Nixon lands early punch, but a bigger fight awaits

The endorsement also served as a catharsis to WFP’s leaders, who likened it to breaking off a borderline abusive relationship.

“You know the way you feel when you know you’ve done the right thing?” said Bill Lipton, the WFP’s state director. “You sleep better at night.”

As the dust settles on the party’s choice, the question remains how, in practical terms — and how much, in political terms — the WFP endorsement will help Nixon, an actress and educational activist making her first run for political office.

The WFP, a small but influential alliance built by labor unions and progressive activists, has become a force in local races, offering candidate and staff training, paid canvassers and organizers to fledgling campaigns.

But as the party prepared to endorse Nixon, two powerful and prominent labor groups, with the governor’s blessing, pulled their support from the WFP — a blow to the finances of the party, which has a $1.7 million yearly budget and a statewide staff of about 15 people.

The party still has some labor groups in its corner. But the unions that withdrew Friday — Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, and Communications Workers of America District 1 — count more than 150,000 members in New York. The state’s biggest union, 1199 SEIU, which represents health care workers, has also endorsed Cuomo, as have other major unions like the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

And several other union leaders, including some that had supported Lipton’s group in the past, were already speaking of the WFP in the past tense, and speaking ill of its current leaders.

“The WFP was a good concept,” said Mike McGuire, a construction union official and former treasurer of the WFP, adding that Lipton and others had turned it into “an irrelevant, impotent, money-hungry engine for their own personal agenda.”

Lipton said that although the departure of the governor’s labor allies had cost his party “millions in funding,” both now and in the future, the WFP still had ample power to promote Nixon’s message through volunteering, canvassing, phone banking and social media. The party had already been using such methods in recent efforts to expel former members of the Independent Democratic Conference, a recently dissolved group of Democrats who cooperated with Republicans, from the state Senate.

“We just had a dress rehearsal for this,” said Lipton, noting 120,000 anti-IDC phone calls and a half-million anti-IDC text messages sent this winter. “And we think this is going to be much bigger.”

There are early indications that the alliance with the WFP, and a range of community groups whose funding were also threatened by Cuomo’s labor allies, may offer Nixon a bevy of surrogates with which to attack the governor.

On Wednesday, for example, Nixon’s campaign distributed a statement from Make the Road Action, a progressive community-action group that focuses on immigrant issues. The statement accused Cuomo of a “recent pattern of falsehoods and exaggerations about his life story,” citing the governor’s suggestion that he was the son of “poor immigrants” — his father, Mario M. Cuomo, was a lawyer and three-term governor — and the fact that he was “a middle-class guy,” something belied by his $173,000 salary, hefty investment portfolio and a lucrative book deal for his memoir. On Thursday, the Nixon campaign debuted an email attack on Cuomo’s credibility, calling out his “lie of the day.”

“There’s a reason Andrew Cuomo and Cynthia Nixon both fought so hard for the endorsement of the Working Families Party,” Rebecca Katz, an adviser Nixon’s campaign, said. “Their ballot line sends a clear signal to voters about which candidate is the most committed progressive.”

As Katz tells it, the WFP endorsement could also help offset Cuomo’s profound financial advantage — his campaign coffers contain some $30 million — particularly by appealing to small donors, who have been almost completely ignored by the governor’s past fundraising.

The two unions were not the only entities to pull out of the WFP; the night before Nixon won the endorsement, Cuomo’s campaign — sensing the party’s inclination toward his opponent — announced that it would not seek the endorsement after all.

Abbey Fashouer, a spokeswoman for the Cuomo campaign, underscored what she characterized as his “unmatched progressive record,” citing his work on securing a $15 minimum wage, marriage equality, gun-safety laws, a free college tuition program and paid family leave.

“After nearly a decade of discord, we have a united Democratic Party and the governor is focused on maintaining that unity to win the state Senate, take back the House and fight Trump in Washington,” she said.

Supporters of Nixon say the WFP is more aligned with the anti-Trump sentiment that is expected to send waves of Democratic voters to the polls to punish Republicans — and maybe some moderate Democrats. “We’re going to electoralize the resistance,” Lipton said.

This argument is backed by a recent Marist College poll showing that Nixon does best among “highly enthusiastic” voters, the type that typically would find their way to polling stations for a September primary. Still, Cuomo has hefty leads in every public poll thus far.

In the 2014 Democratic primary, an underfunded candidate, Zephyr Teachout, mounted a surprisingly vigorous bid to unseat Cuomo, pulling in 34 percent of the vote.

Lipton pointed out that the WFP — which counts about 46,000 registered voters — has drawn at least that many people to the party’s line in recent elections, including in 2016, when Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., won 241,672 votes on the party’s line. All told, fewer than 600,000 Democrats voted in the 2014 primary, about 10 percent of all those registered.

But several political analysts warned that the unions’ traditional muscle in turning out voters should not be underestimated.

Kenneth Sherrill, an emeritus professor of political science at the City University of New York Graduate Center, said the two unions that withdrew from WFP, CWA and 32BJ, were “powerhouses” that could make a difference in September.

“The most powerful labor unions are able to deliver votes,” Sherrill said. “And this clout is undoubtedly more powerful in the primaries than in the general election.”

Héctor J. Figueroa, president of Local 32BJ, said his members were strongly behind Cuomo — citing accomplishments like a hike in the minimum wage and a paid family-leave program — and could bring as many as a quarter-million voters, including union members’ families and friends, to bear on the race. “We intend to do what we do with every election,” he said. “We have a very robust program.”

It remains to be seen if Cuomo’s more traditional campaign efforts — ratcheting up labor backing, doling out support for liberal causes and staging governmental events seemingly designed to promote the governor — can be offset by Nixon’s social media popularity and of-the-people campaign style. A video of Nixon declaring her support for legalizing marijuana has been viewed 3.7 million times. A subsequent Twitter post about the issue garnered more than 180,000 likes.

Charles Tien, a professor of political science at Hunter College, said the schism in the WFP. showed less an ideological difference between unions and progressive activists — “ideological soul mates” — than differing opinions on how those ideals had or had not been fulfilled.

The answer, Tien said, would determine which group could drive higher turnout.

“Their candidate is the status quo candidate,” he said of the unions’ support for Cuomo. “Are people feeling that the status quo isn’t working? If yes, I think that’s where you have the potential for a challenger to be successful.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.