A New statewide political movement of disaffected Republicans, pro-fracking landowners, outraged gun owners, Tea Party enthusiasts, struggling upstate business owners and opponents of Mayor Bloomberg’s “nanny-state agenda’’ is expected to be announced within days, The Post has learned.
The new movement, months in the planning, hopes to raise at least $1 million to spend on next year’s elections, especially on state Senate races where it will attempt to elect gun-rights advocates and supporters of natural-gas drilling in the Southern Tier — even if it means defeating Republicans who voted for Gov. Cuomo’s anti-gun Safe Act earlier this year.
“There’s a feeling that the Senate is going to be our last line of defense against Cuomo and the Assembly Democrats,’’ said Assemblyman William Nojay, a Rochester Republican and one of the new group’s organizers.
“It’s basically a libertarian and nonpartisan movement of ‘just leave us alone’ types who are sick of having the government tell us what to do more and more,’’ said Nojay.
“We plan to focus on getting voters upstate and on Long Island and those in New York City who see what’s happening in terms of losing individual rights, Bloomberg’s nanny state agenda, Cuomo’s Safe Act, the right to drill for natural gas on your own property and those who understand that Cuomo is only giving lip service to the upstate economy,’’ said Nojay, a Columbia University Law School grad and new co-owner of the widely used Empire Page aggregator Web site.
The new group is being modeled on the highly successful, Democratic-oriented Rock the Vote mobilization campaign, which was credited with helping Bill Clinton win the presidency in 1992 and with turning out a massive youth vote for President Obama in 2008.
“When we had 10,000 people at the anti-Safe Act rally at the Capitol on Feb. 28, we realized that the power was there but that many of them were not registered to vote. We are going to use much of the money that we raise for a massive voter-registration effort, along with a major vote-education effort,’’ said Nojay.
He said the group would also fund “issue ads’’ contrasting the positions of candidates it opposes with those it supports, although it won’t specifically endorse any candidate. He said the group may support some Democrats.
Nojay said it was “too early’’ to name other leaders of the group or say who would help fund it, but he said a press conference would be held July 10.
The new organizational effort comes amid growing Republican fears that the GOP will be able to field only token opposition to Cuomo next year, resulting in a lower-than-normal party vote.
Polls show that, despite Cuomo’s recent decline in popularity, no Republican currently considered to be a candidate would have a chance to defeat him.