Sen. Elizabeth Warren picked up a major national endorsement from the Working Families Party on Monday. The WFP has been a force in New York politics for two decades, and more recently has expanded to more than a dozen other states, playing a role largely in local races.
The party’s national director, Maurice Mitchell, framed the decision to endorse now, while other national groups are holding off, as being about progressive victory in the Democratic presidential primary, specifically over former Vice President Joe Biden. “If our focus is on victory, we can’t be delusional about it,” he said. “You don’t defeat the moderate wing of Democrats through thought pieces or pithy tweets, you defeat their politics through organizing.”
In 2016, the WFP endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders for president; this time around, he came in second, with 35.8% of the vote. The WFP announced that Warren got 60% in the first round of voting, with half of the vote share coming from the organization’s members and half from its national committee. This sets up a fascinating ground organizing battle between the WFP and the Democratic Socialists of America, which is strong in some of the same cities as the WFP and endorsed Sanders last spring.