It’s been over a week since Democrats showed up to the polls and secured big wins in places like Virginia, Maine, and New York City. Turnout—especially in the Big Apple—was high.

Was it the messaging of affordability that drove turnout… or was it raging against the Trump Administration?

Detroiter Branden Snyder is the state director for the Working Families Party.

Snyder talked with WDET’s Russ McNamara. 

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.

Russ McNamara, WDET: What is the platform for the Working Families Party?

Branden Snyder, Working Families Party: The Working Families Party, or WFP, is a national organization that is working to build political power for the multi racial working class. And so in some states, like in New York, it’s an actual party, where it has a party line where people are able to vote for candidates who are WFP endorsed candidates, as well as candidates who are Democrats, through the system that’s called fusion voting.

In states like Michigan and Ohio and Wisconsin, the Working Families Party is a community labor coalition where we take action in primary elections, and in non-partisan city council races like we just had last week. And so what we’re trying to build here in Michigan is a political system that works for the many and not the few, and that means being able to recruit and advocate for candidates who are working for the many and not the few, working on economic justice and social justice issues, and being able to actually champion them both from the starting point all the way to the finish line.

RM: The WFP endorsed two candidates: Gabriela Santiago-Romero and Denzel McCampbell. Both were elected to Detroit City Council. What made them worthy of the endorsement?

BS: Well, a number of things. I think. The first is that both Gabby and Denzel are community leaders. Gabby and Denzel, come from working class households and working class communities. I think the things that may us champion them for is their pledge to not take corporate corporate PAC dollars to their commitment to being able to pass economic justice and affordability policy at the city level.

And then [they have] a commitment to co-govern. So co-governance is really this fancy sort of political science term of this idea that we want to govern with the community – the idea that they will take direction and leadership from community organizations, from regular people, and not just billionaires and party elites. They are the ones who…actually want to be able to engage with working class people, working class communities, community organizations, labor unions, etc. So those issues and those stances and values really set them to the top of the heap for us.

And I think the other thing that we want to do was we wanted to be able to throw a punch at what we call corporate Democrats.

RM: Should I read too much into there not being an endorsement in the mayor’s race?

BS: No. In my in my previous life, I was the executive director of Detroit Action, which is a community organization that works really closely with [now mayor-elect] Sheffield on housing issues. We worked to be able to help pass and promote the people’s agenda for Detroit City Charter commission in 2021. I was on the industry standards board for arena workers with Mary Sheffield over this past year to be able to produce, produce policy for arena workers. So our endorsement didn’t reflect policy or values.

Her win is actually a historic coalition between community, labor, and faith.

RM: Zoran Mamdani, the mayor elect of New York City, has drawn a lot of attention for his Muslim faith, but maybe even more than that, was his platform is steadfastly to the left of the current Democratic Party mainstream. Is this a one off thing, or is there a distinct leftward turn in democratic politics?

BS: We’ve been working for years to build leftward momentum in Democratic politics. Part of the Working Families Party is in for lack of a better term, to pull the party towards the left and actually using that energy and that gravity to bring in folks who are MAGA voters, working class people who are feeling the impacts of SNAP cuts or the impacts of the government shutdown. So we’ve been doing a lot of work to bring in people into this sort of larger coalition that can actually win on economic justice. I think that Mandami is win in New York. It’s also a win for economic justice.

RM: There seems to be a disconnect right now between the people that showed up at the polls last Tuesday and then what happened over the weekend, where eight Democratic senators broke away from the party to end the shutdown. That move pissed a lot of people off in Democratic circles. Does the Democratic Party have an authenticity problem?

BS: I think there needs to be a changing of the guard. There’s a lot of millennials and Gen Z and even some Gen Xers who’ve been waiting in the wings to be able to showcase and be able to display power, and be able to lead from the front and lead with community.

There’s also a real desire to have candidates who will fight for people and actually fight for policy and on values.

Shutting down the federal government was a matter of principle for U.S. Senate Democrats back in October.

Tens of thousands of federal workers were furloughed. Air traffic controllers were forced to work without pay. The Trump Administration fought in court to reduce SNAP food assistance.

Tax credits tied to plans through the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, were set to expire, and without them premiums were set to skyrocket. That was unacceptable to most Democrats, who wanted to leverage the shutdown to extend healthcare subsidies.

This week, seven Democrats and one independent changed their strategy and voted to end the shutdown.

They received only a promise of a vote on the ACA tax credits and assurances that federal workers fired by the Trump Administration would be rehired.

In the meantime, people are receiving notice that their premiums are going up. In Michigan, insurers are ending coverage for people through Obamacare. That could leave as many as 200,000 people in the state without coverage.

Michigan U.S. Senator Gary Peters voted to keep the government closed. He thinks it’s going to get worse unless those ACA tax credits are restored.

“Nationally, well over 20 million people are seeing large increases in their health care estimates, somewhere around 10 million will lose their health care coverage as a result,” Peters said.

Peters says he would like the Democrats who capitulated and voted to end the shutdown to speak for themselves.

“I know that they were focused on working on health care costs, but we’re also concerned about the cost of the shutdown itself,” Peters said. “Certainly government employees who had been going without a check for quite some time, which puts a real strain on our families.”

A failure of leadership?

Many Democratic voters—and some Democratic politicians—view the ending of the shutdown as a betrayal of trust and the latest instance where the party refuses to follow through on a promise.

Peters disagrees this was a failure of leadership.

“We don’t work for Chuck Schumer,” Peters said. “Every Senator represents the people in their state. I work for the people in Michigan, and my colleagues around the country work for the people in their individual states, and they have to ultimately do what they think is right.”

The Epstein emails

The White House is scrambling following the release of a new batch of emails to and from rapist and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The emails seem to implicate that President Donald Trump was aware of Epstein’s crimes, and that the president maintained a relationship with the disgraced financier well into his first term in office.

Epstein died in federal custody in 2019.

After promising on the campaign trail to release all the evidence collected in Epstein’s prosecution, the Trump Administration has backed off that pledge.

Peters says the American public needs to see all of the documents.

“Bottom line, I think there’s enough information out now that raises so many questions that have to be answered that we need to see the release of all of the documents,” Peters said.

Earlier this year, the Trump Administration moved Epstein co-conspirator Ghislane Maxwell to a minimum-security prison.

The national Democratic party is weighing proposals behind-the-scenes that could give Michigan a leading role in the 2028 presidential nominating process

The party is deciding which state will hold the first presidential primary election.

Iowa and New Hampshire had long been the initial states to host a Democratic primary or caucus. That changed in recent years.

Former President Biden pushed to set South Carolina as the first state to hold a Democratic primary in the last election cycle, though New Hampshire jumped ahead of it with an unsanctioned contest.

Now those states and Iowa are jockeying again for the pole primary position, along with Michigan and Nevada.

Michigan Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Dingell is part of a committee determining the 2028 primary order.

Dingell says the decision will impact the presidential candidates’ policy priorities.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length

U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell: The state that goes first is the state that gets a lot of attention. The candidates spend a lot of time there. The press spends a lot of time there. The country knows what the issues are there. But, unfortunately, some of the states that have gone first do not reflect the diversity of the country. They don’t have solid organized labor groups that, quite frankly, people have thought of traditionally as Democratic-leaning, but are not always these days Candidates should have to talk directly to the people about the issues that are going to determine the election in November.

Quinn Klinefelter, WDET News: When you’re looking at it from that point of view, is Michigan a good choice to go first?

DD: I refuse to say that Michigan should go first. I don’t think any state should have a lock on going first. I think states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, purple battleground states that determine the outcome of what happens in November, should be part of the early process. Candidates should have to talk about the issues that are gonna determine the outcome in November.

QK: When you look at states like Michigan that have a large population, some people worry that they are too big for candidates to connect on the ground with many individual voters. They think those states favor candidates who have a lot of money to buy commercials. Do you think that’s a legitimate criticism, not just of Michigan, but of any larger state?

DD: I think that candidates are gonna have to be on the ground in larger states as well as they’re gonna have to be in the smaller states. And these larger states actually are dealing with the kind of issues that determine the outcome in November. Candidates should have to appear there. Work there. Win there. And part of that is raising money. That’s part of winning, to be perfectly frank. But I also think it’s more important to have “retail” politics. Going to union halls, talking to working men and women, hearing what they think, getting into senior centers, getting into veteran’s halls. Many of these purple states have a whole lot of different stakeholders that need to be heard from. And the candidates need to be talking with them about how they feel about the issues.

QK: I’ve heard some Democrats raise concerns about certain states, including Michigan, where they fear the party could become divided right off the bat over the situation in Gaza. States where there might be a large Arab or Jewish population. States that saw the rise of the “Abandon Harris” or “Abandon Biden” movements in the last presidential election over their support for Israel. Do you think there’s any legitimacy to that criticism?

DD: First of all, I think that while we do have a significant Muslim population and a significant Jewish population in Michigan, this is an issue that matters around the country. And I think it is better to talk about those issues early than to be losing in November and talking about it for the first time. I think it’s very important they be part of the early discussion.

QK: You were saying in 2016, when people thought that Hillary Clinton had a pretty good lead over then-candidate Donald Trump, that you thought Trump was actually making many more inroads among working-class people than was shown in polling. You predicted he had a good shot at winning in Michigan and elsewhere. When you look at what Democrats need to do now, both in the primary process and going forward, period, do you think your party needs to strengthen those kinds of “working-class” connections more than they are currently?

DD: Yes. That’s why I think that they have to campaign in states where those groups matter and where the stakeholders matter. I knew Hillary was gonna lose before that November election because I was in those union halls. Too many candidates don’t walk into a union hall. They need to.