Democratic Bigwigs versus Their Own Voters, Mamdani, and the Future
There is one truly optimistic story on the US political scene right now, and it is the mayoral election in New York City. With disgraced incumbent Mayor Eric Adams having been pushed aside by the party insiders who are desperately trying to install disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in the mayor's office, the election is now a three-way race between Cuomo, the permanently disgraced Curtis Sliwa (the Republican nominee, because of course he is), and the person who easily won the Democratic primary, New York State Rep. Zohran Mamdani.
According to a recent Fox News poll that was summarized this morning in Newsweek, Mamdani is riding a 21-point lead over Cuomo (49-28, with Sliwa at 13 percent), and Mamdani's lead is even larger among likely voters (52-28-14). Last night's mayoral candidates' debate produced no breakthrough moments for the also-rans, with Mamdani landing this nicely delivered broadside against Cuomo: "What I don’t have in experience, I make up for in integrity. And what you don’t have in integrity, you could never make up for in experience." Yeow.
Before today, I had mentioned the New York election twice in passing here on Dorf on Law. Just over a month ago, while arguing that the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill was hanging by a thread in terms of its credibility with its own voters, I wrote that
there are still very good reasons to worry about the current Democratic leadership, as currently demonstrated by its shameful effort to distance the party from its own nominee in New York City's mayoral race, Zohran Mamdani. It seems that every time the Democrats are given the gift of a compelling candidate, they do everything possible to throw it away.
Two days later, I added: "To her credit, New York governor Kathy Hochul has finally managed to cough out an endorsement -- filled with painful caveats, but still -- of Mamdani." And Hochul's hacked-up hairball is hardly the only painfully forced endorsement from a Democratic leader. Check out this shameful evasion (in the passive voice, no less) by Kamala Harris, as reported by NBC News:
"Look, as far as I’m concerned, he’s the Democratic nominee and he should be supported," Harris said when she was asked for her thoughts about Mamdani, a progressive state lawmaker, and why some in the party have been slow to back him.
Asked whether she endorsed Mamdani, she offered a tepid response before she turned to other up-and-coming names in the party.
"I support the Democrat in the race, sure. But let me just say this: He’s not the only star," Harris said, going on to highlight Democrats running for mayor in cities across the country.
Good grief. To my pleasant surprise, US Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland (D-MD) has described the failure to back Mamdani as "spineless politics." Van Hollen is no Bernie Sanders, by the way, having been on the leadership teams of Nancy Pelosi in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate. But apparently Hochul's "here are all of the things I disagree with him about, but yeah, I'm endorsing him," and Harris's "I support the Democratic nominee, I guess, but ... ooh, look at that squirrel over there!!" are the best we are getting from most leading Democrats -- including those from New York.
There is no mystery here. Even the people who now exalt Barack Hussein Obama as one of their party's greatest politicians are running for cover when asked about Zohran Kwame Mamdani. Why the difference? Because Mamdani refuses to run away from being a Democratic Socialist. And we can't have that, can we, no matter what the truth is about Mamdani's views? (No, Democratic Socialists are not Stalinists. They would, in fact, fit easily within -- and nowhere near the end of -- almost any European country's political spectrum.)
The establishment's panic about Mamdani was so bad that, shortly before the primary earlier this year, Cuomo picked up the endorsements of Bill Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, and James Clyburn. The first two, I suppose, might be drawn to Cuomo's record of sexual harassment and bullying of women. By contrast, Clyburn has served honorably for decades (as far as I know), with the major strike against him being his resuscitation of Joe Biden's candidacy in early 2020, which makes him not a sexist but simply a too-timid party elder. For all three, the message is that anyone who is somehow different is unwelcome in their party: "Cuomo's our guy, because he's always been our kind of guy, facts be damned." Facts. Basic electoral arithmetic. Damn them all.
Van Hollen is, I am happy to say, not the only prominent Democrat who is bucking those trends. Antonio Delgado, Hochul's Lieutenant Governor (who is running for Governor next year) had an excellent op-ed in The New York Times this past July, where he wrote this about Mamdani:
[W]e just saw what it looks like to connect with voters on the most important issue of the day: affordability. In June, Zohran Mamdani pulled off one of the biggest upsets in New York’s modern political history. Establishment Democrats have been talking about affordability for years and have very little to show for it. Mr. Mamdani got through to New Yorkers on the very same set of issues. Instead of lecturing them, he took the time to actually listen to what voters were feeling. He had the courage to directly engage with people, and then brought a laser focus on the issues that they care about. As a result, he shattered turnout records and brought out young voters in droves. It should have been a major signal to the establishment.
I should also note that Mamdani issued a truly inspiring video in which he enthusiastically and unambiguously embraced trans rights (and celebrated trans pioneer and activist Sylvia Rivera), and he is strongly backed by labor unions.
In spite of -- or, if we are to be honest, because of -- all this, Mamdani is rejected by Democratic party elites. At the end of his op-ed, Delgado added this: "Instead of embracing Mr. Mamdani’s success, as I have, many top Democrats have kept their distance. ... Better to maintain an unsustainable economic status quo than be mislabeled a Communist, the thinking goes." Exactly.
What makes this so frustrating is that, as I have argued many, many times, the center-right Democrats' hyper-caution never achieves the goal of blunting Republicans' claims about Democrats' supposed extremism. Republicans are, for example, all currently rushing in front of cameras to repeat their talking point that the upcoming "No Kings" national day of protests is a "Hate America rally." Being congenitally weak and scared is what leads Democratic bigwigs to do politically ridiculous things like having Harris campaign with Liz Cheney in 2024 and Hillary Clinton consult with war criminal Henry Kissinger in 2016, while not even allowing a single Palestinian voice to be heard at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. I cannot help but use the admittedly overused retort: "How'd that work out for ya?"
And to be clear, Republicans have already introduced supposed zingers like referring to an imaginary "pro-terrorist wing of the Democrat Party" (because Republicans simply cannot get enough of their agrammatical rebranding of the Democratic Party). There is no getting around the reality that the Republicans will smear every Democrat -- no matter what anyone says -- as being a communist and terrorist, and even if Cuomo were somehow to come back and win, the imagined damage from Mamdani ever having been a Democratic nominee will be a forever moment for Republicans.
Consider the Republicans' response to the news from Politico earlier this week that a Young Republican text chain was a sewer of racism, sexism, antisemitism (which is notable from the party that is using antisemitism as its excuse to attack universities), and even pro-Nazism. True, JD Vance continued to hone his increasingly unmistakable pro-fascist public image by refusing to denounce any of that awfulness. Instead, he pivoted to a weird and weak whataboutist retort regarding a single objectionable text from Jay Jones, a Democratic candidate in Virginia, as if that was in any way equivalent to the literal "I love Hitler" insanity of the Republicans' group chat (which included, according to the Guardian, "the N-word and a homophobic term," while "[t]he word 'retarded' appeared more than 251 times combined in the chat").
But that is merely Vance being the White DEI ghoul that he is. The rest of his compatriots did manage to denounce their own wayward "youth" (that is, 25-40 year olds), but fear not, for they can always pivot back to Islamophobia and all-purpose sliming of Democrats with ease. Trump-loving convert Elise Stefanik, for example, denounced the Republican chat and called for the vile perpetrators to step down. But that was apparently too much decency for her to stomach: "Stefanik then took to social media on Tuesday night, called the Politico story a 'hit piece', pointed to the Jones texting scandal and accused New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani of embracing 'terrorist sympathizers'."
If Democratic leaders think that they can blunt whatever political damage they think that Mamdani might cause, they are (once again) badly mistaken. Even if Mamdani had never existed, this fake outrage about Democrats being extremists was going to continue to be the Republicans go-to set of lies. And as I have written many times over the years, this has been going on forever, even before Bill Clinton amped up the "I hate my own party" vibe with his triangulation insanity.
The party's current problem with Republicans' gerrymandering strategy also goes back decades, as a commentator named David Daley (the author of the book Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count) wrote recently in "Democrats face a gerrymandering armageddon. This didn’t have to happen": "Had Democratic leadership listened to Steve Israel, John Tanner and Martin Frost [earlier in this century], all of this could have been avoided." Why did the bigwigs ignore the warnings?
Tanner [a former Democratic congressperson from Tennessee] remembers Pelosi saying: "We’ll take a look at it." But he couldn’t get a hearing on his bill in 2007 or 2009 either. Partisan warriors, he suggested, never really want to reform the process. They might fight to take away the other side’s advantage, but never, ever do they want to risk their own.
Might Democratic elders regret ignoring him now, as leaders of a permanent minority? Tanner snorts again. "It’s just not something anyone wants to take up. I went through [redistricting] three times. There’s a lot of power connected to that system."
Similarly, Frost (a former Texas Democratic congressperson) said: "No one else in the party cared about this or understood how important it was, for whatever reason."
Sadly, gerrymandering is only one of many fatal sins of omission on the part of Democratic leaders over the years. I will give the last word to Ryan W. Powers, with whom I was unfamiliar before reading his op-ed "Democrats are captive to outdated etiquette. It’s endangering democracy," earlier this month. He puts the point plainly:
[T]he most powerful liberal institutions – the Democratic establishment, major donors and the professional class around them – are captive to outdated etiquette. They prize agreeability as an end in itself: disruption is discouraged, compromise exalted, restraint worn as a badge of honor. And because these institutions shape liberal culture from the top down, their attachment to niceties dulls urgency and narrows the space for bold, breakout leadership.
Notwithstanding my obvious outrage here, I truly have been hesitant to criticize Democratic leaders during this second Trump era. People without power often look powerless, and it is ridiculous (to say nothing of counterproductive) to mock them for not doing the impossible.
But this is different. The response to Mamdani is certainly a prominent example of the kind of unforced errors that the Democratic leaders commit, but it is hardly an isolated example. If there is to be a democratic restoration in the US after Trump is no longer in office, it will have to be led by someone other than those guys.
- Neil H. Buchanan