IDC-Democrat Coalition Would Need November Wins to Ensure Majority
If all goes according to plan for state Democrats, the breakaway Independent Democratic Conference will join forces with the chamber’s mainline Democrats, the new coalition will take power in the Legislature’s upper house and Albany will usher in an era of progressive lawmaking.
But first, such a coalition would have to win an outright majority at the polls this fall—and Republicans say that is still a big “if.”
“I think we end up with an absolute majority and the IDC would be making a mistake if they break the coalition,” Ed Cox, the state Republican Party chairman, said Tuesday night.
Currently a potential Democrat-IDC coalition would fall short of the 32 members needed to constitute a majority in the Senate, which has 63 seats, even though the party won a numerical majority in the 2012 elections.
The IDC has five members and the mainline Senate Democrats have 24, for a combined total of 29. The district vacated by Eric Adams, who was elected Brooklyn borough president last fall, is widely expected to be filled by another Democrat, which would raise the number of Democrats to 30, although that will not happen until January.
Two other Democratic lawmakers, state Senators Malcolm Smith and John Sampson, are under indictment and have been officially ousted from the conference. Both face Democratic primary challenges, but even if they stave off their challengers and manage to remain in office there’s a good chance they would vote for a Democratic leader. That would give the party the required 32 votes—unless, of course, Republicans achieve a net gain this fall by holding onto their own seats and knocking out another Democratic incumbent or two.
One big question mark would then be state Sen. Simcha Felder, a first-term lawmaker from Brooklyn, who won as a Democrat but joined the Republican conference. He has suggested that he is open to switching his allegiance, emphasizing that the key factor for him is delivering for his constituents. Republicans play up Felder's relationship with Senate Republican Leader Dean Skelos, which they say could keep him in their fold. The GOP currently holds 29 seats.
And that is even before getting into the handful of tossup races between Democrats and Republicans this fall. New York Republicans typically fare better when there is no presidential race, and President Obama’s popularity has ebbed, potentially hurting local Democratic candidates.
Three upstate first-term Democrats—Cecilia Tkaczyk, Terry Gipson and Ted O’Brien—squeaked into office in 2012 and could face tough reelection battles. At the same time, Republicans will have to fight to keep several seats, including state Sen. Mark Grisanti’s in Erie County and the vacancies on Long Island created by former Sen. Charles Fuschillo, who declined to seek reelection, and outgoing Sen. Lee Zeldin, who won the Republican primary on Tuesday in New York's 1st congressional district.
Even if Grisanti wins, he could potentially be a wild card in the mix. In the past Grisanti has been courted by Democrats to flip parties, and Albany has a history of lawmakers being successfully recruited to switch sides.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has typically shied away from campaigning for Senate candidates, recently pledged to help Democrats retake the Senate as part of an agreement for him to receive the Working Families Party line in his own reelection bid, and, as City & State reported exclusively yesterday, the governor was present at a secret meeting on Monday in which a deal was brokered for the IDC to potentially reunite with the mainline Democratic conference.
Organized labor has also signed onto the effort, with 1199 SEIU notably cutting off contributions to Senate Republicans this election cycle. A source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told City & State that parties representing 1199, 32BJ and the New York Hotel Trades Council were also in attendance at the secret meeting on Monday.
Echoing the frustrations of many of his mainline Democratic colleagues, state Sen. Bill Perkins said that his conference feels that it deserves to be in power, based on numbers as well as the needs of New Yorkers.
“Now, power-sharing is a term that has a lot of different meanings,” Perkins said. “In and of itself, I can’t judge [the proposed unity deal] until I know what the details are and what the implications of those details are. Right now, there’s a power sharing arrangement that sucks, in terms of what, not only we are able to do, but what’s good for the state. I assume it’s not that, but that’s the only assumption I would dare make until such time that I get better informed."
At the end of the day the possible scenarios present Senate IDC Leader Jeff Klein with some difficult choices, although NY1 reported that he has tentatively agreed to form the new coalition.
As Siena College pollster Steven Greenberg told City & State earlier this year, the best option for Klein is for neither the mainline Democrats nor the Republicans to win an outright majority this fall.
“You’re going to have Republicans trying to pick up Democratic seats. You may have the IDC trying to, in primaries, pick up Democratic seats. And you have the regular Democrats who want to win Republican seats or IDC seats. So in a sense you have a three-way competition this year,” Greenberg said. “The key for Jeff Klein and the IDC members is to ensure that neither the regular Democrats nor the Republicans get to 32 seats, and therefore they need Jeff Klein and the IDC. It makes for a very interesting dynamic.”
Additional reporting by Nick Powell
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