The dust is settling in New York City after an extraordinary Primary Day that showed how the success of the anti-establishment, socialist-leaning left in last year’s mayor’s race was not an aberration.
Here, at least, it is plainly ascendant.
“A year ago, it was not the end of a political movement,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at a victory party in Brooklyn last night, where supporters chanted “Free, free Palestine” and “D.S.A.,” my colleague Nicholas Fandos reported. “It was the beginning.”
So, what’s next? My colleagues who cover New York City have takeaways for you, and my Politics colleagues Jennifer Medina and Reid Epstein wrote about how the New York City results are the latest to show just how skeptical many Democrats have become of Israel and its actions.
“While many Democratic officials remain supportive of Israel, next year’s class of congressional Democrats is on track to be more wary about America’s relationship with Israel than at any other moment since the Jewish state was established,” they wrote, after three sharp critics of Israel won their House primaries yesterday in New York City.
Today, I want to take stock of a few other national implications of yesterday’s results in New York. Here are five questions I have:
How shaken is the party establishment?
Last night, the retiring Representative Nydia Velázquez — seen as a towering figure in Latino and liberal city politics — watched her preferred successor get crushed. And two incumbent Democratic congressmen, Representatives Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, were ousted despite running robust campaigns.
When I was covering New York City five years ago, I distinctly remember how deferential certain Manhattan politicians — across the seniority spectrum — were to “Adriano.” Now he is out, and a little-known, far-left activist (with a social media history Republicans will be delighted to highlight) is replacing him.
It’s fair to say times have changed. The Democratic Party’s leaders in the Senate and House — Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries — both New Yorkers who would be up for re-election in 2028, have surely taken note.
How do these results affect the thinking of Democratic establishment leaders about their own political futures? And if Democrats retake the House in the November midterms, with the number of socialists in Congress set to double from two to four, how fractious does their caucus get? What does that mean for governing?
How do left-wing candidates do in competitive general elections this fall?
Left-leaning, anti-establishment candidates have triumphed in a series of primaries in deep blue congressional districts. What about in competitive races this fall?
There are a few major contests that could measure that question, including the Maine Senate race, where Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee, has embraced progressive positions such as supporting Medicare for All and calling to dismantle Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
If Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive former public health official, wins the August Senate primary in Michigan, his candidacy would pose a similar test in one of the nation’s most important battlegrounds.
Republicans, for their part, see some of the candidates who won last night as helpful to their broader argument that the Democratic Party has been co-opted by radicals. It’s a message they hope to make stick in battlegrounds that are far more competitive in the general election than any district in New York City.
Can a combat veteran with a sterling résumé flip a key House seat?
The New York election result that may have the most immediate impact on control of Congress came not from the city, but from a highly competitive House district in the Hudson Valley.
Cait Conley, a national security expert and combat veteran with degrees from West Point, Harvard and M.I.T., won the Democratic nomination last night to take on Representative Mike Lawler, one of the most vulnerable Republicans on the map. In some ways, she fits the mold of the national-security-minded Democratic women who appealed to moderate voters and were instrumental in helping flip the House in 2018. How does that translate this year?
Republicans have already suggested an interest in tying her to a national party that they cast as extreme.
“The Democrat party has officially become the party of Zohran, AOC, & Bernie,” Lawler wrote on social media last night.
Some moderate Democrats, for their part, have preferred to focus on Conley and other candidates who won elsewhere in the country last night.
What lessons do Democrats learn about the power of A.I. politics?
In the race to represent an uptown Manhattan district, Alex Bores focused on making a case for regulating the artificial intelligence industry — and he drew a lot of A.I. industry-aligned spending, for and against him.
Bores came in second to Micah Lasher, a political veteran. But his candidacy may still be instructive, my colleague Theodore Schleifer, who has written about the politics of A.I., told me.
“Bores’s campaign showed a model for A.I.-safety politics in Democratic primaries,” he said. “That model is twofold: First, you hope you get attacked by the disliked A.I. industry. Then, you raise your own A.I.-safety money, of which there is aplenty.”
And what are their takeaways for 2028?
Progressives and some moderate Democrats agree that the electorate does not want politicians who are perceived as establishment defenders of the status quo.
Beyond that, the lessons they think aspiring presidential candidates and other ambitious Democrats should take from last night — or whether they should take any lessons at all — are matters of debate.
“Every candidate considering running in 2028 should see last night’s victories as a clear sign of what the Democratic base wants,” said Usamah Andrabi, a leader of the group Justice Democrats, which supported some of the victors last night.
That includes “fighters for the working class” with boldly progressive visions who are willing to challenge the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and “every corporate lobby,” he said.
Others are adamant that what works in a Democratic primary in a Brooklyn-and-Queens-area known as “Commie Corridor” has no relevance in battleground districts and states, much less in a presidential election.
“It’s bonkers to think the DSA offers a formula for winning either the nomination or the general election (I mean, COME ON),” Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank with plans to play in presidential primaries, wrote on social media. “We will not stand by as our party contemplates riding this road to ruin.”
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