I hold this truth to be self-evident:
The UFT leadership continues to be in bed with the establishment political machine that often is not aligned to our values and not held accountable for making decisions that affect us. The uft is the democratic establishment and Mulgrew will try very hard to keep the Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Grace Meng, Hilary Clinton, Randi weingarten etc etc etc power going along with his own.
Sunday, June 28, 2026
Before I get into thoughts on the recent election, tonight is a Fix Retiree Benefits Zoom. Stop by and check it out. The goal is to do one hour from 7-8 but it might run a bit longer. I need to write a lot more on what's going on in the retiree chapter and might get a chance at the zoom tonight.
I'm about to head out to a DSA celebratory beach party that will last all day.
Tuesday I speculated on the election outcome. I expected a closer race in 7 where Reynoso had the advantage of the Nydia Vazquez and his own machines, which turned out to be barely machines at all, a sign of the deterioration of the Dem Party generally and how non-competitive it has been nationally. National and local media were going nuts in shock over the big 3 wins by Mamdani as all losing candidates were backed by the Dem machine led by Hakeem Jeffries. And if Mamdani had allowed Chi Ossi to primary him, guess what?
Jeffries will face a primary next time and if he was smart he would take a run for Chuck's Senate seat, though DSA will probably go for that, though I'm not sure there is enough DSA muscle to win a state race. Or Jeffries might just do a turn around if he's a good politician. But DSA should also keep its discipline and talk of a 2028 candidate is fantasy at this point, though Ro Khana is beginning to look like an acceptable candidate along the lines of Brad Lander has been. Not as left but not center.
It was a smashing victory for DSA which also elected 16 members at the state level and is spreading outside NY.
DSA Dominates Albany Elections Despite Super PAC Deluge: The DSA made gains in New York despite super PACs spending $9.6 million in state legislative races — nearly five times the total from 2024... ny focus
Note this Jacobin headline:
Socialists Won Big in NYC Last Night and Aren't Done ...
Reynoso was more embedded in traditional backroom political dealmaking and backed by the low-expectations wing of the labor movement, in which politics is mostly a matter of making safe bets on electing and reelecting traditional corporate Democrats — even in cities and neighborhoods where it’s clear that the horizons have shifted in a more expansive pro-worker direction. That approach to politics was decisively defeated.
Center Dems don't seem to have enough of a ground game left, relying on endorsements and ads but not enough of a GOTV game.
I would apply the same idea to UFT elections where the only way to defeat Unity is with a ground game, which the oppo has never developed.
I've been a fringe member of DSA for about 8 years even when I disagree with a bunch of their positions but love the energy and organizing ability. I attended South Brooklyn branch meetings until the pandemic. They live up to the democratic label with extreme democracy at local levels. I get to vote on so many issues and leaders. Recently I've hooked up with a group of DSA in Rockaway and we canvased for Mamdani. They are even having an all day beach party in Rockaway today.
Tuesday was also a smashing loss for the UFT/Unity leadership. Look at this graphic:
An ABCer on FB commented:
Michael Mulgrew and the UFT leadership not only once again backed a losing political candidate, they did so:a) when every single poll had him behind the candidate that ultimately won — at one point Goldman was polling nearly *thirty points* behind Lander, andb) without a vote from the Delegate Assembly, the only body in the UFT with the authority to make political endorsements (unless the Delegate Assembly votes to kick the decision to the Executive Board, which to be clear in this instance they didn’t)
Three out of four lost, though I liked the Bores endorsement which was interesting since the UFT endorsed Micah Lasher last time for the state assembly, as I wrote about a year ago:
Another Unity/UFT Sellout - Backs Micah Lasher, Bloomberg pro Tier 6, Charter School, Student First Acolyte - for State Assembly
What happened I wonder for them to abandon Lasher? Maybe the Tier 6 issue stuck?
Mulgrew endorsed every one of the three losing Congressional candidates. The UFT endorsed Goldman over Lander without an endorsement vote from the Delegate Assembly while Mulgrew lied, claiming NYSUT endorsed Goldman. Which means someone somewhere in the union (guess who?) made a decision to undemocratically exercise their political prerogative over the members. Doing this not only violated the UFT constitution, but more importantly it’s flat-out wrong and selfish, and made all the more so when you consider that whoever this presumed "expert" was backed a candidate that lost by nearly 30%.
The union leadership continues to be in bed with the establishment political machine that often is not aligned to our values or not held accountable for making decisions that affect us.
DSA has been a hot item in the mainstream press with the emphasis on the growing threat to the Democratic Party by both the right and the so-called "moderate" Dems, which is really corporate/AIPAC friendly. James Carville positively lost it, joining Trump in seeing a threat to the nation by DSA wins.
Think of the Corp Dems calls for DSA to stay out of the Dem Party and form their own party. The James Carville off the wall comments. Imagine they replaced the Green Party in a much more effective manner and ran a third party presidential candidate, thus making the Dems a sure loser. Oh the howls of protest for them doing exactly what they are being told to do if they did not be part of the big tent?
Most Dems still say the party is big-tent even with the extreme views expressed by some winning candidates. Now never forget that our own beloved UFT/Unity leadership are very much part of the anti-left Dem Party going back to the Shanker roots of supporting the Vietnam War. The Mamdani endorsement was forced on them by the stark choice of him or Cuomo - and the clear direction of the momentum. But make no mistake, the UFT fundamentally is where it was politically in the Shanker years.
The UFT leadership engaged in a vicious red-baiting attack on DSA as recently as January, 2025:
How different is this from the Trump comments?
I blogged about that post:
DA Chaos - Unity Goes Red-Scare Wilding In Dual Attacks on MORE Caucus and Arise - And also Aims Dart at Marianne
I noted:
A strong candidate for mayor, Zohran Mamdani is in DSA. Imagine the UFT, given a choice between Cuomo and Mamdani, will back Cuomo because of their 65 year history of vicious anti-communism and red-baiting.
Well I was wrong on that as it was clear Cuomo was going down and give Mulgrew credit for hopping on board with a winner, though it may not help much in upcoming contract negotiations.
The Unity crowd toned down their critiques of MORE and ARISE with the rise of ABC, a big tent group that both ARISE components and Unity see as a bigger threat, as it proved in the election with their 32% compared to the ARISE 14%.
How come the DSA crowd centered in the 14-year old MORE Caucus has failed to develop a ground game in the UFT, as evidenced by the 14% vote in the 2025 election for the ARISE slate? Remember, the other two caucuses in ARISE are retiree RA and the mostly retiree New Action, so MORE was expected to carry the load and clearly failed. The failure of DSA people in the UFT compared to the success of DSA on the larger playing field is worth exploring in a follow-up but here's my initial view: MORE began in 2011 as a big-tent operation but post-2016, the DSA/ISO (now defunct) leadership decided to narrow the tent with a move to the left that pushed out even fellow-leftists, many of whom have drifted to ABC.
One of the keys has been the hemorrhaging of MORE members who leave teaching or jump out of the intensity of the regular classroom. Or jump from school to school. I came into my new school after 3 years of teaching when I got my full appointment as the resident big mouth radical and turned many people off. It took me 5 years to begin to gain the trust of my colleagues and yes, I modified my big mouth radicalism. I heard Hasan Piker last week make the point that newly organized often go over the top and it takes years to learn to temper things as you work with people not of your views.
The internal big tent vs narrow tent struggle in MORE was between the older lefty ICE people and the younger International Socialists who at one point according to internal memos, considered giving up on the MORE project until they came up with the idea of going to DSA to recruit teachers into MORE - and they were so successful they were able to dominate by 2018 and push the ICE people out, this cementing MORE as a hard left caucus, which meant they could never win a UFT election on their own, as they found out when they ran alone in the 2019 election, thus forcing them into alliances with United for Change in 2022 and ARISE in 2025, with increasing alienation from a strong minority that either doesn't want to run in elections or doesn't want to compromise with other groups that don't adhere to their rigid ideology.
Big tent vs narrow tent
Unlike the DSA in the big tent Dem Party, the DSA faction in MORE believes the caucus must remain small tent pure. I contend that if the original MORE as big tent that included people from ICE had been adhered to, MORE would be a contender. Let me give you one example of a hard-core MOREista I was friendly with a few years ago. She texted me asking where I stood on Israel about a year and a half ago and I replied I was still working things out due to my growing up in the post-holocaust era. I was Done. Ghosted.
The DSA has proven it can be a major force on all levels of politics with a big-tent approach in the Dem party and internally there is some room for a variety of caucuses to operate. Is that a perfect solution to democracy? I had offered that type of idea at the very first meeting of MORE -- let ideas compete in an open way. But that's not the way of ideologues.
In my final days in MORE I proposed they were more of a club or advocacy group in the UFT, which I was fine with - just not a caucus in UFT elections and I have been proven right. My advice is to not run as a caucus in UFT elections but to be open to whatever members who do want to be involved do so. ABC would be the perfect place for them to land. If MORE followed my advice, ARISE would be dead, it it already hasn't died and we would have one group facing Unity head on, with an actual chance to win in 2028. But don't expect practicality to win out.
Afterburn
The New Socialist Revolution: Zohran Mamdani's remarkable night
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