Working Families Party endorses Elizabeth Warren after backing Bernie Sanders in 2016

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is working her way up the primary ladder.

After interviews with five major candidates, the labor-focused Working Families Party announced its endorsement of Warren on Monday. It's a major blow to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who got the party's backing in 2016, and to former Vice President Joe Biden, who the party has explicitly opposed.

In a ranked ballot vote of "tens of thousands" of WFP members, Warren dominated five other candidates by earning 60.9 percent support, per The New York Times. Sanders, meanwhile, ended up with 35.8 percent. It was a "larger than expected" victory for Warren, a party spokesperson said, considering that Sanders has praised the WFP as "the closest thing" to "my vision of democratic socialism." But the Working Families Party's national director didn't see this as a "splintering of the Democratic left," the Times writes, and instead he called on other progressive groups to raise their powerful voices early to dethrone Biden's spot at the top of the polls.

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Working Families interviewed five candidates it was considering for an endorsement: Warren, Sanders, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, and New York City Major Bill de Blasio.