Liberal Party of New York

The Liberal Party of New York is a minor political party active only in New York State. Its platform supports a standard set of center-left policies: it favors choice on abortion, higher spending on education, and universal health care.

The Liberal Party was founded in 1944 as an outgrowth of the American Labor Party, which has been formed earlier as a vehicle for leftists uncomfortable with the Democratic Party to support Franklin Roosevelt. Despite enjoying some successes, the American Labor Party was tarred by the perceived influence of communists in its organization, which led David Dubinsky, Alex Rose, and Reinhold Niebuhr to leave and found the Liberal Party as an explicitly anti-communist alternative. In the 1944 elections, both the American Labor and Liberal parties supported Roosevelt for president, but by 1948 the two parties diverged, with the Liberals nominating Harry S. Truman and the American Labor Party nominating Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace.

The Liberal Party is one of several minor parties that fulfill a role unique to New York State politics. New York law allows a candidate to be the nominee of multiple parties (this is true in several other states as well, but only in New York is it commonly practiced). In fact, since each party is listed with its own line on New York ballots, multiple nominations mean that a candidate's name can be listed several times on the ballot. The Liberal Party's primary electoral strategy is to cross-endorse the nominees of other parties who agree with the Liberal Party's philosophy; only rarely does the Liberal Party run its own candidates. By supporting agreeable candidates and threatening not to support disagreeable ones, the Liberal Party hopes to influence candidate selection by the major parties. Other currently active parties pursuing a similar strategy in New York include the Conservative Party, the Working Families Party, and the Right to Life Party.

While the Liberal Party generally endorses Democratic candidates, this is not always the case. The Liberal Party has also supported liberal Republicans such as John Lindsay and Rudolph Giuliani for mayor of New York City and Jacob Javits for U.S. Senator, and independents such as John B. Anderson for president. In 1969, Lindsay, the incumbent Republican mayor, lost his own party's primary but was re-elected on the Liberal Party line alone. In 1977, after Mario Cuomo lost the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York to Ed Koch, the Liberal Party endorsed Cuomo, who proceeded to again lose narrowly in the general election.

The Liberal Party declined in influence since the 1980 election. Their 1998 candidate for governor, Betsy McCaughey Ross, received less than 2% of the vote. After a very poor showing in the 2002 gubernatorial election, the party lost its state recognition and ceased operations at its state offices. The Liberal Party's current executive director is Martin Oesterreich.