Dan Cantor

Daniel Cantor is an American political organizer known for organizing labor and community figures to advocate for social democratic reforms in the Alinskyite Social Democrat tradition. He is most well known for being the co-founder and long-time leader of the Working Families Party (WFP), a social democratic and progressive third party in New York.

Early life and education Cantor was born in 1955 in Levittown, New York, to an Ashkenazi Jewish family. Cantor has stated that his interest in politics began when, as a teenager, his uncle gifted him a subscription to The Progressive. In 1984, Cantor joined the National Labor Committee in Support of Democracy and Human Rights in El Salvador and mobilized opposition to AFL-CIO for its support of Ronald Reagan, especially after the Iran–Contra affair. In the mid-1980s Cantor left the NLC to work for the Veatch Foundation on Long Island which saw Cantor work on Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns. The party saw immediate backing from ACORN, United Auto Workers, Citizen Action, and the Communications Workers of America.

Cantor hired Bill Lipton, another ACORN veteran, as its first organizing director.

The party maintained a close relationship with Mayor Bill de Blasio, with Cantor and the WFP running his 2009 election as Public Advocate.

In 2013 with an interview with Bill Moyers, alongside Jonathan Soros, Cantor reflected on his longstanding political alliance with Soros and his Friends of Democracy PAC. The pair argued for extensive political finance reform to effectively overturn Citizens United v. FEC at a local level. Cantor argued for "one person one vote, not one dollar one vote" and to construct limits over the amount of money in politics. Cantor argued that local, grassroots donations should be the sole metric of if a campaign is viable so that the politician is held responsible to their constituents instead of their donors.

2013 would serve as a high-point for Cantor's political influence and the reach of the WFP, seeing longtime ally de Blasio elected mayor, a member of the WFP, Kenneth P. Thompson, was elected attorney general of Brooklyn as well as 12 of the 13 candidates the WFP ran for city council winning election, bringing their total to 20.

From 2011 to 2014 Cantor wrote 11 op-eds in the Huffington Post mostly reflecting the WFP's ongoing political campaigns as well as advocating for socialistic economic and social programs.

The party and Cantor's influence entered a period of decline during and after the 2014 New York gubernatorial election where Cantor initially sought to run a WFP candidate against Andrew Cuomo, perceiving him as a conservative due to his tax cuts for the wealthy, tax breaks for banks and expansion union-free charter schools during his first term.

Cantor stepped down as the head of the WFP after nearly 20 years leaving the party in 2018, being succeeded by Maurice Mitchell who led local Black Lives Matter rallies.

Shortly before his departure from the party in 2018 Cantor described the WFP as an "independent faction" of the Democratic party comparing it to the Tea Party movement in relation to the Republican Party, as opposed to a true third party like the Green Party.

In 2019 Cantor co-wrote an op-ed in The Nation supporting the practice of Fusion voting, the reason why the WFP has been successful in New York, stating that the practice helps the United States strive towards "a more perfect union" and touting Ruth Bader Ginsburg's support of the practice. Cantor also highlighted the practice allowing the Populist Party and the American Labor Party to more directly impact other parties manifestos by showcasing that their stances where what the voters supported. Cantor closed the op-ed attacking Andrew Cuomo's proposal to ban the practice in New York, and calling on the practice to be adopted federally nation-wide.

Cantor has outlined his personal political belief as that of accountability and community interaction. That residents of a district should know their local state representatives and senators, and that they should not only have a relationship with them, but also hold their representative accountable. Cantor also stated in a 2018 interview with The New York Times that he was inspired to form the WFP and engage in political activism so that there was a progressive left-wing alternative to the religious right, specifically citing his own Jewish upbringing as a counterbalance to right winged evangelical Christians.

Personal life Cantor married Laura Markham, founder of the leftist Detroit Metro Times in 1989.