Independence Party faces fight for its future

ALBANY -- The Independence Party could be fighting for its political future this month.

The minor political party is expected to cross-endorse Democrat Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo for re-election, just as it did in 2010. But some liberal Democrats are urging Cuomo to refuse the Independence support -- and will ask the state Democratic Committee to take up a resolution to that effect Wednesday, when the party opens its convention in Melville.

Further, some members of the labor-backed Working Families Party also are trying to convince the governor to reject the Independence line.

Their cause faces long odds. But if Cuomo doesn't accept the line, the Independence Party could face a tough task in finding another candidate and obtaining the 50,000 votes required in a gubernatorial race to maintain its ballot status in New York.

State and Suffolk Independence Party chairman Frank MacKay, of Rocky Point, didn't return messages for comment. The party is expected to endorse a candidate this month.

Assemb. Fred Thiele (I-Sag Harbor), the lone Independence member in the 213-seat State Legislature, said the push to oust the party is election-year jockeying.

"This just looks like old-fashioned hardball politics," Thiele said. "I think there's a lot of political rivalry going on. There's a lot of jockeying for electoral position, about which minor party is more important."

Party sprung from Perot

The Independence Party has been a minor political party in New York for two decades, springing from Ross Perot's 1992 presidential campaign. It was the vehicle for Rochester billionaire Thomas Golisano's three unsuccessful gubernatorial runs. His best showing was 15 percent in 2002. Since then, it has largely cross-endorsed Republicans or Democrats in statewide and local contests rather than field its own candidates.

Even though it's been around 20 years, analysts say the party hasn't built an identity or a cause -- unlike, say, the Conservative Party or the liberal Working Families Party.

Critics also say the Independence Party accumulates members -- 482,356 currently enrolled, third-most behind Democrats and Republicans -- because voters mistakenly think they are signing up to be "independent" and not part of any organized party.

"It largely exists because New York voters don't make the distinction between independent -- that is, not enrolling in a party -- and the Independence Party," said Gerald Benjamin, a political science professor and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at SUNY New Paltz. "Some enroll not realizing what they are doing."

In 2012, the New York Daily News interviewed 200 New Yorkers who enrolled as Independence Party voters and said 169 of them thought they were not joining any party, but rather registering as "independent."

No ideological center

"Perot had a program: Tax limits. Term limits," Benjamin said. "The Independence Party is unusual in that it has no center in terms of ideology or history. They're not a workers' movement or an ideology. They are surviving by either contrivance or an accident."

On its website, the party says it aims to "foster a nonideological 'big tent' party of ideas which serves as a think tank for the solutions to the problems we face."

In the past, the party also pushed to change campaign-finance laws, ease ballot access and open up primaries to allow more voters to participate.

But it's also been embroiled in controversies, perhaps the most high-profile one coming when a campaign operative was convicted of stealing more than $1 million that then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave to the Independence Party in 2009 for a poll-watching operation. The party itself wasn't charged.

But now some Democrats say the third party is for sale.

The party "embodies the corrupt ethos of 'pay to play' politics," according to a resolution the Democratic Progressive Caucus plans to introduce at the Democratic state convention this week. It calls on Cuomo to "reject" the minor party's nomination.

Rachel Lavine, chairwoman of the Progressive Caucus, said that beyond the governor's race, party members resent the battles for the Independence endorsement in local elections.

"County leaders are upset about it," she said. "There is real resentment from people in the rank-and-file."

Nassau County Democrat chairman Jay Jacobs has been the most outspoken critic, calling the minor party corrupt.

Thiele said the Independence and other minor parties "play a valuable role in bringing issues to the table" that the major parties don't want to resolve.

Cuomo hasn't answered whether he would accept the nomination. "I don't, um, I don't consider myself an expert on that," he said in March.