Cuomo’s So-Called ‘Women’s’ Party

NEW YORK — If you happened to turn your attention to the sand pit of New York politics this week, you might have found yourself beset by a series of vexing questions. Why, for instance, at the state’s Democratic Convention on Wednesday, where Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo received the support of 95 percent of delegates in his bid for a third term, did he greet Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and presidential candidate, with a bouquet of flowers? Would perfume have been better? If she was getting roses and baby’s breath, what was the governor planning for Joe Biden, set to speak the following day? Gerber daisies and a half-dozen hydrangeas?

You might rummage around the oddity of all that for a bit and then wonder what was going on with the Women’s Equality Party, about which you have probably heard very little over the past few years, if you have ever heard anything all. First and foremost, the WEP, as it is called, is not to be confused with the WFP, which is to say the Working Families Party. Put it this way: If the Working Families Party is Fleetwood Mac, the WEP is Rumours, Binghamton’s premier Fleetwood Mac tribute band.

Although actress and education activist Cynthia Nixon, an actual woman, won the nomination of the WFP to challenge the governor in the Democratic primary this year, she did not receive the endorsement of the WEP. This went instead to Cuomo himself because, really, to whom else would it go? He conceived the party four years ago when he was running for re-election the first time, as a means of appealing to female voters.

“Yes, Cynthia is woman, and yes she represents a lot of our values, but we have a governor who literally created the party,” Susan Zimet, chairwoman of the WEP, told me.

During the 2014 election, Cuomo drove around the state in a bus called the Women’s Equality Express, which had a pink stripe adorning its side. Some found the entire enterprise craven and patronizing — and an obvious effort to peel off votes from the WFP, which had been fighting for paid sick leave and other causes vital to women’s lives for many years. Others found it duplicitous, given the rampant culture of sexual harassment that had been permitted to fester for so long in the state capital.

During that race, Cuomo was challenged by an unknown law professor, Zephyr Teachout, who wound up, to great surprise, receiving a third of the vote. In the wake of former Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman’s downfall over allegations he had physically abused four women he had been dating, Teachout announced this week that she will be running to replace him. But given the history, she is as likely to receive the backing of the WEP as Noam Chomsky is of getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Donald Trump. It seems a lot like a political shell company.

When it was founded, the WEP was financed largely through a loan from Cuomo’s 2014 campaign. A second loan, from his current campaign, came several months ago, according to Rachel Gold, the state’s former deputy commissioner of labor and the party’s treasurer. “We don’t have the bandwidth to do fundraising,” she said. “We don’t really have a website or a coffee mug.”

That might explain why we aren’t seeing WEP placards championing Liuba Grechen Shirley, a young mother running for Congress on the South Shore of Long Island in an effort to unseat longtime Republican incumbent Peter King, who a decade ago complained that “there are too many mosques in this country.” But in actuality, there is no signage because the WEP isn’t endorsing her either, an especially curious omission, given that Shirley successfully requested that the Federal Election Commission grant approval for her to use campaign funds for child care, the first female candidate to petition on the matter. Despite that, the party is supporting her opponent in the Democratic primary, DuWayne Gregory, who lost to King by more than 20 percentage points two years ago.

“I see that Liuba is running a pretty remarkable campaign; I admire her,” Zimet told me. “But DuWayne came as a recommendation through our state committee person.” This statement has all the passion of someone telling you that she chose her husband because of the prudent manner in which he managed his 401(k). Gregory had stood by the party for a long while.

It seems like a strange moment — when the universe seems to be correcting for the countless errors of the patriarchy — to be rewarding apparatchik loyalty over feminist ambition. Will women voters feel exploited by what they might see as a ruse, and will that anger rebound in Nixon’s favor? Women are tired of being used.

It is true that Cuomo has supported a lot of legislation favorable to women. Yet he also enabled the Independent Democratic Conference, a group of Democratic state senators that caucused with Republicans and stood in the way of the kind of progressive legislation that one expects in deep-blue states. The state Senate still has not passed the Reproductive Health Act, which would take the state’s abortion law, which predates Roe v. Wade, out of the penal code. Doctors are often afraid to perform later-term abortions for fear of being prosecuted.

The WEP has been involved in many small, local races in the past few years. (“It can make a difference in a suburb of Syracuse,” as Gold put it.) This year the party says it has been inundated for requests for support from mayors, county legislators, family court judges — even from county coroners. Some of those requests are being made sincerely, one assumes, and some are being made by those who see an opportunity. Who knows what kind of causes a feminist coroner might champion?