The Third Party That’s Pushing the Democrats Left
Most Americans, even many Republican voters, disapprove of the war in Iran and remain unhappy about the high cost 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 this week. That’s great news for Democrats ahead of this fall’s midterm elections—but there’s a catch.
Despite overperforming 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 that while Trump is underwater by 23 points, Democrats are only ahead of the GOP by six points on the generic congressional ballot.
Many voters, it seems, are angry at both parties. The Democrats’ low approval rating—which lately has hovered in the upper 30s, similar to the GOP’s—is attributable in part to a base that feels 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 aims squarely at 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 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 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 system 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 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 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, the Searchlight Institute, and the Welcome Party, 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, 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.”