As moving trucks descend on the New York governor’s mansion and Andrew Cuomo finishes his tenure, felled by his utter inability to adapt to a small shift toward gender equality in the workplace, it’s worth reflecting on one of his more laughable experiments in neoliberal identity politics. That would be the Women’s Equality Party, may it rest in peace.

In 2014, faced with a progressive female challenger, the legal scholar Zephyr Teachout, Cuomo and his lieutenant governor, now-governor Cathy Hochul, founded the Women’s Equality Party to attract more female votes to himself and his centrist buddies, many of whom were men.

Some fifty thousand voters were fooled into voting for the Cuomo-Hochul ticket on the Women’s Equality line in 2014, and who can blame them? “Women’s Equality” sounds like something progressives would want to support. But it was a sham.