Why Did Unions and the WFP Oppose Last Night's Electoral Breakthroughs in NYC?
Working people want working-class fighters in office, not more old-guard politicians backed by unions and the Working Families Party
Last night, New York City’s labor and non-profit leaders got a brutal reminder that they no longer politically speak for the working class they claim to represent.
In the city’s two marquee congressional primaries, candidates backed by labor’s biggest names — 32BJ, 1199SEIU, DC37, the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, the United Federation of Teachers, and others — went down to defeat. In the first, Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair Adriano Espaillat, a corporate Democrat who racked up some fourteen union endorsements, lost his Upper Manhattan and Bronx seat to Darializa Avila Chevalier, a thirty-two-year-old democratic socialist insurgent backed by Zohran Mamdani, the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA), and Justice Democrats.
Delivering Chevalier the biggest Congressional upset since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s win in 2018, District 13 voters showed that they no longer trust a Democratic establishment unable or unwilling to seriously challenge Trump and an oligarchic status quo. Yet most union and non-profit leaders haven’t yet followed their lead. And it’s a sign of dramatic internal decay that these organizations, so powerful on paper, can now deliver so little in the way of actual votes.
No less significant was the race in Brooklyn’s District 7. In a battle for the mantle of New York City left politics, the race pitted Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso — backed by a nearly identical union roster, the Working Families Party (WFP), and the city’s alphabet soup of progressive non-profits — against union activist and DSA cadre Claire Valdez. By delivering an unexpectedly decisive victory for Valdez, Brooklyn voters put a lie to cynical claims about community representation against white gentrifiers: she swamped Reynoso 56 percent to 36 percent.
Faced with an era of crisis and anger at the status quo, working people of all backgrounds are increasingly tired of old-guard politics, in both its corporate Democratic and non-profit industrial complex varieties. How long before labor and community leaders get this?
We saw this same movie play out in early 2025, when most of the city’s union leadership lined up behind Andrew Cuomo — a serial harasser they’d demanded resign four years earlier — and watched Mamdani beat him anyway. (WFP, to their credit, endorsed Mamdani in that race.) Similarly, the WFP and non-profit leaders’ decision in February 2026 to endorse Reynoso over Valdez — thereby overruling the votes of their own on-the-ground members — gave strong echoes of the WFP leadership’s controversial decision to endorse Elizabeth Warren over Bernie Sanders in 2019, as well as its decision to back Joe Crowley against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the year prior.
Again, only a tiny handful of unions had the political courage and conviction to stand up for transformational change. It is to the credit of United Auto Workers (UAW) Region 9A, led by director Brandon Mancilla, that it fought so hard for both Valdez and Avila Chevalier. As UAW president Shawn Fain put it at Valdez’s January 9 campaign launch event: “This is exactly how the labor movement can fight back against corporate greed and inequality: by electing more of our own.” (Claire was also endorsed by IFPTE and AFGE as well as by the left-led, South-Asian non-profit DRUM Beats.)
There are strong moral and political reasons why unions and progressive non-profits should start backing viable fighters for the pro-worker, anti-billionaire agenda that socialists are championing: such politics can deliver the type of change working people desperately need and, in so doing, provide a viable alternative to Trumpism.
But even on purely self-interested grounds, savvy union and non-profit operators should start reading the room. Backing old-guard politicians is no longer a risk-averse, pragmatic wager.
Union and non-profit leaders blew it in early 2025, and again in this 2026 cycle. It remains to be seen whether they’ll do so again in 2028 when faced with a possible Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presidential run.
The movement of the future is being built with or without these labor and NGO officials. It’s an open question whether they’ll finally jump on board — or get run over.
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My output for Labor Politics is going to be a bit less frequent than normal for the next year—expect about one post a month. I have a good excuse: in addition to helping set up a new student to labor pipeline, I’m deep into a new book project on what we can learn from evangelicals about organizing and community building. I just spent a fascinating week embedded in a multiracial, Trump-leaning mega-church in the Midwest; can’t wait to share with you all these stories and lessons. We’re so far behind evangelical churches when it comes to building mass belonging, developing leaders, and recruiting working people via music, ritual, community, and big ideas that give life purpose and meaning. Lots more to come.
Thank you, Eric, for your courage in writing this. You convincingly expressed what for me was in inchoate & uncertain inkling of a feeling!
Excellent post. The old guard is crumbling and finally for good reason. It’s time for unions to get on board or get out of the way.