Who Will The UFT Endorse And Why Should Anyone Care?

NY Teacher reports the UFT plans an endorsement in the mayoral primary:

“We are endorsing,” President Michael Mulgrew announced after the vote. He said that delegates will debate at their May meeting which candidate to back and will vote on their final choice at the Delegate Assembly in June. In the meantime, delegates and chapter leaders should discuss with members which candidates they prefer.

Mulgrew kicked off the debate by saying that the UFT could follow one of four paths in the mayoral race: endorse in the primary, wait to endorse in the likely event of a runoff between the top two primary vote-getters, endorse only in the general election, or don’t endorse at all.

One challenge to endorsing a primary candidate is that UFT members have different views at this point on who they want to win, Mulgrew said. The range of opinion is evident from straw polls he has taken of members at school visits.

“We have an extremely diverse union,” Mulgrew said.

That diversity of views on candidates was on the mind of some delegates who urged against endorsing in the primary.

I'm going to go out on a bit of a limb here and make a prediction about this endorsement.

It won't mean squat.

What makes the UFT leadership, who were just re-elected by more retirees who live in Florida than active teachers who live in the New York area, think the endorsement of the union will mean much in an election?

If this union actually tried to engage members on a consistent basis, so that rank-and-file members actually took part in union-generated activities, I'd say maybe a UFT endorsement might matter.

But this union leadership has actively worked to create a disengaged rank-and-file membership that is isolated from the leadership, kept in the dark about policy decisions and issues and discouraged again and again from taking an active role in the union (unless that active role is one already prescribed by the Unity caucus.)

Hell, when the UFT calls for members to come down and join protests at City Hall with other unions, they can only muster a few hundred people.

The UFT election turnout was an abysmal low, with just 25% of UFT members returning their ballots - only 18% were working teachers.

And back in 2001, when the UFT endorsed three times, the candidate they endorsed lost every time.

The UFT leadership engages in extreme hubris thinking many people outside of their own Unity/New Action cronies care about what they think or who they will endorse in an upcoming election.

In the end, the only benefits a candidate gets from a UFT endorsement are a little extra press (which could hurt as much as help), a minor league GOTV campaign (the UFT can't even get its members to vote in its own elections) and a bit of money.

Not all that earth-shattering a benefit, this UFT endorsement, in my opinion.

In any case, I am going to go out on a limb and say that the UFT endorses Bill Thompson for mayor.

Christine Quinn's candidacy is floundering, de Blasio has not managed to take off yet, Liu is terminally wounded by the campaign finance fraud trial, and Weiner is running simply to assuage his own ego, not actually be mayor.

Given the parameters of the race so far, I think Thompson make the most sense from the UFT leadership's perspective.

Thompson has made noises that he will run the school system differently than Bloomberg, has said he will put a halt to school co-locations and curtail closures, and has indicated that he will be much more open to parent and teacher input into how the system is run.

Because of those policy stances, I suspect Thompson will be the candidate the UFT will endorse.

They will figure that he's raising more than enough cash to be a serious candidate with a good shot to win and they will figure they can work with him once he is elected.

That Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch is helping to run his campaign, that Al D'amato is raising funds for him, that Thompson has made a bundle of money on Wall Street in the years since he left public office, are all red flags for me.

But the UFT leadership, despite paying lip service to having a "diverse union" with members holding many different opinions, doesn't actually care what I think.

They will do what they do and endorse who they want.

But in the end, I doubt anybody outside of the Unity/New Action caucus will care much.