Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

How the Working Families Party Can Promote Black Political Independence

In many state and local races, the WFP ballot line has helped Black candidates win office without falling in line with the Democratic political establishment.

A mobile billboard in Washington, DC, sponsored by The Frontline, a coalition including the Working Families Party, the Movement for Black Lives, Rising Majority, and United We Dream

Since its founding in New York in 1998, the Working Families Party has tested a proposition that many Black voters are led to dismiss outright: Political power does not need to be tethered to permanent loyalty to the Democratic Party. Founded in New York in 1998, the WFP has pursued a strategy rooted in labor organizing, fusion voting, and independent ballot lines—methods designed not to replace the two-party system overnight but to exploit its vulnerabilities. Its aim was to elect more union-backed progressives—and thereby shift the Democratic coalition back in line with the interests of working people.

As voters across all demographics become increasingly disillusioned with the Democratic Party’s failure to function as an effective opposition party during Donald Trump’s extremist second term in office, the WFP’s model raises an urgent question for Black Americans in particular: Does the traditional logic of political pragmatism—holding forth the promise of incremental change in exchange for unwavering group loyalty—still make sense when the Democratic Party stops delivering change?

“What I get frustrated with,” says Colin Radix-Carter of the Independent News Network, “is mainstream commentators will say, ‘The GOP sucks. Democratic leadership sucks, but we need to vote for them.’ You can admit that the Democrats are shit, but you’re not talking about thinking of an alternative, so that we’re not relying on Democrats for things that we need. The [Congressional] Black Caucus is not going to do it for us. The politicians on both sides are not going to do it for us. We need to start talking about alternative means that will enable us to fend for ourselves. We don’t do that enough. And we aren’t having those conversations.”

Radix-Carter is right, and his comments highlight a broader pathology in contemporary Black political discourse: Critique is permitted; independence is not. As Radix-Carter noted, “We call out the problem, we recognize the problem, but the solution we say is that ‘we need to vote for the same people and party.’ And no we don’t.”

Black Americans have moved in near lockstep with the Democratic Party since the middle of the 20th century—a migration that began with the partial realignment of the New Deal and crystallized after the civil rights era. Black voters’ prior status as party-line voters for Republican candidates in the wake of the Civil War underlines that they, perhaps more than any other segment of the electorate, have seen their political aspirations confined within the two-party system. That’s been an abiding source of tension for Black Americans who also have long honored the legacy of community resistance harking back to the slave diaspora: to make a way out of no way.

In this broader historical context, the question facing many Black progressives isn’t whether to keep faith with the Democratic Party, but rather how we can start imagining a political future beyond it. With a reactionary Republican regime taking up the rhetoric and program of white nationalism, and unleashing death squad assaults on opponents that extend the legacy of police killings of Black citizens, this is less a theoretical quandary than an existential challenge—for both Black Americans and the fate of whatever remains of our multiracial democracy.

The Working Families Party offers one tentative answer—not by rejecting the two-party system outright but by navigating it strategically. The WFP seeks to transform movement-based reform into electoral success through the mechanism of fusion voting, which allows multiple political parties to nominate the same candidate on separate ballot lines. Fusion voting allows voters to support a candidate without having to endorse the major party that typically claims ownership of them. It is a way of registering dissent without disengagement—of signaling political independence while still influencing an election’s outcome. And by adopting provisional alliances with a major party, fusion tickets avoid the major charge levied against third-party candidacies—that they lapse into spoiler efforts that siphon votes away from Democrats, and lend support to the GOP.

“Sometimes we endorse normies [non-WFP-aligned Democratic candidates] to block a Republican,” Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, said in an interview with The Nation. “We don’t vote for the Democrats because we love the Democrats. It’s because we’re in a rigid two-party system, and the Republican Party wants to kill us.”

“We deprive Republicans of governing power everywhere that they’re trying to gain governing power because they are a threat to the human rights of everybody on this planet,” Mitchell continued, “And we advantage union-backed progressives in the Democratic Party coalition. The work we do aims to accomplish both. It’s part of our strategy.”

In many settings, the strategy has worked. In New York, it has already reshaped electoral outcomes in ways that would not have been possible through Democratic Party channels alone. The standing of the WFP has also benefited from New York’s adoption of ranked-choice voting, which has freed the state’s electorate from the zero-sum logic of first-past-the-post balloting between two major-party candidates. In 2025, WFP-endorsed State Senator Sean Ryan........

© The Nation