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

(Image credit: Getty Images)

published 16 September 2019

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.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Explore More

Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.

Subscribe to The Week

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox