Next Tuesday is Election Day, and in all three marquee races, the Democratic candidate appears to be at least fairly well positioned. Zohran Mamdani (at 45 percent) is way ahead in New York City, although if Curtis Sliwa were to drop out and encourage his voters (15 percent) to switch to Andrew Cuomo (28 percent), it might get somewhat close. In Virginia, the 10 most recent polls average out to giving Abigail Spanberger an eight-point lead over Winsome Earle-Sears. New Jersey is closer, but even there, Mikie Sherrill leads Jack Ciattarelli by around five points.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that all three win. That would be a great night for Democrats and a very bad night for Donald Trump. He has endorsed both Ciattarelli and Earle-Sears, so both of those races will to some extent offer a verdict on his ability to influence outcomes (of course, these are both blue states). In New York City, he’s made his heaping contempt for Mamdani widely known. Three victories would continue the roll Democrats have been on this year—in more than two dozen contests, the Democratic candidates have outperformed Kamala Harris’s numbers from last year.
If all three win, Mamdani will clearly be the biggest story. His win would be historic, one of the biggest upsets in New York political history. Billionaires, led by Mike Bloomberg, have spent $20 million or more trying to stop him. His campaign hasn’t been flawless, but he’s mostly stayed on message and remained upbeat—that’s harder to do than it looks in the closing days of a campaign when people are trying to destroy you. Wins by Spanberger and Sherrill would be historic, too—Spanberger would be the first woman governor of Virginia, and Sherrill the first Democratic woman governor of New Jersey—but they have both been favorites all year, so the story lines are less compelling.
But the interesting question is this: If all three win, what will it mean for the Democratic Party internally? Progressives will tout a Mamdani win as proof that the party needs to move left. Centrists will say wins by Spanberger and Sherrill demonstrate that the party must tack to the center.
I utterly detest this argument, for two reasons. One, electoral politics is way more complicated than these trite tropes. And two, the zest with which both sides will prosecute their cases will prove once again that Democrats would really rather argue with each other than fight Trump and the Republicans and the GOP’s big donors the way they ought to be doing.
Mamdani’s focus on New York’s affordability crisis is as close as these three candidates get to offering something that the party should adopt universally. It’s simple and brilliant, as is the way he talks about it. When he talks about the working class, he actually sounds like he means it: “I fight for working people. I fight for the very people that have been priced out of this city. And I fight for the same people that [Trump] said he was fighting for. This is the same president who ran on a campaign of cheaper groceries… ultimately, it is easier for him to fan the flames of division than to acknowledge the ways in which he has betrayed those working-class Americans.”
Democrats should all try to learn from this. The other thing I wish they’d learn from him is that you can’t succeed in this day and age by merely saying who, and what, you’re for. You have to show people what—and who—you’re against. And I don’t just mean Trump. That’s a gimme. I mean huge donors who very obviously compromise the Democratic Party’s ability to take aggressively pro-worker positions. Specifically, there needs to be a reckoning in the party, and soon, about tech money and crypto money. There was a great story in Wired not long ago by Steven Levy about how tech money is deserting the Democrats and going to Trump. I say good riddance. Can’t happen fast enough.
Having said all that: New York City’s national applicability is limited indeed, and Mamdani fans would do well to remember that. New Yorkers hate hearing this, but New York City, which I covered for about 15 years before I moved to Washington, hasn’t been important to national politics in a very long time. Developments in New York get loads of media attention because it’s the country’s media capital, but few political trends that start in New York City in recent history have taken root across the country. Occupy Wall Street may be the lone exception, but that movement was powered by people, not politicians. Meanwhile, three recent mayors have run for president, each one’s performance more embarrassing and irrelevant than the one before it (yes, Trump was from New York, but he was not of the New York political culture).
Beyond that, there is no single formula for political victory here in these United States. It’s a big country, and different candidates in different places have to try different combinations of things to address voters’ concerns, both national and parochial. Mamdani’s affordability crusade deserves to resonate nationally, but even then, different candidates will tailor it to meet local needs. It works as a rubric, not as a carbon copy.
As for Spanberger and Sherrill, their prospective wins won’t really prove that much one way or the other. Spanberger is running against a crazed extremist who supports a six-week abortion ban with no exceptions. Ciatterelli isn’t as extreme as Earle-Sears, but he’s well out there in MAGAland, too, enough that he should not be able to win a blue, even if not exactly liberal, state. Spanberger and Sherrill have run cautious and uninspiring campaigns in states where the Democratic gubernatorial candidate ought to win unless he or she really screws something up, as Terry McAuliffe did in a few fatal debate seconds four years ago. You could even make a similar argument today about Mamdani: His winning the primary was the stunner, but now that he’s the Democratic nominee in a six-to-one Democratic city, well, he ought to win.
So maybe there’s not a whole lot to read into any of it! This will not stop Democrats from tearing each other apart trying to prove one point or the other. Sigmund Freud developed a concept he called “the narcissism of small differences,” by which people or groups of people who have comparatively minor differences end up elevating those differences and disliking each other intensely—even more than they dislike other groups that ought to be their common foe.
I’m not saying the centrists’ and progressives’ disagreements are meaningless. They’re important. Especially, to me, on the very economic issues that I think will win them back enough working-class voters to recapture the presidency, if they embrace them. Speaking of Spanberger, I remember her saying in the fall of 2021: “Nobody elected [Joe Biden] to be FDR, they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.” I wrote a column saying au contraire—millions of us voted for him to be FDR, a comparison Biden himself made frequently during the 2020 campaign. So yeah, the differences are real and need to be debated.
But I’ve been around these people, on both sides of this argument, for a long time. And I can tell you: Some of them get more animated talking about the Democratic faction with which they disagree than they do about Trump. That has to stop.
I noticed last week that I got a fundraising email for Spanberger from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This was interesting because not only are they from different wings of the party, but they had a once-famous feud in a House Democratic caucus meeting back in 2020. The email emphasized the things the two have in common, which turned out to be quite a lot of things. More of that, please, Democrats.
The post If Mamdani, Spanberger, and
Sherrill Win, What Will It Mean? Not Much. appeared first on New Republic.
