The Graham Platner saga should not distract from a fact that is bigger than any one candidate: The uprising against the Democratic establishment is coming from the voters, and it cannot be contained.
Rising leftists have won primary elections for Congress in New York and Colorado. Another progressive fighter is running a strong campaign to win next month’s crucial Michigan Senate primary. Centrist Democrats in the House are already predicting a “war” with the insurgents when they arrive in Congress, a conflict that could dog leaders such as Hakeem Jeffries, who seeks to be the next speaker.
The Democratic establishment needs shaking up. It is weak, and has lost the confidence of its own voters. The mess in the Maine Senate race argues for more discipline on the left. But millions of rank-and-file Democrats — and anyone else keeping track — can see clearly that the positions, tactics and approach of conventional Democrats have failed.
Establishment Democrats lost the 2024 and 2016 presidential elections, handing control of government to Republicans. They couldn’t prevent Republicans from stealing a seat on the Supreme Court, helping lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. They failed to stop President Trump from sending masked federal agents into the streets or giving billionaires tax breaks. Some of them backed supplying weapons to military campaigns that have killed civilians abroad, while in the United States everyday people struggled to meet basic needs such as housing and food.
They have also alienated their own voters over many years by stifling competition and dissent within the party, from the Democratic National Committee’s attempted undermining of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential bid to the White House staff’s efforts in 2024 to hide President Joe Biden’s obvious signs of aging from voters.
If anything, Democratic voters indulged their leaders for too long. Mr. Sanders’s unsuccessful presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020 laid the groundwork for the recent uprising, which began in earnest last year with the election of Zohran Mamdani, New York’s popular democratic socialist mayor. Since then, Democratic primary voters have chosen more candidates who are committed to fighting, loudly, for progressive values — Mr. Platner, yes, but also people such as Claire Valdez in New York and Melat Kiros in Colorado, both insurgent House candidates.
Democratic leaders fear that their party’s growing progressive flank will dash its chances in the midterm elections. That is possible. But — clearly — many Democratic voters no longer buy this argument. There is less reason for them to worry than there was in previous election years. Much of their agenda reflects views that a large number of Americans now hold: disentangling politics and corporate interests, raising taxes on the wealthy, ending military aid to Israel, passing Medicare for All.
About 60 percent of U.S. adults say they’re bothered by the feeling that wealthy people and corporations don’t pay their fair share in taxes, according to a poll earlier this year from the Pew Research Center. The same survey found that 81 percent of Democrats and 41 percent of Republicans are frustrated because they believe wealthy people don’t pay their fair share.
A Pew poll in December found that 66 percent of all U.S. adults say the government has a responsibility to ensure all Americans have health coverage. Half of Americans support dismantling ICE, according to a YouGov poll in March. And a New York Times/Siena poll in May found that 57 percent of American voters oppose sending further military aid to Israel — including huge majorities of Democrats and independents.
The political mood in New York City overall may be more progressive than in many places. But the geography of the primary results within the city nevertheless suggests that the appeal of democratic socialists — or at least parts of their platform — is not limited to a small slice of the Democratic base.
Ascendant leftists swept the gentrifying enclaves of North Brooklyn, where young socialists celebrated their victories with chants of “Tax the rich!” and “Free Palestine!” under a glittering disco ball. They also won in Harlem and Washington Heights, where Darializa Avila Chevalier won Black Democrats, young voters and college-educated voters. Adriano Espaillat, the incumbent congressman she defeated, won Hispanic and lower-income voters. But Ms. Chevalier performed well among them, too, drawing about 40 percent of their support. Ms. Chevalier’s thin résumé and amateurish commentary on social media several years ago — for which she has apologized — didn’t stop voters from handing her the Democratic nomination.
The insurgents won in the Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhood of South Williamsburg known as Los Sures, where voters chose Claire Valdez, a democratic socialist assemblywoman and former union organizer. They won in the leafy, well-to-do neighborhoods of brownstone Brooklyn, where voters ousted the incumbent, Dan Goldman, a former prosecutor and an heir to the Levi’s fortune. These voters chose Brad Lander instead, a longtime Jewish progressive who pledged to stop sending military aid to Israel and has been a constant presence at a federal building in Manhattan, using his body to protect immigrants from masked ICE agents. Mr. Lander last year forged an early alliance with Mr. Mamdani and had his endorsement.
Like the coalition that propelled Barack Obama to the presidency, the Mamdani coalition is multiracial and powered by young voters, and it cuts across lines of class and religion. These Americans believe that the Democratic Party and its leaders are not up to the task before them.
In the contest of ideas unfolding in the Democratic Party, the progressives may go on to overreach, or lose important races for the party in key swing states. But the cautious centrists and center-left establishment politicians who have dominated the party for so long have failed. The sneering some of those elected officials have directed toward their own voters recently is a measure of their hubris, and an argument for still more competition. The Democratic base is finally prepared to take big risks on something bracingly different.
Mara Gay is a staff writer at New York Times Opinion who writes about politics. @MaraGay
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