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THE THIRD PARTY THAT’S PUSHING THE DEMOCRATS LEFT  
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Monica Potts
April 27, 2026
The New Republic
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_ Long a major progressive influence in New York politics, the
Working Families Party has released its first national platform
ever—and it has the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Ro Khanna on
board. _

Senator Elizabeth Warren has endorsed the Working Families Party’s
new, progressive national platform., Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

 

Most Americans, even many Republican voters, disapprove
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of the war in Iran and remain unhappy about the high cost
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of everything from gas to groceries, which is only getting worse as
the conflict continues. So it’s not surprising that President Donald
Trump’s overall approval rating hit record lows
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That’s great news for Democrats ahead of this fall’s midterm
elections—but there’s a catch.

Despite overperforming
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in special elections over the past year, including flipping
congressional districts that voted convincingly for Trump in 2024, the
Democrats are hardly taking full advantage of this opportunity. G.
Elliott Morris at Strength in Numbers shows
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that while Trump is underwater by 23 points, Democrats are only ahead
of the GOP by six points on the generic congressional ballot
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Many voters, it seems, are angry at both parties
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The Democrats’ low approval rating—which lately has hovered
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upper 30s, similar to the GOP
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attributable in part to a base that feels
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that party leadership isn’t doing enough to stand up to Trump. So
now the Working Families Party is stepping into the breach, hoping to
give dissatisfied progressives something to get excited about.

A third party that’s well established in New York, the WFP has
steadily expanded its footprint beyond the Empire State over the past
two decades. But last week, for the first time, it released a national
platform. Endorsed by 18 members of Congress—including Senators
Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Merkley, and Ed Markey, as well as
Representatives Ro Khanna, Maxwell Frost, and some members of The
Squad—the Working Families Guarantee
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affordability issues, promising to lower housing costs and provide
health care for all, union jobs, low-cost childcare, and paid family
leave—all of it funded by a billionaire wealth tax
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like the one proposed by Warren.

The platform is a direct appeal to the public that we haven’t seen
from the party before. “This marks years of work of electing more
and more champions into Congress, specifically, and establishing a
presence on the Hill,” said Maurice Mitchell, the party’s national
director, adding that the platform shows “us flexing this muscle and
articulating for the first time in our history how we as the Working
Families Party intend to govern differently if given governing
power.”

The WFP is an unusual third party. Rather than trying to establish
itself outside the two-party system, it has aligned with and works
within the Democratic Party while also trying to build its own power.
It was founded
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in New York City in 1998 as a way to give frustrated progressives in
the state a party to vote for while the national Democratic Party
under President Bill Clinton moved to the center, but without taking
votes away from Democrats and therefore aiding Republicans. New York
and a handful of other states at the time had a fusion voting
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that allowed candidates to be endorsed by more than one party,
enabling the WFP to endorse the most progressive Democratic candidate
in primaries and then the Democratic candidate in the general. (In
most states, it means that candidates with the WFP endorsement will
appear on the general election ballot twice. In New York, if at least
2 percent of votes cast for the Democratic gubernatorial or
presidential candidates—the biggest races in any election—fall on
the Working Families Party ballot line, the party is guaranteed a spot
on future ballots and the other benefits of being an official party in
the state.)

In 2020, the WFP launched its national program to endorse candidates
in House and Senate races around the country, and was firmly
established as a party in 18 states. The party endorsed Democratic
candidates who supported its more progressive goals, and over the
years they began winning and winning reelection, establishing
themselves as lawmakers. The aim, of course, was to pull the party to
the left, which the WFP’s founders believed would be more effective
and lasting if done within the party apparatus rather than through the
disparate community groups and activists that dominated left politics
at that time.

It’s not clear if it’s directly attributable to the WFP, but the
Democratic Party has moved left on some issues since the WFP has been
active. In the 2016 and 2020 elections, Democratic presidential
candidates like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren held
positions the Working Families Party had long endorsed, like free
college and paid sick days for all workers. But the WFP has had to
make compromises over the years too, to ensure it could get enough
votes to survive as a party—like when it endorsed
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Governor Andrew Cuomo for reelection in 2014, or when it had to pick
sides in the 2020 Democratic primary and endorsed Warren over Sanders.

This tension has existed from the beginning: How many compromises
should the WFP make to be on the winning side, and when should it buck
Democratic leadership to protect its core values? But the question may
be more urgent than ever during the second Trump administration, as
Democrats fight over why they lost the last presidential
election—the party still hasn’t released
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its autopsy of the 2024 debacle—and what they need to do to win in
the November midterms and beyond.

Forces inside the Beltway, notably more centrist think tanks like
Third Way
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the Searchlight Institute
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and the Welcome Party
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cherry-pick polls to argue that Democrats need to moderate on issues
like immigration and crime to win back the working class. But it’s
not clear that voters prioritize such issues. As it has for several
cycles, the economy still dominates voter concerns, especially among
the working class. Mitchell argues that anyone who knocks on voters’
doors or lives in working-class communities knows that, and shifting
to more centrist positions would read as inauthentic to voters.

“I think the reality is, you don’t get very far by pandering to
people, and you don’t get very far by lying to people about who you
are and what your values are,” he said. “People just don’t need
to agree with you on everything, but they do need to believe in you,
and people are hungry for authentic leaders and authentic parties and
organizations that have a point of view.”

That’s why his party is banking on an unapologetically progressive
economic platform, which has been endorsed by WFP candidates like
Julie Gonzalez [[link removed]], a Colorado state
senator who is challenging Senator John Hickenlooper in the Democratic
primary this year. When I asked her whether a billionaire tax would
truly cover all these new costs, she responded with a moral argument:
When the government is spending billions on wars and ICE enforcement,
it’s clear that it has plenty of money to fund such programs.

“The question is, do we have a Democratic Party strong enough to
stand up to the lobby and the politicians that they have bought and
paid for in order to say, ‘Actually, let’s spend that money in
different ways in order to advance benefits for working people on a
daily basis’?” she said. “That, to me, is the question that we
ought to be grappling with here. And I know where I stand. I know
where we stand together. And that, to me … is the question that
voters will get to decide here in 2026.”

The Working Families Party, after diligently building power and name
recognition for three decades, is hoping for a big breakthrough
nationally this year. Having 18 sitting U.S. senators and Congress
members endorse its platform wouldn’t have been possible even five
years ago, and the party is hoping to add to its numbers with the
midterm candidates this year. The odds are good, given how mainstream
Democrats aren’t fully capitalizing on this moment.

“One of the things that we’re concerned with is that at least at
the Democratic Party, they’re relying on backlash and in some ways
relying on the incompetence of Trump,” Mitchell said. “But it
isn’t clear that there is actually a unifying positive agenda to
articulate why people should show up to vote in the midterms and in
subsequent elections.” The WFP, he added, is “standing in the gap
and articulating a set of positive values that people need to vote
for.”

“People everywhere want these things,” he added. “There’s
actual consensus, and these ideas are actually really popular and not
very controversial. The only place where these ideas are controversial
is Capitol Hill.”

_Monica Potts is a staff writer at The New Republic. She is the author
of __The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in
Rural America_ [[link removed]]_._ 

* Working Families Party
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* national program
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* Democratic Party
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