“First-past-the-post” is the time-honored way elections have been held throughout most of the United States for much of our history. If a candidate wins a plurality in a field of competitors (i.e., if they come in first), they win—irrespective of the size of the plurality or the margin of victory versus the runner-up candidate. Mostly all of New York elections follow this practice, and voters and candidates generally take this fact in stride. Acceptance of this practice, however, was recently put to the test after Daniel Goldman narrowly won a Democratic Party primary for Congress in a multi-candidate field.

With 13 candidates on the ballot, he received approximately 26% of the vote. And, although the district has 301,934 enrolled Democrats, only about 66,000 people voted. He received about 17,000 votes, just about 5% of those eligible. As a result, supporters of the runner-up, Yuh-line Niou, who received about 15,000 votes, had considered mounting a challenge in the general election on the Working Families Party line but opted not to do so. Apart from the fact that Mr. Goldman would have had a huge financial edge in the race, it is extremely rare to successfully challenge a major party candidate. In 2003, current New York State Attorney General Letitia James won her New York City Council seat as WFP’s standard-bearer against a Democratic nominee; in 1977, Eliot Engel ran on the Liberal Party line to beat the Democratic candidate in a special election to fill an Assembly vacancy; in 1970, James Buckley was elected to the U.S. Senate as the Conservative Party candidate and Oliver Koppell, running as an independent, was elected to the Assembly against a Democrat; and in 1969, Mayor John Lindsay won re-election on the Liberal Party line against Democrat Mario Procaccino. In a word, then, such challenges can be waged, but are successful only under the most extraordinary of circumstances. If history is any guide, Niou on the WFP line probably would not have beaten Goldman.

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