This article says the New York Working Families Party is campaigning hard so as to retain its spot on the ballot. It needs 2% of the gubernatorial vote. Of course its nominee, Kathy Hochul, is also the Democratic nominee. The Working Families Party only got 1.88% of the vote for Governor in 2018.
I live in New York State and I plan on writing in “NOTA”. What will that mean for the ballot-listed parties?
The 2% is calculated to include the “scattering” vote. Your vote would be classed as “scattering.” So if you left Governor blank, you would not be part of the denominator. But if you write-in “NOTA”, you are making the denominator a tiny bit bigger. I suspect there will be lots of write-in votes for Governor.
It seems like they shouldn’t have too much trouble. They scored 1.8% in 2016 and 4.5% in 2020, and they also don’t have to worry about potential vote splitting from the Women’s Equality or Independence parties. Considering their recent mobilization, they will likely not only retain ballot access, but beat the Conservatives as well to retain Line C
MCUSAP, I don’t think the Working Families Party will get more votes than the Conservative Party. But we’ll see.
The Conservative vote for Governor is always higher when it nominates the Republican and the Republican does well in the general election. When the Republicans won the Governorship in 1994 the Conservatives got 6.31% for Governor. When Republicans won again in 1998, the Conservatives got 7.36% for Governor. WFP has never come close to those percentages for any statewide office in New York. This year the Republicans are doing well in polls for Governor of NY.
Looking at the numbers again, it seems like it’ll be close, but the WFP still have good chances.
Looking at the 2020 general elections, the WFP scored about 7.3% of the vote within their coalition, while the Conservatives scored around 9.1%. If you apply those scores strictly to the 2022 polling average, one would estimate that the WFP would score around 3.7% overall, and the Conservatives would score 3.9%, giving them line C, but by a slim margin.
Yes, the past results tell a different story. In 2018, the Conservative and Reform together received 14.6% of the coalition vote and the WFP/WEP/Independence scored a mere 5.8% of theirs, and I assume that many of the voters that previously voted for the other fusion parties will switch to the Conservatives and the WFP this election. This would give the conservatives a clear advantage over the WFP, but the swing from this year to 2020 wasn’t solely a matter of presidential vs. gubernatorial, but a result of a massive effort in 2020 by the WFP to keep their ballot line.
2016, despite being a presidential year, had somewhat comparable results to 2018. In 2016, Fusionist parties scored 3.9% of Clinton’s vote, and 11.5% of Trump’s. That is a 4 year swing (2016 to 2020) of +3.4 for the Democratic-allied fusion parties and a swing of -2.4% for Republican-allied ones. Assuming there is an even greater swing from 2018-2022 (which there likely will be, as fusion parties do better for governor then president), the WFP might be able to close the gap between them and the conservatives, even with Zeldin doing so well this year, especially if they are running a more active campaign.