New York Post - WFP Tensions Rise Over Cuomo-Backed Women's Equality Party

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By Carl Campanile

Female leaders of the Working Families Party are fuming that Gov. Cuomo has created a new party geared to women that threatens to siphon votes from their ballot line.

The left-leaning WFP gritted its teeth and endorsed Cuomo in May, hoping to prod the centrist Democratic incumbent to back its agenda while luring voters from the Democratic Party.

But Cuomo is urging female voters to cast their ballots for him on a new Women's Equality Party line that he announced two months later.

The governor even featured his daughters and girlfriend Sandra Lee in a TV ad for the new party and has stumped throughout the state on the "Women's Equality Express" campaign bus.

By comparison, he's barely mentioned the WFP.

"A Women's Equality Party run by men? Please!" WFP co-founder Bertha Lewis told The Post. "The Women's Equality Party is unnecessary. I don't like it. It's cynical."

WFP co-chairperson Karen Scharff also ripped the women's party.

"Women are actually the vast majority of voters in New York state, and I don't think we should be pigeonholed in a separate party," Scharff said on "Capitol Tonight," an upstate cable-TV news show. "Women should be voting on the WFP line."

Said another WFP insider: "The Women's Equality Party is Cuomo's F U to the WFP."

The Cuomo campaign declined to comment, but its strategy appears to be working.

The latest Quinnipiac University poll shows Cuomo leading Republican rival Rob Astorino by 32 points among women and only 4 points among men.

The WFP awarded Cuomo its line after much wrangling, hoping to run up its vote totals Nov. 4 -- an election that determines ballot position over the next four years.

With disaffected leftists upset at Cuomo, WFP officials are conceding privately that the Green Party will likely surpass the WFP's vote totals with little-known UPS worker Howie Hawkins as its gubernatorial candidate.

Hawkins received about 60,000 votes -- or 1 percent -- as the Green candidate in 2010. Cuomo received 155,000 votes on the WFP line and 146,000 on the Independence Party line four years ago. Most of his 2.9 million votes, of course, came on the Democratic line.

Hawkins is now getting between 7 percent and 9 percent in polls.

"We will become the alternative voice to the establishment. We'll have two parties on the left -- the Green Party and the Democratic Party," he said.

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