The Working Families Party cleaned up in the run-off last night, with its candidates Bill de Blasio and John Liu each winning handily.
The party only has 11,800 registered voters in New York, but it’s been able to craft an oversized role thanks to an effective, if controversial, Get Out The Vote operation.
“[T]he Democratic Party is the label, and they [the W.F.P.] are the apparatus,” Michael Oliva, a Democratic consultant, tells Azi in a story about the party.
By “apparatus,” Oliva means the party’s Get Out the Vote Operation, which has been lauded as not only better than that of the Democratic Party’s, but the only real one left in New York.
In Oliva’s estimation, the Democratic organizations now amount to “a bunch of clubs with ten senior citizens who get five signatures on your petitions.”
In addition to the two winners last night, five of their Council candidates won in the primary, meaning seven people at City Hall will soon owe some loyalty to the W.F.P., and many more will be interested in getting on their good side.
“One good thing will be that with these people in office, it will force Bloomberg to talk about working class issues,” Evan Thies told me at last night’s party for David Yassky, Thies’ former boss, who had just lost the comptroller’s race to Mr. Liu.
The Post goes one step further, declaring “Lefties The Real Victors,” and questioning whether “elected officials are going to be willing to take on an issue in the public interest if it’s not in the WFP’s interest.”
“They are not doing this for holy reasons,” Councilman Simcha Felder told the Post. “They’re waiting for their piece of the pie. They’re going to be eating it for the next four years.”
And with Liu and de Blasio all but officially installed in citywide office, it could be much longer than that.
