The cynical, sclerotic centrist establishment of the American Democratic Party took a huge L in Tuesday’s Mayoral Primary in New York City. This race functioned as a pre-season game for the 2028 presidential primary and it’s importance to the national party politics is reflected in the tens of millions of dollars spent to prop up former Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Don’t believe me? Ask Matt Stoller and Ross Barkan:
This primary is historic. The Democratic primary was the bulwark for the Clinton/Obama/Wall Street axis.
That’s gone.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) June 25, 2025
pic.twitter.com/XwcjxRZtSc
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) June 25, 2025
The NYT summed it up:
Zohran Mamdani’s stunning performance in the Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday amounted to a watershed moment for Muslim New Yorkers, who could see one of their own lead City Hall for the first time should he succeed in the general election in November.
New York City is home to roughly one million Muslims; they made up 12 percent of the electorate in the 2021 mayoral election. Mr. Mamdani wove his faith into his campaign from its earliest days, hitting the trail while fasting for Ramadan and taking his message of affordability to mosques and Muslim community centers throughout the city.
His triumph over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who led in most polls throughout the race, was driven by the diverse coalition of voters he built that included young people, people of color, and first-time and infrequent voters. Muslim voters played a large role in growing that base.
The cooperation among Democrats from different backgrounds was especially heartening for some, who saw his background as an example of a new generation of leadership.
Spencer Ackerman described the desperate attacks aimed at Zohani:
…against all odds, against DoorDash, against Michael Bloomberg, against Bill Ackman, against Palantir’s Alex Karp, against Andrew Cuomo, against the Murdoch media behemoth, against Bill Clinton, against Jim Clyburn, against the entire Democratic Party, Zohran Mamdani will win the Democratic nomination for mayor. The ranked-vote total will confirm it; Cuomo stunningly conceded the nomination.
For three weeks, every time I turned on the local news, every time I turned on a basketball or a baseball game, every time I loaded a YouTube video, every time I went to my mailbox, I saw those forces call Zohran Mamdani a dangerous, antisemitic jihadi.
David Sirota disected the already begun battle to control the narrative and decide the meaning of Mamdani’s win for The Lever:
in the media class that exists to interpret these moments for the political mainstream, a different story is already being written. And it reveals something deeper: not just confusion, but ideology — one that insists democracy is a performance, not a transfer of power or a mandate for a different set of policies.
For months, pundits dismissed Mamdani as championing too radical, too fringe, too unserious an agenda. But now that he’s clinched the nomination, the narrative is shifting: Mamdani, they say, succeeded not because of his policy program, but because of his energy, his style, his vibes. On Pod Save America — a proxy for the entire Democratic political class and its liberal followers — Tommy Vietor praised a video of Mamdani walking across Manhattan for giving him “Obama 2007 feels,” calling it “nimble and fun.”
Then came the pivot.
“I do think it’s worth separating out the style of politics from the policy,” co-host Jon Favreau said. “Because we could have a whole debate about what policy positions can win… but if there’s a center-left candidate who campaigns like Mamdani, that person could be president.”
That’s the tell.
This is not a new trick. When liberal elites feel threatened by a winning candidate whose politics could actually challenge capital, they seek to depoliticize the victory and attribute it to vibes, marketing savvy, and brand. It’s a containment strategy: Treat the insurgent’s style as admirable while ignoring — or quietly discrediting — their policy platform. That way, the establishment gets to appropriate the energy without having to endorse the demands.…The mass rage rising up inside the Democratic Party is not a demand for better optics or technocratic tweaks to the system. It’s a demand for more autonomy, freedom, and economic security. Mamdani doesn’t just look or sound inspiring — he offers people material tools: ownership, stability, dignity. To reduce that to tone is to drain the politics of its power. It’s to gaslight the American people into believing that real democracy isn’t control over one’s own life, it isn’t true freedom — but submission to its guise of elite management.
Centrist rat Matt Yglesias tweeted as he jumped from the sunken SS Cuomo (in fairness to Matt Y, he technically kinda sorta endorsed the disgraced former Mayor Eric Adams rather than Cuomo):
Cuomo and all the people who lined up behind him absolutely deserved to lose. Just an absolutely cursed series of decisions.
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 25, 2025
Just as I used Emmanuel Todd’s analysis of the nihilism at the heart of Netanyahu’s Israel to explain Google’s decision to risk their multi-trillion dollar search business to go all-in on LLM AI on Monday, it’s irresistible to apply to the failure and rot at the heart of the Democratic party establishment.
This Politico article details the 18 New York politicians who both called for his resignation as governor in 2021 AND endorsed him for NYC mayor in 2025 — without offering any explanation for changing their minds.
A comprehensive Politico story about Dems who urged Cuomo to resign in 2021 then endorsed him in this race. An orgy of self-inflicted humiliation.
— David Weigel (@daveweigel) June 25, 2025
This is not limited to the New York party leadership.
62% of Democrats think their party’s leaders should be replaced pic.twitter.com/6cRejMfceL
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) June 25, 2025
And how could anyone be ready to replace misleadership like this?
Asked if he supports @RoKhanna’s war powers resolution that would require Trump to seek authorization from Congress for any war with Iran, Hakeem Jeffries says: “I haven’t taken a look at it.” pic.twitter.com/eWEfFN0ePI
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) June 23, 2025
Even the most deeply embedded members of the consultant class recognize that the party leadership is bankrupt:
“Right now we’re leaderless, we’re messageless, we’re agendaless, we don’t have any alternative ideas to the president and the Republicans right now. So, you know, I’m concerned, to say the least,” Solis Doyle, who ran Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid, told journalist Mark Halperin on his podcast “Next Up with Mark Halperin.”
The outsider wing of the party is licking their lips:
I’ve been waiting for this kind of election for 20 years, ever since we lost to Joe Lieberman in 2006. It’s the beginning of the end of neoliberal politics.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) June 25, 2025
Ackerman is declaring this the end of the 9/11 era of politics:
…tonight, Zohran Mamdani is on the verge of sitting in the seat of Rudy Giuliani.
It is important, it is revealing, and it is crucial to observe who played 9/11 Politics against Zohran. Who made a deliberate point of trying to make Jews like me hate and fear Zohran. It was DoorDash, Bloomberg, Ackman, Karp, and the rest. It was capital. 9/11 Politics were their means to divide the people of this city so they can continue conquering it. To keep the most vibrant city on earth out of reach of the working people—and particularly the immigrants and their children—who create its vibrancy. To keep New York what Bloomberg once called “a luxury product.”
Let it sink in: In an era of obscene wealth consolidation, in a prolonged period of soul-crushing unaffordability, capital needs the politics of 9/11 to divide the people of New York from living the lives we deserve.
While I was out in the baking heat today volunteering for Zohran, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal flashed a notification on my phone. It read: New York’s housing crisis has gotten so bad that a socialist might become mayor. And just like that, even a Murdoch paper could understand historical materialism.
Capital has ground New York down so deeply that the people who live here will not take it anymore.
Mamdani wanted this fight, he waged it, and he won it. He did what the people’s playbook said it would take to win it: He organized thoroughly, mobilized relentlessly, and promised the working class deliverable policies needed to keep their lives within their grasp—lower rent; free childcare; fast and free buses; cheaper groceries through public stores—despite the entire political and economic establishments laughing at those policies and those needs. He did not shy away from these needs. He championed them.
Not only is the Dem establishment rotten to the core it is deeply divided between contending groups of idiots as illustrated in this Atlantic piece about a conflict between the Kamala Harris campaign (the 2017 Cleveland Browns of Politics) and Future Forward a $900 million stupor PAC that if possible, was even more misguided and addled than the campaign.
Future Forward developed a very effective sales pitch:
Future Forward believed there was a superior way to run campaigns and allocate money. By March 2024, it was telling donors that it could produce “the absolute best ads that are proven to be effective across platforms” with a voter response rate “55% better than the average ad.” Over the course of 2024, Future Forward conducted hundreds of focus groups and collected more data on American voters than any other political effort in history, including more than 14 million voter surveys in the final 10 months before Election Day. The group created and tested more than 1,000 advertisements to support Harris’s presidential bid from dozens of ad firms, using a randomized-controlled-trial method that compared the vote preference of people who had seen an ad against those who had not. The best-testing spots blanketed the airwaves in swing states starting in August and were used to purchase more than 3 billion digital-video ad impressions.
As a matter of fundraising, the pitch was a massive success, attracting more than 69 percent of all Democratic presidential super-PAC dollars—more than three times the share of the top super PAC in 2020, according to an analysis by the independent journalist Kyle Tharp. Much of that money came from America’s wealthiest Democratic supporters, such as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. (Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of Emerson Collective, which is the majority owner of The Atlantic, gave to a part of the Future Forward effort that does not disclose its donors, according to The New York Times.) For context, $900 million is more money than the Democratic National Committee raised last cycle and nearly twice as much as Trump’s own campaign collected. The Biden and Harris operation ultimately raised $1.2 billion.
But their approach to campaigning was a classic example of missing the forest for the trees as revealed by this staggering pair of blunders.
Screw up #1:
Future Forward, which had long favored advertising close to Election Day, held back, even as MAGA Inc. began going on the air the next year. The first Future Forward super-PAC spot did not run until after Trump’s indictments, felony convictions, and assasination attempt; the Republican convention; and the switch to Harris. The election’s exit polls showed that 80 percent of voters had made up their minds before the end of August, when the full force of the group’s spending hit the airwaves.
And #2 which indicts their entire approach:
Anat Shenker-Osorio, a Democratic data strategist who works with Way to Win and has criticized Future Forward’s methods, argues that ad testing in online panels creates an artificial environment where people are forced to watch the tested spots. “That does not mirror conditions in real life,” she told us. “This testing cannot tell us what would cause people to pay attention and what would cause your base to want to repeat the message. What would cause your base to wear the equivalent of the red hats?”
I would love to know if Future Forward was involved in raising and spending some of the almost $30 million the Dem establishment just wasted on Andrew Cuomo.
All the stupid money on Earth can’t save the nihilistic neoliberals from the likes of Mamdani and his multimedia producer Donald Borenstein.
Transcript of Mamdani ad:
Newscaster:“This evening New York mayor Eric Adams has been indicted by a Federal grand jury…”
Mamdani:“Every politician says New York is the greatest city on the globe. but what good is that if no one can afford to live here? City Hall is engulfed in corruption. The cost of living is the real crisis.
“New Yorkers are being crushed by rent and child care the slowest buses in the nation are robbing us of our time and our sanity.
“Working people are being pushed out of the city they built.
“A mayor could change this and that’s why I’m running. I’ll make buses fast and free.”
Older Woman: “So I can just get where I’m going.”
Mamdani: “I’ll make Child Care available to all New Yorkers at no cost.”
Younger Woman: “I want to raise my kid in New York.”
Mamdani: “I’ll freeze the rent for every single rent stabilized tenant.
African-American Woman: “These Eric Adams rent hikes are killing us.”
Mamdani:: “Life in this city doesn’t need to be this hard, but politicians like Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo want it to be this way. They care about their donors. They care about themselves. They don’t care about you, the working class who keep this city running.
“This campaign is for every New Yorker who believes in the dignity of their neighbors. The government’s job is to actually make our lives better. We can afford to bring down the rent, have world class public transit and make it easier to raise a family. We can do all of that and so much more because this is New York. We can afford to dream.”
A corrupt establishment hack like Rahm Emanuel could raise and spend infinite money running for president in 2028, but since he can’t even bring himself to promise to materially improve the lives of voters, I give him a 0% chance against a genuine progressive with a plan to do just that, especially if they have someone like David Borenstein helping craft their message.
Watch out for a “David Borenstein” primary among progressive Democrats with Presidential ambitions.
But before I get too carried away with thoughts of 2028, Ackerman reminds us the NYC Mayor’s race is far from over and it will get very dirty indeed:
Usually the Democratic nomination in New York City is the mayoral election. That won’t be the case this year. The Democratic Party machinery will be as intransigent as possible. Capital will flood into this race as never before. The fear-mongering of these past three weeks is likely nothing compared to the way they are going to call a Bronx Science grad who raps about his grandmother a terrorist who will kill Jews.
They will do all of this because they see what the people of New York did tonight as a test case. And they are correct. If a socialist can wrest power from the servants of oligarchy in the financial capital of the world—well, my friends around this country, around this world, what can you do to take the power back from them where you live?
And the American Right is either in panic mode:
Blame the GOP tonight.
You have no idea how many high level Republicans I spoke to about @ZohranKMamdani within the GOP.
They all said, “he won’t ever win”.
Their inaction and lack of awareness in a prompt manner is what allowed a Muslim communist to win in NYC tonight.
— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) June 25, 2025
Or cracking their knuckles for a fight they think they’ll win, from Sasha Stone:
The Democrats’ biggest problem is that all they have to sell for ten years is their war on Trump. In Zohran, the young have found someone they believe in. He will sell them exactly what they didn’t even know they wanted, but now they want it really bad. He’s the Music Man.
He inspires them, sells them the dream, and pushes out one beautiful lie after another. What they want is someone who is not white, who sees America the way they do—as an oppressor/oppressed nation with equity as the only solution. And what’s the endgame of equity? Socialism, Marxism, Communism. Some things never die.
What Mamdani does really well, at least from what I’ve seen, is that he is talking about something other than Trump. He’s talking about a path forward for the Left. It might sound like promises he can’t possibly keep, but it’s better than what the Democrats are selling, which is nothing.
For years, the Democrats tried to prevent this energy from overtaking their party. They sidelined Bernie, and they’re not exactly thrilled with AOC. They pretended they were moderates and used Joe Biden to present that facade. Now, though, they have no choice but to move out of the way.
The Democrats have nothing to offer now — no leaders, plan, or vision. That’s why it’s so easy for someone like Mamdani to come along and sweep so many up in his fantasy. The only question is, can he deliver on his promises?
Either way, the Republicans should not fear the rise of a guy like Mamdani. He’s a pampered college kid and the son of filmmaker Mira Nair. It’s the Democrats who should be worried. There is no turning back now.
Or talking in frankly terrifying terms that are quite plausible in a post-Constitutional, post Jan. 6 era:
Simple plan:
1) Drive NYC to secede from the union 2) Occupy and annex it3) Strip it of its electoral votes4) Install @BillAckman as Viceroy and Governor-General
— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) June 25, 2025
Things are getting very interesting, but hopefully not this interesting….yet
