Today’s vote for governor decides whether the Working Families Party keeps its automatic place on the ballot through 2028, and with it the line that 12 candidates for Congress and the Legislature on North Brooklyn and Ridgewood ballots are running on this year.
Under state election law, a party keeps that place only if its candidate for governor draws at least 130,000 votes on its line. A party that falls short loses its ballot row and its primaries under the same law, and its members are re-recorded as belonging to no party. The Working Families Party has 5,255 members in the seven Assembly districts covering Bushwick, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Ridgewood, by the state Board of Elections’ count, and the Conservative Party, which faces the same test, has 1,771. Republican Bruce Blakeman’s new Vote Affordable line becomes a party if it clears the same bar.
The line has drawn some of its strongest support in these neighborhoods. In the 2022 governor's race, five of the 10 Assembly districts where the Working Families line drew its largest share of Gov. Kathy Hochul's vote covered parts of North Brooklyn, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Ridgewood, as the districts were drawn then, according to state Board of Elections results by Assembly district, and Brooklyn cast 23.7 percent of the line's statewide vote for governor, according to the city Board of Elections.
Neither the Working Families nor the Conservative line has come within 110,000 votes of the bar since state law raised it from 50,000 in 2020, according to certified state Board of Elections results. The Working Families line cleared it by 214,276 votes in 2020, 131,323 in 2022 and 112,572 in 2024, and the Conservative line by 123,998, 183,187 and 156,514, the results show. The bar rises to 2 percent of the vote when that is higher, as it did in both presidential years; for governor, that would take more than 6.5 million valid votes, against about 5.9 million in 2022, by the board’s tally.
In 2018, under the old bar, the Working Families line drew 114,479 votes for then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, according to the board’s district-by-district results, short of today’s bar. In 2020, the first race under the new rule, the Libertarian, Green and Independence lines lost party status, drawing 60,383, 32,832 and 22,656 votes for president against a 172,337-vote bar, by the board’s count.
Under state election law, only a party holds primaries, and the enrollment of each member of a party that loses its status “shall be deemed to be blank” until the voter files a change. Statewide, the board’s Nov. 1 count lists 69,959 Working Families members and 173,589 Conservatives.
Every office on the local Working Families line is on the ballot again in 2028, because House and legislative terms last two years. Under state election law, a party candidate’s designating petition needs signatures from 5 percent of the party’s active members in the district, or 53 in the 56th Assembly District, where the board counts 1,043 active members. Without party status, the law requires an independent nominating petition for the same line, signed by 5 percent of the district’s vote for governor, up to 1,500 signatures for the Assembly, 3,000 for state Senate and 3,500 for Congress. The same rules would apply to the Conservative line, which carries three local Republican nominees, Melvin Rivera and Lewis Mizrahi for Congress and Brett Wynkoop for the 52nd Assembly District, according to the city Board of Elections.
No other party inherits a lost line. Under state election law, party rows are ordered by each party’s vote in the last race for governor, and candidates nominated only by independent bodies are printed below every party row. On the board’s 2022 totals, the Conservatives hold Row C and Working Families Row D, and Tuesday’s totals set the order on ballots through 2030.
Vote Affordable, an independent body, is Blakeman’s third line for governor, after the Republican and Conservative lines, and appears in no other local race, according to the city board’s contest list. If it draws 130,000 votes, state law makes it a party under that name, with a ballot row, an enrollment box on the voter registration form and its own primaries.
Jasmine Gripper, the Working Families Party’s state director, set a goal of at least 250,000 votes for the Hochul ticket on Row D in a Nov. 2 memo published by the Yonkers Times. Conservative Party Chairman Gerard Kassar told the Times Union his goal is 300,000 votes, and the party’s website urges “Vote Row C!”
Under state election law, a filled-in oval on any of a candidate’s lines counts as a vote for that candidate, and filling in two of them counts once. Polls are open until 9 p.m.
Featured image: Photos: Metropolitan Transportation Authority, CC BY 4.0 (Valdez); NY Senate Photo, CC BY 2.0 (Salazar); Tessa Bury, CC BY 4.0 (Tate); Eon Huntley campaign (Huntley). Composite by Bushwick Daily
