David Sirota is staff writer for PandoDaily, a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and the author of the books Hostile Takeover, The Uprising and Back to Our Future.

Suburban Albany is not known for its rip-roaring weekend scene, but this most recent Saturday night, it was the momentary center of the political universe, as an underfunded political party was using its quadrennial convention to try to force America’s most powerful and best-financed governor to submit to its demands. Though the Working Families Party’s conventions are typically low-key affairs, this one had drawn 800 activists and operatives and most of the New York press corps—all to see if the party would endorse conservative Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo or run a third-party candidate against him.

In the end, when the floor-fight drama died down, the boisterous crowd dispersed and all the #wfpconvention tweets subsided, the leaders of the once-obscure party insisted that their brinksmanship was successful, even if they stood down and backed the incumbent. It was a signal moment for the American left, and one that speaks to the progressive movement’s broader dilemma in this time of rising economic anxiety: Can change come from inside the Democratic Party—despite the feeling among many activists that Democrats are hopelessly compromised by their ties to corporate donors? Or will it only come from outside the two-party system, through the kind of robust third-party challenge that hasn’t been seen in America for decades?


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The answer may lie somewhere in between. The Working Families Party’s ideological allies say the threat of a challenge to Cuomo compelled the governor to give the left-leaning party what it wanted. And it is certainly true: In exchange for the WFP’s coveted ballot line in the upcoming 2014 election, the prospective presidential candidate who has championed tax cuts for the wealthy, tax breaks for banks and union-free charter schools suddenly (and maybe only momentarily) discarded his rhetoric of corporate centrism and cast himself as a proud progressive.

Though the WFP has just 42,000 registered members, the party nonetheless can deliver hundreds of thousands of votes. And so, facing a very credible threat, Cuomo reversed his opposition to localities unilaterally raising their minimum wage levels, setting the stage for New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to raise his city’s rate to more than $13 an hour. On the political front, the governor also announced he would lead a campaign to electorally defeat the same Republican state senate leadership he had long embraced in a tacit alliance against the left.

“The convention proved the strength of our movement,” boasted Hector Figueroa, president of the WFP-affiliated Service Employees International Union’s 32BJ. Another union leader, SEIU 1199’s George Gresham, described the party’s pragmatic calculations a bit more bluntly, saying: “Yes, many people will say that the governor has not been a perfect governor. I can’t remember the last time we had a perfect anything.”

But the questions and recriminations began almost immediately after the convention-goers and hordes of reporters left Albany’s Desmond Hotel. Did the party leaders sell “their souls to the devil,” as the Green Party asserted? Did Cuomo “kowtow to the most extreme liberal” activists, as New York Republican senate leader Dean Skelos claimed?

People wonder about the Wizard of Oz and what’s happening behind the curtain in New York politics ... The answer is: It is Cantor working it.”

Now, as the WFP formulates plans for a multi-state expansion, two of the biggest questions reach way beyond New York’s labyrinthine state and local politics. How did a loose coalition of liberal activists, community organizing groups and labor unions avoid the left’s penchant for circular firing squads and instead become a cohesive force able to exact serious concessions from elected officials? And with their third-party coalition model, have the WFP’s leaders suddenly unlocked the key to building a national Tea Party of the left?

Over the course of the last few months, I found some—but certainly not all—of the answers to these questions by tagging along with the party’s longtime executive director, Dan Cantor. During that time leading up to last weekend’s convention, Cantor had been trying both to maximize his party’s new power in New York and to use that success to forge a national opportunity. His goal, he told me, is nothing less than a resurrection of the powerful progressive coalition that shaped the New Deal era.

Bradley Russell of Albany, N.Y., holds demonstration signs he made for the New York Working Families 2014 political convention in Albany, N.Y., Saturday, May 31, 2014. | AP Images

Watching Cantor navigate the negotiations, deals and compromises that cultivate the party’s authority in its home state provided a glimpse of a disciplined inside-outside model that many liberals believe is the best—or, perhaps only—hope to amass progressive power across the country. This is the tale of my journey with him—and the story of how the left is building a model designed to hold Democrats’ feet to the fire, or possibly throw them into the blaze.

***

It is a cool December morning on downtown Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall, and Cantor is dutifully playing his role as populist rabble-rouser for both the assembled protestors and for the Fox News camera being shoved in his face.

It is one of those gray, pull-the-covers-over-your-head kind of days, but the 59-year-old seems positively ebullient. Weeks after the WFP helped elect one of its founders, Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York City, and days after President Obama and the p ope delivered speeches echoing the WFP’s longtime criticism of economic inequality, Cantor is basking in the sound and fury of a demonstration for higher wages happening outside a local Wendy’s.

“In the richest and most unequal city in the world it is a disgrace that fast-food employers are making enormous profits and are unwilling to share that in any meaningful way with their workers,” Cantor tells the Fox News reporter, amid cheers of “We can't survive on $7.25!” from the protestors demanding higher wages.

In his khakis, rumpled white shirt and tweed gray jacket, Cantor does not look like the puppetmaster who, his adversaries fear, now controls New York City’s government, nor does he look like the Rasputin his allies hope has unlocked the key to building progressives an election-winning machine. Instead, Cantor looks more like the happy-go-lucky dad from “Family Ties.” But that understated appearance cannot disguise the fact that he and his small party are enjoying a huge moment.

Seemingly out of nowhere, 15 years of the WFP’s work electing progressive Democrats and waging grassroots advocacy campaigns for liberal economic priorities appears to be paying off for the community organizing groups, unions and progressive politicians that built the party. And as the party’s influence spreads to other blue states and cities, it has become, in the words of Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith, “one of the most powerful progressive institutions in the country.”

In Connecticut, the party took over the Bridgeport school board, won three seats on the Hartford city council, helped pass a law making the state the first to mandate paid sick days for workers and successfully pressured the Democratic legislature to enact the highest statewide minimum wage in America. That minimum wage level was soon matched by Maryland, with the help of the Working Families Party’s new chapter in that state.

In Oregon, the party was the driving force behind legislation that could significantly lower the state’s college tuition rates.

In Philadelphia, the party’s affiliate just delivered a petition signed by 40,000 people pressing the city government to put a referendum on the ballot demanding the state relinquish its control of the city’s schools. There is also talk that Working Families-linked candidates will displace Republicans as the major minority party on the city council.

In New Jersey, the party’s Working Families Alliance helped convince Jersey City and Newark to pass paid sick days mandates. The alliance also played a pivotal role helping Ras Baraka defeat a Wall Street financed candidate in Newark’s most recent mayoral election.

And here in the Big Apple in 2013, the WFP’s endorsed candidates won races for mayor, city comptroller, public advocate, city council speaker and most contested city council races. In all, WFP-endorsed candidates now comprise more than half of the city council. Nearly all of them emphasized platforms promising to combat inequality in a city where almost half of the population lives at or near the poverty line.

“Many progressives wouldn’t be in office without the Working Families Party,” says Jumaane DWilliams, a 37-year-old city council member from Flatbush who is wearing an Occupy Wall Street pin at today’s minimum wage rally.

If the WFP’s wins were isolated incidents, perhaps they could be ignored. But as Congress remains gridlocked and as liberal frustration with Obama’s cautious centrism mounts, similar progressive upheavals have been occurring throughout the country.

In Massachusetts, progressives cleared a potentially crowded Democratic primary field and elected liberal hero Elizabeth Warren to the U.S. Senate. In Seattle, Kshama Sawant unseated a Democrat to become the city’s first socialist city councilor in decades. In Lorraine County, Ohio, a slate of Independent Labor Party candidates swept Democrats out of power during local elections. In Chicago, the teachers union mounted primary campaigns against state lawmakers who voted to slash public employee pensions, and now the same union is leading an independent political organization that may mount an election challenge to incumbent Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2015. And in Vermont, socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders is considering a presidential run in 2016, promising to try to push the Democratic Party to the left.

With the WFP being the most consistently successful of all these uprisings, liberal magazines have been gushing over the party’s potential to be a game-changer all over the country. Thanks to that national hype, Cantor is a mini-celebrity in New York politics. In this particular event’s sea of mostly young African American and Latino activists, he has been shaking hands, pressing his message with reporters and taking friendly flack from organizers about all the attention he’s received.

“Did Dan tell you he put this whole thing together himself?” asks activist Jonathan Westin as we first arrive. Cantor laughs, and then turns to the fast-food protest’s lead organizer, Camille Rivera, and says, “You look tired. You’ve been up all night getting ready for this, right?”

That 24-7 ethos is a prerequisite for Cantor’s scrappy third party—and it is one he lives by.

“People wonder about the Wizard of Oz and what’s happening behind the curtain in New York politics,” said Emmanuel Caicdeo during a staff party the night before the fast-food rally. “The answer is: It is Cantor working it.”

The line generated a chuckle from the WFP’s young staff, and Cantor immediately responded by saying, “That’s ridiculous.” His reputation, however, is no laughing matter now that WFP is winning elections. Success has brought more critical scrutiny of the WFP than ever, as evidenced by the Fox News reporter now pressing him to admit that the sign-wielding activists outside Wendy’s are not actually fast-food employees.

“It’s Fox News and so you are typically wrong,” Cantor says to the correspondent, throwing rhetorical red meat to the protestors elbowing in to watch the exchange. “Now, I’m sure this part won’t get on your show, but it is always the case that when workers struggle they try to organize community support. So we see the community’s involvement as a great thing, not something to hide.”

It is the kind of zinger he has clearly used before, whether 30 years ago when he was a young fast-food union organizer, or today as the middle-aged head of the WFP. But it is also more than a sound bite. For all the liberal paeans to solidarity, creating a unified multiracial coalition around progressive economic causes—and also generating broader “community involvement” in politics—is the most challenging part of Cantor’s job.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, shown in this 1999 photo with his family and Bill and Hillary Clinton, was an early supporter o the Working Families Party. | AP Images

It is about to get even more difficult as this iconoclast now tries to grow his party into a 50-state operation.

***

There is a redundancy to the modern left’s quest for an analogue to the conservative movement’s political machine. Every election cycle, PowerPoint-wielding gurus are touted as liberalism's messiahs, and then they and the front groups they create, with names like Priorities USA and America Votes, often vanish after the campaign. Meanwhile, with union membership declining and community organizing groups chronically strapped for cash, the left’s political infrastructure and connective tissue weakens.

Cantor, because of his recent success, is the guru du jour. His third-party model aims to reverse the trend by expanding the WFP into more locales and by making the party a household name.

“When Gallup surveys voters, they ask ‘Are you a Tea Party Republican,’” he says as we walk back to the WFP’s office after the fast-food rally. “We want Gallup to ask ‘Are you a Working Families Democrat?’ and we want voters know what they are referring to.”

Why New York Isn't Blue Enough Last Saturday, progressive Democrats won a battle in New York. But whether we will win the war is more of an open question. The short-term win was Gov. Andrew Cuomo agreeing to a suite of progressive reforms in response to my candidacy against him for the Working Families Party nomination for governor this year. On some issues, like freeing municipalities to raise their own minimum wage beyond the dictates of Albany, the governor made a notable switch in position. On others, like passing a DREAM Act that will extend state financial aid for higher education to undocumented students and pushing for public financing of elections, the governor re-committed to positions he previously failed to fight for. I was proud to work with the Working Families Party, to show progressives in New York and across the country a blueprint for exerting leverage in primaries. I do not, however, believe that the governor’s commitment to a progressive vision is real enough or substantial enough to deny the people of New York a vigorous debate this year. I’m still considering mounting a challenge against Governor Cuomo in the Democratic primary. Time is tight, and the odds are against me. But if I can put the resources together quickly, this could be a powerful opportunity to change the debate in this state and the country. Why? Because a contest between corporate Republicans and corporate Democrats is not good enough. The public still deserves to hear what a truly progressive, populist vision of our economy and our democracy looks like. My vision for New York is different from the governor’s. I believe we can live in a state where wages are rising, small businesses are thriving and our schools are the best in the country. We can have an economy that works for everyone, not just the wealthy and well connected. Our society can work for the upstart small businesswomen with big ideas, the young couple (gay or straight) trying to get a loan for their first home and the retail workers struggling to achieve the American dream. New York’s economy is dominated by mega corporations that are the result of mergers on top of mergers, and banks that are so big they are destined to fail. We’ve come to accept this state of affairs as the natural order, and we don’t question it. But if we are going to reinvigorate our economy and democracy, we must challenge it and we must change it. As governor, I would change the rules and un-rig the system. People know the deck is stacked against them: Just ask the rising tech entrepreneurs who are cut out of the market by Internet giants, or the publishing companies discriminated against by Amazon. Ask the workers who want nothing more than $15 an hour and a voice. On day one, I’d take steps to stop the Comcast merger dead in its tracks, a deal designed to stifle competition and raise your cable bills yet again. At every turn, at every opportunity, I would find ways to break up economic cartels and force real competition where small businesses could get in the game in every corner of our economy—from finance to publishing, retail to manufacturing. And for those who say manufacturing can’t come back, I say their imagination has failed them. We can make manufacturing a bedrock of New York’s economy if we stand up to those who have economic interests different from the working families of our state. Power doesn’t cede power without a fight, but it is a fight I am ready to have if I can gather the resources. Whether in this election cycle or not, politicians like Governor Cuomo need to see a groundswell of support for a bold, progressive, populist new politics. The more we confront them with this vision, the even greater the demand for the vision will be. Zephyr Teachout is associate professor at Fordham Law School.

With the WFP’s state parties and national organization together operating on only an $8.5 million annual budget, it is a lofty goal. After all, a single candidate, Cuomo, has alone raised more than $33 million, and the Koch brothers’ political network has amassed more than $400 million for its operations. But unlike those who preceded him, Cantor offers the left one thing the average campaign consultant does not: He has for years been battle testing his theories about challenging the so-called 1 percent in the shadows of Wall Street. And he doesn’t buy the argument that such inequality must remain an unchallenged fact of life.

“We believe America is healthier when there is a powerful left,” he says as we trudge up a cold stairwell to the WFP’s Brooklyn headquarters after the fast food rally. “When we had a strong left, we got stuff like higher wages and a social safety net. Without a strong left, we have gotten rampant inequality. Everybody knows this, but we are the party that is willing to do something about it.”

Cantor was supposed to be taking this message all over America at the beginning of the Clinton era, not toward the end of the Obama presidency. Back then, pro-business Democrats had vanquished the party’s New Deal liberals, championing Wall Street deregulation, welfare cuts and jeremiads against “the era of Big Government.” It worked well for Bill Clinton in the 1990s, even as many progressives feared those policies were sowing disaster.

For Cantor, the only future seemed to be outside the Democratic Party. He wasn’t, however, interested in the traditional third-party formula of putting up a doomed presidential candidate and then hoping that becomes a national political apparatus. (See Nader, Ralph.)

Though polls have long shown Americans are disillusioned with both major parties, Cantor believed a third party could only succeed if it started in the tiniest of political arenas, where door-to-door canvassers could actually meet most voters, and therefore give progressive candidates a fighting chance against the ad campaigns of their better financed opponents. He also theorized that a left-leaning third party aiming to generate liberal support had to avoid being locked into the “spoiler effect” whereby it always siphons votes off from Democrats in general elections and consequently throws elections to Republicans.

In the year after working on Jesse Jackson’s failed 1988 presidential campaign, Cantor began formulating a proposal to community groups and unions suggesting they create a party to run its own candidates and, at times, to list Democratic candidates on its ballot line. Through this latter “fusion” tactic, Cantor believed a small political party could remain independent, even while making periodic alliances with what he calls “the most viable progressive” Democrats.

A memo outlining the idea written by University of Wisconsin professor Joel Rogers and Cantor was marked “not for distribution,” Cantor says, in hopes that the mysterious label would actually prompt activists to do the opposite and widely circulate his manifesto. That’s exactly what they did, ultimately creating the New Party in the early 1990s in places such as Milwaukee, Little Rock and Chicago. The problem, though, was that generations ago, the major parties in many states had enacted bans on fusion, fearing the tactic gave too much power to smaller parties. Cantor, Rogers and the New Party were banking on those bans being overturned in court, but when in 1997 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed their constitutionality, many New Party chapters soon folded.

“He was demoralized,” said Cantor’s wife, Laura Markham, a child psychologist, who remembers Cantor first becoming interested in third parties when reading news coverage of parliamentary politics during their honeymoon in Britain. “This is a guy who wakes up happy every morning, but he was really at a low point.”

Within a year, though, Cantor, CWA’s Bob Master, ACORN’s Jon Kest and other key allies were hard at work on a more limited project in New York. From the American Labor Party to the old Liberal Party, the Empire State had a storied tradition of periodically successful third-party activism, and it remained one of the half dozen states where fusion was never outlawed.

In 1998, the Working Families Party was born—a party focused narrowly on progressive economic and civil rights causes, and with financial backing from the United Auto Workers, Citizen Action, the Communications Workers and ACORN. Among the political players supporting the effort were De Blasio (then a regional HUD official and elected school-board member in Brooklyn) and Eric Schneiderman (then a public interest lawyer mounting his first campaign for state senate, and now New York’s attorney general). With the allied grassroots groups urging their members to cast gubernatorial votes on the WFP’s line, the party eked out the 50,000 votes needed to secure a place on future New York ballots.

The WFP initially built its reputation by mounting headline-grabbing campaigns for a higher minimum wage and higher taxes on the wealthy, and even scored some early successes at the county and municipal level. The party also made shrewd candidate endorsements during elections, mostly of Democrats, but occasionally of moderate Republicans. In 2001 and 2002, the strategy delivered the WFP its first big electoral wins, when the party’s ballot line provided underdog Democratic candidates on Long Island the margin of victory in a county legislative race and then in a congressional election. Two years later, the WFP gave its line to a GOP state legislator in exchange for Republican lawmakers’ support of a bill boosting the minimum wage.

They started out as a rag tag bunch of agitators and activists, but they now have the single most effective turnout operation in city and state politics."

“The issue work built our brand, which then made our ballot line mean something to voters,” says Cantor between phone calls in his cramped office.

Once that brand was well known, though, it was time to test Cantor’s second theory. “We needed to defeat some corporate Democrats in primaries to be taken seriously,” he says.

With independent polls showing New York’s Democratic primary voters trusting the WFP’s endorsement, WFP-backed candidates soon defeated Democratic bosses’ more conservative candidates in high-profile races for Albany district attorney, New York City Council and New York state legislature.

That was prelude to the 2008 financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street, which supercharged the WFP’s work at the very moment the party reached what Cantor calls “critical mass” in election wins. He credits the snowballing victories—and the fear they sowed—with forcing Democrats to successively reform New York’s drug laws, impose a statewide millionaires’ surtax and mandate New York City employers provide paid sick leave to employees.

Even Cantor’s adversaries admit his work has shifted local politics in unprecedented ways.

“Historically, the left could never get its act together, but [the Working Families Party] is in many ways the most powerful political party in the state,” says Kathryn Wylde, CEO of the Partnership for New York City, which represents the city’s major private employers.

Though she is often working to try to stop WFP initiatives, Wylde admits that the party has become a formidable foe. “They have both mobilized and, to some extent, replaced organized labor as the force on the left,” she says. “Mayor de Blasio’s base is largely energized by the Working Families Party. He appears to be sticking with much of their program, and we’ve really never seen that before.”

***

Of all Cantor’s theories for how third parties can be successful on a national scale, the notion of a “critical mass” of relationships and networks is among the most crucial. Politics, despite money’s influence and the rise of online campaigning, remains an intimate interpersonal business, and so if a political organization hangs around long enough, it can change things by sheer osmosis. Knowing that, Cantor has mimicked the old infiltration theory of labor organizing. Only rather than placing union sympathizers in company jobs, the WFP has tried to place allies in as many power positions as possible in hopes that over time, that will shift the political class’s assumptions about public policy.

This is why Cantor has packed into his already jammed schedule a visit to an early Saturday-morning training session for MoveOn.org activists at a union hall in midtown Manhattan. Even though the next election is more than a year away, he is already prospecting for new blood. In particular, he’s looking for people like the public school teacher he just met—the one who happens to live in the district of a Long Island Republican lawmaker that the WFP aims to defeat.

“Getting up early this morning just became totally worth it,” Cantor says with a fist pump after convincing her to consider running for the state legislative seat.

It is also why Cantor a few days later trades in his jeans and flannel for a suit and tie, and hobnobs with the liberal elite at the Nation magazine’s annual gala.

During the cocktail hour, Cantor is first stopped by tennis star John McEnroe, who implores him to focus on helping de Blasio “because it is such a huge job to make change.” He then gets to meet one of his personal heroes, literary humorist Calvin Trillin. But he’s really here to “work it”—in this case to gather intel from politicos like Janette Sadik-Khan, Bloomberg’s former transportation commissioner, who quietly worked with the WFP on a proposal to use surveillance cameras to reduce traffic in bus lanes (“It’s a middle-class quality of life issue!” Cantor tells me).

Bouncing him across the American left’s vast socioeconomic stratum, Cantor’s whirlwind schedule represents an attempt to create the image of ubiquity, as if the WFP is everywhere politics happens. This is buttressed by the WFP’s never-ending campaigns, which—win or lose— have acculturated ever-more politicos to the party’s worldview.

“If you are in Democratic politics in this state, you will inevitably end up working with WFP folks,” Democratic strategist Neal Kwatra tells me during a post-election meeting of legislators and leaders from the WFP’s member organizations. “They started out as a rag tag bunch of agitators and activists, but they now have the single most effective turnout operation in city and state politics. They’ve become a key part of the fabric of political life in New York and that gives them the kind of leverage that money cannot buy.”

As Kwatra lists all the former WFP operatives dispersed throughout city and state government, WFP organizing director Mike Boland is telling the group about this year’s results of the party’s Pipeline Program, which aims to elect allies to the most local of local positions. A beefy, bearded 35-year old who oversees the WFP’s local recruitment, he recounts how the party’s local chapters last year screened nearly 1,000 candidates for public offices around the state, ultimately focusing on 38 key elections and winning 25 of them.

“We need to be thinking years ahead of us,” Boland says, noting that each targeted race occurred in a locale with a “soon to be retired” incumbent in a higher office.

Picking up on Boland’s theme, Cantor reviews plans to support existing Working Families operations in New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania, and to help activists create WFP-style organizations in other states such as Illinois, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Hawaii. Although none of those states permits fusion, Cantor argues that by becoming experts in recruiting electable progressive candidates and running Democratic primaries, the WFP does not actually need the cross-endorsement tactic to gain power.

“New York is the mother ship for the national effort,” he tells the group. “Whenever you go to another state with an idea, the first question people ask is: Where else has this happened? We’ve got the answer right here.”

***

To hear Cantor reluctantly retell the story of his life, he never consciously chose to become an agitator. He was born into the business in 1955, as his mother, Millie, was collecting political petitions the night she delivered him. And within a few years, her son was working on his first campaign—a successful one for her library board candidacy in Levittown, New York, during the era’s heated debates over censorship.

“By the time Danny was 13 years old, it was the height of the antiwar movement and he was up on every issue,” said Steve Villano, a longtime aide to former Gov. Mario Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo’s father, who has known the Cantors since his youth. “They were a very political family. They weaved discussions of serious social and political issues into the course of everyday meals.”

Following college at Wesleyan—interrupted by a semester working on an Israeli kibbutz—Cantor landed jobs that prepared him for his current career. An ACORN gig in Arkansas trained him in multiracial organizing against an intransigent local government. An assignment with a group pressuring the AFL-CIO to end its support for the Reagan administration’s foreign policy schooled him in the art of squeezing an ostensibly liberal institution from the left. Stints with Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns taught him about tensions between Democratic Party powerbrokers and the party’s liberal base.

From these experiences, Cantor became a party boss far less mealy mouthed—and far more openly ideological—than his Democratic and Republican counterparts. This is a lefty firebrand who still channels his old kibbutznik spirit with 6 a.m. shifts labeling vegetables at the Park Slope Co-Op, and during a subway ride to an evening rally in Lower Manhattan, he happily admits that he is pursuing a “social democratic” agenda. It is that kind of blunt rhetoric that has built the WFP a loyal following. But it has also helped stoke criticism from the right.

Letitia James, the first Working Families Party candidate to be elected in New York State, at her swearing-in ceremony for New York City Council in 2003. | AP Images

For instance, the conservative Manhattan Institute has labeled the WFP a “socialist third party." National Review has called it an “Alinskyite” operation that serves as “a left-wing attack machine.” And the New York Post’s right-leaning editorial page regularly excoriates Cantor’s crew as an outright menace. The tabloid’s columnist Bob McManus argues that the party’s ”real goal is to pick the public’s pocket” on behalf of its member organizations.

That latter criticism was echoed by Michael Bloomberg, who used his final speech as mayor to air a thinly veiled attack on the party, decrying what he called the “labor-electoral complex.” Yet, for all the animosity between the billionaire former mayor and the WFP, one of Bloomberg’s confidants says the party plays a necessary and constructive role in New York politics.

“If WFP didn’t exist, it probably would have made my life easier, but I wouldn’t say things would necessarily be better for the city,” said Bloomberg’s former deputy mayor, Howard Wolfson. “I would prefer that politics were a bit more firmly in the center on both sides, but I do think given where we are right now there is a value in having a counter on the left to the Tea Party.”

Pointing to the thousand protestors gathered in Foley Square, Cantor says: “Look, the right and the corporate guys see all of this as just liberals and socialists, but if you really want to know who hates us the most, it is the center-right of the Democratic Party.”

This is true. Take former Democratic legislator Craig Johnson. In a 2007 special election, the WFP vaulted him into the state senate, but he blames the party for his loss three years later. Echoing Clintonite arguments against liberal stalwarts in the early 1990s, Johnson said that the WFP’s laser focus on inequality endangers Democratic candidates in swing districts. “I agreed to vote for the WFP’s millionaires tax when I was in the legislature, and then within a few days they were demanding I support another tax increase,” he said. “I voted for it and then I lost the election because of it. It proved the left’s intransigence can be as bad as the right’s.”

Once Cantor is finished giving his speech to the crowd—which he delivers in both English and Spanish—I ask him about this line of criticism.

“Yeah, we help people win, but we will often fight them like hell when they are in office,” he says, between embraces with union leaders from WFP’s board. “We are a party but we are also a political movement and a movement sometimes involves pressuring politicians, regardless of their party.”

Other critics say Cantor has constructed a stalking horse for the Democratic Party—one that, on a national scale, would simply convince liberal voters across the country to keep voting for the same centrist Democrats. In this view, aired recently in the socialist Jacobin magazine, the WFP’s endorsement of corporate-friendly Democrats prove it has “compromised its claim to be a party pushing economic justice issues.”

The party’s complicated relationship with Cuomo is a case in point. The New York governor won the WFP’s endorsement in his 2010 campaign despite promising the very tax and spending cuts the party was ostensibly created to oppose. As governor, Cuomo has been, in the words of Wylde, “the champion of the anti-tax movement,” even fighting de Blasio as the new mayor pushed for a local tax increase on the rich to fund universal pre-kindergarten.

Cuomo, in other words, has pursued such a consistently conservative economic agenda that even one prominent former Cuomo supporter, Democratic rainmaker Bill Samuels, has publicly labeled the governor a closet Republican advancing “the interests of the wealthy elite at the expense of regular citizens.” Yet Cantor and the WFP’s criticism of Cuomo has been muted, to the point of ultimately endorsing him in his 2014 reelection campaign.

Over a beer after the rally, Cantor first says the party opted to back Cuomo in 2010 rather than wage an expensive fight against him only because the WFP was then facing a resource-draining federal campaign finance investigation (the probe has since been closed with no findings of wrongdoing).

But after a few more sips of lager and some combative back and forth (“I reject the premise of your question!”), Cantor also concedes that some of the WFP’s reluctant dance with Cuomo is precisely the kind of necessary calculation that will be key to long-term expansion and political agency.

“Purity is for people with no power,” Cantor tells me. “If you have even a modest amount of power, you have to make compromises. We are not political hobbyists. We have passed real legislation that other third parties have not. But doing that means working with people we don’t always agree with.”

That salute to realpolitik, though, may also be a convenient way to gloss over a weakness in Cantor’s model that Cuomo appeared to exploit.

In the lead-up to the WFP’s convention in Albany, the incumbent governor worked to drive a wedge between the party’s ideological and grassroots wings and its better-resourced institutional union wing—the latter of which has transactional business (contracts, wage scales, regulations on teachers) with New York State.

This is a schism, of course, that has periodically plagued the Democratic coalition—most famously in the labor/liberal split of the Vietnam War era. Ultimately, the implicit threat of Cuomo working against the WFP unions’ transactional interests in his second term compelled those unions to threaten to pull their financial support of the party if it did not endorse the incumbent governor in spite of his conservative economic record.

But, then, perhaps the divide is not as gaping or binary as it may seem. After all, at the WFP’s convention, community groups representing low-wage workers ended up providing the swing votes for Cuomo after he was forced to endorse the WFP’s minimum-wage position. Naquasia LeGrand, a KFC employee who ended up delivering a speech in support of Cuomo at the convention, put it this way: “Nobody ever puts my family first and nobody ever thinks about what we need to survive.” She credited the WFP with pressuring Cuomo to switch positions.

Cantor makes a similar tactical argument for a detente with an adversary like Cuomo, citing the fight over funding universal preschool. Sure, Cantor was unhappy that a Democratic governor in a deep blue state fought de Blasio on a proposal to raise rich people’s taxes. However, before the de Blasio victory and the WFP’s attendant city council wins, the preschool program wasn’t even on the legislative agenda. But after the election, it became a foregone conclusion that the program would be created in some form, as long as Cuomo wasn’t completely alienated from the left.

Purity is for people with no power,” Cantor tells me. “If you have even a modest amount of power, you have to make compromises.”

“It is like most of our work: It is a long slog that is not sexy,” Cantor says. “But we eventually get results.”

He takes another sip of his beer. “Maybe that should be our bumper sticker.”

***

Gov. Andrew Cuomo's video speech to the Party's 2014 political convention in Albany, N.Y., Saturday, May 31, 2014. | AP Images

A few months after my first set of tag-alongs with Cantor, I accompany him during a series of meetings between party officials and their allies in New York City government. Though the 2013 election is a distant memory, there is still giddiness among his colleagues. Before a strategy session in the city council’s offices, WFP’s New York state director Bill Lipton reminisces as he tells me, “The last time I was here I was being told by the speaker [Christine Quinn, a de Blasio rival] we weren’t going to get paid sick-day legislation.” Lipton then recounts how the WFP not only overcame Quinn’s opposition to pass that bill, but also later helped elect its ally, Melissa Mark-Viverito, council speaker.

Because of such victories, things still seem to be on the upswing for the WFP. The council has expanded the paid sick-day mandate while de Blasio has curtailed the police department’s controversial stop-and-frisk program and established tougher affordable housing requirements on real estate developers.

“When good people get elected, good things can happen that don’t take years of work,” Cantor says.

These should be high times for him, yet beneath his jovial facade there is simmering worry. How can he scale up?

“We do better with legislators than executives because you don’t need as much money in those elections,” he says before we head into a meeting with the city’s WFP-endorsed comptroller, Scott Stringer. “As great as the New York party is, though, we can’t do what we need to do unless we expand. If we had $100 million, we could change the country with this model.”

“That’s a huge if,” Cantor readily admits. Although the Democratic Party can use its social liberalism to attract wealthy donors, the WFP has trouble convincing those same kinds of donors to sponsor its crusade against economic inequality. That’s hardly surprising, considering such financiers are among inequality’s big winners, but it does pose a serious problem for the party’s plans for expansion. Unless the WFP expands its individual donor base, its disproportionate reliance on money from other resource-strapped community organizations and transaction-focused labor unions could limit its growth.

Then again, Cantor’s financial conundrum may not be insurmountable. In the meeting with Stringer, he and officials from conservation groups pushed the comptroller to divest the city’s $150 billion pension fund from coal companies. With climate change’s effects disproportionately harming the poor, the cause fits with the WFP’s core mission—but also could expand its appeal to environmental donors.

“Dan and I have been talking about this idea for months,” says Stringer during the closed-door discussion. “But the question is: Should we keeping our holdings and use them as leverage? Do we divest, or do we stay and fight?”

It is a version of the inside-outside question that plagues the WFP. Can you only make change by playing the insiders’ game? Or is it better to push from the outside?

On the way out of the meeting, Cantor gets that pinch-me-I-must-be-dreaming feeling again as he and Stringer discuss other ideas about how to leverage the comptroller’s office.

“These are the kinds of conversations that can change the world,” Stringer says as they shake hands.

Lipton then tells Cantor they are late for their next meeting, and asks Stringer if they can go out a side door because it might be faster. But Cantor answers first.

“After the last election,” he says with a smile, “we use the front door.”