Building an Associational Party

Between 1998 and 2018, the WFP built an associational party—a political organization with deep ties to civil society and the electorate through a coalition of membership-based organizations and individuals. By doing so, it strengthened its capacity to function as an “intermediar[y]…linking citizens and civic groups” in New York “to their government.”¹ This section explores key elements of that party-building effort and its associational elements.

The WFP’s first critical decision was to ground its new party in existing membership-based civic associations. The strategy of building a party on the backs of membership-based unions and community groups followed the original vision as laid out in a 1990 memo circulated by Cantor and Rogers in the wake of Mayor David Dinkins’ near-loss to Rudy Giuliani in the 1989 New York City mayoral race.² The strategy fit Cantor’s decades-long experience as an organizer, first as a community organizer with ACORN, a dues-paying membership organization focused on the needs of low-income communities, and then as a labor organizer. Thus, when the WFP party association was formed, in 1998, it was comprised of four membership-based groups: District 1 of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), United Auto Workers (UAW) Region 9 (Western New York), ACORN, and Citizen Action of New York. These founding members were soon joined by others: construction workers in the Laborers’ Union, building service and security guards in SEIU Local 32BJ, hospital and home care workers in SEIU Local 1199, and low- and moderate-income tenants and homeowners in community groups such as Make the Road New York and Community Voices Heard.

Building the party rooted in membership-based organizations had both organizational and electoral advantages. First, it ensured those who entered the party leadership came with both political skill and knowledge.³ ACORN and Citizen Action, the two founding grassroots membership groups, brought significant expertise in canvassing that they shared with their labor partners. ACORN, for example, taught the party that it was possible to canvass for membership dues in low-income neighborhoods: “Most of labor and the white members knew about canvassing in rich neighborhoods…And we’re like, ‘No,…you can actually canvass in the projects.’ You can actually canvass in low-income neighborhoods from poor people, because that’s how we got our membership. We taught labor how to door-knock. Can you believe it?”⁴ In upstate districts, the WFP often arranged “door-knocking with somebody from Citizen Action and somebody from UAW as a team.”⁵

The decision to found a political party anchored by membership organizations also had electoral advantages. To establish itself as a party under New York law, the WFP needed to secure 50,000 votes on its line in the 1998 statewide gubernatorial election.⁶ Political associations in New York that failed to meet this metric were not recognized as political parties by the law and were not guaranteed a ballot line.⁷ As a party grounded in membership organizations, the WFP began with connections to the actual voters and local communities it sought to organize and represent. Unions brought not only their membership lists,⁸ but also a loyal base who were accustomed to being canvassed about issues and would vote reliably on election days.

Institutional members thus played an important role when it came to getting out the vote, and the party tapped into those networks for volunteers (and subsequently for leaders and candidates).⁹ Cantor explains, the CWA “did the same mailer every election. They’d have a picture of the union logo, the union logo, a picture of the candidate that was being nominated and the party logo and the literature always said, ‘Our Union, Our Party, Our Candidate,’ something like that. And we just swapped in a different picture each time: ‘Our Union, Our Party, ____’ because unions are very popular with their own membership.”

The choice of groups, and the effort to include both public and private unions, was critical to organizing at a politically relevant scale in a large and diverse state. Party leaders understood that building a coalition capable of resisting the Clinton Democrats—their embrace of neoliberalist economic policy and their efforts to limit the social safety programs—would require casting a broad net to draw in a cross section of working families across the state. WFP leaders, thus, consciously orchestrated a membership that, through its geographic spread, would provide the statewide presence it needed to enter New York politics. With the decline of manufacturing, as one founding member recalls, there were not a lot of private-sector unions in New York, “but crucially, the group that we did end up getting was Region 9 of the United Auto Workers, which was at that point based in Buffalo and represented what was left of the auto industry in upstate New York, which wasn’t much, but it was a little bit.”¹⁰

With the help of its civic partners, in 1998, the WFP became a political party in New York after 51,325 people voted for Peter Vallone, the gubernatorial candidate on its line—“a number that’s etched in [the] memory” of many of its founders. As newbies to the New York scene, the founders did not realize that the election night count is often an undercount and prematurely gave a concession speech, believing they had fallen just short of the 50,000 needed to qualify as a minor party.¹¹

Still, right from the start, the WFP committed to recruiting not just a diverse membership but a hybrid membership. Cantor explains, “We were very clear from the very start that we needed…both institutional actors and free-floating individual actors.” The former “had bank accounts and relationships in Albany and lists of members…They already knew who to get through to in the speaker’s office”; “the free-floating activists,” on the other hand, brought “energy” and “are always on fire.” 

Individuals who sought to join the WFP had to prove they were committed to organizing. Cantor expounds, “If you wanted to sit at the leadership table of Working Families, you had to represent someone other than yourself.” Chapters could be as small as 25 people (compared to a union with 40,000 members) “because we actually know how hard it is to organize a group of 25 actual people to be involved, come to meetings, screen candidates, and those sorts of things.” But individuals without a base could not sit at the leadership table of the Working Families Party. 

Nearly three decades later, this commitment to a diverse and hybrid table remains and has filtered up to the national organization, which requires any political association that seeks to affiliate with it to commit through its bylaws to “create an internal democracy where no one sector, meaning labor or the community groups or grassroots activists, could run the table.”¹²

The Democratic and Republican parties do not need to secure their place on the ballot. Nevertheless, integrating with federated membership-based organizations (including churches; local chapters of the ACLU, NRA, the Sierra Club or the League of Women Voters; or mutual aid organizations and YMCAs) would strengthen them as associational parties by providing a direct tie to local communities and, through them, the actual voters the parties seek to organize and represent. Such integration might require some groups to reincorporate (though it also might not, as we will see), but it would have significant electoral advantages. Community organizations would provide organic connections to support voter mobilization, potentially reducing the need to hire a fresh cadre of organizers each cycle while reducing their dependence on commodifying and manipulating voters and the cynicism about parties it breeds.¹³ Likewise, reintegration with membership-based organizations could bolster the leadership skills of state and local parties.

The WFP’s capacity to build a strong associational party was supported by a panoply of organizational choices. The most important of which was the creation of a dues-paying organization, in the European tradition, within the network of party-affiliated legal structures, and placing the locus of decision-making in that body.¹⁴ Technically, dues were paid to the Advisory Council 501(c)(4), not the legal party.¹⁵ Established by the State Executive Committee, the Advisory Council operated as an intermediary between those participating in the nomination processes and the State Executive Committee. Many of the same people sat on both the State Committee and its Advisory Council.

Comprised of both institutional members and leaders of regional and local chapters, the Advisory Council embodied the party for members. While the State Committee and other party entities formally retained nominating authority under New York law, it was the dues to the Advisory Council that conferred the “right” to participate in a local chapter and its endorsement process. As such, interviewees emphasized that for its first 20 years, the WFP’s “members were the people and institutions who paid dues and participated in party processes.”¹⁶

Dues were not an important financial stream and were not established for revenue purposes, Cantor stressed.¹⁷ Instead, dues served two party-building functions. First, dues were designed to create a feeling of membership. As Cantor explained, “You want [dues] because it shows ownership, investment,…then you go get bigger money.” Dues, he continued, are thus different from today’s small online donations. Small donations are “not like membership, that’s just, you know, hair on fire, left-wing money”; when people pay “dues money,…people are saying, ‘No, this is for the organization, not for a candidate,…[but] just to sustain my organization.’” 

Dues were also designed with careful attention to how power and conflict would be mediated within the party. The WFP required that all groups (institutional and individual) paid dues for a vote on the Advisory Council. As Bob Master, a key player in the party’s founding and, at the time, the legislative and political director for Communications Workers of America (CWA) District 1, put it, “We wanted [even local chapters] to pay something so that they would have skin in the game. Like, we don’t want it to be a free ride.” But in recognition of their different economic positions, dues were calibrated on an equitable, rather than per capita, basis. Thus, a large union was required to pay dues of approximately $42,500 per year while the grassroots community organizations were required to pay one-fourth of that. Individuals paid even less. 

Voting rights were similarly allocated on an equitable basis. Despite owing more in dues, the number of votes that a large union with 25,000 members received was capped to enhance equity at the party table. Party rules also favored representation of local chapters and clubs with floors: “If you had 100 members, you had a few votes, even though a union, with 100 members, didn’t even qualify because there was a recognition that that organizing was much harder to do,” Bill Lipton, a co-founder of the WFP, explained. The decision to set a ceiling on representation was specifically designed to ensure against the future capture of the party by the state’s largest public-sector unions. Lipton continued, “We had the foresight to say, ‘Someday we’re going to be strong, and all these bigger unions are going to want to come in, and we are going to be prepared for that.’”¹⁸ 

These voting rules enhanced the party’s capacity to mediate internal divisions. By providing for rough equity in representation, the party forced its members to form internal alliances in order to sway the party toward their goals. The party’s voting rules thus offered one more mechanism by which to hold the party together through tough political decisions. As Cantor explained, “We didn’t want any group, just because they had a ton of money, to be able to dominate a board vote. So, we set the rules that basically you had to make some friends…It was an incentive to associational-ism…You’re going to get more power if you figure out how to work well with others…And that really held us together.”¹⁹

These organizational choices—the decision to require dues and the compromise-forcing voting rule, like the commitment to a diverse table previously discussed—proved critical to the party’s development as an associational party. Were a state chapter of one of the major parties to decide to engage in an associational rebuild, it would be prudent for them to review their internal bylaws to consider how to support investment in the party itself and to incentivize compromise within the party. Without such rules, a political party can become a magnet for activists seeking to vindicate their own political ideological missions, in which the only law is that of the Lord of the Flies, where the powerful (most often those with the deepest wallets) prevail.²⁰

The WFP cultivated itself as an associational party with interpersonal depth by establishing regular and meaningful opportunities for its members, individual and institutional, to engage in face-to-face party politics. These processes facilitated an imperfect, but nevertheless important, two-way street of communication between party leaders and the members they sought to represent.²¹

One of the WFP’s first strategic decisions was to invest in developing neighborhood clubs and chapters consisting of dues-paying members: “the party faithful.”²² In the early years, the most important of these were the South Brooklyn chapter, Albany chapter, and Western New York chapter. Participants came from institutional affiliates but also arrived independently, bringing their own personal and political networks with them.²³

Local chapters provided places for participants to gather and to join in the party’s work. As Cantor explains, “We had our own version of [the Democratic Party] clubs, and our clubs were much more vibrant than the Democratic Party clubs, and that was the basis for the party. We had people who would show up at press conferences; they would go to Albany on lobby days,…[and] the most important thing they would do is screen candidates.” 

Local chapters, in their original form, proved expensive to support and difficult to scale. Even though they were entirely informal as a matter of law, the chapters were organized and supported by the party. Scaling them up thus proved expensive given the limited number of paid staff. Some in the leadership also worried about their propensity to be overtaken by individuals with their own private political agendas. 

The WFP has thus experimented with different models at different times, eventually settling on the institution of regional councils. Operating at a larger scale, regional councils mitigate the individual take-over problem while maintaining the party’s commitment to “decentralize decision-making to bodies closer to what was happening in their respective geographies on both candidate prospects and issue fights” at a price it can afford.²⁴

The WFP today remains committed to providing a place for the unorganized and institutionally unaffiliated, finding them through their friends and neighbors. Ana María Archila, co-director of the New York Working Families Party, emphasizes that this need is driven by the fact that “the majority of people don’t” have a union or a community organization. “So, there are lots of people who are searching for a place to engage in their politics.” 

The WFP did not just cultivate membership; it also worked to integrate them into critical party tasks, from selecting candidates to electioneering to lobbying officials once elected. It demonstrated this commitment early with its very first decision: its name, Working Families Party.

The nascent party did hire professional pollsters to test names, but party leaders decided on the name only after canvassing their membership. A key point of contention was a concern that the proposed name might alienate members of the LGBTQ (then gay) community. At the same time, the name had distinct feminist appeal by suggesting that family was not just a women’s issue but that “We’re all in this together.” To resolve these tensions, the party decided to engage its members. As Bertha Lewis, founding co-chair of the New York WFP and former CEO of ACORN, recalls, “We door-knocked our members at ACORN. We talked to our members. You know, ‘What do you think about this? What do you think of when you think of Working Families?’” ACORN and the other membership-based civic groups pressed the labor unions to do the same, “to actually come and show that they had to engage their rank-and-file members.” After these rounds of consultations, party leaders decided that everyone was part of some family and that most people worked: “You know, if you’re not working, you want to be working. If you are working, you want to work better…And everybody came out of some kind of family. It doesn’t have to be what the traditional family is. You know, if you’re living, you got a mother, somebody birthed your ass,” said Lewis. The process, though arduous, both set the course and proved a solidarity-forming, identity-forming fight—one that would create deep personal bonds within the early leadership. These bonds proved critical during conflicts over policy down the line, according to several interviewees.

After it secured its status as a ballot-qualified political party, the WFP established a range of internal processes that allowed its members to tangibly engage in party politics. For example, it regularly involved its members in lobbying through so-called 500-Person Lobby Days. Cantor explained, “It’s a lot of work to get 500 people on buses to Albany.” Grassroots lobbying required “train[ing] your people so that they were comfortable” and providing them with answers they could use when elected officials responded, “Yeah that’s true, but…were you forgetting about this?” Despite the effort involved, these initiatives were effective for the party because they facilitated face-to-face conversations between elected officials and people from their district. Lobbying days were also meaningful for the party faithful, who would “feel some oomph; they feel some power; they’re in the room,” said Cantor. These efforts were effective for the party.

The central mechanism, however, by which the WFP integrated its members into the party’s work was through the candidate selection process. As Cantor explains, “Hundreds of candidates run under the WFP label each year, and that means there are a LOT of screening interviews. You gotta have local leaders and members for that to happen.” 

Candidate selection became the centerpiece of the WFP’s associational party-building. It created the WFP’s party faithful—ordinary people who opted to invest in party politics—and offered them a regular “voice in shaping the party’s decision-making.”²⁵ More importantly, from an associational party-building perspective, it provided an in-person experience of party membership. As Scharff notes, it gave “ordinary folk…a chance to sit in a room with candidates, some of whom were already elected officials” and share their concerns about their block or with their officials’ choices.

Candidates seeking the WFP’s ballot line are required to meet with representatives of the party in their district as a critical part of the screening process. Candidates begin by filling out a questionnaire designed with input from the party’s members. The form itself provides a meaningful opportunity to participate in the party. As one professional associated with Make the Road New York, a largely Spanish-speaking dues-paying membership organization and institutional party member, explains, “Input into the Working Families Party questionnaire…is an important thing for us because, you know, having a political party comes with a certain stamp of legitimacy and power that candidates sometimes feel [an obligation] to respond to that they may not [have for] an individual organization.”²⁶ Following the questionnaire, each candidate appears for an interview. According to Cantor, party staff would hold “pre-meetings” and ask the group, “What are the three most important questions we’re going to ask?” The interviews themselves were then conducted by individual dues-paying members, including those associated with affiliates. 

Cantor’s description of such interviews highlights their significance as a face-to-face experience of party association: “So, imagine a room with, you know, 50 people in it and, all day on a Saturday, candidate after candidate comes in basically begging for our support. This made people feel good. These were not big-shot people. These were regular people who gave up a Saturday.” Cantor also emphasizes how unusual the experience was from the candidates’ perspective:

“The great moment of every single one of these literally thousands of interviews that we did over a 20-year period…was the around-the-room introduction…These elected officials are all pros. They’ve gone to talk to a zillion kinds of groups and unions and so on. But this was everybody. So, you’d watch them see 20 people introduce themselves going around the room, ‘Oh, I’m from this union,’ or ‘I’m from this neighborhood,’ or ‘I’m from—I work at the library.’ And you could see them like, ‘Oh this is unusual. Like, I don’t get to just say one thing. I don’t just get to say to the union, ‘I’m with you in your struggle against such and such,’ because, well, what about the, you know, people over here that are worried about affordable housing and the ones over here?”

Scharff also describes the small-d democratic significance of these interview sessions: “We would have these weekends where people would basically spend the entire weekend on our committees doing interviews nonstop of candidates for all different levels of office, and it’s an incredible learning experience for the members. And it’s a chance where they actually are face-to-face with someone who’s in office often and then, if not in office, someone who’s going to possibly be in office and they get to say their thing and say, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ And [candidates] have to answer.”

Like Cantor, Scharff notes that candidates were sometimes disconcerted, describing how in “calls afterwards…especially the incumbents being like, ‘What the hell was that? Why are people going after me? I’ve done, you know, nine out of 10 things you’ve ever asked.’” She would have to gently remind them, “This is what the process is. This is our chance to get you to move on some issues you haven’t moved on and to let you know when we’re unhappy.” 

The nomination process, though participatory, did not mean that the party leadership had ceded nominations to local chapters. A local unit’s candidate selections would filter up the party chain, subject to final approval by the State Executive Committee. Party rules, in accordance with New York law, conferred on the State Committee exclusive and final authority to nominate candidates for all statewide races.²⁷ The State Committee, therefore, could legally ignore a local party group’s preference. A strong, if informal, presumption, however, was that nominations would follow the chapter’s choice. Master, who served on its State Committee, emphasized that “we were pretty judicious—like, we really, really needed a reason…to overturn the chapter. We would always meet with the chapter and explain to them. We would never do it in a ham-handed way.”

Nevertheless, the WFP’s nomination process offered the party faithful an opportunity to exercise real, if imperfect, influence over the party’s candidate choices and, indirectly, its platform and impact. They would deliberate and make recommendations. Sometimes this produced “some very big fights, because people would have their favorites, and somebody wins, and somebody loses.” But such processes, even when there were conflicts, reinforced the party as a strong-tie political network and provided a regular forum through which the perspectives of those voting on the party line could filter up to party decision makers. As Archila explains, including individuals is the way the party “guarantees that the Working Families Party is actually in direct relationship [to] and service of poor and working-class people.”²⁸

As a minor fusion party, the WFP was uniquely positioned to offer its members a substantive role in the nomination process. The two major parties, by contrast, are required to nominate by direct primary election in most states. Nevertheless, it would not be impossible for a major party committed to associational party-building to create hybrid-nomination processes that included similar opportunities for meaningful face-to-face experiences of party life. They could, for example, formalize the well-established invisible primary that determines who appears on the primary ballot, transferring the gatekeeping function from moneyed interests to the local party (perhaps reconstituted as an associational party club). Similarly, the two major parties could embrace grassroots organizing, seeing it as an opportunity to shore up engagement with their members while also exerting control on straying officials, rather than leaving such efforts to outside groups or limiting their efforts to organizing opposition to the other party’s policies at town halls.

The WFP invested in building a year-round party organization that was not only active during elections. It invested in its membership and chapters but also in the party as an organization, hiring and nurturing staff through the off-cycles. The magnitude of this investment was on display in 2014, when it maintained 40 full-time staff in New York in addition to a cadre of canvassers who worked both on- and off-cycle. By way of comparison, at the time, the Democratic Party’s permanent, non-canvassing staff was significantly smaller in most states.²⁹ During peak campaign season, the WFP managed about 500 canvassers. Canvassers were paid and given health insurance. When it transitioned from a local affiliate structure to its current regional structure, the party “hired regional directors to manage regional councils to get the politics right, then to hire organizers to build deeper on the ground.”³⁰

This investment in a year-round organization—investments that continue today—ensured a stable staff with critical knowledge and expertise. More importantly, from an associational party-building perspective, WFP leadership combined this investment with an active effort to cultivate a pipeline of party staff and leaders for the future. Even canvassers were mentored and trained, frequently graduating to positions of responsibility within the party organization writ large. Their success, as interviewees readily admitted, fluctuated, and the party has at times had to hire new staff from outside the organization both in New York and nationally, including Mitchell who replaced Cantor. Nevertheless, as Lipton, emphasizes, “[Having] that financial ability to be able to support staff over time, that’s a lot of value, right? Because I know everybody. I know the history. I know the stories. I know how to get things done. I have political capital with lots and lots of people.”

A stable party apparatus makes the WFP a formidable political foe. Even as a minor party, the WFP is able to offer candidates and elected officials the valuable political expertise its staff has developed by running one campaign after another in the same communities.³¹ Indeed, when asked why candidates wanted the WFP’s endorsement, most interviewees cited the value of this expertise far more than any direct or indirect campaign donations associated with the affiliation. Master’s view is typical: “I think electoral expertise is a really, really key deliverable from the Working Families Party.” 

Investment in party staff and year-round organization at the state and local level is just as important for the two major parties. As Didi Kuo and I have argued, investment in party infrastructure at the local level—including in physical gathering spaces—is a vital piece of building political power.³² Running a robust political party requires staff.³³ A year-round organization is necessary to support the candidate selection process, electoral campaigns, and grassroots lobbying, not to mention to advise elected officials. The two major parties know this. 

Since Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign and subsequent chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, each party has periodically made the decision to devote resources to staffing the party and creating a local presence.³⁴ The problem has been the intermittent, arguably shortsighted, nature of their commitments. Too frequently, money dries up between presidential elections, and the parties default to leaving these functions to candidates and the satellite organizations in the party network. When political expertise lies with the staff of individual candidates, it may benefit the political party. But as with large individual donors, the benefit is largely indirect; individuals may follow their bosses through the party structure or take their expertise to another candidate’s campaign, but their loyalty is generally to the person rather than to the party. Similarly, even when outside groups are genuinely embedded in their communities, they cannot provide the stability of party-centered expertise and political capital. When these are simply consultants, there is no return to either the party or its network.

A more sustained associational party-building project for the major parties realistically will require a reorientation to state and local politics as a place to achieve political and ideological goals. It will require political reasons to care about state and local elections and thus state and local parties. It is arguably no accident that the WFP’s growth as a party association and as a party organization was tied to its decision to use its electoral leverage to secure concrete policies from New York’s legislative bodies. Its choice, as we will see below, also offers a window into why such a reorientation could well satisfy the desire for responsiveness Americans currently crave.

Ballot access underwrote the WFP’s capacity to build and sustain its organization and further its associational interests. The availability of a fusion ballot line in New York was critical. Fusion frees voters in a first-past-the-post electoral system to abandon their reluctance to vote on a minor party line and associate with the party, permitting them to express their ideological affinity constructively. Fusion thus enabled the WFP, as a minor party, to manifest its associational strength. As Lewis commented without prompting, “Fusion was the basics and what drove the Working Families Party, because it wasn’t just a third party that could be a spoiler, or just a fringe number of people could participate in and identify with.” Fusion meant the WFP’s electoral appeal and strength were apparent, and the party was able to leverage that strength to build the party. 

The ballot line also mitigated the several organizational challenges associated with party building. Political movements, especially new ones, face two critical organizational challenges. Facing outward, the association’s challenge is to scale its appeal so that it can be effective (operating statewide at first and nationally over time); facing inward, its challenge is to both generate political energy on the ground and maintain the growing coalition.³⁵ The ballot line mitigates the internal conflicts that come with building a broad coalition, as we will explore later in this report. For now, however, we will focus on the way it helped the party scale and build political power.

Building power statewide, like building power nationwide, depends on cultivating a diverse coalition—socioeconomically, racially, but also geographically. As several interviewees noted, a party cannot deliver legislatively without winning in enough places to matter. One-off successes do not help build power in the legislature. Thus, not only a stable ballot line but also a stable coalition is essential to ensuring that wins are sustained. 

A state ballot line provides an instant structure through which to scale up. It ensured the WFP operated across the state right from the start. It meant the party had the capacity (a ballot line) to run candidates (and therefore organize) in upstate New York as well as on Long Island and in New York City. This created instant scale.

The ballot line, unexpectedly, also shifted power dynamics with elected officials. As Lewis explains, the ballot line is “real estate for politicians,” who “need as much real estate on the ballot as they can get.” Two lines are better than one. Certainly, some lobbied for the endorsement simply so that their opponents would not have that second line.

Thus, elected officials across the state almost instantly began approaching the WFP, wanting its nomination and ballot line. Master recalls, “One thing we did not anticipate is [that] if you have a line on the ballot, you have become a significant political player in the state [overnight].” He continued, “I think we endorsed 600 candidates in 1999, one year after we’d gotten on the ballot, in an off year. Like the coroner from Saint Lawrence County wanted us to win. I mean, I’m not making that up. I mean, I don’t remember exactly what the county was, but like…every politician’s like, ‘Well, if I don’t get the line, somebody else might get the line, you know?’ And it made us instantly relevant to the political class.”

Thus, “instead of a power dynamic in which you go to the politician and try to extract the best thing you can, the power dynamic is, ‘I have something you want [our nomination], and I want stuff, too,’” explained another interviewee.³⁶ It turned out that “[in] the general elections, people really wanted that extra 2, 3, 4 percent. It was really, really important, and they would fight for it…We had power because we had the line and our ability to deliver votes on the line…a lot of the big [candidates], like Chuck Schumer, they wanted our line,” Lipton also explains. Candidates eventually came to understand that the WFP’s support also provided sophisticated help in winning office and high-quality advice about how to exercise power once there.

The ballot line also fueled political energy on the ground. Within a few election cycles, not just voters but all manner of players in New York’s center-left political establishment wanted to join the WFP. By the early 2000s, numerous unions sought membership, including a couple that the party turned down, along with their money.³⁷ As Master recalls, “Controlling the disposition of the ballot line becomes something that people want to be part of right away, right?”

Another surprise for the new party was the degree to which the ballot line enhanced the political capital of its constituencies. As the party gained power, candidates approached the affiliated unions in the hopes of securing “some allies at the broader screening and vetting process that the party convened,” Cantor explains. Before its involvement with the WFP, for example, the CWA was politically second tier. As a midsize union in New York, it had some 50,000 members, which, while sizable, was dwarfed by the hundreds of thousands of members in each of the health care or teachers unions. “But [the CWA’s] involvement in the party made them first tier, absolutely powerful, because they had much more reach than they had just on their own.” 

The party’s grassroots membership groups experienced an even more pronounced rise in their political capital. Scharff recalls that prior to its involvement with the WFP, Citizen Action of New York had its own political department and engaged in many of the same organizing activities as the future WFP: “We did okay on electing city council and county legislative people, but we weren’t that great at electing state legislators.” The group also struggled to exercise political influence over the candidates it endorsed: “If we endorsed someone and they won, we were not that important to them. So, it didn’t give us a lot of leverage over actually winning issues in the end…We were not seen as ‘serious players’ in Albany. That was reserved for the major party insiders, the lobbyists of the big real estate interests, large unions, and other groups or individuals who make or bundle substantial contributions to candidates’ campaign accounts.”³⁸ “It was very different from having a political party—it was less sustainable from election to election, it was less understood by voters we door-knocked or called…and our work was not that important to most candidates.”³⁹ Scharff recalls being told by legislators that involvement with WFP “increased the visibility and power of Citizen Action in the state legislature as an organization, on our issues.”

The same was true for ACORN, another community organizing institutional member of the party. Despite being “powerful in central Brooklyn,” Cantor said ACORN’s power in Albany was limited: “You can’t get shit done in Albany just because you have a bunch of poor Black people in central Brooklyn. You need allies in Syracuse, Rochester, Albany, the Southern Tier, Long Island.” Indeed, Scharff recalls, the decision to found the WFP was driven in large part by a desire to change that.⁴⁰ And it worked.

Candidates came to understand affiliate endorsements as a step toward a WFP nomination. Partly this was the result of the party’s own commitment to internal democracy. Cantor remembers telling candidates that approached the party, “Here is the list of the organizations that sit at the WFP table. You want to get our endorsement, you need to go around and get their endorsements…You know, you need to show up at our screening with some friends.” Lipton reflected the ballot line was ultimately critical because it allowed the WFP to “institutionalize some power over time” and enabled the party to be more than “a flash” or “a short-lived thing.” Cantor recalls an emblematic moment:

“After about six years from the party’s beginning in ’98, in 2004, I got a phone call from a guy named Mike Fishman, very important leader of the Building Services Janitors Union. He says, ‘Dan, can you do me a favor?’ And I’m like, ‘Can I do you a favor? What could you possibly want that I could do?’ And he had something that he needed. I was like, ‘Oh my God, we’ve arrived.’ I had been asking this guy for favors for six years. And then he realized, ‘This guy has built something where I can get him to do something.’”

Indeed, a mere 10 years after its first entry into New York politics, at a time when the party’s electoral muscle was particularly strong, elected Democrats and Republicans officials took meetings even when there was no chance the party would nominate them. They scheduled the meetings in the hopes of persuading the WFP leadership to, at least, refrain from running someone against them. The key to such engagement was the nature of the WFP’s appeal: its “ability to deliver votes on the line.”⁴¹