Watch your left, mayor!
WFP’s anti-Adams checklist
The leftist Working Families Party is pushing City Council candidates to fight Mayor Adams’ agenda by offering up endorsements if they back its pet causes such as defunding the police and bail reform.
The WFP also wants the incumbents and other candidates to embrace the tidal wave of migrants flooding the city, support more licensed injection sites for addicts and block charter schools.
“We’re committed to pushing back against Mayor Adams’ agenda of austerity politics, broken windows policing, and mass incarceration policies,” the WFP said in its endorsement questionnaire.
All 51 council seats are up for grabs in 2023 after redistricting to accommodate population changes in new decennial census count.
Campaigning for the June 27 primary elections will occur while negotiations over the city budget heat up, after Adams, a moderate Democrat, submitted his $102.7 billion executive spending plan Jan.
12, which calls for trims for nearly all agencies and services.
The WFP endorsed liberal Maya Wiley over Adams in the Democratic Party’s 2021 ranked-choice voting primary for mayor.
City Hall brushed off the anti-Adams questionnaire.
“A historic coalition of working people elected Mayor Adams to fight on their behalf, and that’s exactly what he has done over the last year in office — creating new jobs and providing more opportunities for young people, taking us out of COVID, and making our city safer,” mayoral spokesman Fabien Levy told The Post.
Play for the primaries
But the endorsement of the left-leaning third-party WFP could help council incumbents or insurgents in contested Democratic primaries. The WFP, like the anti-Adams Democratic Socialists of America, whose members include Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is known to provide foot soldiers and financial resources to help candidates it supports.
The WFP endorsement query asks questions such as, “Going forward, will you work with advocates — including Working Families Party members and affiliates
— as well as your colleagues to form a bloc and build a strategy towards a 2023 budget that decreases funding for the NYPD and instead increases funding for social services and programs? Please explain how.”
The questionnaire also asks candidates if they will back legislation to bar the NYPD from aggressively responding to nonviolent protests, to abolish the “Gang Database,” to remove the police from schools and to eliminate the vice squad that conducts prostitution raids on massage parlors.
The party also blames Adams for public backlash against the state’s cashless bail-reform law, and criticizes Adams’ handling of the migrant crisis and the “influx of thousands of people seeking
asylum.”