health Act,” which would align New York State law with protections guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution. “My bills have repeatedly passed the Assembly, and then been blocked in the State Senate. Once we have Democratic control in that chamber,’ she said, “we can get this passed and do something good for poor women, young women, working women, and families.”