Sad, but not completely unexpected news. Bill de Blasio, Mayor of New York, has
asked the Working Families Party to put Cuomo on their line. The WFP can still win, but things are a bit complicated from here in my opinion. Complicated as in a possible Republican Governor in New York.
This could pay off for us, it could pay off big. The Republican Party could be removed from state election boards and quite a few other things, as Kos has outlined. This is very, very high-reward. But it's also high risk, according to Siena:
The poll shows that Cuomo, a Democrat running for a second term, would handily defeat Astorino, the Westchester County Executive, by 30 percentage points, 58 percent to 28 percent.
But should a liberal candidate running on the union-backed WFP line run as well, Cuomo’s margin of victory falls to 15 percentage points.
The poll found that under that scenario, Cuomo would garner only 39 percent of the vote, with Astorino and the WFP candidate each earning 24 percent
Astorino is still unknown to 66% of voters, so he has room to grow.. Given the WFP candidate was known by 0% of the voters at this time so they have MORE room to grow or fall. But it must be noted that Palodino, Cuomo's 2014 opponent, managed to gather 33% of the vote. And with a perfect storm (For anyone not named Andrew Cuomo) forming, that may well be enough of the vote to win. Or Astorino could perceivably get more of the vote, which would make it even more possible.
Further complicating matters and adding to the storm is this little gem (Full credit to David Nir): Bill Samuels, a Progressive critical of Cuomo (Rightfully so) is running against Cuomo's running mate in a primary . Normally this wouldn't be an issue, but Cuomo is already on the ballot with the Independence Party with his preferred running mate, Kathy Hochul.
If Samuels wins the primary to be Cuomo's Democratic running mate, votes cast for the independence party (to my knowledge) WILL NOT count towards electing Cuomo if he has more votes as a Democrat, so some of his votes will quite literally be wasted and diminish Cuomo's final vote count, as well as that of the Democratic party line.
It's not inconceivable that if Samuels wins enough people would vote Independence to force Cuomo to lose. The question is whether Cuomo would manage to fall under BOTH the Republican and WFP tickets (The Republican would face a similar problem of splitting his party line's votes with the Conservative ticket) which would lose the Democratic Party its spot on election boards and state commissions. Do I see this as a realistic possibility? Absolutely. And while I don't think it's likely to happen, it's still possible.
I don't say any of this to get anyone's spirits down - I still think we could see Dem-WFP or WFP-Dem as the top two vote getters (So long as the GOP doesn't win the governorship we win with any of those three combinations). But this seems like an incredibly risky gamble, and it'd be a difficult balance to walk between making the WFP win by campaigning for them and not beating Cuomo up so much that the Democrats lose their major party status, or worse make it so that the vote is split so evenly that the GOPer slides through.
It's worth the gamble, in my opinion.. But for once I can honestly see why some progressives (De Blasio in this case) would want to go the safe route. Nobody wants to see a Paul LePage type situation in New York.