The party can be traced back to a campaign carried out by people around the Trotskyist newspaper The Spark between 2011 and 2013. That campaign focused on the need for the working class to organize independently. Five of the people active in that campaign ran for office in 2014. The candidates ran for Congress, for Dearborn School Board and for the Wayne County Community College Trustee. The latter was elected due to his only opponent, the Democratic incumbent, being disqualified before the election. Despite the harsh ballot access laws in Michigan, the people active in the 2014 campaign managed to put a party on the ballot in 2016. With several dozen others joining the voluntary effort, they turned in more than the required 31,566 petition signatures. In the end they turned in more than 50,000. The Working Class Party fielded two candidates for Congress and one for the State Board of Education in Michigan. Their candidate for the State Board of Education polled many more than the votes needed for the Working Class Party to retain ballot status in the Michigan 2018 elections. Similar campaigns in other states included for alderman in Chicago in the 25th ward. Candidate Ed Hershey received 614 votes. In 2016, David Harding was on the ballot for Baltimore's City Council elections, running in the 14th district. He received 1,426 votes,. In 2018, Juan Rey ran as a candidate in California's 29th congressional district for the U.S. House of Representatives. He received 944 votes. In the 2018 midterm elections the Working Class Party is running eleven candidates in Michigan: five for the U.S. House, four for the Michigan state senate and two statewide candidates for the Michigan State Board of Education. Most candidates are fielded in districts in and around Detroit, but the party is also contesting districts in Grand Rapids, Flint and Saginaw. The party is again planning to run candidates for the 2020 elections and has announced David Harding has their candidate in the election for the mayor of Baltimore. As of June 2020 the party has 246 registered members in Maryland.
Ideology
The party is actively endorsed by the The Spark, however the Working Class Party does not espouse Marxist political positions. The party supports broadly socialist positions such as putting an end to unemployment and stopping the decline of pensions and social security. They call for workers to look into the books of businesses. They call for the unity of workers against the divide created by the bosses. Also the party supports the formation of a larger party for the working class, as both the Republican, as well as the Democratic party, are controlled by big capital.
