2020 Democrats

“The Earlier, the Better”: Warren Lands Massive Progressive Endorsement, Enraging Sanders Supporters

The decision upset some activists, but with Joe Biden looking bulletproof, time was of the essence. “It was incumbent on us to endorse and endorse now,” said Working Families Party’s director.

By Tina Nguyen

September 17, 2019

In the highly charged world of the activist left, progressives were divided Monday when the Working Families Party, a third-party organization that’s become a progressive kingmaker, defied expectations and endorsed Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primary over Bernie Sanders, whom the party supported in 2016. “Senator Warren strikes fear into the hearts of the robber barons who rigged the system, and offers hope to millions of working people who have been shut out of our democracy and economy,” Maurice Mitchell, the group’s national director, said in a statement. “Our job now is to help Senator Warren build the mass movement that will make her transformational plans a reality.”

In a phone conversation with me after the endorsement, Mitchell was blunter. “In order to both defeat Trump and win the nomination, we need a strong, structural change progressive to lead us to that victory. And there’s clearly candidates that are advancing that. And there is clearly at least one—and maybe you know, it could be argued, others—that are attempting to double down on the policies of the past that have failed us.”

That unnamed candidate, it seems, is Joe Biden. Ordinarily, the Working Families Party has offered its benediction later in the election cycle—often in December, and sometimes as late as after the Democratic convention. This year, with Biden maintaining a respectable lead over Warren and Sanders, his two nearest rivals, WFP decided to move faster. The hope among some activists is that the left will begin to coalesce around a single Biden challenger, consolidating progressive support in time to blunt his momentum going into Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

“I think if you’re them, Warren has a little bit more upside,” said Data for Progress’s Sean McElwee, a pollster who’s become a social nexus for the progressive movement. “She has, I think, a better chance of appealing to Mayor Pete [Buttigieg] voters, [Julián] Castro voters, Kamala [Harris] voters. And they want to build this broad coalition of people who identify as progressives in order to slow Joe Biden’s path to the nomination.”

Warren herself celebrated the endorsement with a tweet from the Amtrak quiet car, but in the valleys of the Online Left, pro-Sanders activists were less than pleased with the WFP’s decision. Some questioned why there wasn’t more transparency surrounding the the party’s voting process. In 2016, WFP weighted the tally such that dues-paying members and email subscribers controlled 1/8 of the total vote, while party leadership and delegates controlled the rest. This year, however, WFP made the vote more democratic, weighting the ranked-choice vote equally between governance and grassroots. As a result, Warren got 60.91% of the vote, while Sanders, who won the WFP’s endorsement in 2016 with a whopping 87%, received only 35.82%. (The Working Families Party declined to clarify how the vote broke down between the board and the online voters.)

Mitchell pushed back against the notion that WFP was in the tank for Warren. In 2016, he said, the party’s endorsement was made simpler by the “binary choice” between Sanders and the more corporate Hillary Clinton, the only two real candidates that year. This year, he explained, the political dynamic was different. “In 2020, you have dozens of candidates—a pretty broad field—and a number of candidates that are lifting up some pretty impressive social change positions, and pretty impressive issue platforms,” he said, adding that the process was designed to engage as many candidates as possible before WFP made its decision. Warren won the first round of balloting, according to the WFP, making any further rounds unnecessary.

There are still months to go until the first primary fight in Iowa, to say nothing of the Democratic convention. But defeating Donald Trump was the party’s top priority, Mitchell said, and time is of the essence. “We need the time. Especially when we’re facing an opponent that is fully organized and has been campaigning, frankly, since he got elected,” he told me. “Even as there are a number of legitimately progressive candidates in the race, it was incumbent on us to endorse and endorse now.”

“There are two sets of actors that are organizing like hell and aren’t waiting to advance their interests,” Mitchell continued. “It’s the corporate, third-way interests within the Democratic Party, and then the far right, ultra right wing interests that have propelled Trump to victory. And we need to defeat both of them. And the earlier, the better, to do that.”