Working Families Party meeting held in Federal Way

The Working Families Party (WFP) of South King County held their first meeting in Federal Way on Jan. 28.

WFP describes themselves as a “nondelusional third party” and has seen several wins in Washington as well as the high-profile election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City.

Locally, candidates endorsed and campaigns supported by WFP include recently elected Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay, Renton City Council member Michael Westgaard, Seattle City Council members Eddie Lin, Alexis Mercedes Rinck, and Dionne Foster, and Burien City Council members Hugo Garcia, Sarah Moore, Rocco DeVito and more.

The Federal Way meeting was held at the 320th Street library. It focused on sharing a background on WFP and updates on recent campaigns and wins, then provided an opportunity to connect and network.

“We believe that no matter where we come from or what our color, most of us want the same things. We want to earn enough to thrive, not just survive, and leave a better future for our kids. We want healthy food and clean water, safe neighborhoods and a safe world. We want to be free,” the WFP states on their website.

To achieve these goals, they describe how “the richest people on Earth — and the political insiders who serve them — have rigged the rules of our economy and our democracy to grab up wealth and power for themselves. They have defunded our schools, undermined community services, and stripped working people of the right to organize into unions. And then they blame poor people or people of different races or different places — aiming to divide us and distract us from what we have in common.”

Federal Way resident Cynthia Gorsuch was among the attendees.

“I went to the Working Families Party meeting last week out of a sense of despair and heartache. 2025 was a particularly heartbreaking year to witness the erosion of civil rights and basic human dignities for entire groups of people, often our most vulnerable community members,” Gorsuch told the Mirror after the meeting.

“I remain hopeful that I can meet like-minded community members who are taking concrete actions to make our neighborhood into the beloved community I still dream of: truly for all people, not one left behind, incarcerated, legislated out of existence or shot in the back by ICE while restrained on the ground with bullets bought with my tax dollars,” Gorsuch continued.

The answer of the WFP is to bring “regular people” together “across our differences to make a better future for us all,” and says it is a “multiracial party that fights for workers over bosses and people over the powerful.”

Clifford Cawthon told the Mirror that the group decided to meet in Federal Way this time for several reasons. One reason was because of the new access to transit from the light rail, while another was because they had heard there was interest in the party within the city.

They also met because “there have been efforts to address the use of Flock cameras recently” and knew there were groups that wanted to fight that.

After a discussion about what people want to see in King County, Cawthon summed up the conversation by describing the common thread that “something needs to be done, and particularly in our own backyard, we see a lot of need for change. We see a lot of need for stepping up, and we see people like ourselves just increasingly frustrated because we’re saying we want something better, and we’re not seeing that actually adapted in real time.”

Keelin Everly-Lang / the Mirror. Vanessa Clifford of the Working Families Party presents a history and updates of the organization’s activities at a meeting in Federal Way.