Interesting piece in Salon about how New York’s Conservative Party wound up nominating middle-of-the-road Republican Rick Lazio as its gubernatorial candidate, while the GOP nominated the more right-wing Carl Paladino. The ConstitutionConservative Party thought Lazio would win the Republican nomination and preemptively nominated him for the CP line as well — the better to garner votes for the CP in November and presumably to curry favor with Lazio and the Repubs also. This cynical strategy has backfired: now if Lazio folds his campaign, which is realistically what one would expect, the CP will have a hard time getting 50,000 votes on its gubernatorial line — that’s the threshold a party has to meet to get automatic ballot access the next time around.

It’s quite a turn of events when a third-party winds up fielding an establishment candidate, though I guess the same would have happened in Alaska if Lisa Murkowski had been able to convince the Libertarian Party to take her.