Kristin Davis Makes the Ballot

New York madam Kristin Davis, who allegedly arranged female escorts for former governor Eliot Spitzer, reached a milestone in her underdog bid for governor last month when she qualified for the ballot as the candidate of the new Anti-Prohibition Party. In a frank follow-up conversation with The Advocate, she talked about the party’s potential to become an outside force for marriage equality, what it's like to be the first woman to run for New York governor while on probation, who's not on her client list, and what she would ask Spitzer if given the chance to appear on Parker Spitzer, the new show he will cohost on CNN.

Lest anyone still question the seriousness of her candidacy, Davis says, “If I wanted the press, I would just release my client list. People find that far more interesting that politics.”

The Advocate:
What was it like getting on the ballot?
Kristin Davis: It was definitely more difficult than I thought. They don’t make it easy to get on the ballot. Most people don’t understand that the system, especially here in New York, is not geared toward letting the average person try to run for office. It’s really geared toward continuing to empower the political class. They give you roughly 30 days in which to collect a minimum of 15,000 signatures, a hundred of which have to be from half the congressional districts, so you really have to amass a huge amount of signatures. We collected close to 23,000.

Why did you call your party the Anti-Prohibition Party?

Part of my platform is to stop the prohibition on marijuana, the prohibition on gay marriage, the prohibition on prostitution, so it just fit in with the large scale of what we’re working on.

Is this a permanent party we can see expect to see in future elections?

I recognize that it’s extraordinarily difficult for us to win. We’re up against [Democratic nominee and state attorney general] Andrew Cuomo, whose approval ratings are over 60%, and he’s got $23 million. It’s kind of hard as a grassroots campaign to go up against that sort of power. I think that the better win for us is to get 50,000 votes. That’s a huge win. If we get 50,000 votes, then the Anti-Prohibition Party gets permanent ballot access, well, semipermanent, for the next four years. So for four years we will have a permanent spot on the ballot from which we can actually lobby for these issues. We can bring bills to the senate, such as a marriage equality bill, and push for these issues. Now, New York is also organized in a hierarchy of the ballot so, let’s say, if we were to get 120,000 votes, then we would take line C, so it would be Republican, Democrat, Anti-Prohibition. That’s when you would really be able to really move these issues into the forefront of politics, where I think they should be.