Ex-Syracuse mayor on her 'audacious' campaign

ALBANY, N.Y. _ Former Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner, running for governor as part of the relatively new Serve America Movement, knows she's unlikely to wind up in the Executive Mansion in January.

"Stranger things have happened than having an independent (candidate) win," Miner said Thursday in a visit to the Times Union's editorial board. "We're in a time of tremendous volatility, politically."

But her third-party bid is "audacious _ a challenge," the Democrat acknowledged.

Recent polls back that up: A Quinnipiac survey from July included a hypothetical six-way general election matchup that showed Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo with 43 percent, followed by Republican Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro at 23 percent; the trio of Libertarian Larry Sharpe, the Green Party's Howie Hawkins and Miner together added up to just 5 percent. Cynthia Nixon, who lost last week's Democratic primary to Cuomo but so far remains on the Working Families Party line, received 13 percent.

Miner, who left office in January after two terms as mayor, was teaching at New York University when she was approached by a number of groups who wanted her to carry their banner. "They thought I was a messenger, given my track record," said Miner, whose tenure as mayor had included a number of high-profile feuds with Cuomo _ especially on issues surrounding fiscal support for upstate's stressed cities.

Assessing the offers, she concluded that New York was "rife with corruption, wasteful, and is not solving problems. ... The institutions that would normally serve as a check on those problems either didn't have enough power or were not able to serve as a check. The system has become ... sclerotic, withered."

So for anyone thinking of mounting a challenge to the entrenched powers, "the only way to do that in an open and transparent way was to do it from the outside," she said.

Miner is running alongside Republican Michael Volpe, mayor of the Westchester County village of Pelham. The Serve America Movement, founded a few months after President Donald J. Trump took office, includes a number of GOP veterans, including several who served in President George W. Bush's administration.

Miner said she and "the group of people who are helping me on this path" were united by a set of core principles: "civility; using data and science to solve problems; re-energizing our democracy by having non-partisan redistricting; ending mass incarceration; (and) having fiscal responsibility be a key tenet of public policy."

In New York, she wants to see the local tax burden eased by the state taking on the share of Medicaid cost currently borne by counties, with the imposition of a strict cap in spending growth for the program. She would abolish most of the state's current economic development incentive programs, which she says have proven to be a massive waste of public dollars but a boon to "vested constituencies that give campaign donations."

She said her own campaign was made possible by low-dollar donations and "people who are deeply dissatisfied with the status quo."

Miner notes that winning 50,000 votes in November would secure a ballot line for the SAM party for the next four-year election cycle _ a major boost for a third party.

No doubt with that in mind, Cuomo's supporters have attempted to oust Miner from the November ballot: The chairman of the Onondaga County Democratic Committee is one of those who have filed formal challenges to her ballot petitions.

"Right now, we have a political culture that rewards snarky 30-second sound bites," she said, pointing to the Cuomo campaign's denunciation of Molinaro as a "Trump mini-me." "I think people want a political culture that solves problems."

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