http://www.capitalnews9.com/content/top_stories/default.asp?ArID=145916

He's their only hope. Sadly for them, they're Republicans and, thus, idiots. So he has no chance at being nominated.

Apparently, Daniels doesnt like Stephen Minarik, the NY GOP Chair. I would go with Golisano if I was the GOP. He's got lots of his own $$$. But apparently, his only two campaign contribution last year were to Dick Gephardt and John Kerry. So, yeah, he might not get the Conservative Party nod. Mary Donohue?? She isnt better than anyone else, in fact maybe worse, since her name recognition is extremely low.

The only time Donohue has made news in the last year is when it was reported that she has been spending more time at her vacation house in cape cod than in new york. If I announced I was running tomorrow Pataki would probably say I would make a good candidate.  

Definitely looks like a Republican primary in the works.  Meanwhile Spitzer looks safe from a primary as there hasn't been much word about Tom Suozzi recently.  

Weld is the only Republican who could realistically win, but the Conservative party will never nominate him, which basically means he can't beat Spitzer (although even with the Conservative nomination he'd be a longshot). They and Minarik have delusions of being able to somehow get a conservative elected. Sure. And then Dennis Kucinich moves to South Carolina and is elected governor. Weld is just bored of his job and wants to be back in politics. His previous track record at governor is not encouraging. First he got bored and challenged John Kerry. Then he was still bored and decided to become ambassador to Mexico, so he resigned when his nomination was held up. If he somehow became governor, New York voters could look forward to him losing interest, challenging Chuck Schumer, resigning, and leaving the state.

I think we're seeing a repeat of 1990 regarding the behavior of the NYS Conservative Party but even better.  In 1990, the Conservatives famously didn't go along with a liberal Republican nominee (Rinfret), instead nominating their own (Herb London) of the Manhattan Institute, who proceeded to get 22% of the vote, nearly edging the Republicans (who had 23%) from their position on the ballot as Row B at that time (In NYS, the position on the ballot is determined by the number of votes a party receives in the last gubernatorial election).  Even in spite of this self-destructive infighting between the two right wing parties of NYS, Cuomo that year got an anemic 50% which presaged Pataki's victory over him 4 years later.  By that point, D'Amato engineered Conservative party support for his crony Pataki, and in a Republican year, a little-known one-term state senator from Garrison was able to be a giant-slayer, defeating Cuomo 49-45.

The trouble is, with the exception of his first year when he put through a 3-year tax cut, and massively hiked state tuition at SUNY (a major reason--btw--why I became a Democrat as I was at SUNY-Binghamton at the time), and 2003 when he vetoed the state legislature's budget which raised state taxes to fill the shortfall caused by 9/11, he's run the state mostly as a Rockefeller-Republican.  The Conservative party has mostly been unhappy about this, but they've gone along, because of the cushy patronage that they get for being Row D on the ballot and for year-in, year-out routinely providing some 200k or so votes for Republican candidates (New York State has fusion voting, where candidates can be cross-endorsed).  Other conservative groups such as Change-NY which originally were enthusiastic about Pataki when he seemed to be an anti-tax conservative despise him now.  Ditto for National Review and other national conservative papers.  Basically, with the exception of 2-3 years of his 12 year tenure as governor, Pataki has spent money like a drunken sailor, massively run up state debt, etc.  Compared to all the dubious things that Cuomo did (such as "sell" Attica State Prison to some off-budget state-run authority), Pataki has been far worse.

So, basically, the Conservative party has nothing in them to play nice and every incentive to play the bomb-throwers.  Spitzer's very likely to win in any case, so they don't have the threat of losing all that state patronage if they don't hold their noses and cross-endorse Pataki (which is what they did in 98 and 02).  To keep their ballot line they just need to guarantee that they have a candidate who will garner them 50k votes--a small sum in a state with some 10m registered voters.  Indeed, I believe Marilyn O'Grady, their candidate against Schumer in 2004 when they famously didn't endorse a pro-choice, moderate Republican, got well over that number.

Hopefully, what we may be seeing is the beginning of the destruction of the NYS Conservative Party.  Founded in 62 to run candidates against Rockefeller and give Republicans in the state an ability not to have to vote for him, they reached their high-water points in 1970 when they elected Jim Buckley to the US Senate and in 1994 when they were instrumental in getting Pataki elected--Cuomo got more votes on the Democratic line than Pataki got on the Republican, only with the fusion votes from other parties added in did Pataki win.

Again, as I said last week in another post, the Dems if they were really smart, would try to capitalize on all this Republican infighting right now and seize several state senate races.  Long term, if we can wait things out a decade or so, the demographic trends will lead eventually to a Dem majority in the state senate, particularly considering the fact that some 5 or 6 seats of the 35 that Joe Bruno has have Dem majority registrations.  All we need to tie is 4, we need 5 for outright control.  2006, with all the infighting in the state Republican party, and all the anti-Bush voters coming out, we might be able to rush up these trends.  Apparently, this is also why Bruno is privately fuming at Pataki's refusal to run for a 4th term and the utter lack of any creditable replacement candidate to replace him.

I agree with your sentiments entirely on this one.  Unfortunately, I'm currently finishing my PhD at CUNY-Grad Center in history and will be looking for full-time academic jobs all this year.  So I'm probably not the one to take on the responsibility of doing a NYC-based blog at this point in time.  I'm certainly willing to pitch in my two-cents here and then, though.  Also, my state senator Liz Krueger (who I volunteered for a few years ago when the upper east side of Manhattan was a Republican district--yes, Republicans do exist in New York City!) is the Senate Campaign Committee chair.  Her, along with Eric Schneiderman, Patterson, and a few others are a new breed of Dems in the State Senate who are not willing to be nice to go along, but rather are aiming to oust Joe Bruno and the republicans once and for all.  So its nice to have someone sympathetic to the blogosphere on this issue of competing everywhere in this crucial campaign post...

Regarding enrollment figures, the NYS Board of Elections is really good on this front.  They have overall month-by-month registration figures by county, by congressional district, by state senate district and by assembly district.  I post below the direct link to the latest figures (April of this year) for state senate districts:

http://www.elections.state.ny.us/enrollment/senate/senate_apr05.htm

Just looking at the Dem to Republican ratios, and not taking into account voters enrolled in the myriad third parties of NYS (both former and currently existing), 6 districts currently represented by Republicans pop out as having more Dems than Republicans:

#11 (N.E. Queens, Bayside, Douglaston, Jamaica Estates) Padavan, an overly noxious immigrant-basher, his district has 92k Dems to only 37k Republicans.  Padavan must be in his 70s by now....

#15 (Queens, Middle Village, Ridgewood) Serphin Maltese (again pushing 80), 77k Dems/35k Repubicans

#22 (S. Brooklyn) Marty Golden (this one is young, but the district was specially gerrymandered in 2000 for him specifically--made up of a lot of Russians who are very conservative because of the Soviet Union, etc.), 76k Dems/37k Republicans

#24 (2/3 of Staten Island)  This is the most Republican of the NYC districts, and even though Marchi is an institution, having served since 1956, the district probably will continue electing Republican/Conservatives as far as the eye can see.  The voter registration does look somewhat doable though: 78k Dems/69k Republicans

These are the 4 NYC Republicans, now 2 suburban seats that popped out at me:

#35 (Westchester, Yonkers) Nick Spano.  Spano almost got defeated in 2004, only winning by 19 votes after his election lawyers succeeded in throwing out large numbers of affadavit voters for his opponent.  She's running again in 2006, so I expect this district to swap hands to us:

90k Dems/50k Republicans

#38 (Rockland County) Morahan.  This is the state senate race back in the 90s that got the commuter tax repealed (NYC from the 60s through the 90s levied an income tax on suburbanites who worked in the City--both political parties back in the 90s tried to outdo each other to win this seat by voting to repeal the tax).  Rockland is a lean-Dem country, full of large numbers of Jewish voters (87k Dems/55k Republicans)

Also, although all 9 of the LI based districts are held by Republicans, districts #7 and #9 in Nassau County by registration figures look doable.  Long Island has been trending Dem for the last decade; 3 out of the 4 congressional seats are held by Dems, and the once-fabled GOP machine in Nassau County is totally kaput now, having first bankrupted the county in the late 90s, then losing the county legislature and finally the county executive (Suozzi).  The only survivors of the machine are its state senators.  Only a matter of time....

Regarding upstate, possibly the Rochester based seat?  What about the other Syracuse based seat as well?  Also, having gone to SUNY-Binghamton and actively campaigned while there for Libous' opponents, I would like someone creditable to take on Libous.  Broome County (Binghamton) just elected Dems to the state assembly and as county executive back in 2004 so we're rebuilding our bench up there....

I would be remiss if I didn't caution that just because a particular seat is say 2-1 Dem or 3-1 in party registration, it doesn't necessarily meant that there are 2 or 3 times more "Democrats" vs. "Republicans."  Because we have partisan mayoral elections (something which Bloomberg has been trying to get rid of for the past 4 years) as well as closed-party primaries, many voters in NYC register Dem to be able to vote in the mayoral primary and then come November cross over and pull the levers for Republicans.  Only by this logic is it possible to make sense of how Staten Island can both have more Democrats than Republicans and then turn around and vote for Bush over Kerry.

That being said, I certainly think that both of the Queens seats are ripe for the taking as the GOP has no back bench to speak of in replacing either Padavan and Maltese when they retire/die.  Marty Golden will be much harder to replace, and the Republicans control 3/4 of the state assembly districts in Staten Island as well as 2/3 of the city council seats there and the borough president (equivalent of county executives), so they'll have plenty of people to replace Marchi when he retires/dies.

For maps of assembly/senate/congressional districts in New York state, to see how hideously gerrymandered the State Senate seats are (as far as funny-looking districts):

http://www.latfor.state.ny.us/

This site also breaks down each district by racial demographics

I can just feel it in the air..

Spitzer is going to win-who gives a crap what loser they nominate?