Catching up - overdue UFT election analysis

After pretty much every UFT election over the last few decades I’ve written some analysis. Here’s 2010. And 2013. I wrote in 2016. And in 2019. And in 2022.

And I was ready for 2025. But I paused. 2025 was going to be a tougher analysis -

• two well-known figures from Unity ran against Unity (one the headliner, the other the man partially behind the curtain) as part of ABC. That was a different from the previous quarter century. That broke the pattern (sometimes a coalition of groups running against Unity; sometimes separate groups running against Unity)

• And in July of 2025, when I first sat down to write analysis it seemed that the campaign had not stopped. Unity fired a bunch of people who were sympathetic to ABC. There was an ongoing investigation into misogynistic election-related harassment. And ABC was still campaigning.

I figured it made sense to wait for the campaign to end. But it has not. And clearly, it will not. OK.

I will start. What needs to be included?

1. Patterns before 2025:

• “Opposition” votes going up or down, independent of Unity. (Unity and opposition “fishing for voters in separate ponds”).

• Corollary: For analysis, we look at numbers. For propaganda, we look at percents. (I look at numbers of votes, not percents).

• An “opposition” majority among high school activists/voters.

• Unity vote slipping, with bumps, on a longterm downward trend.

• “Opposition” votes staying fairly steady overall, with big bumps and dips in individual years. Flat trend.

• Retiree votes happen differently. Retirees voted and continued to vote exactly as they had right before retirement - until MulgrewCare. But MulgrewCare suppressed Unity turnout, got many non-opposition people to vote against Unity, and got some Unity voters to cross-over - highly unusual. There’s an added story - the victory of Retiree Advocate in the 2024 UFT Retired Teachers Chapter election.

• I don’t write about the “functional” vote - because I understand less of who votes - with so many chapters being thrown together.

2. Numbers

• All the vote totals from the previous 8 or so elections

• The vote totals from 2025

• Turnout numbers since 2000

3. The slates

• The significance of Unity members running against Unity

• How it happened that Unity members ran against Unity

• How we ended up with three slates

• What was ABC? (and what is it now?)

4. The campaigns - there’s not too much to write, but a few unusual factors:

• Substack

• Pizzitola

• Trump

• Paul

5. The results

• Numbers

• Retirees

• High Schools

• Which patterns broke?

• Which patterns held?

6. Significance for the future

I will write about bits and pieces. I will jump around. I’m not doing this in order. When I am finished I may try to recompile the whole thing into a single article. That might be long - if I get to it.

A closing thought, for now. A story

In the spring of 2022 after some event I ended up in a long conversation with Cristina Gavin and some guy - older than me - or at least seemed to be - I don’t recall his name. We were “United for Change.” We were on the street, partially blocked off by construction, maybe near NYU. Maybe the guy was on a bicycle? In any case, he was trying to project numbers forward, and how the “opposition” could catch Unity. I was trying to explain both what the numbers showed, and how tightly Unity grips power - that we were not going to simply creep ahead of them in the vote. He argued that this had to be wrong, because that meant there was no way to beat Unity.

I agreed, and disagreed. There was no way to beat Unity as he and Cristina were thinking. But 1) campaigning and working in the UFT was important to do, not just for winning, but also for changing, adjusting, pressuring and improving policy and 2) at some point someone or some group of people in Unity might get pissed off and break with them. The cause could be personal grievance. The cause could be politics (big politics, national stuff, or smaller, local stuff). The cause could be a competent union functionary getting fed up with general incompetence. And when this happened, that break might lead to a change in UFT leadership.

So that raises a question. There was a break with Unity - how did it not lead to a change in leadership?

Stay tuned. I’ll try to get to that. And to numbers, analysis, and thoughts for the future.