The Working Families Party has been my political home since I embarked on a journey of peace, power, and progress for my community and our families. I ran for a seat in the House of Representatives from West Philadelphia in both 2022 and 2024, and in both cycles I came just a few dozen votes short of winning.
A few weeks ago, the Working Families Party endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for President. I am proud to be a Working Families Party Democrat and to be among the 95% of WFP members, divisions and party leaders who endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for President.
As a long-time community organizer, I find the way WFP is approaching this election—it calls it “Block and Build”—very appealing. The work is two-part: stopping far-right extremists from seizing power and building a political movement that truly serves the needs of working people, using a grassroots community approach.
One strategy to achieve this goal is to elect Vice President Harris as President and Tim Walz as Vice President.
Like Vice President Harris, I believe that a vision of purpose, power, and freedom is the foundation for empowering my community. That is why the decision to support Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for President and Vice President is so urgent.
We believe Vice President Harris has the opportunity to build on President Biden’s successes for working people and marginalized communities by restoring the expanded child tax credit, raising the corporate tax rate, and investing heavily in preschool, public and higher education, child care, and elder care. And this candidacy has the opportunity to open a new chapter in the United States’ disastrous support for the Israeli government’s human rights abuses in Gaza.
The WFP understands the danger and impact of a second Trump term. If he wins, he will double down on his attacks on working people, women’s rights, and real DEI – on communities like ours. His friends in the MAGA movement have put together a 900-page plan called “Project 2025“This calls for drastic tax cuts for big corporations and the super-rich, higher health care costs, a ban on abortion, and making it harder for workers to unionize to win better wages and benefits. Our communities deserve far better than this outdated and harmful agenda.
In the last presidential election campaign, the WFP said that defeating Trump was its “moral mission”, and it’s even more important today. Four years ago, WFP played a major role in organizing and mobilizing voters to defeat Trump across the country, but especially here in Pennsylvania.
This year, we are working to defeat Trump’s dangerous movement once and for all by activating WFP’s base: the multi-ethnic working class.
In the 2020 presidential campaign, the Working Families Party undertook a massive GOTV campaign across Pennsylvania, including its “Vote today, Philly“Voter mobilization campaign that contacted more than 80,000 voters in heavily Democratic areas and secured nearly 50,000 early votes. These were crucial for Joe Biden in Pennsylvania, a state he won by nearly 82,000 votes.
In 2022, WFP built one of the largest direct voter outreach programs in the state, focused on mobilizing voters in Philadelphia and communities of color. The party knocked on 400,000 doors and made more than a million phone calls to defeat Republican candidates for Senate and governor.
And in 2023, WFP led a massive campaign, knocking on 300,000 doors and spawning a multi-racial coalition in Philadelphia to elect City Council members Kendra Brooks and Nic O’Rourke, ending nearly a century of two-party rule on the City Council. Compared to previous cycles in 2023 WFP expanded its base in North, West and Northwest Philadelphiathereby increasing WFP’s profit margin in black-majority areas, low-income areas and areas with lower levels of education.
For 2024, that means WFP has a clear, direct role to play in this coming election. And we are prepared to invest time, effort and investment to make that a reality. The Working Families Party has expanded its base with the diverse voters Democrats need if they want to win Pennsylvania. The party is an ambassador committed to making progress, building trust and building coalitions with marginalized voters – who have expressed discontent, have been excluded from the political process, are less likely to vote or are attracted to third parties.
As an organization outside the two-party system, WFP has built a base of grassroots organizers who serve as trusted ambassadors for Vice President Harris and against Trump or third-party candidates. I joined Working Families because I saw it as a place to empower my village and community, which have too often been left out of the political discussion and decisions of those in power. We are building an independent political party that reflects a true vision for the multiracial working class and has historically underinvested in neighborhoods—not individual politicians or large corporate donors—and that message resonates with those very voters.
We are building coalitions and communities across race, gender, and generations. And as we continue to build our collective power, there will soon be a coalition of community-minded leaders, inspired and empowered by WFP, with the vision and mandate to establish a people-driven agenda for working families in city halls, state legislatures, and Washington, DC.
