How the WFP held their NYC mayoral primary slate together

After progressives’ disappointing loss in the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary, Working Families Party co-directors Jasmine Gripper and Ana María Archila concocted a theory. That a diverse coalition of candidates with common values could come together to leverage ranked choice voting and refrain from attacking one another to win – even preventing a political Goliath from returning to office. 

In the year before the June 24 Democratic primary, the words “rank the slate” and “DREAM” took on great meaning. The progressive third party played a pivotal role in defeating former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, endorsing a slate of four candidates, brokering those relationships, keeping the group together and ultimately – about a month out from the primary, ranking rising star Zohran Mamdani, first.

There were doubts the strategy could work – even with incumbent Mayor Eric Adams opting to skip the Democratic primary to run in the general election as an independent. Cuomo led in the polls up until the end. Ultimately though, Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist, was ranked on nearly 60% of ballots – Cuomo meanwhile appeared on roughly 45%. 

City & State spoke with Gripper and Archila about how the Working Families Party organized their slate of candidates in the primary, the contentious behind-the-scenes battle to choose how to rank and the challenge of getting politicians to set their egos aside. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What was the mindset when you started organizing for the New York City Democratic mayoral primary in December 2023? None of the three WFP-endorsed mayoral candidates made it to the final round of ranked choice voting in 2021, stirring criticism that progressives failed to coalesce.

Archila: We started out wanting to learn from 2021 by asking ourselves questions like what happened with the voters? What happened with the candidates? What happened within the surrounding political ecosystem? And of course what’s the role of the party? Those questions drove a vigorous and collaborative process, helping us land on a theory: that what the Working Families Party needed to do was leverage ranked choice voting and create a strategy where different actors could plug in. Where the candidates understood their role, elected officials understood how to support and organizations knew how to hold the coalition together.

Were there any pivotal moments between starting to organize and the June 24 primary in which the strategy changed?

Archila: One key moment was immediately after the November presidential 2024 election when we saw Trump make gains across New York. This gave us really important information about the level of frustration and disillusion that working families were feeling within the Democratic Party and the political system at large. We saw communities long assumed to be Democrats looking elsewhere – either staying on the couch or even going towards President Donald Trump. Our takeaway was that people were looking for someone who will fight for them – someone who will speak to their daily concerns about the cost of living and will actually prove that they are willing to protect them. The initial questionnaire we put out to the mayoral candidates named those things: that they have to propose concrete solutions to the affordability crisis, they have to propose an approach to public safety that is humane and doesn’t just rely on policing, and they have to be willing to stand up to Trump. We also made it clear that the candidates needed to show they have a strategy that takes into account ranked choice voting and that they are willing to collaborate.

There were two major decision points in our endorsement process. Obviously the creation of the slate – identifying who was going to be on it and quickly building a relationship with Adrienne Adams and welcoming her to the slate. This was very important because part of our theory was we needed a slate that was ideologically, geographically and racially diverse. Adrienne was in many ways the representation of that commitment.

Secondly, the decision not to include Jessica Ramos on our initial slate showed discipline in the fact that we really meant it when we said campaigns needed to be strong to be part of our slate. 

And then she ended up endorsing former Gov. Andrew Cuomo a few weeks out from the primary.

Archila: Well, we kind of brought her in at the point of ranking candidates, which in hindsight, I think was a mistake on our side. We’d done so to recognize her trajectory, her record as a state senator. But I think by that time, she had already sort of made up her mind and was going to help Cuomo, which proved to be very damaging to her political record. (Assembly Member Jessica González-Rojas recently announced plans to launch a primary challenge against Ramos.) 

I remember there was a lot of pressure on WFP about how they would rank the slate of candidates. People wanted to know who would end up getting ranked No. 1 and whether there would even end up being a ranking at all. What did the ranking process look like? 

Gripper: Oh, we knew it was going to be complicated. Jokingly, I would describe it as torture. We understood that what we were trying to accomplish was keeping our side together and that doing so would become more difficult once we put out a ranking. What I love about the party, our people, is that it's a democratic process. There's a vote that happens from our New York City Regional Advisory Council. People in WFP have strong opinions. They were ready to make a decision, but those strong opinions weren't aligned. There were people who wanted us to have a strong ranking and knew exactly who one, two and three should be. Not everybody agreed on one, not everybody agreed on the two. And internally, you have to get 60% of the vote in order for it to move forward, so it was a very intense process. 

The night we made the ranking decision, we all met in a room. We took everyone's phones away because we were like, no one's leaking this. It was a Friday night and thank God the New York Knicks weren’t playing. We had to do multiple rounds of voting before we landed at 60%. 

Archila: We understood that the moment we ranked the slate, we’d lose leverage with everybody. That was one of the things that made it stressful. We knew the party was going to do two steps – the slate and the ranking. But we really wanted a third step, which would have been the cross-endorsement. We just understood that that was our final, most important intervention. We had laid expectations to help cross-endorsements between the No. 1 and No. 2 or as many of them as possible, but we knew that upon releasing our ranking, we were in a less good position to facilitate that. 

Ultimately though, I think all the work that we did to make a case for collaboration, solidarity and the importance of focusing on what people need instead of what the candidates wanted for themselves created an attractive center of gravity. Particularly in contrast with the candidate of the billionaires, Andrew Cuomo, who wanted to focus on his return, his record, his career and his ability to lead. We had a theory but politics is usually an activity that engages mostly competition and not collaboration. So I think there was a lot of skepticism that we could get candidates to collaborate, but our work showed that they too were committed to the goal of electing a mayor that would fight for people. Obviously the results on election night were incredible. We thought we could win, but we did not think we would win to that degree.

You mentioned how WFP was essentially playing peacemaker between all of these different politicians to try and keep them together throughout this long election cycle. Something fascinating that’s happening right now is we are sort of seeing the inverse of that in the general election. For those in opposition to Mamdani, there’s this desire to have Cuomo, Curtis Sliwa and Adams work together, but there is no commitment to a strategy at this point. What do you think about that?

Gripper: Our slate to the very end continued to say “rank the slate.” There was a lot of discipline around not attacking one another – forming distinctions, sure, but not throwing each other under the bus. The commitment we asked for was to attack Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams. Those were who we were competing against.

What you see right now on the flip side is there’s an attempt to say, “Let’s get one candidate,” but you’ve got Curtis Silwa throwing shade and has these great lines of attack. Eric Adams is constantly throwing Andrew Cuomo under the bus. He's like, “You want me to drop out? Why don't you drop out? You're the one that's already lost.” There is no discipline. There is no strategy. What we see on that side is ego. The ego is winning. What our candidates and our side committed to was not ego. And it was really hard – to say you want to be mayor of the largest city in the world does require you to have a degree of ego in yourself that you can do it. But what our side committed to, more than anything else, was that their love for the city trumped their own political ambition. They agreed that anyone on the slate would be a better mayor than Andrew Cuomo. That’s what drove the discipline and the commitment to each other. It allowed ego to get out of the way. 

Had the hope initially been for everyone in the slate to cross-endorse each other?

Archila: Not necessarily, because we knew that the first cross-endorsement would probably be the most weighty. We didn't know the mechanics of how to do it with the four of them equally. There's a way where all the candidates on our slate say, “I'm asking all my voters to put, let's say Zohran No. 1 on their ballot.” That's not reciprocal. We certainly encouraged the candidates to tell people to rank the slate, to put Zohran on your ballot. There are different gradations right? The comfort level of naming the number one was different for each candidate, though every single one of them ultimately fulfilled their commitments. 

Adrienne Adams came to our rally and said full chest, “I’m asking you not to rank Cuomo. I am asking you to rank the slate.” Zellnor Myrie spent the last bit of money that his campaign had on 

ads against Cuomo. Brad Lander did the full cross-endorsement and spent the rest of his money with ads against Cuomo. All of them demonstrated a level of generosity and real commitment to the shared goal of making sure that the billionaires wouldn't choose who gets to be nominated as the Democratic mayor. Ultimately, I think that voters are tired of the men that are just about themselves. They smell the bullshit. I think the results of the full rankings really showed that our approach was so much more attractive than Andrew Cuomo’s.

Do you wish that Adrienne Adams formally cross-endorsed someone? Did WFP try to negotiate that?

Gripper: At the end of the day, we had been talking to the other candidates for a year. They had been in a room with us multiple times leading up to even announcing they were going to run for mayor. With Adrienne, we asked. After her State of the City address, we said to her that she sounded very mayoral, asked if she was interested in running, and said we should talk. We pressed multiple times. 

The thing that also made her different from all the other candidates was that she had never been endorsed by the party before. She had no relationship with WFP. We were building that, we were like, “Hey, you've been standing up to Eric Adams, who's been the biggest opponent we have right now. Thank you for your leadership. We see you. We want to support you. We want to build with you.” The thing we were asking folks to do required deeper trust, deeper commitment. We were trying to do a lot in a really short period of time. She came in late. She didn’t have a previous relationship with the party and so honestly the fact that she did so much was quite impressive. I’m actually just really grateful that Adrienne came into the fold and did so as joyfully as she did. She emitted joy throughout our process. She remained her authentic self. I think all candidates need to do that at the end of the day.

Archila: I think she was the person that was most deeply rooted in Andrew Cuomo’s core base – sort of conservative, older Black voters. People knew she represents the constituencies that need to be peeled away from Cuomo the most. We had made a commitment by having her in our slate to introduce her and be ambassadors to a more progressive, younger base of voters and we were doing that. But I think there is an element where Black women are always expected to save the day in Democratic politics. I think she was very committed to not being used. That was a strong grounding for her. She was just like, “You know what I’m just gonna stand in my full power, my dignity, run my race and fulfill my commitments to the collective. That is how I finish strong.”