Working Families Party Who Do They Fight to Make Change
The Pugnacious, Relentless Progressive Party That Wants to Remake America
The Working Families Party has pushed the political argue to the left in the states where it'southward already active. Now—in the era of Occupy and Bernie Sanders—information technology's fix to accept that fight nationwide.
At a recent private dinner in Manhattan, a small group of leftists plotted to take over America.
The group, a dozen community organizers and activists from all over the country, had convened at a sushi eating place in the Flatiron District with the leaders of the New York-based Working Families Political party. They were heads of organizations from Boston to Albuquerque, with names like National People's Action and Washington Customs Action Network. And they were there to hear why their states should course their ain chapters of the insurgent party, in order to capitalize on the land's rising liberal tide and push the national conversation leftward.
The party's deputy director, Jon Green, a pale, bespectacled 42-year-old, made the pitch. "In 2010, we saw the Tea Party yank the entire political discourse fashion to the right," he said. The Tea Party was powerful, he said, because it was boldly ideological; information technology recruited and groomed candidates; and it created a strong national brand. "Our view is that at that place isn't anything analogous to that on the left, and at that place ought to be." Heads nodded around the table.
The Working Families Party'south calendar—frankly redistributionist and devoted to social equality—targets a course of Democratic elected officials who, in the view of many liberals, seem to listen more to their moneyed donors than to the left-fly rank and file. Aggressive, tactical, and dedicated to winning, the WFP would similar to forcefulness Democrats—and the land—to get more than liberal by mobilizing the party base of operations, changing the terms of the fence, and taking out centrist incumbents in primaries.
If there's e'er been a moment for this, it is at present. 4 years after Occupy Wall Street, with the socialist Bernie Sanders pushing Hillary Clinton leftward in the Democratic presidential primaries, liberal frustration with national politics has reached a boiling point. Enter the WFP: Since its founding nearly two decades ago, it'southward become an influential fixture of Autonomous politics in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. At present, the party is going national. Past mid-2016, the WFP plans to exist in 11 states, with more than on the horizon. Last month, the WFP endorsed Sanders subsequently an online vote of its national membership. They may not yet be a household name, but a few years from now, they aim to be a national force.
Many of the activists in the dining room that dark were there because they thought their states' liberals needed more than edge. Javier Benavidez is the executive director of the Albuquerque-based South Due west Organizing Project, a customs group that will help to launch the New Mexico Working Families Party later this yr. In New United mexican states, Benavidez said, labor and customs groups had a good human relationship. "But when it came to taking on corporate Democrats, there was a lot of hesitation."
Analilia Mejia, the crusading managing director of New Jersey Working Families, jumped in from across the table. "Here is what you say to them, verbatim: 'Permit united states of america exist the "crazy" left,'" she said. "'Allow u.s.a. be the voice that creates the infinite that allows you to negotiate for more than of what you want.' You tin't be for raising taxes? Permit us say, 'Tax the rich,' and and then you can push harder."
From Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and New York Mayor Neb de Blasio, to the Blackness Lives Matter movement and recent social-justice protests on college campuses, the activist left is enjoying a prominence non seen since the 1970s. The largest proportion of Americans now identify as "liberal" since Gallup began request the question in 1992. As both cause and symptom of this moment, the WFP represents a sign of things to come for a Democratic Party still in the early stages of wrestling over what form it will take in the post-Obama era.
Without the WFP, de Blasio, who may be the most powerful progressive in the country, would not likely exist mayor. The party'southward Chicago partner helped to forcefulness Mayor Rahm Emanuel into Chicago's showtime-ever mayoral runoff as he sought reelection terminal yr. Information technology played a key function in increasing the number of blacks on the six-member Ferguson, Missouri, city council from one to three in the wake of that city'south police-brutality protests. WFP-supported candidates have defeated incumbent Democrats in legislative primaries in Connecticut, New York, and Oregon, and party-supported candidates serve on urban center councils from Hartford to Chicago. The political party has been instrumental in pushing bug such every bit government-mandated paid sick leave and a $xv minimum wage to the forefront of the national Democratic agenda.
As dinner wound down, the group traded war stories about disloyal Democrats and local fights. Charly Carter, the director of Maryland Working Families, complained that some elected officials seemed to lose the burn down in the belly one time they took office.
"It can be a existent letdown," Carter said. "We are at war. And when you're at state of war, you don't need statesmen—you need gladiators. We elect them to be gladiators, and once they get there they want to be statesmen." Her tablemates nodded in sympathy. The implication was clear: Their mission was to ensure that Democrats couldn't get abroad with selling out their base.
The Working Families Political party's bid for national prominence might seem similar a long shot. But the political party has succeeded in racking upwards electoral and policy victories in the places where it has long been active, starting with New York.
In the Empire State, where it was founded, the WFP is undeniably influential. It's a force in city politics, but also makes its presence felt in the state legislature. It arose as a upshot of the land'south unusual fusion-voting system, in which candidates can run on the election lines of multiple parties—so, for example, a voter for onetime Mayor Michael Bloomberg would find him listed on the ballot twice, as the Republican candidate and as the candidate of the Independence Party.
The fusion system allows third parties to exert influence on the two established parties, offering them the chance to support major-political party candidates rather than playing spoiler. The system has given pocket-sized parties an unusual role in New York politics, simply while the Conservative Party has mostly lived upward to its proper name, the Liberal Party has not: In 1989, it endorsed Republican Rudy Giuliani. The betrayal outraged then-governor Mario Cuomo and prompted a revolt among a grouping of liberal marriage leaders and community activists. They formed the New Party in 1990; after some fits and starts, information technology became the Working Families Political party in 1998. The party is controlled and funded past a board consisting of labor unions, such equally the Service Employees International Union, and grassroots groups such equally Moveon.org; its national president, a garrulous visionary named Dan Cantor, has a résumé that includes the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign and the now-defunct Association of Customs Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.
Success for the nascent WFP came faster than its founders could accept dreamed: In the 1998 election, the party's endorsed gubernatorial candidate, the Democrat Peter Vallone, received more 50,000 votes on the WFP line (despite losing the race), guaranteeing the political party ballot access going forrad. It immediately started scoring policy victories: the state's first canton-level living-wage ordinances; a statewide hike in the minimum wage passed over the veto of a Republican governor in 2004; and the first major reforms to the Rockefeller drug laws, fix in motion by a WFP-backed African American candidate's principal defeat of a conservative Democratic district attorney in Albany.
In 2003, Letitia James won election to the New York City Council on the WFP line lone, beating the Autonomous candidate in the race and becoming the quango'due south first minor-party representative in 30 years. That planted the seeds of the WFP's plan to take over the council. By 2009, the party had helped seven challengers win urban center-council primaries, many of them defeating Democratic incumbents, and backed a progressive councilman named Bill de Blasio's upset bid for the citywide office of public advocate.
In one case in office, the WFP-backed council members joined with liberals already on the council to course an xi-member Progressive Caucus which, despite existence a minority on the 51-seat council, quickly proved capable of driving the agenda—and tormenting then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Christine Quinn, the city council's speaker at the time, sided against the WFP on issues like paid ill get out, ending stop-and-frisk, and extending term limits; once seen as Bloomberg'southward inevitable successor, Quinn was routed in the 2013 Autonomous primary. Today, de Blasio is the mayor of New York, James is the public advocate, the Progressive Caucus numbers 18 members, and the speaker is a former caucus chair named Melissa Mark-Viverito.
In brusk, America's largest city has gone from being run by a billionaire mayor and a party-machine council to existence steered by a progressive mayor and progressive-driven council. In place of debates between Republicans and timid, triangulating Democrats, the fight in New York is now largely between moderates and activists on the left. (Fifty-fifty de Blasio now finds himself to the right of the progressives on the council, particularly on criminal-justice issues.) This is what WFP would similar to reach nationally—on metropolis councils and county boards, in stage legislatures, and in Congress.
"Here's what I'd say is the bottom line about the Working Families Party," Patrick Gaspard, the former White House manager of political affairs who at present serves as the Administrator to Due south Africa, told me. Equally a young New York activist, Gaspard was a founding board member of the WFP. "They have values, they accept high capacity for a relatively pocket-size organization, and different many on the left, they have a habit of winning." (Gaspard stressed that he was speaking in his personal chapters and non in his current professional role.)
The party relies on traditional labor- and community-organizing techniques. It maintains an army of paid canvassers yr-round who tin quickly mobilize voters for elections or initiatives. And it recruits and trains candidates at the ground level, seeding low-level local offices with sympathizers. In October, in a conference room on an upper floor of a Manhattan skyscraper, I watched a legal assistant named Francena Amparo dial for dollars in her reelection race to the Duchess County Legislature, the 25-person board that governs a Hudson Valley county more than an hr north of the city.
"Hi, Wilbur, are you in that location?" said Amparo, a Bronx-accented 38-year-quondam with flowing hair and a gap-toothed smile. "It's Francena, the canton legislator from Duchess County. How are you doing?"
Amparo had set aside 2 hours from her workday for fundraising calls—to family unit, friends, and fifty-fifty her doctor. She worked from a script—"I'thou calling because I'one thousand running for reelection and I need a heave in the abode stretch"—and generally asked for $50 or $75. If she got a "yes," she handed the phone to one of the two hipsterish young African American WFP staffers in the room, who took credit-card data and added the donation to a spreadsheet. The most important indicate in the script, highlighted and underlined and all-caps, was to cease talking once you make the inquire—when you look for the other person to fill the silence, they usually say yes.
Amparo's total fundraising goal was just $7,500, and fewer than two,000 votes would exist bandage in the ballot in Nov, where she was running as both a Democrat and a Working Families candidate, listed on both ballot lines.
The theory behind helping people like Amparo—a working-class, lesbian Latina who never saw herself as a potential officer until the WFP came calling—is that when seats open up upward for state legislature or Congress, information technology's these bottom officeholders that the Democratic Party will depict upon. (Many New York politicos say the WFP is more organized and effective than the state Democratic Political party, and Autonomous candidates routinely depict on WFP staff for their campaigns.) In the municipal elections across New York Land in November, 71 of the WFP's 111 downballot candidates won—including Amparo, who vanquish her Republican challenger by just 21 votes.
But the WFP's story in New York is more complicated than this simple narrative of triumph. Information technology has had a harder time outside New York City, particularly when it comes to the centrist Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, a skilled tactician who has repeatedly outmaneuvered the left.
Fiscally conservative but socially liberal, Cuomo epitomizes the sort of "corporate Democrat" the WFP despises. In his 2010 gubernatorial election, he threatened to refuse to run on the party'south ballot line—a movement that would have killed the party's ballot access—unless the political party'due south leaders promised not to challenge his beginning budget. The WFP had no choice but to agree, and it was "incredibly disheartening" to the party'south leaders and supporters to stand up by in silence as Cuomo successfully passed a package of tax cuts for corporations and the rich, one quondam WFP staffer told me. (A party spokesman didn't dispute that the WFP gave Cuomo a pass on his first upkeep, just noted that the party successfully fought him later in the twelvemonth on the expiration of a tax on loftier earners.)
In 2014, when Cuomo stood for reelection, the political party had recruited a candidate to claiming him in the Democratic main—a police force professor and Occupy Wall Street leader named Zephyr Teachout. Merely when information technology came time for the WFP to make an endorsement and bestow its ballot line, the party was badly divided. Its old ally de Blasio, now the city's mayor (and, at the time, trying to back-scratch favor with Cuomo to get his ain agenda through the legislature), brokered a deal whereby Cuomo would get the WFP endorsement in exchange for a series of promises, such as campaigning for Democratic state-senate candidates and bankroll ethics and entrada-finance reforms. (Teachout however won a third of the master vote, attestation to the level of Democratic dissatisfaction with Cuomo.)
Cuomo took the deal. But once he got the endorsement, he brazenly reneged, flouting his former promises and even seeking to undermine the WFP past starting a new ballot line called the Women'due south Equality Party to misfile voters. In hindsight, WFP insiders view the Cuomo endorsement equally a damaging miscalculation. But they have some encouragement from more recent developments: In a deviation from his usual fiscal conservatism, the governor recently came out in favor of a statewide $fifteen minimum wage. Coming from a politician seen equally motivated purely by self-interest, Cuomo's move was a sign this liberal cause had become a political winner.
Information technology is an irony of the Obama era that, despite having a liberal Democrat in the White Firm, liberals often experience irrelevant to the national political contend. As Analilia Mejia piloted her grey SUV downwardly a New Jersey highway, she considered the question of what ideas are considered politically reasonable.
There had just been another mass shooting, at a community college in Oregon, and the president had once again made a spoken communication proverb the gun situation was out of mitt. On the radio, people were calling in to say that some things that might actually assist—taking away people's handguns, requiring them to register with the government—were manifestly ridiculous, out of the question. But why? That's what Mejia, the managing director of New Jersey Working Families, wanted to know.
A longtime matrimony organizer who actually postponed her wedding to piece of work on the Obama campaign, Mejia had previously served every bit New Jersey political director of the powerful mid-Atlantic janitors' marriage, SEIU 32BJ, whose 145,000 members tin exist constitute everywhere from Yankee Stadium to the Pentagon. The daughter of a Colombian garment worker and a Dominican laborer, Mejia, forth with her younger sis, spent several early-childhood years with relatives in Venezuela subsequently their father injured his back and could no longer support the family. "Information technology was amend to live on poverty-level wages in a shantytown in Venezuela than on a garment-worker'due south bacon in Elizabeth, New Jersey," she told me as nosotros inched forrad in traffic. "That's crazypants."
Matrimony work was satisfying but limiting for Mejia. Given the dramatic contraction of the labor movement, which has fallen to simply vii percent of private sector workers (in 1984, information technology was 16 per centum), she longed to amend the lives of all workers, non only those lucky enough to exist in a union. (In this sense, the WFP represents a stab at an American labor party, a common feature of European democracies that the U.S. has historically lacked.)
The WFP gives activists like Mejia an outlet for their frustration with national politics. Information technology channels their acrimony at the constricting terms of the national debate into footing-level organizing—where the politics may seem unglamorously pocket-size-fourth dimension, but there's a chance to make a departure in people'due south lives.
"We've found ways of electoralizing our problems," Mejia told me. "We make politicians walk the walk—and pay the price if they don't." The thought is to make Democratic politicians more accountable to their liberal base through the asymmetric warfare political party primaries enable, much every bit the bourgeois movement has done to Republicans. "The rules are rigged confronting working people, so we have to retrieve outside the box to find unlike ways to win at this game," Mejia said.
When the Autonomous-controlled New Jersey Legislature wasn't advancing a statewide paid-sick-get out neb, the WFP went to the municipal level to notice a workaround; 10 New Bailiwick of jersey cities have at present mandated paid sick leave. And when Governor Chris Christie vetoed a set of voting reforms—including automatic voter registration and restoring felons' voting rights—the party set out to collect signatures to put it on the ballot instead, hoping to put the issue before voters in Nov 2016.
Mejia has as well spearheaded the party's role as Christie'due south chief harasser—a task the state's sclerotic, Christie-co-opted Democratic Party originally hesitated to have up. The WFP's protests, ethics complaints, and calls for Christie's resignation helped put the Bridgegate scandal on the map, severely wounding the presidential hopes of the man once considered a meridian 2016 GOP contender. The party also worked to elect Ras Baraka, an opponent of teaching reform, to succeed Cory Booker as mayor of Newark over a amend-funded candidate. (WFP-style liberals generally side with teachers' unions in viewing teaching reform, which the Obama assistants and many Democrats have championed, every bit a corporatist plot to undermine public educational activity.)
Arriving in West Orange, Mejia pulled up to the venue for the evening's New Jersey Working Families gala, a banquet hall with a potent Bailiwick of jersey vibe: mirrors, marble, patterned carpet. Bumper stickers reading "Kicking Ass for the Working Class" were bachelor at the check-in table. The evening'southward speakers included Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman, a liberal New Jersey lawmaker the WFP has championed since she was in the state assembly, and Representative Keith Ellison, the Minnesotan who co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus. One testament to the party'south growing local clout was that attendees included the chair of the New Jersey Democratic Party, John Currie, and the mayor of Bailiwick of jersey City, Steven Fulop, whom many local observers look to be a acme Autonomous prospect for governor when Christie leaves role in 2017.
Only equally even mainstream Republican politicians now feel obliged to kowtow to the Tea Political party, the WFP, in the states where information technology is strongest, has begun to bend the Democratic establishment in its direction. "There has been a changing of the guard," Currie, the chairman, told me. "Many more of our elected officials are very progressive at present."
Fulop, whose city was the kickoff in New Bailiwick of jersey and the 6th in the country to adopt paid sick go out, told me the WFP represented the first "collective voice for the middle class" that New Bailiwick of jersey had seen in his retention. Until the political party came along, he said, Christie had largely succeeded in a strategy of "split and conquer" to "get Democrats to give upwardly on our core values in the proper name of compromise," such equally by agreeing to pension reform. Though he declined to tell me whether he was running for governor, it was articulate that he saw cozying upward to the WFP equally the best fashion to signal his progressive allegiances in a potential Autonomous chief.
"The Working Families Party provides a balance," he said. "That was missing, very much so."
Why would the left want a Tea Political party? Mainstream Democrats and Republicans alike tend to see the right-wing movement as a pernicious force that has gridlocked national politics, simultaneously stymieing the president and hurting the GOP'south image.
But to the leaders of the WFP, the right-wing motility'due south sudden rise was a revelation. "I watched the Tea Party achieve our goal in reverse," Dan Cantor, the WFP's national director, told me ane twenty-four hours in his New York office. "They were able to pull the country hard to the right without a unmarried ballot line." The Tea Party showed that you could be a political party-type player while still operating mainly inside the two-party organization, through primary challenges and activism. Information technology convinced Cantor that the WFP's incremental, fusion-based strategy was besides limited, and that in that location were other means to wring ideological purity from a party that was in the habit of selling out its most loyal supporters.
Then, in belatedly 2011, the Occupy Wall Street protest movement erupted across the land. This was another centre-opening jolt for Cantor: "It raised the possibility of a new progressive moment," he said. The energy, he saw, was there to be tapped—it just needed organizers who knew how to channel information technology. Organizers, possibly, like the WFP.
The WFP, Cantor explained, doesn't expect to overthrow the two-party system—nor does it want to be a hopeless cause like the Greens or the Libertarian Party. "Every good thought in American history started with a third party: abolition, the viii-hour solar day, women'southward suffrage, child-labor laws, unemployment insurance, Social Security," he said. "These didn't beginning with the Democratic or Republican Party—they started with the Costless Soilers and the Freedom Party and the Populist Party and the Socialist Political party. That's where these things germinate, and and so when you do well, they go adopted by ane of the major parties, or in very rare cases the major party collapses.
"So we're not naïve," he connected. "The Democratic Party is not about to plummet. But we think in that location'southward a huge number of people inside the Democratic Political party that actually agree with the states, and we want the Democratic Party to be feistier, tougher, and more focused on the needs of ordinary people, not the preferences of their donors."
It was in this spirit that the WFP made its presidential endorsement, of Sanders, in Dec. Information technology was a move that had fifty-fifty some WFP allies scratching their heads: Why align themselves with a presidential candidate who is likely to lose, prompting questions nearly the WFP's clout and potentially alienating Hillary Clinton, who has tacked to the left in ways that satisfy many progressives? Clinton has as well been endorsed by some of the WFP's stakeholder unions, putting them in a difficult position. The WFP risked coming across equally the Bernie Sanders of political organizations: loud and angry, but ultimately a sideshow.
The WFP's stated goal is to assist Sanders win. It decided to back Sanders after a vote past its governing lath and an online survey of rank-and-file members, 87 pct of whom chose Sanders. Just internally, political party members run across an upside to the endorsement even if he doesn't prevail. It'south about expanding the party by tapping the energy Sanders has roused—and giving those new activists somewhere to go once the Sanders campaign has ended.
In 2013, the WFP was agile in just four states—New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Oregon. Since then, information technology has opened chapters in Washington, D.C., Maryland, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Rhode Island, with New United mexican states expected to join this year. "We await for people to call us," Dark-green, the deputy manager, who is spearheading the national expansion, told me with a laugh. Usually, they're people who feel abandoned by their local Democrats.
"They're organizations that used to feel like they had power, generally labor unions," Green said. "Public-sector unions used to feel like the Democratic Party had their dorsum. Maybe that wasn't ever really true, but they're certainly seeing information technology's not true now. And low-income communities that once felt that the Autonomous Party was the logical place for them to situate their politics—they see the Autonomous Political party drifting ever rightward, and being fine with the oppression of black people."
Dark-green has immediate experience with this process. In 2003, he was the director of the newly formed Connecticut WFP, the party's outset foray outside New York, when leaders of the Democratic-controlled land legislature teamed up with Republican Governor John Rowland on a budget that resulted in layoffs for 2,300 unionized state workers. For the state employees' union, the American Federation of Land, Canton, and Municipal Employees, "it was an enkindling," Green told me. It was one thing for the Republican governor to float such a proposal, only the unions had counted on the Democrats to cake him. "They felt like, 'These are the people that have our dorsum. They're Democrats—they're going to be there for us.' And they weren't."
Elsewhere in the country, the Tea Political party is a model for what the WFP is trying to practice. But in Connecticut, the WFP predates the Tea Party—and its clout is such that in 2010, when the Tea Party was rising nationally, a Connecticut Tea Party affiliate cited the WFP as an inspiration. The current bulk leader of the state Business firm launched his career with WFP backing. In 2009, in the wake of the financial crisis, New York and Connecticut were two of the only states to fill their state upkeep holes by raising taxes on the rich rather than merely cutting spending.
In Connecticut's 2010 Democratic gubernatorial primary, an underdog mayor named Dan Malloy attacked the front-runner, Ned Lamont, for his opposition to paid sick days, making it the discipline of a blitz of TV ads. Lamont, formerly a liberal darling for his 2006 primary defeat of Senator Joe Lieberman, led in the polls right up to the eve of the primary—simply Malloy ended up beating him by 14 points. Paid sick days had been proposed only blocked by the Democratic legislature in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010. Once Malloy took function in 2011, he apace signed the nation's first statewide paid-ill-days mandate.
These days, Light-green gets a lot of calls from frustrated liberals looking for a way to force per unit area the Democratic Party from the left. In Wisconsin, the newly formed WFP wants to oust the Milwaukee Canton executive, Chris Abele, a wealthy businessman and ostensible Democrat who opposes tax hikes and supports privatizing authorities services. In Baltimore, the party is training candidates to accept on metropolis-council incumbents; in D.C., information technology is working to put a $15 minimum wage on the ballot. In Chicago, the aforementioned ballot that forced Emanuel into a runoff saw the council'southward progressive caucus increase from seven to xi members. Now, Emanuel faces mass protests and a call up threat for his handling of police violence in the city.
The WFP has also succeeded in pushing its pet issues to the forefront of the Autonomous agenda. One signature crusade is regime-mandated paid ill leave, a once-fringe idea that in the past year was mentioned in President Obama's State of the Union address, presented as a centerpiece of Hillary Clinton's economical agenda, and championed past Nancy Pelosi. Similarly, the party was an early champion of the $15 minimum wage, once considered unthinkable but at present a reality in several large cities.
Is all this plenty to deserve the "Tea Party of the left" label? That may be premature. Democratic divisions take however to develop into the sort of government-shuttering national drama of the GOP's fractures, and the party's presidential primary has turned into a ho-hum coronation. The WFP's victories to date have been numerous but pocket-sized-diameter—a far weep from the Tea Party'southward attention-getting mass rallies and defeats of veteran U.S. senators. Simply the WFP would argue that, with Congress gridlocked and in Republican hands, more constructive policymaking happens at the country and local level. The WFP's focus on municipal role also represents an attempt to leverage Democrats' concentration in urban areas. Like the Tea Party, the WFP bedevils mainstream Democrats. One Democratic elected official in a jurisdiction where the party is active lamented that its absolutist demands sometimes make governing impossible: "They're bomb throwers."
Simply the Tea Party and WFP alike view the traditional mode of bipartisan governance as a corrupt deal. Making that harder is the whole point.
In mid-November, WFP staffers from beyond the state gathered for their first-ever national gala. Held in a dimly lit vestibule of the national AFL-CIO headquarters, two blocks from the White House, the result featured a minor bar and forlorn-looking cheese tray. To i side, an imposing, 1950s-era, gilt-heavy mural of heroic laborers with a motto from Virgil ("Labor Omnia Vincit"); to the other, a canvas banner colour-printed with WFP activists, carrying signs like "The Seas Are Ascent & And so Are We," "Hands Upwards Don't Shoot," and "I Am a Woman." A plaque identified the venue equally the Samuel Gompers Room.
Heather McGhee, the president of the leftist retrieve tank Demos, kicked off the proceedings. "You ain't seen null yet from the Working Families Party," she said. "We're electing leaders, we're winning on issues, and most importantly, we're changing what's politically possible."
McGhee, a black woman with long light-brownish dreadlocks, ticked off the party's victories, starting with minimum-wage hikes and paid sick days. "We took downwardly the Rockefeller drug laws, we won law trunk cameras, and nosotros helped cease the abuse of end-and-frisk," she said. "Nosotros stood up to the hedge funders who look at our schools and run into dollar signs, from Bridgeport to Newark, from Philadelphia to Chicago.
"We've been working day in and 24-hour interval out to win on these bug and change the debate," she added. "And this here, tonight, what you're at, is our coming-out party. Because we are the people who believe that our economy should exist measured in the health, happiness, and security of our families, not in corporate profits. We are the people who believe that democracy is for the people, not the super PACs. We are the people who know that economic inequality in America has ever been built on the scaffolding of racial injustice."
At this, there was adulation and shouts of "Amen!" "We are the people who believe that the hereafter of our planet is worth more than the profits of oil and coal executives," she added. "And y'all know what? We deserve a political party, too."
A few minutes subsequently, a slender, elegant, nighttime-skinned woman in a black silk gown took the phase. She was Diana Richardson, a member of the New York Country Assembly from Crown Heights, Brooklyn; in a May special ballot, she became the first-ever New York country legislator elected solely on the WFP ballot line. Her campaign hinged on railing against gentrification and the "greedy developers" leaving the neighborhood's historic residents backside.
Speaking in a Brooklyn emphasis of Rosie-Perez-in-White-Men-Tin can't-Leap proportions, Richardson proclaimed, "The local Democrats didn't desire someone similar me. Listen to my voice—it'south very strong! Yous can't push me around." The audience laughed and cheered. "But another party did want me," she added. "The Working Families Party."
Richardson exuded a powerful charisma—it was articulate why her constituents had seen her as a champion, fifty-fifty if it was also clear why she wouldn't necessarily fit a major-party mold. If the Working Families Party gets its way, the hereafter of the American left will wait a lot less similar Hillary Clinton—and a lot more like Diana Richardson.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/working-families-party/422949/
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