It Begins With Zohran. It Continues Nationwide With The Working Families Party.
How the Working Families Party is working overtime to make the country more progressive, one state at a time
A few days ago, you might have noticed a bit of a vibe shift with left-leaning voters and commentators across the country. Despite vicious attacks falsely accusing him of antisemitism, Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for the Mayoral race in a SHOCKING upset against disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo.
To those of you reading us right now, it might seem like a no-brainer. Zohran wants free bus transportation. Increased traffic infrastructure. More investment in mental health programs. City-owned grocery stores. Automobile-free school streets to help schools be safer. And so, so, much more. You might even remember some of this from when I spoke to him back in May.
But you may also have noticed that I’ve been talking to, and about, the Working Families Party a lot lately. Zohran Mamdani is not a member of the Working Families Party, but he was endorsed by them alongside four other candidates before the primaries as part of a strategy to get New York voters to rank multiple candidates that WEREN’T Andrew Cuomo. The gambit appears to have paid off, and although it wasn’t the only factor in Mamdani’s decisive plurality of votes, it does seem to be a big factor in why.
In fact, a large amount of the Working Families Party’s candidates won big in New York. Dr. Dorcey Applyrs was endorsed by them in Albany - and won. Sharon Owens was endorsed by them in Syracuse - and won. Sean Ryan was endorsed by them in Buffalo - yep, Sean Ryan won too. You may have seen this graphic on social media go viral following Zohran’s win:
Endorsing strong progressive candidates, even if they’re not members of the Working Families Party, is key to the success they saw last week. And it’s strategy like this, and other strategies being implemented across the country, that lead me to believe the Working Families Party is going to change the way we look at the two-party system for good.
“The Working Families Party is basically trying to build on top of the two party system, a party that will put working people first,” Sarah Johnson, the Deputy National Director of the Working Families Party, told us. “Our current election system really privileges the two major parties and pushes all other efforts to the margins, and so our theory is that we need to both challenge that system, but also contest for power within it. Because every day, our elected leaders are making hundreds of decisions that deeply impact the lives of the people that we organize for and with. And so we try to hold tension and nuance.”
The Working Families Party was founded back in 1998 through efforts by Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential run’s labor coordinator Dan Cantor. Alongside ACORN and a number of other labor unions and community and advocacy groups, the Working Families Party sought to basically do for left-wing politics what the Tea Party did for the right and transform party politics from within. It functions as its own party, with candidates running in and even winning races across the 18 states the WFP has chapters in, but the most visible place you’ll find the WFP on the national stage is by endorsing Democratic and Independent candidates whose values align with their own.
While speaking with Sarah, she told me that WFP national director Maurice Mitchell has an effective but deceptively simple strategy for how the WFP wins elections:
“Maurice often uses this phrase, ‘We try to create non delusional strategies that can win in our current system while we're building the power necessary to change it,’” she says. “That means sometimes we're running candidates through Democratic party primaries. Sometimes we can run candidates on our own. We take a variety of very time/place/condition-specific strategies based on what's best going to build our power in any particular place. But everywhere, the party is really trying to build an organized and durable third force in American politics, shaped and led by leaders from labor unions, from community organizations, from individual political activists that are unified around the idea of building independent political power.”
In New York, where the WFP was founded, the party benefited from electoral fusion laws - laws that enable two or more political parties to run the same candidate. So for example, when you see election results that say Joe Schmoe got 36% of the vote as a Democrat, but Joe Schmoe also got 11% of the vote as a member of the Joe Schmoe party, that’s not two separate Joe Schmoes. That’s the same Joe Schmoe, running one campaign, in which he ALSO signals where his politics DIRECTLY lie: this Joe Schmoe isn’t a Joe Manchin Democrat - he’s a Joe Schmoe Democrat!
In a more direct way, though, Maurice Mitchell and Dan Cantor themselves define the merits of fusion voting for The Nation by writing:
“Fusion is a response to the winner-take-all electoral system. It solves the “wasted vote” or “spoiler” dilemmas that otherwise plague third parties, and allows citizens who don’t fit neatly into the Democratic or Republican boxes to nevertheless participate constructively in politics. And it is important to remember that third parties have played a critical role in American history. Many of our strides towards “a more perfect union”—including the abolition of slavery, the eight-hour day, unemployment insurance, women’s suffrage, Social Security, child-labor laws—began as fringe ideas of third-party activists. They told the truth before the major parties wanted to hear it, and their ideas were eventually adopted by those who initially rejected them.”
Unfortunately, fusion voting is either illegal or unknown to the point of being nonexistent in most states. You will only regularly see it in New York, Connecticut, and Oregon. And considering that the WFP is active in 18 states, as well as D.C., what is their strategy to enact change across the rest of the country?
“Recruiting and electing working families champions to elected office, and then continuing to work,” Sarah tells us. “Our work is not done on Election Day, but continuing to work with them to govern, to deliver for working families in their communities and to hold that strategy. We create state committees in all the states where we have chapters that are leader-led groups of people that create durable, long-term political infrastructure to make strategic decisions to engage and bring themselves into that political work. Candidates and elected officials by themselves are not enough to win and exercise durable governing power.”
To play devil’s advocate for a second, one of the biggest curiosities we had was how a strategy like this would manifest itself in a Democrat stronghold like California, where Jed is from.
“California is a great example,” she told us. “The party has existed there for just over five years, and we have recruited, run, and elected something like 150 state and local Working Families Party elected officials. We don't need fusion voting to do that. And frankly, most municipal races are non-partisan. And [even though] there are many states where they are partisan, we start by trying to build at the municipal level, at the state legislative level, and really in recruiting and running our champions then positioning them to govern. So in different places, that strategy looks kind of different. Michigan is our newest party. We only started the organizing committee last year, so we're just getting started there. We endorsed our first two city council races this year as the first act of the organizing committee. Everywhere we're building, we're at different stages based on how long have we been there, and what's our level of scale and impact.”
Despite being a party focused on the good of the community first and foremost, the candidates do matter. When I asked Sarah what makes for the ideal WFP candidate, she tells me they’re looking first and foremost for “authentic and grounded leaders in their communities that hold in their leadership the lived experiences [of the community] and are deeply accountable for that, and are authentic communicators of that.”
“A great example of this is Kendra Brooks, a Working Families Party-only City Council member in Philadelphia,” she says. “She's such a good example of when people are running [via] their own experiences. So Kendra is a working class mom of four who was housing insecure. She had a job funded by the government, and then Republican budget cuts [cut that job]. When she was in the council, one of her biggest early fights was around eviction prevention. It's like she is literally writing the policies for her community and for people like her.”
With the decisive victories of the WFP’s preferred candidates last week, the future is bright for them. So what’s next? Sarah compares what’s happening in the present to something she witnessed in the past.
“This is a good question to ask today,” Sarah says. “I worked in New York City, for the New York party for five years. I kept jokingly saying, the first time we took over in New York City was in 2013 when [Bill] de Blasio was elected mayor, and we took over the city council. I'm kind of an old person in New York City politics, and that campaign was like nothing I've ever seen before. It was remarkable, especially how many people. The volunteers, of course, were very notable, but the voters it brought in were not normal Democratic primary voters…it was amazing to see how both the vision that he put out there and the campaign that he ran really brought so many people into the political process.”
And this, she says, is a parallel to what we’re seeing today with Zohran Mamdani.
“It’s a call to everybody everywhere that when we are talking about people that are disillusioned by the two party system, we can have a different vision, we can be bold in asserting it, and it will inspire people,” she says. “That is a fundamentally strong lesson that we're going to be bringing from that into our work everywhere.”
If you are interested in becoming involved with the Working Families Party, you can text WFP to 30403 or find more information at workingfamilies.org - including if you want to help, but are not in a state with a WFP chapter.
I really wish the WFP would have backed Deja Foxx in AZ.
Thank you for spreading the word about WFP!