By Michael Howard Saul
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

UPDATED | The Liberal Party considered giving technology executive Jack Hidary its line on the ballot for New York City mayor, but decided on Tuesday to go with nobody instead, a party official said Tuesday.

Martin Hassner, the party’s executive director, said officials were “very impressed” with Mr. Hidary, but there wasn’t enough time to evaluate his candidacy. The party has to decide this week whether to fill the slot, and Mr. Hassner said the party has decided not to nominate anyone.

“I don’t want to leave the impression we’re rejecting him,” he said. “We don’t know what’s taken him so long (to enter the contest). But we hope he gets a chance to be heard. We’re just not going to be able to find the time to put him on the ballot. It’s not in the process that we have to go bing, bing.”

Mr. Hassner said there isn’t enough time to understand the “architecture” of Mr. Hidary’s campaign and “simply put, a guy who is totally unknown to us, personally and professionally and politically” on the Liberal Party line. The party plans now to focus its attention on next year’s race for New York governor.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Hidary did not immediately respond to request for comment.

The Liberal party built a legacy of outsize influence by helping usher into office political giants such as John Lindsay and Rudolph Giuliani, though it has spiraled into irrelevance in the past decade.
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For the mayor’s race, it initially selected Tom Allon, a media executive, as its candidate in January 2012. After Mr. Allon dropped out, the party decided in May to back John Catsimatidis, a billionaire businessman who was also pursuing the GOP nomination.

On Friday, when Mr. Catsimatidis dropped out of the race after losing the GOP primary, the party was left again without a standard-bearer for the Nov. 5 general election.

This summer, Mr. Hidary, a member of the Independence Party, created his own ballot line, the “Jobs and Education Party,” to run for mayor.

In recent days, Mr. Hidary contacted George McDonald, who also lost his bid for the GOP nomination last week, to persuade Mr. McDonald to hand over the third-party line he created this summer. That party is called the “Common Sense” party. Mr. McDonald hasn’t decided what he plans to do with that line, a spokesman said.

As of late August, Mr. Hidary had raised nearly $450,000 and had nearly $400,000 cash on hand. While Mr. Hidary is wealthy, he cannot personally bankroll his campaign because he joined the city’s campaign finance system, which matches low-dollar contributions from New Yorkers with a six-to-one match in public money. As a participant in the program, Mr. Hidary may contribute a maximum of $14,850 of his own money, a spokesman for the Campaign Finance Board said.

A spokesman for Adolfo Carrion Jr., a former Bronx borough president who is running for mayor on the Independence Party line, isn’t seeking any additional lines, his spokesman said. Mr. Carrion left the Democratic Party last fall and became unaffiliated as he prepared to run for mayor this year.

Both major party candidates, Democrat Bill de Blasio and Republican Joe Lhota, will have multiple party lines on the November ballot. In addition to the Democratic line, Mr. de Blasio will be running as the Working Families Party candidate; in addition to the GOP line, Mr. Lhota is running on the Conservative Party line and the Education First line, which he created.

Earlier this year, Mr. Lhota had discussions with members of the Liberal Party about getting their backing. Mr. Hassner said there was no possibility the party would grant Mr. Lhota the line because of what he said when the party backed Mr. Catsimatidis. “I have no interest in seeing the resurrection of the deceased Liberal Party in New York state,” Mr. Lhota said at the time.

The Liberal Party has viewed this year’s mayoral nomination as a chance to rebuild itself as a small but influential third party. The party was founded in 1944 as an alternative to a state Democratic Party “dominated by local party machines rife with corruption” and a Republican Party “controlled by special interests,” according to the party’s website.

Its influence and prestige probably reached its zenith in 1969 when then-Mayor John Lindsay won re-election on the party’s ballot line after losing the Republican primary.

The party helped Ed Koch win election to Congress and supported Mr. Giuliani in his 1993 mayoral bid, but it came under criticism in the 1990s for being more concerned about patronage than core principles. The rise of the Working Families Party, with its ability to marshal labor support, helped erode the Liberal Party’s membership in the late 1990s.

In 2002, the Liberal Party lost its automatic spot on the ballot when Andrew Cuomo, running in his first bid for the governor’s office, abruptly exited the race. The party didn’t have time to switch candidates and didn’t muster the 50,000 votes needed to remain on the ballot in future elections. By 2006, the party’s membership had fallen to less than 70,000 statewide.

The Liberal Party last fielded a mayoral candidate in 2005, when it backed Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s re-election bid. The most recent blow to the party was the guilty plea of Raymond Harding, a party leader who admitted in court that he participated in a criminal scheme that ensnared former state Comptroller Alan Hevesi, who served a prison term on corruption charges.