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**AUGUST 24, 2022**

Could Yuh-Line Niou Run on the WFP Line?

BY ALEXANDER SAMMON

A progressive split in New York's deep-blue Tenth District could help
self-funding moderate Dan Goldman win the primary. But the Working
Families Party could run their own general-election challenger.

Last night, votes were tallied in New York's 10th district, with
Goldman eking out a victory over Yuh-Line Niou by just 2 percent,
roughly 2,000 votes total. With some mail-in ballots yet to be counted,
Niou has still not conceded, though it looks very unlikely that she'll
make up the difference; Goldman has claimed victory. This piece,
published Monday, explores the possibility of Niou making a third-party
run on the Working Families Party line against Goldman, who only won 25
percent of the vote despite spending $4 million of his own fortune and
getting another half million in super PAC support from AIPAC. As it
stands, Mondaire Jones is currently the placeholder on the ballot's
WFP line, but the party could easily remove him ahead of November's
election and he's already said he won't be running in November.

New York, thanks to its congressional redistricting debacle and late
election date, has featured some of the most muddled and acrimonious
Democratic primary races anywhere in the country. On Tuesday, finally,
the state's voters will provide much-needed clarity.

Among the returns most closely and wincingly watched will be New
York's Tenth District, a deep-blue carve-out that includes Lower
Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn, a majority-minority district that is
now New York City's most diverse
.
An extremely crowded field, which includes ex-prosecutor and heir to the
Levi Strauss fortune Dan Goldman, state assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou,
sitting congressman Mondaire Jones, city councilwoman Carlina Rivera,
former congresswoman Liz Holtzman, and assemblywoman Jo Anne Simon, will
be decided with the likely winner netting far from a majority of votes.

The race has featured a notable lack of consolidation, with not a single
of the mentioned candidates willing to drop out and endorse an
ideological ally. A press conference on Friday was expected to feature
Holtzman dropping out and endorsing Rivera, but ended up just being a
mutual lovefest
with vague
statements about the need to elect a woman.

The result of that quagmire is that Goldman, the most conservative
option of the front-runners, is now the expected victor. He has leaned
on his $250 million personal fortune ($4 million of which has been spent
on his race so far) and powerful, dubiously invoked connections

to put himself in the pole position. Goldman, who opposes court reform,
student debt cancellation, and Medicare for All, and even sports a
wobbly record on abortion, would be a disaster for progressives in a
district Joe Biden carried by over 50 points.

But if Goldman is able to buy his way into a first-place finish,
progressives need not take that result lying down. A Goldman triumph
would only secure him the Democratic nomination; it wouldn't
necessarily secure him a seat in Congress. Yuh-Line Niou, one of (if not
the) leading progressive in the race, has already qualified for the
general election on the Working Families Party ballot line.

New York has a fusion voting system where multiple parties get ballot
lines. They can endorse a common candidate, as the Working Families
Party and the Democratic Party often do, but they can also run their own
candidates instead. The WFP endorsed Niou
in
June, and if she fails to win the crowded primary tomorrow, the party
could easily put her on the ballot again in November, if she and the
party want to pursue it.

A spokesperson for the New York Working Families Party declined to
comment on their willingness to pursue this option. But the Working
Families Party owns its own ballot line-something that organizers
fought hard to protect from then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo's campaign to
rescind it via ballot measure in 2020-for exactly these sorts of
situations. It's hard to envision a clearer case for its application.
You have a super-wealthy scion, far to the right of his district, with a
substantial investment in News Corp (parent company of Fox News). He is
poised to secure the Democratic nomination, likely with less than 30
percent of the vote, in an all-time low-turnout election, while a
relatively sizable progressive base and various unions scatter their
votes across numerous progressive candidates.

n that sense, the Democratic primary could be used simply to accomplish
what the candidates have been unwilling to do themselves, clearing and
consolidating the field. Given that Republicans are a total nonentity in
the district, the real race come November would be between two
Democrats, one moderate and one progressive, a two-person contest that
much more accurately reflects the makeup of the district. It's a
matchup that, given the political climate of New York City, would be
eminently winnable for the WFP. It would also be a sorely needed victory
for the city's left flank, which has lately suffered from a
countersurge from machine-friendly moderates, with a mayor and city
council speaker hostile to progressive priorities of all types.

Beyond the opportunity to flex some activist muscle, forcing a de facto
runoff between Niou and Goldman come November would represent a much
more successful exercise of the democratic process than what we've
seen to this point. November will see much higher turnout for the
election than late August, when many New York City dwellers skip town to
beat the heat. Goldman would have much more difficulty buying the race
with one challenger than with five, while the difference between Goldman
and Niou on policy would be much more consequential. Goldman hasn't
gone it alone financially-he's also raised big money from Wall
Street and the real estate lobby-but it would be a lot more difficult
to overwhelm the field from a spending perspective in a two-person race,
if the WFP and like-minded unions and donors step up.

A number of progressive candidates still think they have a shot to eke
out a first-place finish. But if Carlina Rivera, backed by New York City
local electeds, and Mondaire Jones, who features the most national
Democratic support, fail to beat Goldman, it would make plenty of sense
for them to line up behind Niou on the WFP line. At that point, she
would be the only candidate with a path to victory. To make matters
simpler, Niou has polled the highest of any of them, if only by a
handful of percentage points. Obviously we'll get a better reading on
this on Tuesday.

The stakes are high enough for the progressive groups backing these
candidates to force this sort of post-August realignment. And if the WFP
does put up Niou on their third-party line in November, it would be the
highest-profile instance of this since 2003, when Letitia James, now New
York's attorney general, ran against Democratic nominee Geoffrey Davis
in Brooklyn's 35th City Council District, and won.

There are understandable reasons why this course of action by the WFP
has been used sparingly. But if that option isn't pursued in this
case, it would be hard to see why the party fought so hard to keep its
ballot line in the first place.

And speaking of Cuomo, it's worth noting that none of these New York
election debacles, brought on by a catastrophic redistricting process,
would be taking place if it were not for Cuomo's appointment of a
number of conservative judges, including Janet DiFiore, who cast a
critical vote in the New York Court of Appeals' 4-3 decision that
threw out the original redistricted maps in favor of a more "neutral"
rewrite. The subsequent version cost national Democrats a competitive
advantage and set off a mad dash in the New York congressional
delegation, which resulted in more incumbent-on-incumbent Democratic
primaries than in any other state.

In congressional races across the country, more-conservative candidates
have defeated progressives out in open primaries, riding a cascade of
big money from conservative super PACs and very rich, self-funded
individuals. In most cases, those outspent progressives have had little
recourse to fight back. But in New York's Tenth, there are options.
The question is whether progressives will circle the wagons and choose
to pursue them, or quietly admit defeat.

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