What Zohran's victory reveals about Democratic leaders
They are finally putting up a fight — against their voters
Welcome to a Thursday edition of Progress Report.
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The shameful — and predictable — response to Zohran’s earthquake
For the past decade, Democratic leaders have instructed people to Vote Blue No Matter Who, a commandment that apparently does not apply to party leaders themselves.
Queens Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the NYC Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday was clear and unequivocal, the product of mass grassroots enthusiasm from a wide cross-section of New Yorkers. Voters explicitly rejected the Democratic Party establishment, which ran its best-known candidate and buffeted him with tens of millions of dollars in nasty TV ads as well as personal endorsements from the party’s most famous leaders.
There was no controversy around superdelegates, no faulty voting machines, no evidence of collusion. And yet after years of insisting that people subvert their deepest beliefs and defer to Democratic establishment candidates often nominated under objectionable circumstances, the party’s leadership simply cannot bear to respect the will of its voters. Instead, for the past 48 hours, too many Democratic politicians have slapped their own voters in the face and exposed the cynicism at the heart of their middling careers.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, as useless as politicians come, spent her time on the radio on Thursday repeatedly suggesting that Mamdani — a Muslim who took pains to denounce antisemitism, visit synagogues, and campaign with liberal Zionist Brad Lander — might be a supporter of Hamas.
Over and over again, Gillibrand ignored his long history of pro-peace activism and defense of human rights, falsely accusing Mamdani of supporting “global jihad” and agreeing with a deranged caller who was throwing one false allegation after another. Lehrer tried to give her an off ramp, but she refused it.
Up until this point, Gillibrand has spent her year doing everything in her power to capitulate to and empower the actual antisemites in our government. In March, she literally screamed at fellow Democrats to pass the government funding bill that codified the brutal policies implemented by Elon Musk, and this month, she led the charge on the GENIUS Act, which legalized Trump’s brazen crypto scams. Now Gillibrand insinuating that the people who had no choice but to vote for her — there was sadly no primary challenge in 2024, a mistake that won’t be repeated — went and voted for a terrorist sympathizer.
New York Reps. Laura Gillen was even less subtle, slandering Mamdani outright.
“Socialist Zohran Mamdani is too extreme to lead New York City,” Gillen said in a statement. “His entire campaign has been built on unachievable promises and higher taxes, which is the last thing New York needs. Beyond that, Mr Mamdani has called to defund the police and has demonstrated a deeply disturbing pattern of unacceptable anti-Semitic comments which stoke hate at a time when antisemitism is skyrocketing. He is the absolute wrong choice for New York.”
Gillen is an irrelevant backbencher whose name I only know because she buys up other Democrats’ email lists and spams me with fundraising requests, and her words continue the tradition of reactionaries from Long Island spouting shitty and uneducated opinions about the city that deeply annoy actual New Yorkers (why would her opinion on our tax structure be at all relevant?). Still, they cut deep because they give bipartisan cover to the disgusting rhetoric that Republicans have been spewing for the past few days.
Compare it to what GOP Rep. Andy Ogles, a neanderthal from Tennessee, posted on Thursday:
When Democrats echo cynical and hateful GOP talking points, it gives conservatives the space and justification to call for the kinds of extremist action that was previously beyond the pale and politically untenable. Given how frequently they do this, and how many Democrats reacted to the November election by immediately throwing immigrants under the bus, it’s hard to believe that they are unaware of this fact and just prone to stepping on rakes.
Challenging the status quo is not antisemitic
Using antisemitism as a cover is particularly egregious because it continues to be used to silence dissent against what has become a wildly unpopular war in Gaza, one of the issues where Democratic leaders ignore their voters most. Democratic voters are overwhelmingly opposed to the war, want to see a cease-fire, and vehemently disagree with the country’s attacks on Iran, but leadership cannot even bring itself to condemn Donald Trump’s decision to enter the United States into the war.
In fact, “antisemitism” has been so warped and weaponized that it is now being used as code to discredit entirely unrelated policies that excite the base but so inconvenience the Democratic elite. Earlier today, Peter Orszag, who served as the Obama administration’s OMB director and is now the head of financial megafirm Lazard, spoke out against Mamdani as evidence that the Democratic Party is “increasingly antisemitic and anti-capitalism."
He made the smear to CNBC, a network that has devoted itself to trashing anyone who so much as suggests that the wealthiest Americans should pay a bit more than subterranean tax rates. That’s the network’s prerogative — on Wednesday, anchor Jim Cramer fretted that billionaires in NYC would be shot under Mayor Mamdani, and they’re welcome to continue to sound idiotic — but the only reason to insert antisemitism onto the mix is to discredit popular, populist economic policies by association.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul — who was plucked from anonymity, flukishly elevated to the governor’s office after Andrew Cuomo was forced to resign for being a sex pest, and then turned in such a bad re-election performance that it cost Democrats control of Congress — preemptively shot down Mamdani’s popular agenda while telling reporters today that she is not ready to endorse him.
Hochul is not Jewish. Gillen is not Jewish. Rep. Tom Suozzi, who also dissed Mamdani on Wednesday, is not Jewish. Gillibrand is not Jewish. Yet all of them have had the audacity to use antisemitism to cloak their actual reasons for disliking Mamdani — his economic policies, their donors’ loathing for him, his being proof that they may be held accountable by angry voters one day soon — while doing little to stop the actual antisemites who run the US government.
Instead of trying to repair their image by listening to working Americans and loyal voters, Democratic leaders just want to muddy up the waters and create reasons why the party’s rank and filers must be ignored when they demand more.
It’s the same old playbook that Democratic leaders have been running since the early 1990s: Any time voters break lockstep with the party’s preferred corporate shill, leadership rushes to malign and bury the insurgent, often under the guise of electability. The difference here is that inequality has gotten so absurd that only Wall Street outsiders can make the argument against Mamdani’s mild sewer socialist proposals, so they’re ostracizing him for being Muslim, instead.
It should not go unnoticed that the one prominent New York Democrat to fully endorse Mamdani since he won the nomination is Rep. Jerry Nadler, one of the most prominent Jewish, pro-Israel leaders in New York.
“I’ve spoken to him today about his commitment to fighting antisemitism, and we’ll work with all New Yorkers to fight against all bigotry and hate,” Nadler wrote in his endorsement.
Nadler also noted that Mamdani’s election was a “direct repudiation of Donald Trump’s politics of tax cuts and authoritarianism,” points that the Democrats who attacked the Queens assemblyman seemed eager to obscure. After all, focusing on the actual threats to democracy would put the onus back on them, the people who currently hold real power and are absolutely loathed by their own voters.
It’s time for Democratic leaders to stop concern-trolling, exploiting the legitimate fears of Jewish people, and accept that their voters have demanded a new kind of politics and economic philosophy. It’s time for them to embrace democracy and accept the results of an election. Otherwise, they’re no better than Donald Trump.
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It is getting difficult to tell the difference between the Democratic establishment and the GOP. Many of the old guard Dems seem to be okay with massive wealth inequality, policies and programs that oppress the poor, POC, immigrants and women, support of authoritarian regimes around the world, and the trashing of the environment. Many of the newer, younger Democratic electeds are courageous, smart, dedicated to the actual principles of a democracy and willing to oppose the insanity and corruption of the Trump regime. There are some older reps - Sanders, Warren, Murphy, Whitehouse etc. - that have these qualities and are true to these principles as well. Current leadership needs to step aside and let these Dems, who actually try to represent the interests of the people, direct the party. We need fighters, not collaborators and capitulators.
Keep calling them out.