Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Democracywise, an SU-based website with stories from political reporting students.

New York voters have five choices for governor on Election Day Tuesday:

Democrat Andrew Cuomo, now the attorney general; Republican Carl Paladino, an outraged businessman from Buffalo; perennial Green candidate Howie Hawkins of Syracuse; former Manhattan madam Kristin Davis; and Libertarian Warren Redlich, a town board member of Guilderland.

In the Sept. 14 Republican primary, Paladino beat former Congressman Rick Lazio for the GOP nomination. Paladino received 272,898 votes to Lazio’s 166,656 votes. Lazio had been the party’s favorite.

In his victory speech on primary night, Paladino welcomed the party’s support.

‘I want everyone in the Republican Party who opposed me to know this — you’re welcome to join the people’s crusade,’ he said. ‘Come aboard, you’re both welcome and needed.’

He is campaigning on a ‘mad as hell’ antigovernment platform that has also won him wide popularity among the tea party movement of frustrated voters.

The governor’s seat is an open race without an incumbent. Gov. David Paterson has decided not to run for the office. The general election is Tuesday.

On the political spectrum, New York is an intensely blue state. Of the 16 million registered voters, 8 million are Democrats, compared to 3.5 million registered Republicans. There are 500,000 members of the Independence Party. Roughly 165,000 people are in the Conservative Party. There are just over 29,000 Green Party members and another 3,000 who register with the Libertarian Party.

Roughly 3 million voters — or 19 percent — are registered with no party affiliation.

Here are some sketches of the gubernatorial candidates:

Carl Paladino (Republican):

Paladino, 64, is a native of Buffalo. He served in the U.S. Army and then practiced law in New York for 15 years. He is best known as the chief executive officer of Ellicott Development Company, a real estate development company in Buffalo. The company started in 1973 and now controls $500 million in assets. Paladino has a personal net worth of $150 million.

His campaign did not respond to two interview requests.

In his campaign for governor, Paladino calls for an immediate 20 percent cut in state spending and comparable cuts in state taxes. His campaign threat to take ‘a baseball bat’ to Albany has become synonymous with his candidacy, and he takes pride in being blunt.

Early in his campaign, he came under fire for sending out e-mails containing racist and vulgar jokes. He dismissed those as items he had forwarded to others without reading or noting their content.

For the Republican primary, Paladino spent $3 million of his own money on the campaign, according to The New York Times. He has pledged to spend up to $10 million on his campaign for governor.

Still, many political analysts suggest he will not win the governor’s race.

‘I can’t imagine he’s got much chance of winning,’ said Jeff Stonecash, a political science professor in Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. ‘He’ll give a little visibility to a Republican candidate. The question is will he do some things that are off the wall that will hurt the party image?’

Andrew Cuomo (Democrat):

Cuomo has been the state’s attorney general since 2006. In that office, he focused on government corruption and promoting transparency.

He launched Project Sunlight, a website that gives public access to statewide government information. He’s also targeted Wall Street, forcing nine of the largest financial institutions getting federal aid in the recession to disclose the salaries of top executives.

His campaign did not respond to interview requests.

If elected, he would be the second member of his family to be governor. His father, Mario Cuomo, was governor of New York from 1983 to 1994.

Cuomo started gaining political experience on his father’s staff as an adviser to the governor before joining the Manhattan district attorney’s office. He was an assistant secretary in the Department of Housing and Urban Development in former President Bill Clinton’s administration from 1993 to 1997 and then secretary of the department from 1997 to 2001.

Cuomo, 52, was born in Queens. He attended Fordham University and received his law degree from Albany Law School. He was married to Kerry Kennedy, the seventh child of Robert F. Kennedy, for 13 years. They have three children.

In his campaign for governor, he calls for a one-year emergency financial plan to stabilize spending. Cuomo also proposes cutting the size of state government by 20 percent.

Facing the anti-incumbent mood of voters, Cuomo has some potentially heavy political baggage, said Kristi Andersen, a professor of political science in Maxwell. ‘Cuomo,’ she said, ‘is the consummate insider.’

Howie Hawkins (Green Party):

Hawkins has run for Syracuse mayor, Syracuse Common Council, Onondaga County executive, New York state comptroller and both houses of Congress. So far, he has never won an election.

Still, Stonecash commends Hawkins on his persistence. ‘Howie is a good soldier,’ he said.

Hawkins is a former Marine and longtime activist in peace, environmental and social justice movements. Hawkins attended Dartmouth College. In New England, he worked in construction and helped to organize a workers’ cooperative that specialized in energy audits and solar and wind installations. Now he works unloading trucks for UPS Inc. in Syracuse.

In his campaign, Hawkins calls for raising taxes on the rich, increasing funding for public schools and raising the minimum wage. His senior advisor, Mark Dunlea, describes Hawkins’ platform this way: ‘We want to hire everybody. We want to put everybody to work.’

Dunlea added: ‘We want to invest in renewable energy. We want housing. We want to take over more of the cost for local, you know, schools.’

Kristin Davis (Anti-Prohibition):

On her website, Kristin Davis describes herself this way: ‘Best known as the woman who provided escorts for a New York Attorney General and Governor, Elliot Spitzer. Kristin Davis was convicted of promoting prostitution and served 4 months on Riker’s Island.’

Despite misspelling her famous client’s name — it’s Eliot — Davis highlights her connection to Spitzer in her own campaign for governor. She is on the November ballot on the line of the Anti-Prohibition Party, according to the New York State Board of Elections.

‘I am running on a platform of personal and economic freedom,’ Davis said on her website.

Among her policy initiatives, she said, are ending the prohibitions against marijuana, gay marriage and casino gambling. Removing the bans will ‘generate new revenues instead of raising taxes on already overtaxed New Yorkers,’ she said.

Before becoming a madam, Davis said, she was a vice president of a hedge fund. In the scandal that forced Spitzer from office, Davis was convicted of promoting prostitution and served four months on Rikers Island, New York City’s main jail complex.

Warren Redlich (Libertarian):

In 2008, Redlich worked as a lawyer for Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. In 2004 and 2006, he was the Republican candidate for Congress in New York’s 21st Congressional District, which surrounds Albany.

For governor, he’s running as the Libertarian Party candidate. His campaign did not respond to interview requests.

Redlich was born in New York and grew up in the town of Guilderland, a suburb about 12 miles west of Albany. He received his undergraduate degree from Rice University, his master’s degree from Stanford University and a law degree from Albany Law School. On his website, Redlich said he taught English in Hiroshima, Japan, for one year.

He is a member of the National Rifle Association. He supports gun ownership under the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment and a right to carry a concealed weapon. He calls for voter approval of pay raises for elected officials and for a cap on government officials’ pay at $100,000 a year.

In an interview with the ‘Capital Tonight’ public affairs show, Redlich said, ‘We can save a lot of money if we just agree public-sector pay should be kept at $100,000 a year.’

mdcontin@syr.edu

 

Published on October 27, 2010 at 12:00 pm