NEW YORK, Sept. 16 (UPI) -- It's an ill wind that blows no one good. Last year's disaster at the World Trade Center opened a good year for incumbent New York Gov. George Pataki. Ideally, it would have carried him forward 14 months to his re-election, but now his good luck streak has ended at the time of the first anniversary of New York City's tragedy.
Pataki, despite six years of incumbency, was not identified as a major figure on the New York political scene, and did not have good re-election poll numbers until September 2001. Then, fueled by his regular TV appearances with "America's mayor," Rudolph Giuliani, and the general surge of support for incumbents, his poll numbers jumped into the 80 percent range.
In a state which Al Gore and Hillary Clinton won with ease in 2000, and in which the Democrats have nearly 5.2 million registered voters to just 3.1 million Republicans, Pataki took advantage of his poll surge to move his political stance from right-of-center to left-of-center, reaching out to normally Democratic unions and interest groups.
Beyond dealing with liberal Democratic union leaders such as Dennis Rivera of the Health Workers, Pataki went even further, dealing with former Marxists like the Independence Party's Leonora Fulani, in order to get that party's nomination. And despite some grumbling, he was able to do all this while keeping the support of the state Conservative Party.
Meanwhile, two Democratic candidates, former Department of Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo, and State Comptroller Carl McCall, were slugging it out in a close primary for what seemed the futile attempt to face him.
But things began to unravel for Pataki in the first week of September. Cuomo, having slowly fallen behind McCall, dropped out abruptly just a week before the primary. Right away, Pataki's 30-point lead over McCall dropped to a "mere" 15 points in the latest Marist College poll. The same poll showed that Pataki's favorable rating had gone from 81 percent to 69 percent, and that he was below 50 percent in the question "Who are you going to vote for in the election?" and only at 50 percent upstate, which has been his base.
What happened?
The immediate source of Pataki's problems is billionaire Thomas Golisano, chief executive officer of Paychex Inc., who had spent $10 million to run against the governor on the Independence line in each of his two previous races, receiving 4.2 percent in 1994 and 7.7 percent in 1998.
This time, Golisano, realizing that the ante for millionaire candidates in New York area races had been upped by the successful efforts of Democratic Sen. Jon Corzine in New Jersey and Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, proclaimed his willingness to spend $75 million.
He ended by spending near $25 million in a primary campaign to win his own party's nomination against Pataki, in a campaign orchestrated by Republican consultant Roger Stone.
The Independence Party has more than 200,000 registered voters in New York, but the evidence is that the vast majority of its voters think that they have registered as Independents, rather than in a party.
The 20,000 or so voters who actually voted split 9,500 to 8,600 for Golisano, with a couple of thousand absentee and paper ballots yet to be counted. Golisano's entire majority came from his home county of Monroe (Rochester), which he won 1,091 to 139 with two precincts not counted. Monroe County has always been Golisano's base -- he got 20.3 percent of the vote there in 1994, and 33.0 percent in 1998.
Spending $25 million to win perhaps 10,000 votes ups the ever-rising ante of expenditure on campaigns to a ridiculous level -- Golisano spent $2,500 per vote received.
Golisano's massive ad campaign blamed the governor for "failed" policies harmfully affecting the state. Since these ads coincided with very real economic difficulties this year, voter ratings of the state on the key right direction/wrong direction question have moved sharply downward. And Golisano's attacks accusing Pataki of being insufficiently conservative on jobs, taxes, and waste in government resonated among conservative voters in Pataki's upstate base.
Since Pataki was in fact triangulating towards the Democrats, he couldn't very well defend his conservative credentials without losing votes in the city. In fact he is running for re-election as an environmental advocate and a supporter of stricter gun-control laws, at a time when the upstate economy remains weak and local budgets all over the state are collapsing.
Let's look at the numbers. Pataki won the governorship against Cuomo by 2,538,702 votes to the then-incumbent's 2,364,904 votes, or 48.8 percent to 45.4 percent. In 1998, in an election with half a million less voters, he defeated Peter Vallone by 2,571,991 votes to 1,570,317, or 54.3 percent to 33.2 percent.
In New York's tripartite politics -- New York City, the suburbs, and upstate, Pataki got only 28.0 percent in the city in 1994 and 33.2 percent in 1998. But the city cast only 28.1 percent of the state's vote in 1994 and 29.5 percent in 1998.
In the four big suburban counties, Pataki went from 53.4 percent to 62.0 percent in those two elections. But the suburbs cast only 23.9 percent and 24.1 percent of the vote respectively.
It was in the 53 "upstate" counties that Pataki ran up his margins. In 1994, he defeated Cuomo there by 59.3 percent to 31.6 percent, and in 1998 he defeated Vallone there by 63.8 percent to 18.5 percent (Golisano got 12.6 percent upstate that year, and much of it seems to have been Democratic votes).
Fueled by their hatred of Cuomo, these counties cast 48.0 percent of the 1994 vote and 46.4 percent of the 1998 vote. Given their continuing decline in population, and the attraction of a McCall candidacy for urban minorities, one may expect the upstate share of the state's vote to decline further this year, with more of it staying home, most Democrats returning to their party, and many conservatives defecting to Golisano.
In the 1998 Senate race, Chuck Schumer ran just 108,000 votes behind Al D'Amato in the state outside of New York City, while winning the city by 704,000 votes. That's the Republican nightmare.
Pataki's problem now is that he will be getting hit with more than $50 million of negative ads from Golisano from his right while he is trying to beat McCall on his left. His financial edge against McCall might be useless under those circumstances, because if he goes negative against Golisano, it helps McCall, and if he goes negative against McCall, he may drive up minority turnout while losing more votes on his right to Golisano.
Winning two-front wars is difficult. The odds still favor Pataki, but in one short week he has gone from a walk to a race.
