How the left in N.Y. made Andrew Cuomo vulnerable

Throughout his time as governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo has tried to crush the Working Families Party, a progressive third party founded in 1998 by an alliance of union leaders and community activists.

The Working Families Party doesn’t act as a spoiler, like the Green Party. It tries to push the Democratic Party leftward by backing progressives in Democratic primaries, while supporting Democrats in general election contests against Republicans. Because New York has what’s called fusion voting, progressives can vote for Democratic candidates on the Working Families ballot line, allowing the party to show its strength and maintain the threshold of votes required to stay on the ballot from year to year.

Cuomo has tried all sorts of things to kill the WFP. In 2014, he created the shell Women’s Equality Party to siphon votes from Working Families. Unions allied with Cuomo have left the WFP, threatening its funding; WFP leaders believe Cuomo twisted their arms. The governor reportedly pressured Letitia James, New York’s attorney general and a longtime WFP stalwart, to reject the party as a price of his support in her 2018 race. He maneuvered to end fusion voting — while denying that was what he was doing — and used the state budget to triple the number of votes third parties need to keep their ballot lines. According to Politico, the governor has told people he wants to destroy the party.

Even allowing for his reputation as a vindictive control freak, I never fully understood the amount of energy Cuomo seemed to put into this vendetta. But it turns out he wasn’t being paranoid in seeing the WFP as a threat. The 2018 victories of WFP-backed state legislature candidates, part of that year’s blue wave, set the stage for Cuomo’s current crises.

Among the state’s progressive activists, Cuomo has long been seen as a thuggish reactionary. Alessandra Biaggi, a state senator who once worked for Cuomo, told me that his abusive behavior “has definitely been an open secret,” but one that “people were afraid to share because they were afraid of retribution, which is exactly why it’s been kept below the radar of most people in the state and country.”

His emergence as a Resistance hero during the first U.S. wave of the coronavirus only made Cuomo more intimidating, she said. Yet even as he became a national star, the growing power of the left in New York created new vulnerabilities for him.

Before 2018, a bizarre and infuriating deal between Republicans and a conservative Democratic faction called the Independent Democratic Conference prevented Democrats from controlling the state Senate, despite holding a majority of seats. Though Cuomo has denied it, he was reported to be deeply involved in creating the coalition that kept his own party from taking power in the chamber. The arrangement served Cuomo’s interests by ensuring that the left couldn’t push him further than he wanted to go, solidifying his control over the state’s political agenda.

It’s not clear what happens to Cuomo now. As the accusations against him have mounted, so have the calls for him to step down, but a Siena College poll released Monday shows that only 35% of New Yorker voters want him to resign immediately.

New York politics, however, have changed irrevocably. “The ‘no IDC’ campaign was an earthquake that really did shatter the New York political landscape,” said Sochie Nnaemeka, director of the

WFP’s New York chapter. It turns out that Cuomo was right to fear it.

Michelle Goldberg writes for The New York Times. Frank Bruni returns soon.