Vote New York

Best-funded non-incumbent in city tries unorthodox strategy to come out ahead

Even as Council candidate Kevin Kim focuses most of his attention on winning the Democratic nomination in the seven-way race to replace Council Member Tony Avella (D-Queens), he has decided to simultaneously run a primary against attorney Dan Halloran for the Independence Party line in the district.

Halloran, who is also the Republican candidate in the race, recently received the Independence Party’s Wilson Pakula designation.

But this has not deterred Kim, who set out to gather the roughly 100 valid signatures needed to run against Halloran in what would be an almost unheard of Independence Party primary. Kim’s campaign said last night they expected to turn in about 150 signatures.

Kim, an attorney, said his motivation for seeking the Independence Party is to gain a few thousand extra votes in the general election, important given that the district was once held by Republicans and Avella only narrowly defeated Republican challengers in his own races.

“This is unlike many districts in New York, where even though there are twice as many Democrats as Republicans, there are also a significant number of independent voters,” Kim said.

Kim said that if he does not win the Democratic nomination, he is not interested in running solely on the Independence Line in the general election.

Kim is not a registered member of the Independence Party, so if he does gather the required amount of signatures, he still will not appear on their ballot on Primary Day. Instead, he will have created what is known as “an opportunity to ballot,” which means that the would be forced to tally write-in votes cast that day. In other words, if Kim’s signatures are accepted, anyone in the district would now be able to seek the Independence line as a write-in—including any of Kim’s Democratic opponents.

“It opens the Pandora’s box,” said Michael Niebauer, the chair of the Queens Independence Party.

Niebauer did not support Halloran for the party’s nomination. He wanted to give the ballot line to Jerry Iannecce, a community activist who also has the Queens Democratic Party’s backing, though not a clear path to the Democratic nomination.

Niebauer was overruled by State Independence Party chair Frank MacKay and other members of the party’s executive committee who wanted to support a Republican.

“I’m disappointed, but what could I do?” Niebauer said.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is running on the Independence line for re-election, last week endorsed Paul Vallone in the Council race.

As Kim goes forward, he said the over $233,000 in campaign contributions he has amassed—more than any Council candidate in the city other than incumbents Dan Garodnick, Jessica Lappin and James Vacca—would help him to narrowly target voters. That would, of course, prove important, if, as expected, less than 100 people turn out for an Independence Party primary.

Gathering 100 valid signatures was a surprisingly difficult task, Kim said, since there are only about 2,000 registered Independence Party members in the vast district stretching from College Point to Little Neck. Kim said the effort involved tracking down registered Independence Party voters at their apartments and homes, many of whom believe they are registered as independent—not Independence Party—voters.

“It’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” Kim said.

Such a maneuver has worked before in Queens. In 1998, Republican Assembly candidate Matthew Hunter ran as a write-in candidate against Democrat Michael Cohen in a Liberal Party primary and ended up winning the line. (As Neibauer recalls it, Hunter wanted to run as both a Republican and a Liberal so he could say he ran on the same lines as then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who had resoundingly won re-election a year earlier.) Despite the primary victory, however, Hunter did not come close in the general election. The extra 503 votes he got on the Liberal Party line did nothing to put him over the top.

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