The Working Families Party (WFP) is not a typical third party. For one, it rarely runs candidates under its own banner: it wants to avoid the familiar wasted vote or spoiler dilemmas that otherwise bedevil minor parties. In New York and Connecticut, where fusion voting—which allows more than one political party to nominate the same candidate on the ballot—is legal, the WFP “cross-endorses” Democrats in elections, allowing voters to vote for a Democratic candidate under the WFP’s party line. (WFP candidates do appear on the ballot in states that have not banned fusion voting or otherwise allow minor party candidates to contest fairly for public office.) Active today in some fifteen states, the WFP seeks to advance the interests of what it terms “the multi-racial working class.” This year, in addition to endorsing Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, it undertook a massive canvassing drive, focusing especially on reaching working voters in battleground states.
In the years since 1998, when it was founded in New York by a coalition of unions and community organizations, the WFP has grown to become the country’s most vigorous third-party project, promoting—and passing—progressive policy in state legislatures across the country: paid family leave, higher minimum wage laws, higher marginal tax rates on the wealthy, and increased funding for public education.
Maurice Mitchell has served as National Director of the WFP since 2018. In this conversation with Dan Cantor, who served in that same job for the first twenty years of the party’s existence, Mitchell discusses the outcome of the 2024 election cycle, strategies for countering working-class dealignment, and the WFP’s future under the coming “radical Republican onslaught.”
Dan Cantor: It’s still only been a few weeks since the election. What’s your short version of why Harris lost? How much was due to the unique strengths and weaknesses of the two major-party candidates, and how much was due to long-term trends in the society and economy?
Maurice Mitchell: I want to approach this question with the humility that I think it requires: first, because we don’t yet have the district-level voter files that will help us answer these questions with a little bit more rigor, and second, because whenever you’re on the losing end of an election, it’s an opportunity to ask fundamental questions about how to move forward. And we’re in the midst of doing that.
To answer your question more directly, let’s start by avoiding U.S. exceptionalism and remind ourselves that across the industrialized world, incumbent parties have been voted out of office more or less everywhere in the last few years.
There’s never one reason that explains everything, but for sure, way too many working people around the world have been whipsawed by both the COVID economy and the post-pandemic recovery. In the United States, it remains a terrifically lopsided economic reality in which the defining, overwhelming characteristic is inequality, pure and simple. People can see and feel how our economy benefits the very wealthiest and luckiest while doing very little about the common person’s experiences day to day.
At the same time there’s another story, less obvious but no less important: an economy that is making people feel deeply dislocated and frustrated with the status quo and the economic and political elites who run their countries. And so the Democratic Party faced very serious headwinds.
I would invite people to listen to the October 31, 2024, episode of the New York Times podcast The Run-Up, which contains documentary evidence from one of our canvassing efforts in real time. In this case, we were knocking doors in Philadelphia, in Black neighborhoods, turf that was solidly working class and poor. You’ll quickly hear that a good chunk of our fellow citizens is not really sold on what the Democratic Party is offering. It’s not about the quote-unquote issues—they agree with us on the issues. It’s about the messenger. The Democratic Party has a serious brand problem. Some of that is unfair and is due more to the lies of our opponents than to the Democrats’ own mistakes. But some of it is, in fact, due to the legacy of a Democratic Party that bought into trickle-down economics and terrible trade policies that hollowed out people’s communities and lives. So even if a local union or a well-regarded community group or the WFP might each have a good reputation, when the big dog is not trusted, that’s a big, big problem. And that’s how it felt.
This is something that we’re going to have to examine closely. But even as we do so, we should not forget how unusual an election this was. Six months ago, Biden was at the top of the ticket, and it was not looking good, to say the least. In fact, it looked awful, and everyone knew it. So I don’t think that you can place this loss at the feet of Harris as a candidate. Biden was already bleeding support from working people across racial and ethnic lines. Of course, as everyone knows, the change at the top of the ticket created authentic enthusiasm—it just wasn’t enough to close that trust gap. And I think it’s helpful to remind ourselves that this dealignment of working-class people from the Democratic Party has been taking place for many, many years. Harris didn’t create it, and her campaign certainly didn’t figure out how to solve it. That’s got to be on all of us.
DC: Before digging in on a new path, can you briefly paint a picture of WFP’s work in the run-up to the election itself?
MM: We ran large-scale electoral programs in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia, and medium-scale work in Arizona, Michigan and North Carolina. We also built a coalition of labor and community organizations in New York that flipped three House seats and defended key Democratic champions. The heart of it was door-knocking: going to people’s homes and communities and having face-to-face conversations. We spoke with more than one million voters in all.
On top of that, we layered in some mail, really good digital ads, text messages, and an enormous phone canvass. We had millions of conversations by phone with the people in our target universe, both people we had met on the doors and others who weren’t there when we knocked. The basic idea was to interact with an individual voter multiple times, in multiple ways, so that our ideas were real enough to help inform their vote choice. It’s very, very labor intensive and expensive, in part because we were trying hard to reach voters who vote irregularly. That’s important to remember. I always say that no one needs to send my mom a Get Out the Vote mail piece. She’s showing up regardless. But there’s a giant universe of infrequent and nonvoters.
We developed one digital ad that showed Vice President Harris as a fighter for working people against price-gouging corporations and other corporate actors. Our research said that a message like that would do well with a large group of people: both people who are on the fence and people who might agree with us but need some convincing. It was such an impressive ad that the Harris campaign’s independent vehicle, Future Forward, tested that ad and then followed it with a seven-digit investment. I think it reached more than twenty million people. Our argument inside the campaign was that an approach that was much more populist would be valuable. We think that ad proved that case—that when Harris showed up as a fighter for working people, that’s when she was at her strongest.
DC: The race ended up very tight in the battleground states. But it was, as you pointed out, a loss in the end, and there has been a lot of post-election commentary—and, of course, finger-pointing and blame-assigning. What do you make of it all?
MM: Winning is always better than losing. But one of the values of a loss is that it inspires real introspection about how to take on future fights. If we do this well, we’ll only get stronger. It’s clear to me—as it is for lots of other people in and around the Democratic Party and the Republican Party—that the crucial battle ahead is for the hearts and minds of the working class, the multiracial working class. Right after the election, we sent a letter to our supporters that made an argument that I think bears repeating:
Democratic campaigns treat Black and brown working people as just a “mobilization” target—assuming they’re already on board. Often, they treat white working-class people as unreachable. We’re going to have to challenge both of those views to build a new working-class majority. Otherwise, we’re stuck with Trump and his government of, by, and for the billionaire class.
We should not assume that every vote cast for Trump is in affirmative support of his agenda. In some cases, it’s a vote simply for discontent—and in our rigid two-party system, the only way you punish one party is to reward the other. We need to find a home for those unhappy voters mad at the political and economic system and unsatisfied with both major parties.
DC: Who could argue with that?
MM: Not me.
DC: Yes, well, good and obvious ideas still need organizations and parties to carry them forward into public awareness. A couple of years ago, you wrote a piece that got a lot of notice in and beyond the progressive political ecosystem about how to do that. It was called “Building Resilient Organizations,” and I want to touch on it briefly now. You write about the danger of what you call “maximalism,” the tendency of some activists to demand complete ideological alignment from everyone involved in a political project—a recipe for failure if you are trying to build a political party that can not only win hearts and minds, but also elections. How are you thinking about the tension between majoritarianism and identitarianism? To put it another way, how do you stand up for vulnerable constituencies in a way that neither splits your coalition nor advantages your opponents?
MM: One of our values as small “d” democrats is that we don’t believe in simple majority rule. We believe that minority groups and other people who have less power in our democracy are nevertheless fully equal in the eyes of God and the law, and they must be protected. This is what makes democracy in America special and worthy. Simply having the power to wield majorities doesn’t allow you free reign on taking away other peoples’ rights. But we also understand that it’s our job to be popular—to win.
There’s a tension there, but it’s not unresolvable. And so the answer is that we need to approach this challenge skillfully and carefully, and I’ll be specific. Think back for a moment to the Movement for Black Lives. I understood at the height of the movement in 2020 that social movements inevitably create their own backlash. The largest social movement in our lifetime—and probably in American history—precipitated an enormous backlash. Even at the time, we knew full well that some of our ideas on public safety and policing were very popular, and some weren’t popular at all. A social movement is trying to expand the limits of the possible.
By definition, new ideas are not popular. But it’s the job of people like me, who want to win elections—and not just in big blue cities, but in swing territory and other places—to identify the broad popular messages that win people over. And while it is not simple, it is doable, even on tough topics like public safety and policing. It turns out that most Americans believe in accountability when it is directed both at their fellow citizens who commit crimes and hurt others as well as at police behavior. Conservatives believe that, independents believe that, and progressives believe that. So the idea of police accountability was able to permeate and remain even after backlash.
We don’t have to cower defensively. When it comes to fights where we feel a need to protect at-risk groups—and we’re going to see the need for that—we have to be skillful and thoughtful. We have to figure out how to reach more people based on shared values while not abandoning our own. That requires us to live inside of that tension: not running from it but committing explicitly to finding solutions that are majoritarian.
I don’t think our job is to just take the bait and virtue signal to prove that we’re in solidarity with folks, which is essentially signing up to be Breathless Liberal Number One in a Steve Bannon–written drama. Nor can we remain silent, which allows the right wing to frame all these issues. And as we learned the hard way, the person who frames the debate, wins the debate.
We have to be in the conversation, but in a skillful way. I know it’s not fully adequate, but I really believe there’s a synthesis somewhere in there that will allow us to be able to advance in a way that does not throw people under the bus. For sure, we need to correct some stuff, but we should simultaneously resist the urge to overcorrect. We’re not wrong that all people, no exceptions, deserve to be treated with dignity.
DC: What’s going to be different for WFP in the next four years? How are you preparing for a radical Republican—and I don’t mean the Thaddeus Stevens version—onslaught? You’ve raised the issue of taxes as a crucial initial fight.
MM: The Trump administration is going to set fires in hopes that we will reactively attempt to put them out as quickly as they set them. That’s the wrong posture. We need to pick and choose both the defensive and offensive battles that will expose and heighten the contradictions of the Trump coalition, weakening their side while strengthening our own.
Trump ran at least in part on this idea that he and MAGA would be an anti-institutional force that will make the lives of everyday people better and help them deal with the fundamental crisis of affordability in America today. And the tax fight will be one of many fights that will prove that not to be the case. It’s almost certain that Trump and the Congressional Republicans will unite behind a proposal to renew the Trump tax cut. It’s likely to put some money into the pockets of working-class and middle-class people, but the real gains will go to the wealthy. We’ll get a rowboat; they’ll get a supertanker.
We need to tell a different story about who should get what, and how the trillions Trump wants to give to the wealthy could be used instead to improve working people’s lives. Then we need to build a year-long campaign in the districts of the two-dozen or so Republican House members who will be nervous about how this will play for their 2026 reelection chances.
This will be a golden opportunity to show that the Trump administration, when push comes to shove, is no different than any other far-right administration. Their priority is to move wealth from the bottom to the top. Our priority is to tell that story in ways that makes sense to people in North Philly and suburban Milwaukee and even rural Georgia. In other words, we call Trump’s bluff. If Trump is serious about being a populist fighter for working people, this is his first test. Does he cave in to the corporations and the uberwealthy, or does he deliver on his promise?
DC: One last question. The vast majority of Americans reliably tell pollsters that the two-party system is not working very well for them. They wish there were more choices in American politics, but there really aren’t. How might we move to a multiparty democracy for this glorious and wounded multiracial society of ours?
MM: One of the reasons that we’re now facing four more years of Trump and MAGA has everything to do with the party system, our electoral rules, and the very architecture of our constitution. We have to change them all, starting with an improved system for party representation.
Functionally, this means doing the work at the state level to revive fusion voting and then building minor parties strong enough to advance proportional representation. We need a way for all different types of political views to be expressed collectively through political organization, and that is done most effectively and peacefully via a multiparty democracy. This is good for the left, right, and center. Full stop.
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