How A Political Party Diversifies

City Hall has an in-depth, investigative look at the Working Families Party in New York, a progressive political party that endorses Democratic candidates through New York's quirky election laws that allow politicians to run on multiple party tickets.

It's not uncommon for national political entities to have separate nonprofit and PAC divisions, but the Working Families Party actually has four arms: the party itself; the nonprofit 501(c)4 Working Families Organization; the nonprofit, nonpolitical 501(c)3 Progressive America Fund, under which operate the Center for Working Families think tank and the National Open Ballot Project, an initiative to get ballot laws similar to New York's passed elsewhere in the country; and the for-profit political consulting firm Data & Field Services.


Though there are legal restrictions on how the money is supposed to flow, all list the same address in Brooklyn as their home base. (Which, to be fair, is also true of some DC-based groups that have both political and nonprofit, nonpolitical arms, and the Working Families Party says there's nothing wrong with it, either.)

Here's the graphic that City Hall uses to illustrate the finances, the use of plumbing pipes on which may or may not be a stylistic, connotative jab at labor-generated money: