Political earthquake in NYC: Here's what it means

Wow.

Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.

It was a hell of a night in New York City last night — which is becoming a pretty common refrain. I stayed up late to write about what it all means both here and for the party nationwide, and now I’m scheduling it for you to receive at lunchtime.

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The Headline: Leftist candidates run rampant in Democratic primaries

The Lede: All three of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s endorsees won their Congressional primaries while candidates backed by Democratic Socialists of America all but swept down ballot races, too. Establishment Democrat-backed candidates struggle elsewhere, as well.

The Details: New York City experienced another political earthquake on Tuesday night, as Congressional incumbents and lawmakers with deep ties to their districts were toppled in Democratic primaries by an energetic and insurgent left.

NYC Comptroller Brad Lander blew out wealthy Rep. Dan Goldman in NY-10; one-term Assemblywoman Claire Valdez bested Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso in NY-7; and anti-war activist Darializa Avila Chevalier shocked powerful Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, in NY-13.

They were joined in the winners’ circle by half a dozen other leftist candidates in state legislative races, most of whom were DSA-backed socialists and all of whom ran on populist promises and dissatisfaction with an out-of-touch Democratic establishment.

Many of the ousted incumbents were backed by deep-pocketed special interest groups, including AIPAC, which poured major resources into the NY-13 race on behalf of Espaillat and historically backed Goldman in NY-10.

Assemblyman Micah Lasher, the one establishment-backed candidate to barely squeak by in their Congressional primary, was assisted by millions from the AI lobby as well as $10 million from former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and campaign appearances from nearly every elected official in Manhattan.

There are a few ways to interpret this landslide, but they all start with the indisputable fact that Mamdani — agree with his policies or not — is a generational political talent who has only grown more powerful and popular since taking office. He poured himself into these elections over the last month, appearing in ads and at countless rallies with his endorsees, bouncing across four boroughs and urging his young coalition to push Valdez and Chevalier in particular over the line (the mayor also backed Lander, but as a popular fixture of Brooklyn politics, he needed little help).

A few other inarguable points:

1. Democratic voters are pissed at an establishment that lost touch with its base

2. The base of the Democratic Party is changing demographically

3. Party leaders, at least as of last night, still don’t really understand either shift

In much of the country, the Democratic primary challenges and upsets have been driven by exhaustion and outrage over growing income inequality and economic predatory, issues that Mamdani leaned heavily into during his groundbreaking run for mayor last year. All three of his endorsees also spoke to those injustices and frustrations — Valdez was a union organizer, and while Lander isn’t a DSA candidate but ran against Goldman, a scion of the Levi’s fortune who has received gobs of money from the crypto industry, among others. But you can also trace this earthquake to the student encampments that went up at Columbia University to protest Israel’s genocide in Gaza back in 2024.

Taking their cues from the party’s entrenched support for Israel and the Biden administration’s refusal to condemn or rein in Benjamin Netanyahu, many Democrats rushed to condemn the students and label them — even the many Jewish protestors — antisemitic. They backed police action and harsh punishment for peaceful protestors, siding with Republicans who used the moment to introduce resolutions policing language and thought. Goldman visited Columbia and repeatedly condemned the student protestors, while Espaillat, whose district includes Columbia, made TV appearances and spoke on the House floor to condemn the students.

What’s so frustrating is that it’s obviously a good instinct to defend Jewish people; as a Jew myself, I know there’s plenty of scary antisemitism in the world. There should be nothing objectionable about telling Jewish students they are not alone, as Espaillat did in April 2024. But the context was everything.

Democrats like Espaillat and Goldman took the AIPAC argument hook, line, and sinker (read my coverage at the time) and turned protests over human rights on a college campus into Kristallnacht, and as the politics of Israel and Gaza have shifted dramatically over the past two years, they became implicitly aligned with Trump’s thuggish tactics against students.

That includes the kidnapping and ongoing attempts to deport Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian grad student who became a face of the protests. Chevalier, also a grad student at the time, was another one of the protests’ leaders, and she took notice when Espaillat did little to try to help Khalil as he was transferred from prison camp to prison camp across the country. Her run was inspired in no small part by that indifference to injustice, and the larger issue became an animating issue for her campaign, which mixed populism with demands for cutting off material aid to Israel under a “babies not bombs” slogan.

A little over a decade ago, Espaillat was the insurgent reformer candidate, running against Rep. Charlie Rangel, the dean of Harlem politics. He didn’t win his primary challenge, but he eventually displaced Rangel on the strength of changing demographics in the district, which encompasses upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx. Espaillat is the king of the Dominican political scene in New York, which powered him past the traditional Black political machine in Harlem, which Rangel commanded. After five terms, Epsaillat fell to yet another shift in demographics, as the cost of living has driven a mass gentrification of Harlem and Washington Heights.

Much of the last week of the race was animated by Espaillat’s surrogates spreading rumors that Chevalier, who is Dominican, is instead of Haitian heritage, an attempt to rile up his base. And Espaillat wound up winning the Bronx neighborhoods handily, but the district mostly consists of Manhattan, which Chevalier won by more than 5,000 votes. The district’s Manhattan neighborhoods have wealthier, whiter residents than ever before, which fueled accusations that the challenger was a product of transplant gentrifiers and, in the hours since Chevalier’s victory, created questions about this new left’s potential alienation of working class ethnic communities, once the core of the Democratic base.

Well, amplified those questions, really; this is an ongoing debate, driven by the younger, whiter, more middle class base of groups like DSA and Justice Democrats and the frequency with which their candidates — who are often people of color — run against longtime fixtures of minority community politics.

Similarly, in NY-7, Claire Valdez, the UAW organizer and Assemblywoman, dominated in particular in the Queens portions of the district, with Astoria and other more gentrified neighborhoods. Antonio Reynoso, once a rising star who had the support of the trailblazing retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez, and won both the Black and lower income vote:

Mamdani was seen as the avatar of this movement last year, and it’s unquestionable that his early base in the Commie Corridor of Brooklyn and Queens. But Mamdani also wound up winning Latino and Black voters in the end, despite Andrew Cuomo’s long-held dominance with those communities. I can’t speak to the inner thoughts of any other voters, much less Black and Latino voters, but the results over the past few years suggest that there is without question a divide — within Democratic circles, where longtime pros are outrage, as well as among voters — but that they can also be bridged with good governance.

Democratic leaders should look in the mirror, as should pundits who suggest that voters are pearl-clutchers looking for orderly transitions of power within the party and institutions. Espaillat and his allies tried to make a big deal of the fact that Chevalier tweeted “Fuck Kamala Harris” back in 2024, and they carpet-bombed the district with flyers quoting the since-deleted tweet, but voters did not seem to care. I’m not saying that would have been in the case in every district — it probably wouldn’t have helped a candidate in NY-12, for example — but there is a complete disconnect with regard to what people are demanding and what they care about, even after Trump won a second term.

There will be warnings that Democrats can’t lean too much into this lefty socialist stuff, that other parts of the country won’t opt for candidates that are so stridently pro-Palestine and happy to withhold their support for the Democratic presidential nominee. That’s undoubtedly true, but it misses the point. This is less about ideology than the staid establishment that allowed voters to get this angry, inviting one humiliation after another. Voters clearly want authenticity, change, and urgency, and until Democrats do more about it than sling slogans about affordability and go on MS NOW, upsets like this will continue

The Trend: New York got all the headlines, but it was not the only place where these sort of upsets happened. There were two massive grassroots victories in Maryland, including progressive newcomer Amar Mukunda’s triumph over long-serving state Senate Majority Leader Nancy King. I’ll be covering that one more in depth in the weeks to come, but it’s notable that it happened in Montgomery County, not Baltimore, giving the uprising a bit of a suburban element.

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