Working Families Party Endorses Yuh-Line Niou in Key House Race

Over the years, the Working Families Party has endorsed virtually each one of many main candidates in a hotly contested race for a newly configured House seat in the center of New York City: former Mayor Bill de Blasio, Representative Mondaire Jones, Assemblywoman Jo Anne Simon and Carlina Rivera, a metropolis councilwoman.

But when pressured to choose a candidate in the Aug. 23 major contest, the get together voted on Thursday to assist one in all its lesser-known former picks, Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, a rising progressive voice from Lower Manhattan.

“As working people in NY-10 face rising rents, higher costs, and a worsening climate crisis, we know Yuh-Line will put the needs of everyday New Yorkers before the whims of billionaires and special interests,” mentioned Sochie Nnaemeka, the director of the Working Families Party in New York, calling her a “steadfast” supporter of employees, tenants, immigrants and small companies.

The Working Families Party, a stalwart of New York’s institutional left, has seen its affect curbed in current years, notably in marquee races for mayor and governor. But in an unusually crowded House race — as many as 15 Democrats are competing for the nomination — taking part in out over simply a few months, the group and its ties might conceivably shift the tide towards Ms. Niou, 38, or at the very least maintain her candidacy viable towards better-known and better-funded rivals.

The Working Families Party has “always been my home,” Ms. Niou mentioned in a press release.

“Alongside WFP, I have fought to protect our community from the constant attacks of a far-right Republican Party, and stood up to the complacency of corporate Democrats who fail to recognize the crisis our country faces,” she mentioned. “Together, we will build a more just and fair democracy that works for all of us.”

Ms. Niou had been difficult a fellow Democrat for a State Senate seat when the brand new court-ordered congressional maps got here down and prompted her to shortly change course. The new House seat incorporates the entire territory she already represents in Albany, together with Chinatown, the Lower East Side and the Financial District.

Her liberal politics and Taiwanese American roots might additionally place her nicely in the district’s Brooklyn part, which incorporates prosperous brownstone communities and a large Asian inhabitants in Sunset Park.

In her marketing campaign for Congress, Ms. Niou has already sketched out an formidable, left-leaning agenda. She helps common, single-payer well being care; fellow New Yorker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal and the elimination of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Progressives look like splitting over the race. Several nationwide left-leaning teams have endorsed Mr. Jones, who had the Working Families Party’s assist in his present Westchester County district, however misplaced it when he determined to leap to Brooklyn to run in the open seat. And final week, Representative Nydia Velázquez, a number one voice on the left in New York City, backed Ms. Rivera, a fellow Latina.