(Photo: AP/Mike Groll)
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo sits with Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (left) and State Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan (right) during a June 25 news conference following the announcement of new rent-control regulations. The new regulations have been criticized by those on the left as being weak and benefitting the state's powerful real-estate industry.
In the initial aftermath of the 2012 election, New York's progressives were cautiously optimistic. As the returns came in, it became increasingly apparent that voters had elected 33 Democrats to the state's 63-seat Senate. Left-of-center politicians were carrying districts that observers had considered solidly red-indeed, that had been specifically gerrymandered by Republicans to ensure their continued Senate command. Democrats, it seemed, would control the state legislature's upper chamber for only the third time since World War II.
"It's a great night," Michael N. Gianaris, the Senate Democrat who runs the delegation's campaign committee, said at the time. "The voters of this state have sent a resounding message that they want the Democratic Party to run the state Senate."
But the voters didn't have the last word. On November 13, 2012, Simcha Felder, a Brooklyn Democrat and former New York City Councilman, announced he would caucus with the GOP-even though he had just won by defeating the district's incumbent Republican senator. Then, Jeffrey Klein, who in 2011 formed the "Independent Democratic Caucus" (IDC) with three other Democratic state senators (now four), told The New York Times that he was leaning toward throwing his support behind Republican control of the chamber. In early December, the IDC formally announced power-sharing plans that would lead them to caucus with the GOP, giving Republicans continued control over the chamber. Less than one month after having won, New York liberals had lost.
AS THE EMPIRE STATE prepares for the 2016 elections, progressives are confronting an all-too-familiar paradox. New York Democrats enjoy a more than two-to-one voter-registration edge. The state votes overwhelmingly blue in national elections. The Democrats have long had a sizable majority in the State Assembly, the legislature's lower house, and in the state's congressional delegation. Yet thanks to partisan redistricting, poor campaign-finance rules, and Governor Andrew Cuomo-a Democrat who has routinely rebuffed his own party-Republicans continue to control the state Senate.
In consequence, the state has frequently adopted policies that favor businesses and privatization, the electorate's liberalism notwithstanding.
"Gerrymandering, the money from real estate and hedge funds pouring into the state, and Cuomo's alliance with the Republicans-these obstacles have created an artificial situation where you have a state Senate Republican majority clinging to power in what, under a democratic system, I don't think anyone questions would be a Democratic Senate," says Bill Lipton, the director of the New York State Working Families Party (WFP).
The New York Senate map testifies to that body's unrepresentative character. The handgun-shaped 46th District was drawn in 2012 to increase the number of seats from 62 to 63, thereby helping Republicans to continue dominating the chamber. New York's former 51st State Senate District was said to be shaped like Abraham Lincoln riding a vacuum cleaner. The Rochester area's solidly Republican 56th District oscillates in width from 20 miles to 280 feet.
Indeed, Rochester's state Senate districts provide a master class in partisan gerrymandering. The city leans left (Monroe County, of which Rochester is the county seat, gave 58 percent of its vote to President Barack Obama in the 2012 election), but finds itself split between three state Senate seats, each of which extends to include its more conservative suburbs. As a result, all three of Rochester's state senators are Republicans, even though all three of its assembly members are Democrats.
"The Senate Republicans have been very successful and effective in their gerrymandering tactics," says Lauren George, the associate director of Common Cause New York, a nonpartisan good-government group. "It's part of the reason why the balance of power has been so balanced towards Republicans in the Senate for so many years."
In 2014, voters ratified a constitutional amendment put forth by the state legislature that will establish a separate commission to oversee all future redistricting. But the provision is riddled with loopholes designed to give the legislature continued control over the process. The legislature appoints eight of the commission's ten members and can reject whatever map the commission draws. The commission then gets a second try. But the legislature may also reject the second map and then, within some loose limits, amend it to its liking.
The amendment drew opposition from numerous good-government groups, including Common Cause (though others, like the League of Women Voters, supported it as "not perfect" but better than the status quo).
"It did not go far enough," says Gianaris, who still chairs the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee (DSCC). "It still does nothing to prohibit the legislature, at the end of the process, from simply drawing its own lines."
Even were the state to enact serious redistricting reform, progressives would still face stiff opposition from powerful moneyed interests. New York's bizarre campaign-finance regulations allow corporations to circumvent the $5,000 limit on how much they can give directly to candidates by registering as limited liability corporations (LLCs). The Board of Elections treats LLCs as "individuals," which are therefore able to donate up to $60,800 combined to statewide candidates (and even larger amounts to political parties). Worse yet, the companies can form as many LLCs as they like, effectively nullifying a cap on corporate giving altogether.
The impact on policy has been palpable. In the state's 2014 elections, roughly 10 percent of all campaign contributions came from the Real Estate Board of New York, a group that lobbies on behalf of developers and landlords. It included nearly $2 million spent on the Republicans' campaign to capture an outright majority in the state Senate, freeing it from having to rely on the renegade Democrats' support.
The Republicans succeeded. So did the Real Estate Board. The 2015 legislative session saw New York City's rent-control laws weakened to the point that rents could rise dramatically in tens of thousands of city apartments.
(Photo: AP/Mike Groll)
New York State Senator Michael Gianaris, right, debates a rule with State Senator Kenneth LaValle, a Republican, in the Senate Chamber in Albany on May 6, 2015. Democrats in the Senate later walked out of the chamber in protest after Republicans refused to allow a vote to remove the Senate majority leader, Dean Skelos, from office. Skelos, a Republican, had been arrested on corruption charges, and resigned his leadership post a week later. Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, had also been indicted on corruption charges, and resigned his leadership position earlier this year.
THE MAIN TARGET OF progressive ire in New York, though, is probably Governor Cuomo himself. Liberals have complained that he has done little if anything to help his party win control of the Senate. Indeed, according to many insiders, he even facilitated the IDC's decision in 2012 to return control of the Senate back to Republicans, which provided him with an easy excuse for why he could not advance progressive causes that might upset his own high-dollar donors. Cuomo has also drawn criticism for not doing enough to help Senate Democrats in the 2014 elections, despite his explicit pledges to liberal organizations that he'd mount a serious campaign for them. "I don't think he worked hard, at all, to flip the Senate like the Democratic Party was promised, or hoped for," says Lauren George of Common Cause.
Cuomo has also been faulted for his failure to embrace meaningful ethics reform. In 2013, he announced the creation of a commission to investigate corruption in Albany, only to disband it abruptly in March of 2014. His decision drew widespread criticism and prompted the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to take possession of all the commission's case files. The federal prosecutor has since indicted both the Senate majority leader and Assembly speaker for a range of corrupt practices.
Cuomo's defenders argue that he has advanced important liberal causes, including the state's legalization of gay marriage in 2011 and this year's decision by the Cuomo-created wage board to raise the minimum wage to $15 for fast-food workers. But liberal leaders have grumbled that such victories are few and designed to placate progressive criticism.
"He wants to control the valve of how much steam to let off for the left," says Lipton of the WFP. "The wage board action was huge, but it's only for fast-food workers. We need to pass a real minimum wage for all workers. But there's still the obstacle of the Republican-controlled state Senate, which Cuomo has propped up for years."
Cuomo has also been criticized by unions for advancing policies that one might expect from a Republican governor-not from the leader of what is, according to Gallup, the nation's fourth-bluest state. Shortly after winning re-election, the Cuomo administration notified roughly 1,000 members of the Public Employees Federation in more than three dozen state agencies of its intention to reclassify them as non-union workers.
Similarly, the governor has come under fire from the New York state teachers union for underfunding public schools and directing state funds to private education.
In 2015, Cuomo announced the state would provide $250 million in state funds to help private schools over the next two years.
On education, New York's weak campaign-finance laws and policy once again intersect. Education-privatization groups outspent unions during the 2014 campaign by nearly two-to-one. The largest recipient of their contributions was the Senate Republican Housekeeping account.
The second largest? Andrew Cuomo.
GIVEN THE RAFT OF forces working against New York's left, one could forgive state progressives for being pessimistic. Yet when it comes to 2016, Michael Gianaris is upbeat.
"We've got ourselves in the best position the DSCC has been in in a generation," he says. "We came out of the last election cycle debt-free for the first time in at least 30 years."
Democrats will have at least one advantage next year that they did not have in 2014: The country will be electing a president. In the last two presidential election cycles, Democrats-boosted by higher voter turnout-won control of the state Senate (before renegades switched sides). Their 2008 victory was their first since 1965-a testament to the leftward movement of the state's electorate. But in the lower-turnout midterm elections of 2010 and 2014, Republicans recaptured their majorities.
Gianaris is aware of the ways the GOP has structurally embedded its control. But at least when it comes to gerrymandering, he believes that their strategy could backfire.
To overcome the Democrats' overwhelming advantage in voter registration, Gianaris says, Republicans had to spread conservative voters throughout multiple districts to attain a Senate majority. As a result, New York has many districts that may lean right-but only by a narrow margin. "They are stretched so thin that there are a large number of swing districts by definition," he says.
The 46th District (the seat added to the Senate specifically to help ensure Republican control) provides one good example. It was custom-tailored for the real-estate developer-turned-GOP-politician George Amedore. A poll conducted one month before the 2012 election showed Amedore trouncing his rival, Democrat Cecilia Tkaczyk, by 13 points.
Backed by the Working Families Party, Tkaczyk had never before run for state-level office, and despite pleas from Democrats and liberal groups, was never endorsed by Cuomo. For Republicans, it was supposed to be a slam-dunk.
Instead, Tkaczyk won.
"No one believed our campaign had a chance in a district hand-carved by Republicans," she said in a statement. "Yet the power of good ideas and a strong campaign proved itself."
Tkaczyk lost in to Amedore in 2014, but her initial 2012 victory suggests Democrats can win seats even in districts designed for them to lose. "We have a huge playing field on which to play offense next year," Gianaris says.
The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee has also had increasing success in raising money in recent electoral cycles, though Gianaris acknowledges that New York's finance laws had helped give Republicans "a tremendous financial advantage."
As for Cuomo and the Independent Democratic Conference, Gianaris is circumspect. "We would like to have seen more support across the board from everyone," he says.
In the run-up to the 2014 elections, the IDC promised to caucus with the Democrats if the party gained control of the chamber. After Democrats lost, the group decided to continue its alliance with Republicans.
Gianaris says that should Democrats win in 2016, he expects the IDC will make good on their 2014 pledge to work with his caucus. But he adds that Democrats will be paying attention to how party members behave in upcoming elections. "Where support is given, we will publically proclaim our thanks," Gianaris says. "If that support is not there, people can expect to hear from us."
Still, the IDC underscores a stark truth for New York's liberals: Being a Democrat and being a progressive are not one and the same. Even a Democrat-controlled Senate does not guarantee enactment of progressive legislation.
But there are other ways in which the state's left is working to make itself heard, perhaps none more important than the Working Families Party. Founded in 1998, the WFP takes advantage of rules in New York that allow for "fusion voting," where candidates can run for office on multiple party lines. While the WFP needs the support of Democrats to maintain its prominence (to stay on the ballot, the party must receive a certain number of votes in the prior election), its efficacy at canvassing and grassroots organizing has turned it into a formidable force in the state's political arena. As a result, virtually all state Democrats seek out the WFP's endorsement, which the WFP then leverages to demand more progressive policies.
The WFP also has a "Candidate Pipeline Project," through which it recruits people to run for local office, creating a farm team of progressives across the state for future election cycles. It is a long-term strategy, but one with a proven track record, most notably in the New York City Council.
"Working closely with allies on the council, like Melissa Mark-Viverito [now the Council's speaker] and Brad Lander, we used the pipeline idea to build a vibrant progressive caucus that has become the dominant group on the city council," Lipton says.
State progressives also have a natural advantage-on a range of issues, the public is on their side.
A recent Quinnipiac Poll, for example, found that voters trust the teachers union almost twice as much as the governor, and that backing for Cuomo's education policies has decreased substantially over the last three years.
Karen Magee, the president of the New York State United Teachers, says that public-education activists have successfully leveraged this support. While the last legislative session did see increased funding for private schools, Democrats were able to force Cuomo to drop an even more ambitious plan to offer tax credits for families sending their children to private schools and for businesses that donate to private-school scholarship funds. "There are an awful lot of voters who believe in public education and do not believe in the governor's reform agenda," she says.
But winning seats is indispensible: The education tax credit would almost certainly have passed were it not for the Democrat-controlled Assembly. And Lipton is hopeful that a Democratic victory in the State Senate would at least give liberal ideas a platform. "When the Democrats take over, all our problems aren't going to be solved," he says. "But finally, issues of crucial importance to working families will at least be on the table."
Should Democrats win in 2016, Gianaris says, those issues will include "a higher minimum wage across whole sectors of the economy, paid family [leave], campaign finance reform and ethics reform, and more tenant-friendly rent laws." For that to happen, though, the party will need to stick together, which, given the track record of state Democrats, may seem a tall task. But the payoff-an agenda that reflects the wishes of New Yorkers-is enormous.
"There's a lot at stake next year," Gianaris says. "If everyone who is concerned with these progressive issues that we talk a lot about works together, there's no reason we can't be successful."
