Maurice Mitchell (62:24)
Well, hey, I'm just a working class guy who grew up outside of New York City with some humble parents that you know. My mom is a retired nurse. My dad is an electrician who worked underneath trains. And I learned the value of hard work, of unions, and I wanted to fight for people like my parents. And so I got involved in organizing. I got involved in organizing, grassroots organizing, fighting for everyday people in really small schools where, like in Wyandanch, in Long island, where the graduation rate was like 36%. Right? And so we had to organize parents and teachers and fight, and that's how I got involved in electoral organizing is on the school board level. Right. And I saw what could happen when people come together around elections. Right. It's not just about the, you know, choose a sports team, red or blue. These are people's lives. These are people's dignities. And elections and politics often deal with things that are most personal and the deepest to us. And when we're able to unlock grassroots energy, we could change the world. I saw it in Ferguson. I was on the ground in Ferguson. I saw it in the movement for black lives, and I see it today. And what I see is there's a set of people in the Republican Party, and the Republican Party has one master, that crazy guy that we heard, and billionaires. Right. But what people also see is that the Democratic Party has two masters, sometimes the people, but often they're a set of oligarchs. And people are so hungry for something else. And the Working Families Party is designed to be that something else. The Working Families party started around 26, 27 years ago during a time when the Democratic Party moved, like, lurched towards Wall street. And they supported the free trade agreements that led to so many working people no longer having viable careers, no longer being able to support their families, having all of their jobs offshore. They supported the 94 crime bill, which led to a lot of people just getting churned into the criminal legal system. They supported, quote, unquote, welfare reform, which made it harder for people who really needed those services to get those services. And what people said at the time was that you will lose a generation of working people. And those folks were really smug. They were like, well, where are they going to go? They're not going to go to the country club. Republican. Right. Well, Fast forward to 2024. So many working people of all races listened to Donald Trump and heard his fake populism and heard at least somebody that acknowledged their pain, acknowledged what they were seeing and feeling, which is the system's not working for me. Right. What we saw on Tuesday was Zoram Hamdani, chair, a authentic populism. Yeah, Right. That tells a true story about, yes, the system isn't working for you. Yes. There's a set of elites, these billionaires, by the way, like a dozen of them spent like, I don't know, $26 million, $40 million, $40 million against Zora Mamdani and against our coalition. And they lost. And they lost because Zora Mamdani wasn't speaking the full populism of Donald Trump, seeking a populism of togetherness, of solidarity, a Populism that includes everybody. And the Working Families Party has been designed since back then to build that multiracial working class sort of solidarity of just what I like to call regular schmegular people. Right. All of these labels. Democrat, Republican, progressive, Democratic, socialist, conservative. We're just the everyday people who are trying to figure out how things. How to get by, how to make things affordable. And we all kind of have this sense that there's a set of people who are making it harder for us to do this. And most people are clocking the fact that, yes, the Republicans are crazy, but the Democrats are weak. And if my choice is between weak and crazy, those aren't choices I like. So that's why so many people, that's why 90 million people didn't turn out. But that's also why we had the largest turnout in New York City since the 50s, I think. Right. Because people are hungry. People do want to believe. They just need something to believe in and they need a politics. It's just not about fighting the horrible stuff. And a lot of people agree what Trump is doing is horrible. They want something to fight for. And so the Working Families Party, we had close to 700 people on the ballot on Tuesday, so. So I'm really excited about Zoran, but we flipped the mayor's seat in Ohio, in Dayton, Ohio. We won elections in Albany, in Syracuse, in Buffalo. Right. What's happening is happening all around the country. And people are trying to exceptionalize what happened with Zoran because he is an exceptional communicator, he is an exceptional leader. But I think some of those people are actually bad faith people. They want to believe that this is something that only could happen in New York. It's only happening because Zoran is such a sensation online and such a great communicator. And I'm like, no, no, no. What's taking place is actually happening everywhere. You know, we endorsed a black woman running statewide in red Georgia, in purple Georgia, and she won. And the reason why she won, it was like it was Public Service Commission. Right. That they deal with utilities. People's utilities are skyrocketing because the Republican Party has colluded with the elites in the utilities and the extractive oil and gas industry. Right. That collusion is a problem for all people in Georgia.
