N.Y. / Region
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/10/nyregion/as-de-blasio-aids-bid-for-democratic-senate-cuomo-is-a-nearly-invisible-man.html?rref=nyregion&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=N.Y.%20%2F%20Region&pgtype=article                                                                                  

As de Blasio Aids Bid for Democratic Senate, Cuomo Is a Nearly Invisible Man

“He didn’t say Cuomo’s name once.”

 

By MATT FLEGENHEIMER and THOMAS KAPLANOCT. 9, 2014

Inside        Photo    

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has done little publicly beyond promising to campaign for some State Senate candidates. Credit Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Three years before his own name is likely to appear on the ballot again, Mayor Bill de Blasio had returned to full campaign mode, gesticulating in a church basement, sleeves rolled up slightly, imploring about 1,000 people to turn out in November.

 

“We are so close to victory I can taste it,” Mr. de Blasio said of the bid to return a Democratic majority to the State Senate, rousing an audience from the Working Families Party, which hosted the event on Wednesday night. “I can taste it.”

 

But the man perhaps best positioned to effect that change, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, was not in the room. In fact, through a lineup of speakers including politicians, union leaders, a poet and a McDonald’s worker, Mr. Cuomo’s name was barely mentioned.

It has been more than four months since the fragile marriage between the governor and the Working Families Party was consummated: The group endorsed Mr. Cuomo, over many of its members’ objections, after he agreed to pursue a long list of liberal goals, as part of a deal that Mr. de Blasio helped broker.

 

The top priority was an effort to tilt the balance of power in the State Senate, where Republicans currently share leadership with a group of breakaway Democrats.

 

Less than a month before Election Day, with polls showing some key Senate races leaning in Republicans’ favor, the arrangement with the governor appears increasingly fraught. Despite his pledge to push for Democratic control of the Senate, Mr. Cuomo has at times seemed not to have a strong opinion about the outcome of the November elections.

 

“You can’t say, ‘Well, I can work well if they elect this party,’ ” he told reporters last month. “They elect a legislature: Democratic, Republican, whatever they elect. I think the job of the governor is to figure out how to make it work.”

 

Some of the governor’s grudging supporters say he has already faltered on his promise: Mr. Cuomo has not ruled out endorsing a Republican incumbent from Buffalo, Mark J. Grisanti, calling the decision “personally difficult.” Mr. Grisanti, who lost the Republican primary to a right-leaning challenger but is staying in the race as the candidate of the Independence Party, backed the governor’s push to legalize same-sex marriage.

 

The race in Buffalo is of particular interest to women’s groups because Mr. Grisanti opposes a proposal from the governor regarding abortion rights. His Democratic opponent, Marc C. Panepinto, supports it.

 

“Clearly this race isn’t complicated for us or for the women of New York,” said Andrea Miller, the president of Naral Pro-Choice New York. “We would hope that it would not be complicated for the governor.”

 

Democrats hoped that with the support of Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Cuomo, they would be able to win enough seats this year to take control of the Senate. But those efforts are not going so well. A promising candidate running on Long Island ended his candidacy in September after his former law firm accused him of fraud, and a series of polls conducted last week offered a bleak outlook in several other contests.

 

The polls, by Siena College, found three incumbent Democrats trailing Republican challengers by double-digit margins. And in two Republican-controlled districts on Long Island that Democrats had hoped to capture, the polls showed the Republican candidates holding wide leads.

 

City officials have framed the fate of the State Senate as crucial to their agenda. A shift in the balance of power, they say, could help advance legislation related to the minimum wage, campaign-finance reform and immigration, among other issues.

Mr. de Blasio has dispatched a top political aide, Emma Wolfe, to help the Democrats. And the mayor’s wife, Chirlane McCray, is headlining a fund-raiser for two Senate candidates next week.

 

Mr. Cuomo’s role has been less evident. He has done little publicly beyond promising to campaign for some Senate candidates as the Nov. 4 election approaches.

Matt Wing, a spokesman for the governor’s re-election campaign, said the state Democratic Party — which Mr. Cuomo controls — had spent about $1 million helping Democratic Senate candidates.

 

Members of the Working Families Party, a fusion of liberal activism and union muscle, have long been suspicious of Mr. Cuomo, who is promoting an alternate ballot line, the Women’s Equality Party, that seems likely to compete for votes.

 

But leaders of the Working Families Party, who recruited but then declined to endorse Mr. Cuomo’s eventual challenger in the Democratic primary, Zephyr Teachout, have cast their endorsement of the governor as a farsighted, pragmatic choice.

 

“The W.F.P. gets stuff done,” the group’s state director, Bill Lipton, said from the stage during the event on Wednesday, at St. Vartan Armenian Cathedral in Manhattan. “We make it real.”

Other politicians at the event, including Senator Charles E. Schumer and Melissa Mark-Viverito, the City Council speaker, trumpeted their progressive credentials while exhorting voters to cast ballots on the party’s line.

 

And Mr. de Blasio reminded the audience that he was their “poster child.” As he left the stage, New York’s public advocate, Letitia James, who served as the M.C. for much of the night, urged the crowd to cheer louder.“A round of applause for Mayor Bill de Blasio!” she said. “Come on, you can do better than that! Promises made, promises kept!”

 

Amid the roars for the mayor, some in the crowd said that Mr. Cuomo still had much to prove.

 

As Mr. de Blasio left the stage, Stan Williams, 32, offered a pithy review: “He didn’t say Cuomo’s name once.”