The New York Left’s Super Tuesday
The Democratic Party establishment was not happy about Zohran Mamdani’s election, but most did not treat it as an existential threat. The results of the 2026 primary elections can’t be so easily dismissed.
Anxiety gripped the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America in the days leading up to New York’s June 23 primary elections. With less than two weeks until Election Day, all the warning signs were flashing red. Volunteer participation was low, as was early voting among the young voters that fueled Zohran Mamdani’s rise to the mayoralty last year. Like the New York Knicks late in Game 4 of the NBA Finals, the city’s left faced the prospect of a terrible reversal after a major advance. After the Knicks completed their miraculous comeback in that game, Finals MVP Jalen Brunson explained the mindset that carried them to a 3-1 series lead and an eventual championship. “You’re allowed to think about the worst possible scenario,” Brunson said, unintentionally echoing Antonio Gramsci’s famous aphorism on intellect and will. “But you’ve got to go out there and do something about it.” NYC-DSA and its allies went into Brunson Mode, rallied the troops to hit the doors, and pulled out a stunning victory on Election Day.
When the votes were counted, twelve of thirteen NYC-DSA-backed candidates (including three incumbents, four if you count Diana Moreno) had won their races, most by comfortable margins. That would have been a remarkable achievement in any election cycle, but this number included two congressional wins that have shaken the Democratic Party to its core: Claire Valdez’s victory in New York’s Seventh Congressional District and Darializa Avila Chevalier’s in the Thirteenth (Brad Lander, for his part, beat incumbent Dan Goldman in the Tenth District by thirty points).
These wins came over two different components of the Democratic coalition. Valdez bested Antonio Reynoso, the progressive Brooklyn borough president who had the support of the New York Working Families Party (NYWFP) and most of the city’s major unions, by more than twenty points. What began as a polite campaign, with Reynoso even appearing at a NYC-DSA endorsement forum to ask for a nod he knew he would not get, became increasingly messy as Election Day drew closer. This was the first time NYC-DSA and NYWFP squared off in such a high-profile race, and the acrimony reflected the stakes of the race—a changing of the guard on the city’s electoral left.
Avila Chevalier’s nearly four-point victory over Adriano Espaillat, a veteran officeholder and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, is nothing less than an earthquake. The campaign was bitterly fought, with Espaillat supporters routinely making racist attacks on Avila Chevalier for supposedly being Haitian (she is not; like Espaillat she is Dominican American). One Espaillat surrogate made new advances in Great Replacement theory when he accused Mamdani of moving Haitians and Muslims to Washington Heights to displace and disenfranchise Dominicans. Needless to say, there is no evidence to suggest that such a lurid scheme existed. Despite millions of dollars in outside spending, including $650,000 funneled from AIPAC, Espaillat could not overcome the seething anger many Democratic voters feel toward their own party’s leaders. His loss corroborates recent polling that shows DSA with a higher favorability rating than Congressional Democrats among Democratic voters. Avila Chevalier will represent a district in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, marking a fresh advance for a group whose strength to date has largely been concentrated in Brooklyn and Queens.
Establishment Democrats were certainly not happy about Mamdani’s election last year, but for the most part they did not treat it like an existential crisis. Perhaps many thought it could be chalked up as a one-off win by a uniquely talented politician over uniquely vulnerable rivals. The scale and depth of the left’s Super Tuesday triumph, however, cannot be dismissed. It overcame the best efforts of progressives like Reynoso and establishment fixtures like Espaillat, and it made plain the leadership role Mamdani has carved out for himself in Democratic politics—one that may well extend beyond the five boroughs.
With the 2028 presidential jockeying already well underway, and with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez looking like a top contender for the nomination, the New York primaries have triggered a full-fledged panic attack within the Democratic establishment. Their reactions betray a fear that a fate like the one that befell the leaders of the pre-Trump Republican Party is closing in on them, quickly.
“All of us are a little frustrated with the Democratic Party,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who backed both Reynoso and Espaillat in the primaries, said to CNN when the smoke cleared. “But you don’t blow it up. That’s what MAGA has done.” James has become a doyenne of New York Democratic politics, but she is not implacably hostile to the left. She gave Mamdani crucial support in his run for mayor, and in 2003, while running for city council, she was the first candidate in New York to win office solely on the NYWFP line. Still, she is deeply connected to the party’s most established officeholders and institutions while also maintaining good relations with many progressives. Both of these segments of the Democratic coalition have viewed NYC-DSA’s rise to prominence with varying degrees of wariness and alarm, even when organizations like NYWFP find themselves lining up with socialists in electoral and legislative campaigns. Even though NYC-DSA has been a real political player for nearly a decade, other actors in New York politics are still figuring out how to grapple with it. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated Joe Crowley in 2018, yet establishment Democrats still struggle to defend their incumbents from primary challenges. Progressive formations like NYWFP are far more in step with the shifts happening in the Democratic base but cannot seem to generate the kind of grassroots enthusiasm and participation among its supporters that NYC-DSA can.
“Some of the candidates that [Mamdani] has supported,” James claimed in her comments to CNN, “are individuals who do not understand the politics of New York City, the cultural differences from district to district, who have not been part of the history and the struggle of some of these districts, and are relatively new to the body politic.” This echoes the standard criticism of NYC-DSA, which is that it’s an organization of transplants and gentrifiers who don’t understand the city they live in. It is true that NYC-DSA has yet to build the kind of multiracial working-class base that is essential to a truly durable socialist project. The worst thing it could do is forget this in the flush of electoral success. At the same time, if the organization and its candidates don’t understand New York’s politics and neighborhoods, then how do they keep winning?
There are many reasons why, from Democrats’ failure to contain the exorbitant cost of living to party leaders who find themselves in public with genocidaires like far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. But the fundamental reason is so obvious as to be overlooked: it has built a member-led organization that does the things political parties used to do, but don’t anymore. With thousands of active members spread across the city, it has become a rooted civic institution that doesn’t simply mobilize voters on Election Day, though it does this extremely well. It engages and educates voters between elections; provides opportunities for sociability, fun, and fellowship; and mediates effectively (if not always perfectly) between leaders and the base. It is doing “partyism,” as some political scientists have called it, without the party.
In their excellent book The Hollow Parties, Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld trace the transformation of the Democrats and Republicans from mass parties into rival “blobs” of consultants, donors, and interest groups. This process, driven in part by the expansion of primary elections for candidate nominations, has been a key enabler of the socialist insurgency in the Democratic Party. But it’s not just the official party that is hollowed out. So are many of the organizations that ostensibly filled the void it left behind. Reynoso’s campaign website touts the endorsement of twenty-nine organizations, including an array of labor unions that collectively represent hundreds of thousands of members and boast enormous treasuries. But whatever support they provided paled in comparison to the scores of volunteers who scaled multistory walkups, phonebanked, and texted their friends, family, and exes to help elect Valdez to Congress. As political scientist John Mollenkopf has observed, NYC-DSA has built “the most effective targeting, canvassing, get-out-the-vote effort that the city has seen in a long time,” mostly on the strength of voluntary labor and relational organizing. It owes its success to the old civic arts as much as it does to social media and vertical video.
Tuesday’s results are the clearest sign yet that the Democratic Party is in the midst of a full-blown crisis of hegemony. A long-simmering conflict between the represented and their representatives, kept in check for years by fear of the Republican Party, has now boiled over. The Democratic establishment is losing its grip for the reasons Gramsci once identified in his Prison Notebooks: It has “failed in some major political undertaking for which it has requested . . . the consent of the broad masses,” in this case stopping the rise of Trump and MAGA fascism. At the same time, its supporters “have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity, and put forward demands which taken together . . . add up to a revolution.”
It’s not hard to see the young volunteers resolutely campaigning for unions for all, housing for all, Medicare for all, the abolition of ICE, and an end to funding war and genocide abroad—the main points of Valdez’s congressional platform—in this description. It is far too early to say where all this will lead. But it seems clear that the Democratic Party as we know it is over.
Chris Maisano is a trade unionist and Democratic Socialists of America activist. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.