After watching a handful of Biden district U.S. House seats swing toward Republicans during the 2022 midterms, New York Democratic Party chairman Jay Jacobs seemed to have a clear-eyed assessment of how his own party erred.
“This was an issue-driven election,” Jacobs said in a postelection interview. “And I think that the issue was crime.”
But as per usual, the head of New York Democrats’ chief political apparatus may already be having trouble getting Empire State progressives on the same page. New York’s Working Families Party — a labor-backed minority party and grassroots organizing group that typically backs progressive candidates in primaries but often lends its ballot lines to mainstream Democrats in general elections — is handing over its leadership reins to two progressive organizers who have a long history of expressing support for defunding the New York City Police Department.
Meet the group’s two new co-directors: Ana María Archila, co-founder of Make the Road New York, and Jasmine Gripper, executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education.
“I think we should divest resources from police, prosecutors, and jails and invest in the things that make people whole and keep people safe: housing, education, childcare, health care, transportation, good jobs, income support for those who need it, spaces for recreation and joy, and more,” Archila, then-candidate for lieutenant governor, told Teen Vogue last year. (She lost the primary by double digits.)
The minority party’s decision to empower anti-police activists within its own ranks ahead of a presidential-election year is not at all surprising given the group’s ultraprogressive views. “We are absolutely not here just to support the Democratic Party and to get them out of a crunch when they get there,” Archila told Politico in a glowing profile of the two new co-directors last month. “Our goal is to get progressive leaders who truly identify as Working Family Party candidates and whose values are aligned in key places.”
The group is similarly controversial on the national level, holding a national phone bank this week to demand a cease-fire for what the group has labeled “Israel’s war”:
But the New York group’s co-directors’ soft-on-crime positions could prove tricky for mainstream Empire State Democrats who desperately want to retake the handful of blue-leaning seats they lost in 2022. Recent local elections suggest that Republicans’ electoral messaging on crime continues to pay dividends at the ballot box. Last week, for example, New York Republicans won a Suffolk County executive seat in Long Island for the first time in two decades and a city council seat in the Bronx for the first time in four.
None of this comes as welcome news to mainstream Democrats like Jacobs, Governor Kathy Hochul, and Mayor Eric Adams, who have long sparred with Empire State progressives over political strategy and policy.
But even they can’t escape the reality that the New York WFP played a notable role in last year’s closer-than-expected gubernatorial election, deploying an eleventh-hour get-out-the-vote effort on behalf of Hochul to preserve its own third-party ballot line in future elections. (New York, one of the few states that allows fusion voting, requires political parties to receive 130,000 votes, or two percent of the total vote, every two years to keep their ballot lines.) The WFP then took credit for helping Hochul beat crime-focused Republican representative Lee Zeldin by a meager six points in a state that Joe Biden had carried by 23 points two years prior.
In recent years, the group has also notably lent its ballot lines to a number of swing-seat Democrats such as Representative Pat Ryan in the Hudson Valley and progressive representative Mondaire Jones, who is vying for a comeback against first-term representative Mike Lawler.
The New York WFP is already pledging to deploy a “robust ground game” in 2024 ahead of what’s already shaping up to be a politically tumultuous cycle. Earlier this week, New York’s highest court heard arguments in a Democratic-led redistricting effort to redraw last year’s favorable GOP-leaning congressional maps, and today, scandal-plagued representative George Santos (R., N.Y.) said he will not run for reelection minutes after a new ethics report found “substantial evidence” of the first-term congressman’s criminal wrongdoing.
The New York Working Families Party, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment, seems ready to put all hands on deck again in 2024.
“We both know the importance of community organizing; we both know the importance of grassroots leadership development,” Gripper told Politico last month. “But we also know the importance of political strategy and movement moments.”
“We can play a major role in taking back the House,” Gripper added.
The question remains: Will mainstream Democratic House candidates want — or require — their help?