What Both Sides of the Democratic Party Divide Need to Do Now
We can and should have a debate about what path the Democratic Party should follow while staying unified in the fight against fascism.
The supporters of Mayor Mamdani (and apparently there are a lot of them) are justifiably ecstatic about the three decisive congressional primary victories in NYC. The Democrats who don’t like Mamdani are weeping and moaning and gnashing their teeth, freaking out that Republicans will sweep the elections because some Democrats are socialists.
Everyone needs to take a deep breath. Politics is a long, tough slog with no permanent victories or defeats, and many twists and turns. And everyone needs to remember that the fight against fascism is deadly serious, probably the most important thing we collectively will ever do, and we need to build a big coalition to win it.
I want to make several points about what is going on inside the Democratic Party right now.
The Mamdani Moment
Whatever you think of Mayor Mamdani, he is having a moment. In a country that is inherently irritable, anti-establishment, and anti-incumbent against whoever is in power, usually the first thing that happens after a politician wins power is that they start diving in the polls. The last two mayors in NYC, Adams and de Blasio, both struggled mightily from the moment they took office. Obama, the most popular politician of this century, won decisively twice, but lost the next elections by huge margins after his big victories.
Not Mamdani. His popularity and political muscle were fully on display in the NYC primaries, with his endorsed candidates beating incumbents and winning big.
I think rather than panicking and going on cable TV to melt down about it all, the question all the anti-Mamdani Democrats should be asking themselves is: why is this guy so popular?
It’s actually not hard to figure out. He promised lower costs for New Yorkers, and instead of waiting around, he is already delivering. On child care, on rents, on grocery stores in neighborhoods that don’t have them, he is already making things happen. Mamdani’s policies are clear, easy to understand, and focused on helping working folks. It’s not hard to see why he is popular and why the candidates he is supporting are winning. Steve Rosenthal wrote a great column about this here yesterday.
My advice, based on 45 years of political experience, is highly sophisticated and nuanced: copying what is working is a better strategy than panicking on cable TV. Maybe if you incorporated some of the progressive populist Mamdani agenda into your platforms and messaging, you too could combine working-class swing voters with working-class base Democratic voters, and then win more elections.
Please, Everyone: Calm the Fuck Down
To my progressive friends dancing on the graves of their establishment Democrat opponents, while your victories are important and worth celebrating, we still have such a very long way to go. Donald Trump is still president, and threatening to smash our democracy and hand over the economy to the billionaire tech overlords. The Republicans still run Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, and most state governments, and have hundreds of millions of dollars from corporate America to try and crush us. Democrats backed by crypto, AI firms, Wall Street, AIPAC, and Big Pharma still have won lots of Democratic primaries over the last several weeks. Progressive economic populism is clearly winning a lot of the time, but those of us who advocate for those positions have many miles to go before we can rest.
It would also be good to acknowledge that outside of the biggest cities on the two coasts, voters may have more mixed feelings about the word socialist, about slogans like “abolish the police,” and about the immigration issue. And we are going to have to win the votes of at least some of those skeptical folks.
To our friends in the establishment wing of the Democratic Party freaking out over people who call themselves socialists winning elections, or the random goofy comments by Chevalier (and yeah, as progressive as I am, I do think she has said some pretty dumb stuff), please take some very deep breaths and stop reinforcing the ideas that (a) Democrats are crazy leftists bent on the country’s destruction, and that (b) when centrists lose primaries, they want to destroy the unity of the Democratic Party.
For those who think Democrats can’t win in swing districts because some socialists won their primaries, I want to remind you all that after AOC got massive media coverage for winning her primary in 2018, Democrats picked up 40 seats in the House that fall; that after Mamdani became the media star of the moment for winning the Democratic primary in June of last year, Democrats went on to dominate the fall elections all over the country and in special elections throughout the last year; and that when Joe Biden very visibly moved to the left to embrace much of Bernie Sanders’ and Elizabeth Warren’s economic platform — arguably running the most progressive populist Democratic presidential campaign since LBJ — that Democrats won a trifecta that November.
Democratic candidates in red and purple states and districts are perfectly capable of distancing themselves from the rhetoric and positioning of Democrats they don’t agree with, and if they need to do that to win, Godspeed. But the one thing all of our Democratic candidates should definitely do is not to forget my first point: whatever label you put on it, Mamdani’s economic populism is working. That is the through line all Democrats should be embracing.
One final point in terms of calming the fuck down: that goes for us all. If we want to prevail over Trump’s fascist authoritarianism, Democrats need to be able to work together as we head into the general election this fall. Mamdani referred to AIPAC, who supported some of the candidates he opposed in those primaries, as monsters. My old buddy James Carville said he didn’t want to be in the same party as Chevalier because of some of her dumb tweets. And Jaime Harrison ranted about Democratic candidates who criticized the Democratic Party.
C’mon guys, simmer down. For democracy to survive, we all need to work together to beat Trump. Chevalier had some outrageous tweets about the American flag, private property, and abolishing, I guess, all kinds of things, but she also apologized and took the tweets down. I think AIPAC has become an awful organization, full of right-wing donors and Bibi-philes, but they and the candidates they support are not monsters. And Democrats criticize each other all the damn time, as you just proved Mr. Harrison. Please, in the words of Desperately Seeking Susan, everyone should “take a valium like a normal person.”
Democrats have our differences, but we are not mortal enemies. Our mortal enemies are the fascists who have come to destroy our democracy.
Plenty of Time to Have the Battle Democrats Need to Have
Don’t get me wrong: the Democrats are going to have a big battle over whether our agenda for our future should sound more like NYC’s former mayor Michael Bloomberg or more like the current one Zohran Mamdani, or maybe like the many great union and working class-candidates who have sprouted up in this election cycle, running in all kinds of competitive states and districts around the country. The big money will naturally be on Big Money’s side, but a lot more voters will be hanging out with those of us on the populist side.
We won’t be able to avoid this fight if we wanted to, and shouldn’t want to: the Democratic Party needs to decide which side we are on. In the primaries yet to come this year, in our labor and community organizing, in the columns we write, and in the Zoom calls we conference in, we can make our case this year. I know I certainly will.
But once this general election is over is the real time to engage in this battle. There will be a fight over the soul of the party in the 2028 presidential nomination fight, and I hope my progressive populist side can settle on a good candidate and win that fight then — I’m pretty sure that is the only way we will win the 2028 general election. I’m also quite certain there will be plenty of good progressive populists to choose from, and plenty of candidates supported by the Big Money team if you want to go with them.
In the meantime, though, Democrats need to stay focused on winning the November election rather than beating the hell out of each other.
And just one final note to my friends in the Democratic Party establishment: looking at the populist politics that are working and welcoming us progressive populists to the table makes more sense as a purely pragmatic political strategy than trying to banish us from the party.
Well said, Mike. I couldn't agree more!