Two days after the run-off elections that saw both their candidates cruise to easy citywide victories, and two weeks after they swept a number of City Council races, a handful of Working Families Party-backed area politicians and allies gathered by the courthouse in Lower Manhattan to advocate for mandatory paid sick and family leave.
Hundreds marched over the Brooklyn Bridge, half of them high school students. There were the requisite “Si Se Puede” chants. A hipster marching band jammed with some of the older protesters banging on drums.
“I think,” said one man surveying the scene, “that we are looking at the future.”
Thanks to a superior field operation—albeit one that could be curtailed pending investigations by the Campaign Finance Board—becoming a favored WFP candidate has became the real contest this year, for the most part deciding well in advance who won the Democratic nominations, and, almost certainly, most of the elected offices in New York. For any who want to win or move up in the future, the message seems clear: before anything else, get right with the Working Families Party.
“You get Working Families, it comes with a package of the most professional grassroots operation out there,” said Simcha Eichenstein, director of political services with the Friedlander Group, who worked on several city campaigns this season against WFP-backed candidates. “It’s not a fair game. It’s Mike Bloomberg running against Freddy Ferrer.”
The party has shown a willingness to target incumbents who they feel are not sufficiently energetic on their issues, as they did in the State Senate in 2008 when longtime liberal lion Marty Connor was unseated by the WFP-backed newcomer Daniel Squadron.
And being right on the issues has not shown to be enough to get the WFP endorsement or even to avoid being targeted in Democratic primaries—the WFP leadership admits that there is not too much ideological difference sometimes between those whom they energetically support and those whom they target.
“We want people in office who are not just going to vote the right way but who are going to be progressive leaders,” said Working Families Party executive director Dan Cantor. He mentioned the defeat of Connor, and added, “I’m sure that some of the incumbents who just lost never voted against many things that we might stand for, but they weren’t driving an agenda forward—and that’s the difference.”
The rise of the Working Families Party comes at an odd historical moment. Nationally, at least, organized labor is at its lowest in decades. New York City has become a global capital of financial and cultural elites, a city home more to the Carrie Bradshaws of the world than the Archie Bunkers. This is the city, after all, that is supposedly icing out the working class, to say nothing of the middle class.
Yet it is also a city where organized labor has a tighter grip over City Hall than it has had at anytime since the 1970s.
The rules have clearly changed. Take David Yassky. The Brooklyn Council member was endorsed by all three major dailies, had the support of the Brooklyn Democratic organization, ran strong in the vote-rich neighborhoods of the Upper West Side and brownstone Brooklyn, and was backed by Sen. Chuck Schumer and, later, former Mayor Ed Koch—the rare politicians whose endorsements are supposed to actually carry serious sway. He had a record and a traditional base, and he barely squeaked into the run-off. Then he lost by 12 points.
Ever since the primaries ended, the city’s tabloid editorial pages and some of its more prominent business-friendly and conservative thinkers have fretted that the WFP’s victories mean that the city will take a sharp leftward turn, and that this center of global finance will suddenly morph into a Socialist Worker’s Collective.
That is a line that those who have worked in city politics for years—and seen other groups come and go—dispute.
“The principles of the Working Families Party and the principles of the Democratic Party are largely similar,” said Council Member Lew Fidler, an ally of the Brooklyn Democratic leader but not so much the WFP. “It’s not like you are waking up someday and someone is asking you to become a Bolshevik.”
Cantor agreed, painting a picture of the group’s priorities that were largely in the mainstream of progressive thought in urban America.
“Something on responsible development, something on education and something on the climate crisis, and we can die happy,” he said, enumerating the group’s priorities, and adding, “It is a modest agenda, except in the American context where you look like you’re a crazy radical. What we’re talking about is Social Democracy 101—let’s try to have society be sensible and not just oriented toward the glitterati.”
Two of the items in this list—education and the environment—are also the top priorities of another major political player in town: Michael Bloomberg.
Cantor said he was open to the idea of charter schools, a Bloomberg education centerpiece. And many WFP-backed candidates have pushed for greater parental involvement, something that the state legislature in Albany addressed before re-authorizing mayoral control. He also mentioned lowering the price of tuition at CUNY, something many officials see as a virtual impossibility at this point.
On the environment, Cantor acknowledges that the mayor’s record has been a pretty good one, but he would like to see more bike lanes, more bus rapid transit and more ferry service. All of these are issues that Bloomberg has championed.
What this points to, according to many longtime political watchers, is that for the moment, at least, the era of knock-down drag-out urban political fights is largely over. Gone are the days when New York was home to widespread political strife over education and housing policy. A new political consensus around safety, livability and what makes cities attractive for newcomers and residents appears to have emerged.
Some fissures in this happy picture are inevitable. Partially due to his wealth, partially due to his approval ratings, and partially due to a City Charter that makes the mayor’s power unmatched, Bloomberg has been able to pull dissenters into his orbit and give cover to legislators who oppose him.
Now, with the Working Families Party planting its flag from St. George to Kingsbridge, politicians and interest groups may be able to look elsewhere for support.
“The Working Families Party and this coalition is creating an opportunity for a lot of disparate voices to come together and operate as a whole greater than the sum of its parts,” said one political operative. “For eight years, the aggregated sector of power has been in the mayor’s office, and you have a lot of different and often uncoordinated voices going up against that. What this coalition and this primary may do is to bring those different voices together and create a counterbalancing effect.”
One area where the party and the administration are likely to lock antlers is over development issues. The Bloomberg administration has presided over a building boom that has remade much of the city—at the expense, critics say, of neighborhood character, affordable housing and economic development.
“Responsible development is a huge one,” Cantor said, enumerating the party’s general principles. “Meaning from soup to nuts, it has to be built responsibly. The jobs that are created need to be good jobs. The housing that’s created needs to include a substantial amount of affordable housing. It needs to be sensitive to local neighborhood concerns. It’s got to be a democratic planning process as much as possible. We should not give away such a precious social resource without demanding a social benefit.”
Often in development projects in New York, however, those principles are in conflict: the city must choose between whether or not they want developers to add more affordable housing or build lower in deference to community concerns. Plus, Bloomberg administration officials say, there is more agreement than some of their critics allege, but that say translating those kinds of principles into deals with private-sector developers and community groups is often easier said than done.
WFP allies, though, say that the Bloomberg administration has often favored developers over neighborhood concerns. Now in power, they vow to re-orient local government’s priorities.
“It’s about making community concerns a core priority rather than an afterthought, and economic development geared towards that priority,” said Brad Lander, one of the WFP priority candidates who scored a convincing Democratic primary win with the party’s help. “If you start with increasing the tax base and letting the developer dream big, then yes, living wages are going to be a nuisance—but you can start with affordable housing, good jobs, sustainable neighborhoods and public amenities, and then gear development around that.”
But the Working Family Party may find even their limited goals harder than they have imagined. The graveyards of city politics are littered with big dreams that were dashed against the ponderousness of city government.
“There are a lot of good people coming in and they have a good progressive history,” said one veteran Council member. “But you get in and then it’s not as dramatic as you might think. I don’t know if [the Council] is going to change all that much.”
Their ability to move the needle of city policy may be further hampered, ironically, by their success. Campaigning is always easier than governing, and party insiders may find themselves disappointed as their candidates try to reach out to other constituencies. Forces like the Real Estate Board of New York and the Independence Party are already lining up against what they see as a leftward onslaught.
“They can’t start overstepping their bounds,” says one Council staffer. “They can push what they want but, they bite off more than they can chew, they could lose it all. They may find out that members will decide they would rather not have the WFP’s backing if it means having to be in lockstep with them all the time.”
Furthermore, after a series of electoral successes, the Party has attracted the attention of the Campaign Finance Board, which issued a ruling before the primary that it considered the WFP’s for-profit canvassing arm, Data and Field Services, to be an arm of the party. A deeper audit and further investigations are expected.
“Their last couple of years have been good but you have to wonder how much longer they will be able to keep it going,” said the Brooklyn political operative. “In the future, it won’t be the same for them, but the question is how much it will be restricted.”
The party will also run into difficulty pushing their agenda, political analysts say, due to a worsening economic crisis. New development has already slowed, and developers may not be able to take on extra burdens.
Tight budgets may slow a large portion of their agenda as well.
“I think they’ve got a problem because there is no more money,” said Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City. “You can’t get blood out of a stone. They face a real challenge because they have created an enormous expectation through their success at the polls. And in some ways it couldn’t come at a worse time.”
Wylde says after 35 years of working in the city, she is used to dealing with labor leaders who have often exerted an outsized role over city policy. But she sees the WFP, which is made up of over 60 unions and community groups, as a different entity.
“The leadership of organized labor has historically been more practical than ideological,” she says. “The Working Families Party has not been put to the test, but they are on a mission that doesn’t have a lot to do with solving the problems of the city.”
The next big hurdle for the WFP will be in the selection of committee chairs and the speakership. Traditionally, county leaders have driven that process, but the emergence of the WFP and candidates who were backed by them instead of the county organizations makes the party something of a sixth borough in the city, and one that is much more cohesive and powerful than several of the existing county organizations.
“If you’re running for office, who would you rather have on your side—the Working Families Party or Vito Lopez?” said one operative. “Getting the Working Families Party means a lot more at this point.”
The new WFP-backed members will find out soon enough that politics is about making compromises, and so they will unlikely be able to do all of the WFP’s bidding. Still, if the party is able to get a couple of key people in key positions, extract concessions during the speaker’s race and preside over a political universe where elected officials try to out-WFP one another, then the city may begin to morph into a different place.
For most of the Bloomberg administration, the focus has been on keeping the city on par with the Londons and Shanghais of the world, and to ensure that the best and brightest across all fields of human endeavor continue to flock here.
Cantor signaled a shift.
“You know, the rich and fabulous are going to be just fine. They don’t need a political party. Them that has gets in America. We don’t like that. There has to be a better way.”
Hundreds marched over the Brooklyn Bridge, half of them high school students. There were the requisite “Si Se Puede” chants. A hipster marching band jammed with some of the older protesters banging on drums.
“I think,” said one man surveying the scene, “that we are looking at the future.”
Thanks to a superior field operation—albeit one that could be curtailed pending investigations by the Campaign Finance Board—becoming a favored WFP candidate has became the real contest this year, for the most part deciding well in advance who won the Democratic nominations, and, almost certainly, most of the elected offices in New York. For any who want to win or move up in the future, the message seems clear: before anything else, get right with the Working Families Party.
“You get Working Families, it comes with a package of the most professional grassroots operation out there,” said Simcha Eichenstein, director of political services with the Friedlander Group, who worked on several city campaigns this season against WFP-backed candidates. “It’s not a fair game. It’s Mike Bloomberg running against Freddy Ferrer.”
The party has shown a willingness to target incumbents who they feel are not sufficiently energetic on their issues, as they did in the State Senate in 2008 when longtime liberal lion Marty Connor was unseated by the WFP-backed newcomer Daniel Squadron.
And being right on the issues has not shown to be enough to get the WFP endorsement or even to avoid being targeted in Democratic primaries—the WFP leadership admits that there is not too much ideological difference sometimes between those whom they energetically support and those whom they target.
“We want people in office who are not just going to vote the right way but who are going to be progressive leaders,” said Working Families Party executive director Dan Cantor. He mentioned the defeat of Connor, and added, “I’m sure that some of the incumbents who just lost never voted against many things that we might stand for, but they weren’t driving an agenda forward—and that’s the difference.”
The rise of the Working Families Party comes at an odd historical moment. Nationally, at least, organized labor is at its lowest in decades. New York City has become a global capital of financial and cultural elites, a city home more to the Carrie Bradshaws of the world than the Archie Bunkers. This is the city, after all, that is supposedly icing out the working class, to say nothing of the middle class.
Yet it is also a city where organized labor has a tighter grip over City Hall than it has had at anytime since the 1970s.
The rules have clearly changed. Take David Yassky. The Brooklyn Council member was endorsed by all three major dailies, had the support of the Brooklyn Democratic organization, ran strong in the vote-rich neighborhoods of the Upper West Side and brownstone Brooklyn, and was backed by Sen. Chuck Schumer and, later, former Mayor Ed Koch—the rare politicians whose endorsements are supposed to actually carry serious sway. He had a record and a traditional base, and he barely squeaked into the run-off. Then he lost by 12 points.
Ever since the primaries ended, the city’s tabloid editorial pages and some of its more prominent business-friendly and conservative thinkers have fretted that the WFP’s victories mean that the city will take a sharp leftward turn, and that this center of global finance will suddenly morph into a Socialist Worker’s Collective.
That is a line that those who have worked in city politics for years—and seen other groups come and go—dispute.
“The principles of the Working Families Party and the principles of the Democratic Party are largely similar,” said Council Member Lew Fidler, an ally of the Brooklyn Democratic leader but not so much the WFP. “It’s not like you are waking up someday and someone is asking you to become a Bolshevik.”
Cantor agreed, painting a picture of the group’s priorities that were largely in the mainstream of progressive thought in urban America.
“Something on responsible development, something on education and something on the climate crisis, and we can die happy,” he said, enumerating the group’s priorities, and adding, “It is a modest agenda, except in the American context where you look like you’re a crazy radical. What we’re talking about is Social Democracy 101—let’s try to have society be sensible and not just oriented toward the glitterati.”
Two of the items in this list—education and the environment—are also the top priorities of another major political player in town: Michael Bloomberg.
Cantor said he was open to the idea of charter schools, a Bloomberg education centerpiece. And many WFP-backed candidates have pushed for greater parental involvement, something that the state legislature in Albany addressed before re-authorizing mayoral control. He also mentioned lowering the price of tuition at CUNY, something many officials see as a virtual impossibility at this point.
On the environment, Cantor acknowledges that the mayor’s record has been a pretty good one, but he would like to see more bike lanes, more bus rapid transit and more ferry service. All of these are issues that Bloomberg has championed.
What this points to, according to many longtime political watchers, is that for the moment, at least, the era of knock-down drag-out urban political fights is largely over. Gone are the days when New York was home to widespread political strife over education and housing policy. A new political consensus around safety, livability and what makes cities attractive for newcomers and residents appears to have emerged.
Some fissures in this happy picture are inevitable. Partially due to his wealth, partially due to his approval ratings, and partially due to a City Charter that makes the mayor’s power unmatched, Bloomberg has been able to pull dissenters into his orbit and give cover to legislators who oppose him.
Now, with the Working Families Party planting its flag from St. George to Kingsbridge, politicians and interest groups may be able to look elsewhere for support.
“The Working Families Party and this coalition is creating an opportunity for a lot of disparate voices to come together and operate as a whole greater than the sum of its parts,” said one political operative. “For eight years, the aggregated sector of power has been in the mayor’s office, and you have a lot of different and often uncoordinated voices going up against that. What this coalition and this primary may do is to bring those different voices together and create a counterbalancing effect.”
One area where the party and the administration are likely to lock antlers is over development issues. The Bloomberg administration has presided over a building boom that has remade much of the city—at the expense, critics say, of neighborhood character, affordable housing and economic development.
“Responsible development is a huge one,” Cantor said, enumerating the party’s general principles. “Meaning from soup to nuts, it has to be built responsibly. The jobs that are created need to be good jobs. The housing that’s created needs to include a substantial amount of affordable housing. It needs to be sensitive to local neighborhood concerns. It’s got to be a democratic planning process as much as possible. We should not give away such a precious social resource without demanding a social benefit.”
Often in development projects in New York, however, those principles are in conflict: the city must choose between whether or not they want developers to add more affordable housing or build lower in deference to community concerns. Plus, Bloomberg administration officials say, there is more agreement than some of their critics allege, but that say translating those kinds of principles into deals with private-sector developers and community groups is often easier said than done.
WFP allies, though, say that the Bloomberg administration has often favored developers over neighborhood concerns. Now in power, they vow to re-orient local government’s priorities.
“It’s about making community concerns a core priority rather than an afterthought, and economic development geared towards that priority,” said Brad Lander, one of the WFP priority candidates who scored a convincing Democratic primary win with the party’s help. “If you start with increasing the tax base and letting the developer dream big, then yes, living wages are going to be a nuisance—but you can start with affordable housing, good jobs, sustainable neighborhoods and public amenities, and then gear development around that.”
But the Working Family Party may find even their limited goals harder than they have imagined. The graveyards of city politics are littered with big dreams that were dashed against the ponderousness of city government.
“There are a lot of good people coming in and they have a good progressive history,” said one veteran Council member. “But you get in and then it’s not as dramatic as you might think. I don’t know if [the Council] is going to change all that much.”
Their ability to move the needle of city policy may be further hampered, ironically, by their success. Campaigning is always easier than governing, and party insiders may find themselves disappointed as their candidates try to reach out to other constituencies. Forces like the Real Estate Board of New York and the Independence Party are already lining up against what they see as a leftward onslaught.
“They can’t start overstepping their bounds,” says one Council staffer. “They can push what they want but, they bite off more than they can chew, they could lose it all. They may find out that members will decide they would rather not have the WFP’s backing if it means having to be in lockstep with them all the time.”
Furthermore, after a series of electoral successes, the Party has attracted the attention of the Campaign Finance Board, which issued a ruling before the primary that it considered the WFP’s for-profit canvassing arm, Data and Field Services, to be an arm of the party. A deeper audit and further investigations are expected.
“Their last couple of years have been good but you have to wonder how much longer they will be able to keep it going,” said the Brooklyn political operative. “In the future, it won’t be the same for them, but the question is how much it will be restricted.”
The party will also run into difficulty pushing their agenda, political analysts say, due to a worsening economic crisis. New development has already slowed, and developers may not be able to take on extra burdens.
Tight budgets may slow a large portion of their agenda as well.
“I think they’ve got a problem because there is no more money,” said Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City. “You can’t get blood out of a stone. They face a real challenge because they have created an enormous expectation through their success at the polls. And in some ways it couldn’t come at a worse time.”
Wylde says after 35 years of working in the city, she is used to dealing with labor leaders who have often exerted an outsized role over city policy. But she sees the WFP, which is made up of over 60 unions and community groups, as a different entity.
“The leadership of organized labor has historically been more practical than ideological,” she says. “The Working Families Party has not been put to the test, but they are on a mission that doesn’t have a lot to do with solving the problems of the city.”
The next big hurdle for the WFP will be in the selection of committee chairs and the speakership. Traditionally, county leaders have driven that process, but the emergence of the WFP and candidates who were backed by them instead of the county organizations makes the party something of a sixth borough in the city, and one that is much more cohesive and powerful than several of the existing county organizations.
“If you’re running for office, who would you rather have on your side—the Working Families Party or Vito Lopez?” said one operative. “Getting the Working Families Party means a lot more at this point.”
The new WFP-backed members will find out soon enough that politics is about making compromises, and so they will unlikely be able to do all of the WFP’s bidding. Still, if the party is able to get a couple of key people in key positions, extract concessions during the speaker’s race and preside over a political universe where elected officials try to out-WFP one another, then the city may begin to morph into a different place.
For most of the Bloomberg administration, the focus has been on keeping the city on par with the Londons and Shanghais of the world, and to ensure that the best and brightest across all fields of human endeavor continue to flock here.
Cantor signaled a shift.
“You know, the rich and fabulous are going to be just fine. They don’t need a political party. Them that has gets in America. We don’t like that. There has to be a better way.”
