Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Stands Up For New York's Working Families Party
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York City Democrat, encouraged her supporters in New York to vote the Working Families Party’s ballot line in an effort to save the independent progressive group’s place on the ballot.
“In New York, we’re lucky. We have the opportunity to both vote out Trump AND, and the same time, send a message to the Democratic Party that we can do better,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a Monday message to New Yorkers on her email list and the email list of the New York WFP. “We do that by voting [Joe] Biden/[Kamala] Harris on the WFP line.”
Ocasio-Cortez has already encouraged the 1.6 million people who follow her on Facebook to vote for the Democratic presidential ticket on the WFP’s ballot line.
“We need to defend our movement, and to defend the Working Families Party,” she wrote on her Facebook page on Oct. 3. “Will you pledge to join me in voting on the WFP line for Biden and Harris?”
Ocasio-Cortez’s appeal lends an influential voice in an obscure internecine political fight that many Empire State progressives nonetheless believe has high stakes for the activist left’s future in the overwhelmingly Democratic state.
In New York’s unusual “fusion” voting system, candidates have the option to seek the ballot line of multiple parties, enabling voters to demonstrate support for an ideological movement within a party without jeopardizing the political power of one of the two main political parties ― Democrats and Republicans.
The WFP, which progressive labor unions and community groups founded in 1998 to provide a left-wing voice in New York politics, has long encouraged left-leaning voters to vote for Democratic candidates on its ballot line to show the strength of the party’s progressive wing.
But New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), a corporate-friendly moderate whom the WFP unsuccessfully sought to unseat in 2018, is trying to disempower the group. He slipped a provision into the state’s budget this year...
