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The major parties in the United States are struggling to fulfill the most basic of party functions: developing cohesive policy programs that respond to voters’ needs, recruiting and supporting high-quality candidates, and delivering effective governance. The public is losing faith. Public trust in American democracy—and in political parties—has dropped sharply. The dim view of the two major political parties is shared across racial groups, catalyzing large shares of Americans to shed their party affiliations.

The instinct to eschew political parties is understandable. Parties have ceased prioritizing ties to communities, building communities of voters with shared ideas, and delivering for their supporters. Instead, they increasingly function as fundraising operations and short-term campaign machines.

Yet the good government Americans crave is not possible without political parties. Durable representation and governance require the collective action that only parties make possible. The question is not whether parties matter but, rather, what kind of parties we have—and what kind we need.

This report examines the experience of the Working Families Party (WFP) in New York to show that a better party model is possible. While many argue that party reform should focus on shoring up party leaders and their control over both nomination and campaign funds, an emerging literature stresses the need to prioritize strengthening political parties as organizations with ongoing ties to the voters and communities they represent. This literature argues that a hollowing out of our political parties has negatively impacted the tenor of our politics and undermined the parties’ incentives to develop a cohesive policy program that is responsive to the public and its concerns. Some, however, have reasonably questioned whether the face-to-face politics at the heart of such a reform strategy is possible in an age when politics is dominated by social media and AI bots rather than party clubs and bosses. This report suggests an answer in the affirmative.

The report shows that between 1998 and 2018, the WFP built an associational party: a political organization rooted in membership-based civic groups, structured to support ongoing participation, and capable of converting electoral leverage into legislative returns. The party embedded itself in existing organizations and communities, invested in a year-round staff, and created participatory nomination processes. Individual and institutional members gained access to elected officials normally reserved for big donors, but also a tangible experience of party membership and solidarity. Organizational investments, meanwhile, enabled the party to strategically recruit and cultivate candidates and to leverage the party’s visible electoral support on New York’s fusion ballot line to deliver significant policy returns for its working and middle-class voters.

The WFP does not fit the conventional concept of a party. It rarely runs independent candidates. It does not prioritize voter registration under its own label and often exerts influence through the Democratic primary. Nevertheless, as the report shows, the WFP exists not just as a political brand on the ballot line in New York but as a durable party organization anchored to its constituents. It recruits candidates, coordinates governing action, and continually struggles to hold its broad and diverse membership and coalition together. It also routinely engages in a politics of pragmatism, sacrificing ideological purity to get things done. It thus performs core party functions—the very areas in which the major parties are falling short.

The case of the WFP presents a blueprint for how parties, major or minor, might rebuild organizational capacity and reestablish the critical link between citizens and government.

This analysis draws on interviews with the WFP’s founding leaders, senior staff, affiliated union and community leaders, elected officials who sought or held the party’s endorsement, and activists involved in internal governance. The narrative that emerged from the interviews was triangulated with the public writings of its leaders and secondary sources. Like all case studies, the WFP experience is unique. And yet what it provides is a granular account of party-building that no large-scale quantitative study could. It offers an illustration of how an associational party can work in practice.

First, associational party-building is feasible under contemporary conditions. In an era often described as dominated by candidate-centered campaigns and mass digital media, the WFP constructed a party anchored in organized constituencies rather than donors or candidates.

Second, organizational design reinforced the WFP’s political capacity and power. The decision to draw civic associations into the party fold and adopt a dues-paying structure proved critical not just to the party’s capacity to scale but also its capacity to mediate the internal conflicts associated with a broad, diverse political coalition. Institutionalizing avenues for member participation created an imperfect, but still important, two-way channel between leadership and membership. Members played a meaningful role in shaping endorsements and placing candidates on the ballot even as final decision-making authority remained centralized.

Third, stable access to a fusion ballot line was indispensable to the WFP’s formation of a strong, effective party organization capable of delivering public goods and social benefits. Fusion voting—which allows minor parties to cross-nominate major party candidates—enabled the WFP to scale statewide, measure its support independently of the Democratic Party, and bargain with candidates without acting as a spoiler. The ballot line created a significant incentive for coalition members to remain associated with the party. The ballot line explains the significant advantages of party politics over coalition politics when it comes to mitigating the struggles associated with holding a socioeconomically broad and racially diverse coalition together. Because of its ballot line, the WFP was able to withstand Governor Andrew Cuomo’s political attacks.��

Finally, the WFP case challenges formalistic definitions of political parties as organizations. It shows how a political party is much more than the official party committees or what the state deems to be the party. But it is also more than a mere “party blob.” A party is a network of individuals and groups tied together by a ballot line and a shared governing project.

Much contemporary reform debate focuses on leadership authority, primary rules, campaign finance, or electoral design. These approaches often assume that party strength centers on formal leadership and fundraising capacity. The WFP case suggests that organizational capacity deserves equal attention.

For party leaders and reformers interested in strengthening parties, the WFP case offers several lessons. Investments in year-round state and local infrastructure, integration with membership-based civic organizations, and the institutionalization of participatory processes can improve how parties recruit candidates, manage coalitions, and exercise leverage. Where available, fusion voting creates space for minor parties to emerge and build power, filling gaps in representation left by major parties and modeling a healthier, associational style of politics. The strategy offers particular promise at the state and local level.

The WFP’s story demonstrates that hollow political parties, particularly the two that dominate our politics, can, if they choose, transform themselves into the party associations Americans deserve. It offers an analysis of what it takes to build a party with the kind of political power that leads Zohran Mamdani, a rising star in the Democratic Party, to vote on the WFP line, but also why those who dismiss the WFP as a mere faction are mistaken, and, missing the main story.