Please Follow us on Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, Gettr, Truth Social, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram
The Working Families Party (WFP) sent its donors a victory lap email on Monday, celebrating "WFP champions" who won their primaries.
The Connecticut paragraph is telling.
Five Democratic primary winners, the email says, “dealt a direct blow to the legislature’s corporate-aligned ‘Moderate Caucus,’” the group that has spent years “watering down housing bills and blocking workers’ rights.”
Translation: the progressive wing just primaried the Democrats who still sometimes say no.
The Working Families Party was founded in Connecticut in 2002 by ACORN and public-sector unions, including AFSCME, the Communications Workers, and UFCW. It describes itself as an independent progressive organization fighting to “abolish inequalities grounded in hierarchies of race, patriarchy, and wealth.”
Nationally, members adopted a “Working Families Guarantee” this spring: government health care for all, a federal jobs program steered into union work, guaranteed low-cost childcare, 12 weeks of paid leave, and lower rents, mortgages, and utility bills, paid for by taxing the rich. In Connecticut the legislative list has long been the same shape: a public option, higher rates on high earners and capital gains, pressure on landlords, more money for the districts the party already runs, and hostility to charter schools, which it treats as a profit center rather than an exit from failing districts.
It almost never runs its own candidates in November. It cross-endorses Democrats, then uses that ballot line, and the primary, to drag the Democrat nominee left. Registered WFP voters in this state number in the hundreds. The leverage is the fusion line and the primary threat. Dan Malloy’s 2010 margin was smaller than the votes he took on the WFP line.
That is the model: a minor party with a major-party whip.
Maryam Khan won the 2nd Senate District primary with 41 percent, ahead of Ayana Taylor at 33 and Doug McCrory at 26. McCrory, a legislator since 2005 and the Senate Education Committee chair, finished third while a federal grand jury was already examining his role in steering state grants through Hartford nonprofits, including hundreds of thousands of dollars to businesses run by Sonserae Cicero.
Moise Carelus, a youth soccer coach, took the 31st House District in Glastonbury with 68 percent against Anthony DiLizia. Four-term incumbent Jill Barry never made that primary ballot. She lost the Democratic convention endorsement to Carelus earlier in the year. The email folds that into a morality play about a Democrat who “sided with Republicans to kill gun safety legislation.” What actually happened is that a sitting Democrat was removed before voters in the primary ever saw her name.
The other three were open seats. Angie Parkinson, an East Hartford town councilor and public-school staffer, won the 10th House primary 51–49. Toni Lombardi, also a public-school staffer, won the Milford House primary — the 118th, not the 18th the email lists — with 73 percent. Jack Fazzino won the open 13th Senate primary 63–37 over Jim Jinks for the seat Jan Hochadel is leaving.
In August the national party published “A Practical Handbook to Winning the Working Class,” a 2026 midterms edition it is now circulating to members. The document is a messaging manual for candidates, campaigners, and “current electeds,” built by Working Families Power with HIT Strategies and the Justice Research Collaborative. Its premise is that Trump won in 2024 because working-class voters moved away from the Democrats, and that the fix is not a broader Democrat Party. It is “Working Families Democrats.”
Tested side by side, the handbook says, the line “vote for Working Families Democrats” beat “vote for Democrats” by a significant margin. The scripts it tells candidates to run are the ones found in the victory-lap email: the economy is “rigged, on purpose,” billionaires pay a lower rate than a teacher or a nurse, monopolies write the laws, and “a new generation of Democrats” must reject corporate PAC money and “side with working families 100% of the time.” Cost of living is the top issue in every cluster they modeled. Data centers and “wars abroad” are the add-ons. One of the seven voter clusters is labeled “Anti Woke Traditionalist,” 17 percent of the working class, reactionary on social issues and open to populist economics. The recommended message for them is still “Rigged Rules.”
Three weeks earlier, the Connecticut WFP endorsed Ned Lamont and a long list of Democrats, 82 names in all. This is not a third party taking on the machine. It is the progressive wing moving the Overton window even further left.
But the WFP will not be talking to anyone they have already labeled as MAGA. In the handbook, that cluster is simply “out of reach,” and the recommended message is none.
Stay updated with the latest in the Constitution State with The CT Centinal
