The WFP is known for running independent progressive candidates that challenge corporate-friendly Democratic politics. Their vision is to not only win races but organize around local and municipal elections, building capacity for the left to make gains beyond Election Day. Their policy priorities include expanding workers’ rights, opposing right-to-work laws, raising the minimum wage, reforming drug scheduling and misdemeanor sentencing, and establishing paid family medical leave.

In local elections in nine states so far this year, dozens of candidates were elected running on that policy platform, boosted by WFP, alongside other groups they work with, like the Democratic Socialists of America and Run for Something, a political group founded after the 2016 election to support young progressives running for office at local and state levels.

In Chicago, the United Working Families, a Chicago affiliate of the WFP, helped reelect two incumbents and install seven new aldermen — including five democratic socialists, who were also backed by the Chicago DSA — to City Council, unseating corporate Democrats with close ties to the Chicago machine. They knocked on more than 500,000 doors and sent 230,000 texts to voters between September and the runoff in April. The upsets were a solid repudiation of former Mayor Rahm Emanuel and spoke to the group’s success in not only establishing and maintaining an active base in the city, but expanding it after helping push Emanuel into the city’s first mayoral runoff since it started holding nonpartisan elections in 2015.

In Wisconsin, a state largely considered the birthplace of voucher and charter schools in the U.S., WFP helped elect five new pro-public school candidates to the nine-member Milwaukee Public School Board. The party recruited four of those candidates to run. Incumbent Tony Baez, who they backed in 2017, also won reelection, building a crucial base of support for Tony Evers, a first-term, pro-public school Democratic governor, in the state’s largest city.

In Phoenix, Arizona, community organizer and migrant rights leader Carlos Garcia, who co-founded the WFP’s Maricopa County chapter, won a competitive City Council race to beat former council member and lobbyist Mike Johnson. Previously, Garcia helped lead the human rights organization Puente Arizona, which was instrumental in the takedown of former sheriff Joe Arpaio and led opposition to the state’s controversial SB 1070, the “show me your papers” law that endorsed racial profiling. There, the WFP helped to contact more than 15,000 working-class voters.

In Morgantown, West Virginia, where WFP launched its chapter just two years ago, every member of the party’s seven-candidate slate — which included five incumbents, one write-in candidate, and a newcomer against a former council member — was elected to City Council in April.

The party’s Texas chapter helped elect former City Council Member Stephen Mason as mayor of Cedar Hill; Mason is the city’s first black mayor. The WFP also backed three successful candidates for city councils in Lancaster, DeSoto, and Balch Springs.

In Pennsylvania, the state’s WFP chapter backed Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney’s reelection bid, and supported Gym, the Democratic City Council member who endorsed Brooks, and insurgent Democratic candidate Isaiah Thomas, who is running for City Council, in their primary races. Monica Taylor, who the party backed in a May primary, will head to the general election for Delaware County Council in November.

The Oregon WFP helped elect a total of 28 candidates across five counties in Oregon. They include 24 pro-public school officials who are now serving on school and community college boards, as well as four Parks and Recreation board members in Willamalane and Tualatin Hills. Ahead of the May municipal election, the state chapter conducted candidate training and helped coordinate staff and volunteers who knocked on 1,500 doors and sent 2,500 text messages.

In Denver, Colorado, five of six people who ran on the WFP slate in June were elected to City Council. Among them is Candi CdeBaca, the Council’s first ever democratic socialist, who was also backed by the DSA. The social worker and activist, who was connected to WFP through one of their weekend candidate trainings, defeated a two-term incumbent who was previously the top fundraiser in one of the city’s most expensive districts. She has already made an impact: This summer, she led the Council in opposing a total of $10.6 million in contracts from two private prison companies seeking to run halfway houses for the city.

What WFP is demonstrating through its chosen candidates, said Maurice Mitchell, the group’s national director, is that “in every single region of the country, we’re running on a brazenly, unapologetic, progressive agenda, with grassroots folks who represent their communities, and are running grassroots volunteer-focused and volunteer-powered campaigns. And they’re winning.”

Through candidate trainings and workshops, WFP works hand in hand with established and upcoming leaders in communities that already have strong organizing roots but might lack the resources to effectively translate that power into office.

This type of work couldn’t be done without the trust WFP has cultivated in communities where it has chapters, said Abdullah Younus, DSA National Political Committee member and former co-chair of NYC-DSA. The party “has a lot of institutional knowledge, holds a lot of relationships, and can provide infrastructure and rigor that was otherwise unattainable for local grassroots groups previously — or maybe not attainable at the same level as it can be,” he said.

They work in conjunction with local grassroots groups as well as national political and activist organizations, like DSA; Run For Something; Sister District, which provides services like fundraising, canvassing, and phone banking for candidates running in state legislatures controlling redistricting in 2021; and Forward Majority, which focuses on flipping state legislatures in areas with heavy gerrymandering and evidence of voter suppression.

In Phoenix, for example, WFP worked with the Campaign for Better Neighborhoods, a group that organizes around local races on issues like education and government accountability, to contact 15,000 voters before Garcia’s May runoff election. The candidate, who came to the U.S. from Mexico at age 5, already had deep ties in the community. He had a reputation as a respected and effective activist through his work with Puente, the grassroots human rights organization that challenged Arpaio’s policing.

The goal, in some ways, is to fill in for a Democratic Party that now more or less ignores state and local elections, and even more so municipal elections, which are largely nonpartisan and therefore off-limits for the national party. “What we’re doing is stuff that at one time the Democratic Party did,” Andy Cockburn, who chairs the party’s West Virginia chapter, said. “Over the last 20 years or so, that has completely disappeared here. The state party in the November election — the only campaign they did was a series of mailers all for Joe Manchin for Senate.”

But the objective, also, is to make room in politics for people who are often neglected by a political system that is too often beholden to corporate dollars.

“We’re interested in building institutions and building infrastructure, before, during, and after,” Mitchell said. “So after an election, even in a scenario where there’s a loss, because of the way that we conducted the election, we surfaced grassroots leaders who otherwise wouldn’t be involved in politics.”