In the week leading up to the New York gubernatorial election, progressives opened their email inboxes every day to find messages from the Working Families Party (WFP) telling them to vote on their line, whether from the mouth of Whoopi Goldberg or Mike Boland, the campaign manager for primary candidate Zephyr Teachout.

But unlike most traditional political literature, these emails carefully avoided mentioning their gubernatorial candidate. The WFP knew that few of their voters could get excited about Andrew Cuomo, the anti-worker Democratic governor the party had endorsed.

At the same time, they didn’t want to give Green Party standard-bearer Howie Hawkins any additional attention or acknowledge the very real competitor for the progressive vote that he had become. Meanwhile, the Greens and their supporters circulated numerous articles attacking not just Cuomo, who appeared on various ballet lines, but the WFP itself.