Mamdani’s Machine Will Be Tested Tuesday
Red Rabbits, Workers Deserve More and The Race for 2028.
New Yorkers will vote in four truly contested Democratic primaries on Tuesday, an exciting election day in a city that’s usually dominated by incumbents.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a sign of a vibrant new reform movement. It’s more like the political trend that the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini illustrates in the chart below:
We have entered the “progressive drift” era of New York City politics, which may be supercharged by Mamdani’s political clout: the two most striking races pit established left-wing Democrats against a new crop of Mamdani-backed loyalists grown in Democratic Socialists of America labs.
In the DSA heartland of Queens, Polymarket gives Mamdani’s candidate, Assemblymember Claire Valdez, an 83% chance of winning against the hyper-progressive Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso in NY7; in Upper Manhattan, Darializa Avila Chevalier is narrowly favored against the longtime incumbent, Rep. Adriano Espaillat in NY13. Meanwhile, Mamdani’s old rival turned ally, Brad Lander, is heavily favored against Rep. Dan Goldman in NY10, a district that includes Park Slope. In all three races, Mamdani’s candidates have gotten to the rivals’ left with criticism of Israel.
Mamdani is flexing his muscle in districts he won easily in last summer’s primary. If his candidates, and particularly the previously unknown Avila Chevalier and Valdez, both members of the DSA, win, the results won’t immediately change New York City policy. They’ll be backbenchers in Washington.
But their victories would shake up New York’s power structure. The lesson will be that Mamdani and the DSA can make or break your career — and that you’d better fall in line with the organization’s extreme left priorities broadly, and its hostility for Israel in particular, if you want a political future in New York Democratic politics.
“People often ask me what I think of the state of the Democratic Party. This slate here today is our answer. The Democratic Party must change,” Mamdani said while speaking at a rally for his slate of endorsees last night in Brooklyn.
One discordant note: The 4,000-seat theater was not packed, by some accounts, and early voting does not indicate a massive turnout by Mamdani’s young base. That’s New York too: with the World Cup and the Knicks, there are so many fun things to do in the city right now. Who wants to think about voting?
Making Frenemies
“It is a general rule of politics that newly elected leaders have only a limited amount of political capital and must be careful how they spend it. Mamdani is trying to use his to expand the role and power of the DSA in Democratic Party politics, even if it upsets putative allies,” David Freedlander writes in the New York Magazine. “It’s a gamble. Win and it cements the mayor as a national political figure heading into the 2028 presidential election. Lose and he has created a squadron of lawmakers with bruised feelings who will be looking for revenge.”
I’d edit that slightly: Win or lose, Mamdani is destroying the old machine to replace it with his own, creating deep resentment within the Democratic establishment.
But that’s the cost of a local political revolution. Mamdani and the DSA are on a mission to radically reshape that rather calcified and visionless Democratic Party from within and are flexing their young political muscle, which is impossible without damage. They have both a strong socialist vision and the momentum, and have fully embraced the Trump strategy of dominating the news cycle. But the city has not been progressive for that long, and Mamdani would do well to remember he won with just 52% of the vote.
Related:
The Congressional Primary Tearing the Mamdani Coalition in Two (NYT)
DSA vs. WFP: Who leads the left in NYC? (Michael Lange)
The Democratic Socialists of America are leaving it all on the field in NYC (Politico)
Embrace Left Wing Machine Politics (Hamilton Nolan)
Radically American
MI’s President Reihan Salam has an interesting take in Sapir on the parallels between some American Muslims’ move to the left and that of American Jews a hundred years ago. The driving force, he argues, isn’t political Islam but the global left-wing, anti-imperialist worldview called “Third Worldism.”
“Third Worldism is proving as seductive to today’s second-generation American Muslim radicals as socialism, Communism, and anarchism were to the second-generation Jewish radicals of the 1920s and 1930s. The parallel is closer than it might appear. Like today’s Third Worldists, the Jewish radicals of that era were largely secular. Their radicalism was a substitute identity rather than an extension of religious practice, a way of channeling communal energy into political commitment,” he writes. “Like Third Worldism, the Jewish radical movements of the early- and mid-20th century were not marginal phenomena; they shaped American intellectual and political life in ways that took decades to work through.”
DSA Mayors
“[T]he DSA’s electoral success should not be confused for policy success—much like the establishment Dems they replace, the DSA mayors are confusing class warfare for actual solutions to the affordability crisis,” MI’s Charles Fain Lehman observes in City Journal.
“[I]n embracing them, mainstream Democrats also risk welcoming in an organization that has quietly grown disturbingly radical, a fact that could prove politically disastrous in the long run,” he writes.
Related:
What Spencer Pratt’s Defeat Tells Us About the American City (NYT)
Mamdani Is Channeling Knicks’ Fans Euphoria. Will It Work? (NYT)
Workers Deserve More
Stu Smith explored the extreme new national DSA agenda, “Workers Deserve More” in City Journal this week. Plans include “scrapping the U.S. Senate, “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and “replac[ing] the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” I hope voters will take one look at these proposals and decide they’re as crazy as they sound.
Read Stu’s account of what “Workers Deserve More” means.
Red Rabbits and National Uprisings
At least part of the answer to how the DSA plans to accomplish its radical agenda seems to be through preparing for increasingly radical conflict.
“The Red Rabbits Security Commission, a subgroup within the DSA focused on “community defense” efforts, is, according to its authorizing resolution, preparing for a “national uprising against federal agents and police brutality.”In practice, that means training cadres in tactics like armed and unarmed self-defense, blocking intersections, and fighting “fascists” with umbrellas,” Stu writes in another piece that will help you understand DSA and its agenda.
Blurring Governing and Campaigning?
Josh Code wrote in The Free Press about his shift canvassing, organized by the city, to encourage residents to testify at the city’s Rent Guidelines Board hearings, which will help determine if and by how much rents may be increased for rent-stabilized apartments in October. The mayor ran on freezing rent increases as a major campaign promise.
“Immediately, though, I could see how the line between nonpartisan engagement and campaigning might become blurry,” Code writes. “Two of my four fellow canvassers were former Mamdani campaign aides who now work for the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement. One wore a bracelet that said “SOCIALISM.” The other two said they had knocked on doors for Mamdani last year. Off we went.”
Extra! Extra!
Your Uber driver may soon be unionized (Reason).
Recently, MI’s Jack Santucci and John Ketcham published a brief on New York’s de facto multi-party elections and how proportional representation might lead to more accurate representation of voters’ preferences.