Democratic Establishment Copes Hard After NYC Mayoral Primary

On Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani pulled off one of the most unlikely grassroots upsets in the history of U.S. politics. The 33-year-old social democrat and member of the New York State Assembly overcame the most expensive attack ad campaign in the history of our nation's largest and wealthiest city to defeat its best-known political scion, Andrew Cuomo, in the Democratic mayoral primary. At a time when the Democratic brand could not be more toxic, this should be good news to the party. However, establishment Democrats and their institutions immediately hailed the result as an unmitigated disaster.

Mamdani is of Indian descent and was born in Uganda. His father is an accomplished Indian academic (Uganga apparently has a significant Indian expatriate community), and his mother is an Indian-American filmmaker. The family moved to NYC when he was seven. Mamdani is also a Muslim who, while condemning the October 7 Hamas attacks as a “horrific war crime,” has remained deeply critical of Israel’s disproportionate response, calling it a genocide. He has also described Israel as an apartheid state, and said that if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were to travel to New York City, he should be arrested in accordance with the International Criminal Court's warrant against him for war crimes in Gaza.

New York City has the largest population of Jewish citizens anywhere outside of Israel, and these positions (mostly with gross distortions of them) were the primary basis of the $25 million PAC campaign launched against Mamdani and in favor of Cuomo. Despite this and Cuomo’s unrivaled name recognition (both he and his father served as popular governors of New York), Mamdani won a landslide victory, including what appears to be a majority of the Jewish vote.

How could that be? Well, Mamdani ran on a slate of issues that enjoyed immense popularity among a very broad swath of New Yorkers, including capping rent increases, “fast and free” public transportation, universal childcare, meaningful steps to address climate change, and a living minimum wage, all paid for by relatively small taxes on the uber wealthy. In other words, he gave working-class Democratic voters the platform they have been screaming for, only to fall on the deaf ears of a DNC that increasingly relies on the largesse of billionaire donors who have hijacked the party to try and maintain an unsustainable status quo.

The Democratic establishment has been busy spending enormous amounts of time and money supposedly examining why it lost the White House in 2024. Corporate, left-leaning media outlets have breathlessly reported on these election post-mortems in such a ludicrous manner that it is difficult to discern whether they are attempting to further gaslight their voters, or they are so cartoonishly disconnected from them that they actually believe the nonsense conjured up by a consulting class whose only interest is in the self-preservation and enrichment that comes with telling the richest donors what they want to hear.

David Schor is a favorite “data analyst” trotted out by these platforms, supposedly to give a cold and clinical after-action review when Dems lose races that were theirs to win. After Kamala Harris was defeated in November’s presidential election, Schor concluded that there were no problems regarding the Democratic platform. Schor’s “data” told him that the party had simply done a poor job of “messaging” to voters. What was never disclosed in any of the litany of media appearances I saw Schor make was that his consulting firm was crafting the messaging Harris’s $700 million super PAC was using.

So, the person responsible for “the messaging” tells Democratic leaders and voters that “the messaging” was the problem, and he is still trotted out as an expert on what they need to do next. According to Shcor, Democrats just have to keep the same pro-corporate centrist candidates and billionaire donor-friendly policies, but give him and other consultants more money. Then they can do a better job of telling rank-and-file voters why the elites’ policies are superior to the ones that actually appeal to them, such as curbing corporate greed, addressing exponentially expanding wealth inequality, affordable healthcare, a living wage, climate action, protecting Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, and a meaningful reduction of wasteful military spending.

This is music to the ears of deep-pocketed, billionaire donors on Wall Street and in the Silicon Valley who have benefited so greatly from our unsustainable status quo. It allows them to delude themselves into believing that any kind of reform that might see their tax burden increase or limit their ability to hoard wealth, even slightly, is unnecessary. Elite donors continue to fund these consultants, while exorbitantly-paid corporate media elites disingenuously pass off the self-serving rhetoric as expertise to their viewers—wash, rinse, repeat, and mostly lose.

The Democratic Party’s problems began when it abandoned the working class during the Clinton era and began courting its own team of billionaire donors who wanted essentially Neocon foreign and economic policies wrapped in the cultural veneer of liberalism. The so-called Third Way. This consultant class has consistently blamed culture war issues for Harris’s loss, arguing that issues like trans rights and other matters of identity politics were to blame. Only these consultants know full well that her campaign never highlighted those issues and that the biggest obstacle it faced was President Biden’s insistence that Harris leave “no daylight” between their platforms when anointing her as his replacement, as well as the lack of democracy in doing so rather than allowing Democratic voters to choose their nominee.

Biden was deeply unpopular as the election approached, and some of that was, in fact, due to Democrats' poor messaging of policies that were popular with voters (just not on the issues you are being told). The cause of the messaging failure was that most of those successful policies were an affront to the party’s biggest donors. The Biden administration had done more to strengthen unions than any in modern history, and union density is the most significant determinant of wealth inequality. It had also taken more action on antitrust than any modern administration, fighting successfully against price fixing and monopolies. Its Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had done outstanding work in reining in financial fraud, returning millions of dollars to Americans who had been scammed by financial institutions.

At the same time, Biden and the Democrats did a terrible job of securing the border. Knowing it was a top two issue for most voters, Vice President Harris still could not muster up the resolve to say she would handle it with any significant differences from Biden. The other top-line issue was inflation and affordability, and instead of empathizing with Americans experiencing real economic pain and insecurity, both the Biden and Harris campaigns attempted to use charts and graphs to tell voters that what they were experiencing was simply not true.

Sure, they acknowledged that the recovery had been “uneven,” that prices still needed to come down, etc. That is of little comfort to working-class Americans who watched as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and seven other billionaires collectively gained $500 billion in wealth just in 2024, bringing their combined net worth to more than $2 trillion among just 10 individuals. Harris could not address any of this because billionaire surrogates, such as Mark Cuban, were making the rounds, assuring their buddies that Lena Khan would no longer chair the Federal Trade Commission, Harris would not regulate crypto or AI, and tax policy would remain largely unchanged.

In other words, she would maintain that unsustainable status quo regardless of the consequences. Add to that the fact that Harris was never a particularly talented politician. In her 2020 presidential campaign, she failed to garner even 3 percent in the primary polls and even lost in a landslide in her own state despite a massive push from donors and corporate media. Toss in the facts that she largely sidelined her running mate and other popular progressives like Bernie Sanders and AOC to campaign with Neocon Liz Cheney, the daughter of one of the architects of our forever wars, the unpopularity of continuing to support Israel’s actions in Gaza among her base, and that Biden had named her the “border czar,” and anyone but a beltway schill can tell you why she lost.

The establishment thought it could simply raise a billion dollars from its wealthiest donors, pay a bunch of celebrities to show up at her rallies, run some vaguely Obama-like campaign that swapped out “Joy” for “Hope and Change,” and enough white collar suburban women would turn out to give her a victory. As for identity politics, those same consultants are attempting to rewrite history to suggest that the focus came from the progressive left. It did not. Identity politics have originated from elite institutions, funded by elite donors, as a means to offer some sort of difference between Democrats and Republicans that can make some people feel better about themselves, while, and this is the crucial part, costing the elites themselves nothing.

American voters have roundly rejected both neoconservatism and neoliberalism. The populist right, largely through the efforts of a single charismatic personality, has successfully wrested power from its establishment, despite the establishment fighting tooth and nail to prevent it from doing so. In 2016, Democrats also experienced a populist movement that rose to meet the moment in the form of Bernie Sanders. However, party powerbrokers ultimately succeeded in squashing the movement from within, resulting in the election of Donald Trump, who had trailed Sanders by 10 points in head-to-head polls. Failing to learn their lesson, they repeated the same mistake in 2020 and then ensured there would be no primary in 2024.

The Democratic donor class insists on deluding itself into thinking that voters will once again be so exhausted by a Trump presidency that simply presenting a milquetoast alternative in 2028 will be enough. However, even if they manage to get the White House, the next president will face unprecedented challenges, ranging from a severe debt crisis to mass unemployment resulting from AI to an increasingly chaotic climate.

The Democratic establishment is already trying to sell voters on polished establishment candidates like Gavin Newsom, who will champion the status quo and give Americans more empty rhetoric in place of meaningful reforms, like he has in California. They are attempting to intellectualize superficial weak tea policy platforms like elitist pundits Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s tone deaf “abundance” rhetoric as a superior alternative to the policies their voting base is actually clamoring for. Take even a cursory look at the “Abundance Movement” and you’ll find nothing more than the rebranded, pro-corporate, deregulatory centrism that ushered in the neoconservative movement—just one more opportunity for the DNC to tack right, now that MAGA has moved that end of the spectrum to its farthest fringes.

Meanwhile, Republicans have already demonstrated how they plan to address our challenges. They are adding to the debt crisis at an unprecedented pace. They have gutted the FTC, CFPB, EPA, IRS, and every other regulatory agency with the potential to address the other issues. They are gutting Medicaid and ignoring the needs of Social Security to achieve their longtime goal of successfully dismantling the most successful social safety net program in our nation’s history. They are gutting the VA while putting tens of thousands of veterans out of work, and have insisted that no state or local government can enact any regulation on AI for the next ten years, regardless of the consequences it has on their economies.

In sum, Trump and his biggest donors are transitioning us into an authoritarian techno-oligarchy in which Americans who are not among the wealthy elite can fight for scraps with little to no protections from the sort of exploitation FDR Democrats successfully fought to insulate them from after the Great Depression. For their part, Democrats are merely offering a slower-moving train off the same cliff.

The Washington Post, the New York Times, CNBC, CNN, and Democratic talking heads on every outlet that will have them have been loudly describing Mamdani’s victory as some sort of harbinger of death for the party. Republicans, including Trump and the oligarchs, have been even more hyperbolic. In reality, his victory should serve as a wake-up call.

Democrats, along with many independents and third-party voters, want the party to return to its roots as the one that represents the working class, acting as a buffer against the monied interests that have successfully set up a rigged casino where more and more wealth continues to be redistributed upward each and every year. That is an alternative vision to the realities of what the MAGA movement has proven to be, and it should be presented to voters as a real choice going forward.

We have entered a zero-sum game between selfish billionaires aided by bought-and-paid-for millionaires on both sides of the aisle, against the rest of us. Rank-and-file Americans would be best served by dismantling their circular firing squad and waking up to the reality of the situation. Time is running out, and the elites aren’t making room for us in their doomsday bunkers.

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of our weekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County government since 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Click here for his bio. Mitch is also the author of three novels and a short story collection available here.