Many of Los Angeles’s progressive politicians were feeling galvanized last Tuesday as they watched New Yorkers elect Zohran Mamdani as their next mayor. The results from a similarly high-profile big city across the country seemed to show that Democratic Party politicians could run unapologetically on socialist-inspired ideas prioritizing the interests of tenants and the poor – and still win. Some hoped that could also happen in Los Angeles.
But when he cast his own ballot last Tuesday, Mamdani didn’t actually vote for himself under the Democratic Party banner, which he was running under. He voted instead for Zohran Mamdani, the Working Families Party candidate.
While the profile of the Democratic Socialists of America has risen, including in Los Angeles, where Mamdani’s win was seen as buoying politicians carried into office by the efforts of that group’s local chapter, the Working Families Party has in recent years been making inroads in Los Angeles and in California, especially among left-leaning politicos.
That includes last week, when the Working Families Party co-hosted an election night watch party with DSA-LA at the Greyhound in Highland Park last week, where local progressives like Los Angeles City Council member Eunisses Hernandez sought to pump up enthusiasm for, among other goals, an effort here to establish a stronger, expanded progressive bench on the City Council.
The Working Families Party has been around in New York for years, and former mayor Bill de Blasio was active in it during its early days. Mamdani could raise that group’s profile a bit more, especially as many around the country have been watching his rise.
But some who may hear about the Working Families Party outside of New York may be scratching their head a bit as to how this political group works. The group functions in a somewhat unique mode, offering a kind of “third” party option, without actually needing to be separate from the Democratic Party. This has been more of a natural mode in New York because, even though Mamdani was running as a Democratic Party candidate, he was also able to run as a Working Families Party candidate. That’s because in New York, candidates can run under more than one party under a now-rare voting process that pre-dates the American Civil War, known as fusion voting.
Some say the benefits of a fusion voting process can be that when someone casts a vote for a candidate under a second party, such as the Working Families Party or the Green Party, for example, the candidate gets to know where that vote comes from. And that could give people elected to office more data on the values of those who supported them at the polls.
Jake Hart, who grew up in New York and now lives in Los Angeles where he runs a local chapter of Swing Left (a “vote blue no matter what” organization – though he likes to think of it as “we just beat Republicans”), told The LA Reporter at a recent Working Families Party endorsement meeting that he misses the fusion voting process he grew up around, and he wishes it could be implemented here.
Hart acknowledges that elected officials can often ignore any data they get through that process, but it’s at least something that exists and can be pointed to, “for the people who might care.” He said he still sees U.S. Congress left-wing “squad” member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talk about people from the Green Party voting for her.
Although fusion voting does not exist here in California and many other places for that matter, Working Families Party members here say having a group that promotes their values still matters. Their group operates in a similar way to the Democratic Party, while not necessarily treating themselves as a complete alternative.
They do endorsements of candidates in which they interrogate aspirants for office in ways that better reflect their values – and those include questions about how they would protect tenants, put more funding into unarmed crisis response, and defend against the Trump Administration’s attacks on immigrants and others in Los Angeles.
Hart said he is active in Democratic politics but wanted to diversify his political awareness, so he went to check out the Working Families Party, showing up for one meeting, and then the next.
“It was the first third party that was speaking from a sensible point of view, to me, where the goal seemed to be not to detonate the Democratic Party and to reset, but to keep them honest and make them better,” Hart said. He explained that this was important to him because he doesn’t view the creation of a viable, completely separate third party as feasible at this moment.
Hart was able to ask a question about trans rights bills Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed, during an endorsement meeting held in Glendale on Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025, four days after Tuesday’s election, at an office suite housing the National Union of Healthcare Workers, one of the groups that helps form the Working Families Party (one of the organizers of the interview event, a representative of that union, apologized for the mess in their office, saying they had just concluded a six-month strike by healthcare workers). In his question, Hart said he made many calls on bills he cared about, and he was “pissed” about some of the ones Newsom had vetoed, so he wanted to hear the candidate’s take on those bills.
Hart and other dues-paying members were participating in the endorsement interviews of candidates in the races for the Board of Equalization, the Los Angeles City Controller, and state Senate District 26. The candidates were asked about how they were going to protect tenants, and what they would do to fight back against the Trump Administration’s immigration raids. They also questioned candidates about what made their candidacy viable. The interviews were streamed in full to people who weren’t dues-paying, with people in the remote audience also able to submit questions. During the 2022 election cycle, the Working Families Party also invited the public to view similar screenings of candidates, including one done with then-mayoral candidate Karen Bass.
Most of the questions were from those on the Working Families Party’s Los Angeles regional chapter’s steering committee, which is made up of representatives sent by the organized labor and nonprofit advocacy groups that are part of the organization. A third group of people on the steering committees are elected, dues-paying members. Party representatives said the idea is to keep the number of people from those three pillars (labor, advocacy groups, and members) evenly distributed on the steering committees.
Some of the groups, which are mostly 501c4s (usually the political arms of nonprofits formed to do political advocacy work), involved in the local chapter include Community Coalition Action Fund, LA Forward, ACCE Action, and the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). The prominent labor group Unite Here joined the California Working Families Party at the state level, and regionally in the Bay Area, according to spokesperson Edward Wright.
Maria Briones, a member of ACCE and of Working Families Party, took up the role of asking questions about tenants during Saturday’s endorsement interview. She said she joined ACCE four years ago because she was fighting a landlord who was harassing her constantly for three years. At one point during the interviews, Briones added a question, asking one candidate how they would protect people who had lost their home, became homeless, and “are being criminalized and being punished for being homeless.”
Briones said she learned about the Working Families Party two or three years ago when she was invited by ACCE organizers to participate. “I'm very interested in having people [in office who] care about the community, not just about the money they can raise … not just about the politics that serve only the ones who have the money.”
During the interviews, someone from NUHW posed a question to Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who is running for re-election, that pointed to the large share of the LA city budget pie that the Los Angeles Police Department takes up. She asked how Mejia would fight to protect and even expand non-police departments that provide the services that “help keep workers and families going … given … the power of the Los Angeles Police Protective League,” the union that represents the 9,000 or so rank-and-file police officers. The police officers’ union is often viewed as a powerful political force that keeps political leaders from making much headway in shifting funds to non-police city services and programs.
Mejia said in the three years he’s been in office, he’s seen little action on the part of other elected officials to take action, despite the information his office puts out on the issue. So the pressure might need to come from outside, he said.
Mejia consistently hammers away at how much the police department’s spending and liability costs eat up LA’s budget, but he pointed to a lack of appetite for disagreement at City Hall. In the endorsement interview on Saturday, he pointed to how, even though the budget is something that the mayor and the City Council can veto each other on, the two sides still tend to move together. And officials inside City Hall feel little pressure to engage in debate. For now, in his role as the city’s controller, Mejia said, the most he feels he can really do is provide information and tools for people in Los Angeles to better understand what is going on.
For example, when Trump first launched his federal immigration raids in Los Angeles back in June, his office moved quickly to release information on the ballooning police overtime that the deployment of the LAPD was incurring, even as questions arose on whether the LAPD was helping or defending Los Angeles residents against the federal government’s actions.
His office also recently put out a report detailing how the LAPD’s mental health response seems to underutilize the county medical clinicians that are paired with armed police officers as part of what is known as the SMART (Systemwide Mental Assessment Response Team) program, which pre-dates the newer “unarmed crisis response” and “CIRCLE” pilot programs that send out unarmed teams.
Mejia also took a moment during his interview with the Working Families Party members to give a plug to the participatory budgeting tool he released during budget deliberations earlier this year.
He joked that his efforts have become more or less background noise for other elected officials at City Hall. “I say a lot in there,” Mejia said. “I say so much in there that they [at City Hall] don’t even listen to me anymore. Because they're like, ‘Oh, it’s just Kenneth yapping again. Oh, yeah, we’re overpaying again.’”
Yaquelin Perez, a member who was elected to the Working Families Party steering committee in Los Angeles, told The LA Reporter she can identify with the dynamic at LA City Hall that Mejia references. Perez, who worked for a city elected official and now works in a Los Angeles Unified School District board member’s office, said the difficulties in getting policies that matter for the underdog adopted at City Hall were what motivated her to participate with the Working Families Party.
Perez said she saw “how difficult it is to build that momentum internally because of the pressures that the council members have,” and she felt there needed to be a “pipeline” created for “electeds that are gonna be supporting those kinds of policies” that help poor people and others the party aims to represent.
She said she hopes the party can “support folks who want more affordable housing” and who want to create policies that create public safety by investing in “care for communities,” such as mental health support, unarmed crisis response teams, and social services for children and families – “basically [things] that help make communities feel actually safer.”
Wright, the spokesperson for the California Working Families Party, says they “do want to be a political home for people, and that's a home that's kind of an alternative to the Democratic Party, but we also organize within the Democratic Party.”
Wright explained that they “operate as a political party in every sense of the word … we do all of the things [the Democratic Party] does … we identify and recruit and train and uplift candidates for political office, we develop relationships with those candidates before they get elected, and then maintain that relationship after they get elected, and work to co-govern with the now more than 120 elected officials that were elected with our support across California.”
Wright, himself an elected official who was endorsed by the Working Families Party, said that politicians who identify with their party’s values have needed more of a community. “People feel like they've been out fighting the good fight, and now they really have kind of a home and a team and an organization they can build with,” he said.
Wright added there is a perception that California’s politics are “super, super progressive,” simply because the Democrats are the strongest here, he said. “But if you look at who wields power statewide, and who really influences what happens in Sacramento, for instance, and what makes it through the state capital, it's usually, you know, the Association of Realtors, it's the oil and gas lobby, it's these, like big money, corporate influences that do wield outsized power in California.”
“We're trying to move California from just being a blue state to being a really bold state,” Wright said. “We think that the people of California are actually a lot more progressive than our representatives. So we're just trying to create an alternative power structure to actually win that representation.”
Hector Sanchez, who is a representative from Community Coalition Action Fund and a member of the local steering committee, posed questions about immigration raids to the candidates on Saturday. He told The LA Reporter he has been watching the Working Families Party’s activities in New York for years, and sees a connection between New York and Los Angeles with both cities being “multicultural, multi-class.” He said he saw politicians in New York act in a more “emboldened” way, that was less constricted by the existing power structures, on policies that help workers and families.
It’s something that’s needed, Sanchez said, with the "political spectrum” shifted away over the years from “supporting working families, working poor folks,” even though those groups are the ones “most impacted by policies that are enacted by elected officials.”
“It's important that we uplift those values and center those values as that is what the majority of our community is,” Sanchez said. “We can't continue to serve the few when the majority are suffering.”