The Working Families Party has called Albany’s failure to pass major campaign finance reform legislation, which would have provided public matching funds for small donations in all state races, a “lost opportunity to fix our broken political system.”
“The reason we lost, at the end of the day, is that the governor did not meaningfully support his own proposal,” New York’s Working Families Party Executive Director Dan Cantor said in an email.
As part of New York’s 2014-2015 budget, which passed last night, the state will only adopt a limited pilot program this year that provides public financing for candidates running for state comptroller.
Cantor says the pilot program is “almost surely designed to fail … It will in no way advance the agenda that we have fought for since 2010.”
Last year, Bill Moyers spoke with Cantor and Jonathan Soros, co-founder of the Friends of Democracy super PAC, about their push to make New York state a national model for the public financing of political campaigns.
In this video clip, they speak with Bill about the urgency of implementing public financing, how the system (already in place in New York City) would work and why it would open up the playing field to more candidates.
Watch the five-minute clip:
