August 20, 2018
City & State New York
unions can no longer compel nonmembers to cover the costs of their representation. One progressive activist and union delegate who didn’t want to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the issue said, “We know that because Jessica Ramos is trying to unseat of Janus, we’re all fucked, and state Sen. Jose we also know that the governor Peralta, a former is running for re-election. And member of the we see the governor basicalIndependent Demly signing a bill that protects ocratic Conference. us from the worst effects of (the decision). So everybody is freaking out because in a post-Janus world, you’re only as strong as your advocate.” Some unions have nonetheless backed insurgent candidates. The Communications Workers of America endorsed all eight challengers to the former IDC members. “The calculus,” the delegate said, “is that taking out the IDC is worth the risk of jeopardizing their relationship with the governor.” A veteran progressive organizer who was granted anonymity to speak freely about the situation said “things are pretty tense between labor and community and advocacy groups because of this whole situation.” Progressives who have worked together on issues like a $15 minimum wage are finding themselves on opposing sides of some races. The starkest example of this came in April when several unions left the WFP because the party backed Nixon over Cuomo. ministration, is running against Cuomo. A number of observers see Nixon’s candidacy as a proxy war between de Blasio and Cuomo, in part because the former “Sex and the City” star tapped several veterans of the mayor’s first campaign for key positions on her team. Another factor playing out in often unpredictable ways is that New York has the highest union density of any state in the country, so organized labor remains a major force in progressive politics. Unions tend to be risk averse and back Democratic – and sometimes even Republican – incumbents who haven’t gone out of their way to antagonize organized labor. So unions are splitting in this cycle: Some are enthusiastically backing insurgent candidates, while many others getting behind Cuomo and the erstwhile IDCers. For instance, Biaggi received the endorsement of 32BJ SEIU, while most other major service sector unions are sticking with Klein. Labor has to make some especially tough political calculations after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31 that
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O A DEGREE, the battle for control of the Democratic Party is separate from the party’s efforts to take back one or both chambers of Congress and check the Trump administration’s power. But many insurgents see increasingly left-wing policy preferences and effective resistance to Trump as inseparable. “These aren’t two fights; they’re one fight,” said a senior staffer for one insurgent candidate in New York City who asked not to be named in order to talk candidly about issues not directly related to the campaign. “If we’re going to really fight against Trump and Trumpism, we’re going to need a less corrupt and compromised Democratic Party. A lot of people woke up on Nov. 9, 2016, and realized that Democrats in New York had been winking and nodding to progressives and our agenda but then not following through.” Leftist activists see the mobilization against Trump as an opportunity to move the party in their direction, a moment they have long-awaited. The marquee races at the state level – Nixon’s challenge against Cuomo, primaries against the former IDC members,
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and, for some candidates, the contest to succeed former state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman – are the product of years of pent-up frustration on the left. A state with more than two Democrats for every Republican should have unified Democratic control and progressive policies on par with their West Coast counterparts like California, the insurgents and their supporters reason. The impediment, as they see it, is Democrats who pay lip service to liberalism while taking campaign donations from big businesses and colluding with Republicans to serve those interests. For example, as of June, Peralta’s top two donors were a political action committee run by the Real Estate Board of New York and the LeFrak Organization, a major landlord in Queens run by Richard LeFrak, a close friend of Trump’s. The establishment Democrats counter that their policies are unaffected by their fundraising. “Senator Peralta has a long history of fighting for rent reform and legislation to protect tenants, which is why he was endorsed recently by the LeFrak Tenants Association,” Tom Musich, a spokesman for Peralta, said in an emailed statement. But it is process, as much as policy, that has driven New York’s left-wing insurgency: outrage over Albany insiders continually cutting deals that gave Republicans control of the state Senate and the gerrymandering, restrictive voting rules and lax state campaign finance regulations that have kept a disproportionately white, male and Republican state Legislature in office. But can they convince a majority of primary voters, many of whom are less than expert on the inner workings of Albany, that incumbents with mainstream Democratic positions are actually impeding progress? “The challenge for the insurgency is to explain that when Cuomo postures that he’s for the DREAM Act or criminal justice reform or campaign finance reform, he’s actually used the IDC to block those very things,” Bill Lipton, a co-founder of the Working Families Party and its New York state director, told City & State. “It’s a hoax being perpetrated on the working people of New York.” To understand why the activist left so opposes Cuomo and the former IDC members, despite Cuomo’s many liberal policy achievements – some of which the IDC helped pass – including banning hydraulic fracturing, raising the minimum wage and passing stricter gun control, one has to know the backstory. Early in his first term, Cuomo formed the Committee to Save New York, a nonprofit advocacy group that raised money from a group of donors which, according