Hacking the Democratic Primaries with Maurice Mitchell

Battleground with Amanda Litman and Faiz Shakir

The Recount

Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2021

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Third parties are famous for siphoning off votes from the major parties and ruining elections. While this phenomenon, known as the spoiler effect, is real, America's two-party system makes for strange bedfellows. It's not obvious what a democratic socialist like AOC has in common with a conservative Democrat like Joe Manchin, other than a "D" after their names.

So what can reform-minded progressives do? How can they advocate for systemic change without tilting the field in the Republicans’ favor? Maurice Mitchell, a seasoned organizer and National Director of the Working Families Party, joins Amanda this week to discuss the WFP’s decades-long effort to build substantive, multiracial political power for the working class. The WFP emerged in 1998 as a direct response to the conservative-corporate takeover of American politics. Maurice details his party’s multifaceted approach that has its sights set not only on conservative Republicans, but on establishment Democrats in very blue districts who are out of step with the needs of their communities. In other words, the WFP is providing progressives, the working class, and people who don’t identify with either party a path to representation in government through collective organization. Just how effective are they? Ask now-former Governor Andrew Cuomo.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Amanda Liman and this is Battleground, a podcast from The Recounts.
0:14.5	Our guest this week is Maurice Mitchell, who is the National Director of the Working
0:17.5	Families Party.
0:18.7	I wanted to have Mo on the show this week to talk about Working Families Party because
0:22.2	I think what they're building is so interesting.
0:25.5	It's kind of a third party, kind of integrated with the Democratic Party, kind of distinct
0:31.0	in ideology, kind of distinct in organizing mechanisms.
0:34.4	I think Paul is one of the best thinkers on the progress of side right now.
0:38.7	He really understands how to navigate the tension between having a visionary ideal
0:43.5	for what America could be and how to get there and a really pragmatic sense of what the
0:48.9	path there looks like.
0:50.5	So I was really glad to have him on the show today and to have what I think is one of
0:53.7	our more optimistic and uplifting conversations in a while.
0:57.9	And I want to flag, since we talk about fusion voting in our conversation and I know most
1:02.4	folks are not New Yorkers or might not be New Yorkers who don't know what that actually
1:05.3	means, I wanted to define it for you.
1:08.1	What it looks like in practice is that more than one political party can support a common
1:12.5	candidate.
1:13.5	So Joe Biden, for example, was on the party line for both the Democratic Party and the
1:18.6	Working Families Party.
1:20.1	I could have voted for him in 2020 and either of one of those.
1:23.8	And there are certain thresholds that the Working Families Party or any of the third party
	...

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