There's Always 2037

Assembly members won't need to share their chamber with delegates to a Constitutional Convention, after voters decided not to hold the once-in-a-generation gathering.

Pre-election polls suggested it wouldn't be close — and it wasn't.

About 83% percent of New York voters cast a "no" on Tuesday, giving their side more than a 2-million-vote victory over the "yes" side.

Labor unions had spent millions of dollars on advertising, warning New Yorkers that a constitutional convention would be captive both to "insiders" from the Albany establishment and "outsiders" prepared to spend "unlimited" money to make New York more conservative.

"This is a win for workers and people saying, 'Enough is enough — we're not going to let big money get involved here,'" said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers. "It was workers coming together, working really hard, communicating with each other and communicating with the public to make New York understand what a constitutional convention is."

Mulgrew said a convention could have given conservatives a foothold to roll back protections, such as the constitutional right to public education.

"People take these things for granted, but I will tell you: we have fights all over this country about basic funding for schools that we don't have here, because we have these clauses in our constitution," he said.

Organized labor forged a broad coalition of dozens of different organization across the political spectrum to spread this message, spending millions of dollars on a campaign called "New Yorkers Against Corruption." Their message of pessimism appears to have overwhelmed those who portrayed the potential once-in-a-generation meeting as an opportunity for reform.

"We don't have any other method, because the legislature will not reform itself, so we're stuck in a very dead-end situation for reform in New York," said Professor Gerald Benjamin, a scholar of state political history at SUNY New Paltz and one of the most vocal campaigners for a convention. 

Benjamin said supporters of a convention say unions exaggerated the dangers of a convention

"The opposing side had a lot of advantages," he said. "They had the dominance in the resources. They had a network across the state of labor union members. And they instilled a good deal of unfounded fear in their members about the loss of something very important to them individually."

Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, says she shares many of the goals of Benjamin and the other reformists — but also believes a convention would have been "too risky."

It feels like we dodged a bullet with the constitutional convention, but we have a lot of work to do to protect our democracy," Lieberman said. "People are fed up with dysfunction in Albany, and it leaves us with the obligation as New Yorkers to step up our efforts to insure that our legislature responds to the will of the people."

The question of whether to hold a convention goes on the ballot every 20 years. Voters have now rejected it in 2017, 1997, 1977 and 1957. They'll get another whack in 2037, on the centennial of a convention that was approved, and which, during the Great Depression, enshrined many labor rights that led, paradoxically, to a union movement that is currently opposed to constitutional conventions.