Cabán’s team knocked on roughly 120,000 doors in the final four days of the race, campaign spokesperson Monica Klein said. | Mary Altaffer/AP Photo Cabán's success marks a win for Working Families Party — without union support

Looking to reshape New York City’s political landscape, the Working Families Party tapped left-leaning insurgents to run on reform platforms, exciting enough voters to topple candidates backed by the Queens Democratic Party.

Those victories 10 years ago threatened established norms and signaled the rise of a third party formed on the political strength of the city’s unions.


Last Tuesday, when a 31-year-old public defender inched past the establishment pick in a race to fill the vacant Queens district attorney’s seat, it wasn’t just an electoral win for the Working Families Party. It was a triumph over Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s attempts to bludgeon the party and over the unions that departed its ranks in 2018 as part of that feud.

Tiffany Cabán declared victory in a Democratic primary reminiscent of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s defeat of a longtime Queens incumbent a year earlier. In addition to Ocasio-Cortez and the Working Families Party, Cabán was backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, billionaire activist George Soros and a political action committee with ties to Bernie Sanders.

Queens Borough President Melinda Katz — who shifted leftward on criminal justice issues like ending cash bail — had the backing of the county party, Cuomo and a slate of unions once regarded as nearly bulletproof in a competitive election, though their levels of involvement varied.

A spokesperson for 32BJ, which represents building service workers, said union members knocked on more than 50,000 doors, handed out at least 100,000 fliers and called or texted some 150,000 residents on Katz’s behalf.

The Hotel Trades Council did considerably less, according to several people familiar with the race. A union representative declined to comment when asked about the organization’s efforts.

A spokesperson for healthcare workers union 1199SEIU said the organization “put forward a robust mobilization to get out the vote for Katz,” but did not provide specifics beyond that. The union’s political action fund donated $10,000 to Katz’s campaign a few days before the election.

Nevertheless, the power of organized labor was not enough to lift her to victory. Katz lost by a slim margin — 38.3 percent to Cabán’s 39.6 — though she is not conceding until the remaining 6,337 absentee ballots and affidavits are counted.

“They don’t make NY Unions the way they used to…” tweeted Patrick Gaspard, former political director for 1199. He is now president of the Open Society Foundations, which was founded by Soros, whose Justice and Public Safety PAC donated $70,000 to the Working Families Party for Cabán’s campaign in the final days of the race.

“I think many of the unions want to be with the progressive candidate. Their members are with the progressive[s]. But there’s an elephant in the room here and his name is Andrew Cuomo,” said Democratic consultant Rebecca Katz, who works with progressive candidates.

Cuomo and the Working Families Party were locked in a protracted dispute over his embrace — or lack thereof — of the party’s agenda in Albany. After begrudgingly endorsing him for reelection in 2014, the party’s leaders felt he continued to stonewall key issues. He cast them as ideological purists who failed to understand the reality of bipartisan governing.

Last year, the party supported actor Cynthia Nixon in a primary against Cuomo, but he trounced her by 30 points, with the help of most New York unions.

The Queens district attorney’s race marked the first time since the unions split with the Working Families Party that the two factions faced off and the unions lost.

“Big picture — message beats machinery. And politics is changing really, really quickly,” said a Democratic operative who supported Cabán and would only speak on background.

Having union support “helps, but it’s not enough,” he added. “They can’t carry you over the line if you don’t have a compelling message.”

Any lessons taken from the election should be contextualized: An off-cycle primary and morning rain depressed turnout, and Katz’s campaign was hurt by a strong showing from a more conservative candidate, career prosecutor Greg Lasak.

As Forest Hills resident Renate Eisinger left Katz’s polling place on Election Day, she explained her vote for Lasak: “I voted for Melinda many times before today. I thought he had more experience in the court.”

But if Cabán’s victory holds, it will demonstrate that the Working Families Party can thrive without unions.

The question now is can those unions win elections without the Working Families Party.

“There have been many changes to WFP, but the infrastructure of WFP is still there and that infrastructure knows how to win borough-wide races,” said Lupé Todd-Medina, spokesperson for Mina Malik, who came in a distant fourth in the seven-way race.

“The unions, as well as not just Queens County [but] all counties — all of them have to go back and review the way that they are running races because it is changing,” she added, citing more social media engagement and fewer people with landlines.

Where the Working Families Party once relied on its now-defunct, for-profit arm to turn out votes, these days it depends on the hustle of young volunteers, dispirited by the 2016 presidential election and looking to get involved in elections.

Cabán’s team knocked on roughly 120,000 doors in the final four days of the race, campaign spokesperson Monica Klein said.

“There’s so many other things to consider with races now. But it’s not the first time that unions have had to adjust. They will adjust. New York City is a union city,” Todd-Medina said.

She hoped to secure the third party’s endorsement for Malik, assuming it would carry weight among black, middle-class voters in Southeast Queens, where turnout is typically high. But without its member unions, Todd-Medina said the party’s leadership is younger, more white and attracted to insurgents like Cabán.

The results bore that out.

Two voting districts that encompass the gentrified neighborhoods of Long Island City and Astoria provided Cabán 10,832 votes out of 15,170 cast. Katz, whose team was not expecting to do well in those areas, received 2,375 votes.

She was unable to make up the difference in Southeast Queens, where turnout in the civically-active area — home to many union households — disappointed. In her best district, Katz received 3,269 votes and Cabán got 1,327.

Shaun King, a criminal justice activist who worked on Cabán’s campaign with the Sanders-linked Real Justice political action committee, said the groups sent 284,377 text messages to 176,282 voters in Queens.

“I hate that it’s framed that way because I’m a union guy and I love these unions,” King said in a recent interview. “Personally, each time a union endorsed Katz, it stung for us. It stung for me because I’ve worked with unions in every city that we’ve run races in.”

As he campaigned, King said he met residents who were supporting Katz simply because of the influence of their union leaders.

“Whatever they say, the information they send home, we just follow,” 64-year-old Marie Alexandre, an 1199 member, told a POLITICO reporter on Election Day.

"Melinda earned the support of teachers, firefighters, healthcare workers and thousands of working people across the borough and she won handily in neighborhoods where union membership is high,” her spokesperson, Grant Fox, said in a prepared statement last week. He blamed the results on negative mailers and ads against Katz, who ran her own attack ads targeting Cabán in the final days of the race.

Bill Lipton, New York state director of the Working Families Party, said he hopes to join forces with the unions in future elections.

“I don’t think that this marks a permanent divide between labor and the left,” 32BJ Vice President Alison Hirsh said. “This is one unique election and as we move forward to win for working people in the state of New York each election will be handled differently and from an advocacy perspective we all need to be working together to advance a common agenda.”