I wanted to share an update with you. I’ve decided to take on an important role in the new administration as Deputy Communications Director of Economic Justice.

I’m stepping into this role at a moment when affordability is the city’s defining challenge. In City Hall’s communications team, my focus will be on listening to New Yorkers and connecting their lived experience to how this administration is using governing power – across economic policy, consumer and worker protections, and a more serious approach to building and development – to bring down the cost of living and ensure dignity.

I’m excited and honored to be stepping into this role at a moment when governing power for working and middle class people is urgently needed. I believe deeply in the direction of this administration and in the work ahead.

I will be concluding my time as the founding Executive Director of The Bloc. At the same time, I want to share a difficult update. After careful deliberation and conversations with our board, advisors, partners, and funders, we have decided to wind down The Bloc in 2026.

This wasn’t the outcome I wanted. Over our first full year, we assembled an exceptional team and did work I’m genuinely proud of. That included helping movement partners respond to rapid federal attacks, building a cross-movement spokesperson bench, strengthening communications capacity, and media accountability that brought scrutiny to mainstream media coverage. I’m grateful for what we built together for today’s attention economy and populist era.

But The Bloc is still a young organization, and the fundraising environment has been challenging. After weighing our options carefully, it became clear that attempting a founder transition this early would put people and partners through unnecessary uncertainty. Rather than push forward under those conditions, we’re choosing to close the organization with care and intention.

Over the coming period, we’ll focus on closing out our work responsibly and supporting our staff and partners through the transition.

For program-related questions, please follow up with ilona at the-bloc.us. For overall transition and wind-down matters, jee at the-bloc.us is the right point of contact.

To our donors, partners, and supporters: thank you. You took a bet on something new and gave us the trust and space to try to build infrastructure where it was missing. And to the staff who rolled the dice with me over this past year, I’m deeply grateful.

This will likely be my last Substack for a while as I step fully into public service and comply with the city’s guidelines. I hope to return to writing in time, but for now, my focus is on the work ahead.

With real thanks,
Waleed

G. Elliott Morris’s innovative research tracks how often Democrats and Republicans use the word “affordability” in constituent emails. Through most of 2024, both parties sit in the middle of the chart, with Republicans actually using the term slightly more. Joe Biden drops out. Donald Trump wins the presidency. The lines barely move. Democratic mentions drift toward zero by mid-2024 and only slowly recover. As Morris writes:

Mamdani’s primary win in June 2025 is where you see the real inflection for affordability. Democratic mentions jump and never return to their earlier baseline. It’s the moment when affordability goes from being a niche progressive word on email newsletters to a party-wide message.

Most arguments about inflation and the cost of living stay at the level of macroeconomics. These charts point to something more political: they show how a single primary in New York reset what Democrats from safe blue districts to front-liners think it’s safe — and necessary — to say and frame about the economy.

The claim here isn’t that progressive candidates in big cities don’t care about persuading swing-seat voters. It’s that party realignments rarely start in swing seats at all. The anti-slavery movement of the 1840s and ’50s, the industrial-union Democrats of the New Deal, the civil-rights coalition of the 1950s and ’60s, and the conservative movement of the 1970s and ’80s all followed the same script: first consolidate power on home field, then pull a shapeless political center in their direction.

Safe Democratic seats in large, diverse metros play a crucial role today. They’re where the party’s core voters are densest, where campaign and policy ideas can be tried at full strength, and where future, entrepreneurial staff and messengers get trained. When a candidate wins there with a different story about the economy, it doesn’t stay local. It becomes a template for every Democrat looking for a way to answer the same voter anxiety.

Some pundits are now borrowing a term from sports analytics. “Wins above replacement” in baseball measures how many extra games a player is worth compared with a generic substitute. This version asks how much better a candidate does than a “generic Democrat” once you control for partisanship, incumbency, and money. Despite some reservations on the actual data and math here, it’s a somewhat sensible way to think about nominees in swing districts.

But it misses what races like Mamdani’s actually do. They are less another brick in the existing structure and more a new blueprint for how the party’s house can be built. A single safe-seat member does not add square footage to the Democratic majority, but they can alter the design: which rooms get the most space, which issues sit at the center rather than the edges. Over time, even cautious incumbents begin renovating their own plans to match that new layout, including the language they use and the priorities they emphasize.

The Green New Deal is an obvious, more recent precedent. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn’t flip a Republican seat in 2018. She won a safe Democratic district. Yet her victory, and a small cluster of similar ones, helped push climate to the center of the party’s agenda and shape the eventual contours of the Inflation Reduction Act. Moderates like Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger did not run on the Green New Deal. But they ended up voting for a climate-heavy industrial policy their party probably wouldn’t have produced without pressure from its safest members aligned with a social movement organizing a constituency of voters.

Mamdani’s primary is the affordability version of that story. On paper, it is another Democratic win in a city Democrats already run. In practice, it did something the party had struggled to do for three years: it distilled the inflation debate into a frame Democrats could actually fight on. MWithin months, that vocabulary shows up not just in left-aligned newsletters but in the emails of swing-district Democrats whose voters look pretty different from Queens, because they are hearing the same complaints about rent, child care, and groceries and because Mamdani has shown that this is a way to engage the argument.

That’s the strategic case for paying attention to deep-blue primaries. The national party and its major donors will always saturate the marquee swing races; an extra dollar there mostly buys another ad buy or poll: “Republicans bad, Democrats good.” In safe seats, that same marginal dollar can change who holds the office — and with them, the assumptions that shape how Democrats describe the economy and what they demand when they negotiate with Republicans.

There is obvious demand inside the Democratic electorate for a new generation of pro-democracy, multiracial, working-class leaders. Poll after poll shows majorities of Democrats saying they want new voices at the top of the party. This is the closest either party has come to a Tea Party–style opening in more than a decade. Yet on the progressive side, the money and machinery that could turn that opening into a real faction are mostly missing. Liberal philanthropy has stayed cautious, like a venture fund that keeps talking about disruption while parking its money in blue-chip stocks. The vast majority of large donors to Mamdani’s primary against Cuomo were a small circle of Muslim and Arab Americans, not the big foundations and institutional givers that dominate liberal politics. They remain committed to familiar partisan and advocacy models and short funding cycles rather than the slow, unglamorous work of building an internal challenger wing. Zohran Mamdani’s primary exposed that gap as much as it showcased a candidate: the demand is there, the supply is still not.

What’s required looks less like another pop-up PAC and more like a permanent farm system: aligned polling and message testing, candidate recruitment, staff development, independent-expenditure muscle, and basic governing prep that runs year-round instead of for six frantic weeks before a primary. Justice Democrats is by far the closest thing to that kind of operation—its staffers separately helped run the largest independent expenditure backing Mamdani. The organization has been central to electing a handful of the new members who now anchor the party’s left flank. They are trying to build a pipeline in Memphis, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Durham, St. Louis, Denver, and beyond. But they are doing it on a fraction of the resources now pouring into AI and crypto lobbying—or into AIPAC’s effort to stop exactly these kinds of candidates from ever reaching Congress.

Justin Pearson’s race in Memphis is another test of this new faction. In a safely Democratic seat, a young Black organizer who helped lead the fight against Musk’s xAI “Colossus” project is forcing a simple question: should the party’s only House member from Tennessee stand with Big Tech’s AI buildout or with communities breathing in its fumes. If Pearson wins, it will not change which party controls the House, but it will send a clear signal about where the Democratic coalition stands in the next political economy and who gets to set the party’s line on Musk and AI at a time when the biggest tech companies are working hard to win over the party establishment.

“In a chaotic time, people who have a clear program often exert more influence than their numbers might suggest,” the historian Eric Foner has said.

Parties on their own tend to drift toward the lowest common denominator: vague language about “the middle class” and “opportunity” that offends as few factions as possible. What organized edges do, as political scientist Daniel DiSalvo has argued, is give the center concrete bones to work with: specific demands, usable frames, devils in the details. Morris’s affordability charts show what that looks like in real time, as one deep-blue primary produces a visible bend in the Democratic line and a way of talking about the economy that even Republicans start to copy. If Democrats want to be the party of people who cannot afford rent, child care, or a first home, they cannot rely only on swing-district triangulation; they need more Mamdani-style wins in safe seats that take risks, work out the substance, and help hand every Democrat from Zohran Mamdani to Mikie Sherrill a clearer story to tell.

It is a careful account of how the fox behaves. What it never quite asks is where the fox came from—and the answer, I think, is that there is no fox. The henhouse produced this itself.

Yglesias is right that the source texts present themselves as anti-liberal. The standard CRT primer says outright that it questions the very foundations of the liberal order; the anti-oppression trainings really do file “individualism,” “objectivity,” and “urgency” under the heading of white-supremacy culture, recasting as pathologies the traits an earlier liberalism counted as virtues. But institutions do not adopt theories. They adopt procedures. What a foundation or a newsroom metabolizes from these texts is never the critique of the liberal order itself—that part is left on the seminar table—but a new etiquette the order can absorb without strain: a workshop, a style guide, a hiring rubric. The doctrine is radical on the page and liberal in operation. This is the thing Yglesias has caught, and he has mistaken its costume for its body.

The observation is not new; it is the argument the socialist and Black left has pressed for decades. Adolph Reed Jr. and Nancy Fraser, from somewhat different positions, each described a politics that took capitalist markets and the basic institutions as given and confined itself to disparity, representation, and access—the questions that press hardest on the professional and managerial fractions of women and minorities seeking the full value of their class position, and least on the working majorities whose difficulty is the job itself, the rent itself, the school itself. In that form the language of race and gender justice functions as the left wing of neoliberalism: a moralized extension of anti-discrimination law, carried by nonprofits and personnel departments, spoken as a dialect of status among the credentialed. Its horizon is not the overthrow of the order but advancement within it. It asks who rises inside the house, not how the house is built.

None of which makes the right’s campaign against DEI a service to anyone. Even the clumsiest diversity programs answered real inequities in work, housing, and health, and the corporate enthusiasm that followed 2020—however much of it was liability management dressed as conscience—at least forced uncomfortable questions. The crusade now waged against it by Trump and Musk proposes no better universalism. It removes even the modest instruments institutions had for acknowledging racism, on the theory that in a society that has formally disavowed its caste arrangements, any notice of race is the discrimination that remains.

I encountered this anti-racism not in a personnel module but as a college freshman, in a summer program for the socially conscientious. We read about power and privilege and performed the now-canonical privilege walk—step forward if your parents went to college, back if you had ever skipped a meal to save money. It was instructive to watch my wealthier and whiter classmates draw steadily ahead while I fell behind, and instructive for them to see the distance laid out on the floor. It was also the first time I had words for something I had felt without naming: that I had been tracked into the whiter, more affluent classes of my public schools at some disadvantage I could render only as “my parents don’t really take vacations.” To recast that as a patterned matter of race, class, and migration rather than private luck was, for a moment, a genuine education. The exercise did what radical pedagogy hopes to do. It made a structure visible.

Then the program ended, and the limits of the form became visible too. A college cannot instruct its students to organize a union or fight for a bill without compromising its tax status and its self-image; what it can offer is the examined conscience. So the energy of that revelation drained into a secular catechism of self-scrutiny and confession, and the question shifted from what we might collectively demand to who I was in the hierarchy and how I ought to speak. In the institutions most of us entered afterward—universities, foundations, newsrooms—those were the available instruments. One could issue a statement, redesign a training, revise a rubric. One could not readily alter who owned what, or what passed into law. The culture obliged: an entire media economy arose to convert the identity turn into product, trafficking in small shocks of recognition—27 Signs You Grew Up Like This—that the reader could brandish as evidence of a self. A politics of the subtle slight suited the machinery exactly. It felt insurgent and consisted, for the most part, of recognition in place of any rearrangement.

Here the essay’s two villains turn out to be one. The campus activist conducting the privilege walk and the party strategist who speaks fluent inclusion while leaving the distribution of wealth untouched appear to be antagonists—the insurgent and the establishment she denounces. They are in fact dialects of a single condition. Both offer recognition because neither can any longer offer redistribution. The activist has the tools her institutions permit; the strategist has the tools a donor coalition permits; and in both cases the symbolic flourishes precisely where the material has been foreclosed. To see how that foreclosure happened, one has to recall what liberalism was briefly able to do, and stopped.

American liberalism has always been, by the lights of its most serious Black critics, at once indispensable and insufficient—its rights and neutral rules necessary, and hollow wherever a racialized economy still decides where one lives, who does the policing, and what work is on offer. Suspicion of liberal neutrality is not an import; it grew on native ground. And for a few decades liberalism answered that suspicion with more than a workshop, under pressure from two directions at once. From the economic side came the example of European social democracy, which, as Adam Przeworski argued, treated parliaments and constitutions not as ends but as instruments for taming markets and building welfare states. America produced no mass party of that kind; instead an elastic liberalism absorbed fragments of the critique—the regulatory state, the New Deal, the Great Society—while keeping rights and markets at its center. Bayard Rustin gave the synthesis its clearest American statement from within Black politics: a self-described socialist, he held that the freedom struggle required jobs and freedom together, civil rights joined to full employment, strong unions, and a generous floor. It was that combined pressure that moved Lyndon Johnson to declare, at Howard in 1965, that freedom was “not enough”—that the country owed “not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

The synthesis frayed and then dissolved. The unions and mass organizations that had supplied its pressure withered; the Democratic Party turned to donors, consultants, and professionals; contests once settled along lines of economic interest came to be settled along lines of culture. In presidential politics the party has been led not by its economic left but by Obama, Clinton, Biden, and Harris—figures fluent in the grammar of diversity who left the structure of ownership very nearly as they found it. Politics grew exquisitely symbolic, symbols being cheap to manufacture, and correspondingly powerless, since the levers over investment, prices, housing, and wages now sat elsewhere. That is the vacancy the identity left was summoned to fill, and the same vacancy in which an identitarian liberalism came to flourish at the center of the coalition.

It is in this light that the casting of the young as the great postliberal menace looks least convincing. The millennials and members of Gen Z so charged came of age after the civil-rights era and beneath the long shadow of Obama, instructed that the decisive battles had already been won, and then discovered that mass incarceration, school segregation, and a widening inequality had not only survived but were frequently administered by the very institutions claiming to have transcended them. By the time they reached working life the old toolkit was spent: the landmark statutes were enacted, Congress had become an engine of deadlock, and no one could seriously propose a new Voting Rights Act or a program of full employment. When structural reform is unavailable, attention migrates to conduct and culture—to the microaggression, the panel’s composition, the disputed word. Meanwhile the largest prison population on earth, a handful of men holding more wealth than the bottom half of the country, and a generation priced permanently out of a home are seldom filed under “illiberal” at all. Nor is the phenomenon, at bottom, a rebellion of the young from the left: in 2016 and 2020 the young broke heavily for Bernie Sanders, the supposed class reductionist, and many of the sharpest identitarian attacks on him issued from older and more moderate quarters whose economics had stayed put while their vocabulary modernized. What Yglesias describes is less a campus fashion than the house manner of a set of institutions—newsrooms, foundations, universities, NGOs, personnel offices—that happen to lean Democratic.

Palestine is the clarifying case, and it cuts against the diagnosis. It was not postliberal radicals who did the most to keep Palestinians outside respectable politics but liberal and center-left institutions—campaigns, leading newspapers, universities—for which the Palestinian voice was simply too charged to handle. At the 2024 Democratic convention the uncommitted movement secured a genuine first, an official panel on Palestinian human rights, whereupon, by several accounts, the planners balked at seating a Jewish speaker and pressed for an all-Arab and all-Muslim arrangement—converting a dispute over American policy and American weapons into a tableau of Muslims and Arabs narrating their suffering while everyone else looked on from a safe remove. The maneuver is the thesis in miniature. The only register in which these institutions can hear a Palestinian is the register of recognition—who counts as fully human, who is admitted to the circle of sympathy—because the other register, the one concerning arms and policy and power, is precisely the one they have closed. The structural question goes unasked because asking it would cost something.

For all that, Yglesias is right to be uneasy about what the style does to the liberal habits of free expression, due process, and the judgment of persons one at a time. The clash of values is real; if one believes that rights and general principles are how a plural society quarrels without dissolving, one must say so, and be prepared to tell one’s own side when an idea is merely bad. To make group identity the master key to moral standing, or to convert every disagreement into a referendum on who has been made to feel unsafe, does corrode the thing. But the group-as-trump-card is not a disease of the left alone; it reaches its purest form on the nationalist right, in a Zionism that offers the identity of one people as the final answer to any universal claim. The logic Yglesias fears is general, and he has met only its left dialect.

Michael Dawson’s Black Visions preserves a richer inheritance than either of the poles between which Yglesias moves. Its “disillusioned liberalism” keeps faith with rights and courts and constitutional protection while withdrawing trust from the white-run institutions expected to honor them unpressured; its “radical egalitarianism” goes further, drawing on Reconstruction, the industrial-union upheaval of the thirties, and the welfare-rights tradition to insist that Black freedom requires a broad and universal redistribution—of work, housing, income, and power—and not merely a shield against discrimination. That is, more or less, what mid-century liberalism was compelled to wrestle with when labor pressed from one side and the freedom movement from the other. The politics Yglesias dislikes is what is left of that wrestling once the synthesis has collapsed and only its vocabulary survives.

Two generations were told the great contests were settled, watched the settlement curdle under a liberalism grown managerial and defensive, and went to work in institutions whose only instruments were the training, the statement, and the hiring decision. Liberalism prevailed on paper and then stopped. Into the empty room rushed a flattened, forwardable anti-racism, radical in its phrasing and powerless in its effect.

If liberalism means to survive its own offspring, reproach will not be enough. It will have to recover what it was learning between the thirties and the sixties under pressure from without and within: to take the socialist and anti-racist demands seriously enough to alter who holds power and what the powerless are guaranteed, while keeping faith with rights, due process, and free inquiry. Short of that, its objectivity will go on sounding like a joke and its rights will go on reading like paper, and the henhouse will go on producing the thin and frustrated politics that Yglesias, having named the symptom, has taken for the disease. There was never any fox. There was only the house, and what it had stopped being able to feed.

By now, though, most Americans don’t buy that premise. Majorities tell pollsters the political system is broken, rigged, and doesn’t work for them. The Democratic brand, in particular, has become “overpromise and underdeliver”: big rhetoric about climate, health care, wages, and housing followed by disappointing or invisible results. The “abundance” school of politics — clear procedural and bureaucratic veto-points to build more housing, more clean energy, more infrastructure — is one answer to that frustration, and I’m sympathetic to many parts of it. But even abundance can’t magic away minority rule in the Senate, aggressive gerrymandering in the House, a far-right Supreme Court, or the question of how aggressively a president is willing to use executive power.

By 2028, almost nobody who shapes the presidential conversation will believe that “good plans + 51 votes = change” story anymore. The editors, bookers, pollsters, and strategists who define what “the debate” is just watched a Democratic administration win, create task forces to write a big agenda on paper, and then see Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and a conservative Court carve the 2020 ideas primary down to something much smaller, or nothing at all. Inside that world, the working assumption now is: anything ambitious will probably die in the Senate or in court.

That means the next primary will be less about what Democrats want to do and more about how they think power works. The real dividing line in media coverage won’t be single-payer versus public option; it will be competing theories of power: What’s actually blocking change? Which levers are you willing to pull? How hard are you willing to push against the rules of the game? Everything else — the culture-war skirmishes and the electability panic — will sit on top of that.

I’m describing that dynamic, not endorsing it. In a healthier party, you’d want exactly the kind of real argument over economic and social policy we saw when Warren, Sanders, and Buttigieg laid out competing blueprints. But the lessons the system took from 2020 cut the other way. The candidate with the thinnest policy offering—Joe Biden—won the primary. The media got burned for treating white papers as the main event, and then watched Manchin, Sinema, and the Court shred most of those ideas anyway. So the incentives now point toward covering personality, vibes, and “who can actually wield power,” not a direct replay of the Medicare-for-All seminar.

One obvious theory of power is what you might call maximalist reformism, and Gavin Newsom is the clearest early sketch. In this version, he doesn’t just talk about democracy reform; he uses California as Exhibit A. He leans on his own state to stop unilaterally disarming on House maps, openly embraces a partisan gerrymander as payback for what Republicans have already done in Florida and Ohio, and cuts an ad with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spelling out the case for using every ounce of blue-state power.

Newsom has a structural advantage in telling that story: he’s a governor. Governors don’t live in the world of Twitter arguments; they live in a world where wildfires, power rates, and housing starts either get handled or not. A properly maximalist governor would push their state as a demo project — stop unilateral disarmament on gerrymandering, expand voting access and public financing — and say: this is what we’d do nationally if we had the votes.

A second theory of power is the managerial presidency: promise to run the existing system more competently, cut a few bipartisan deals, and trust that calm, competent management will keep Trumpism in check. It’s basically the Joe Biden “return to normalcy” model — stabilize the institutions, dial down the drama, and let technocrats govern. We’ve already run that experiment once, and it did deliver some big laws. But it’s not obvious that “let’s do 2021–2024 again, but smoother” is a satisfying answer to voters who think the whole system is rigged.

A third theory of power is the familiar political-revolution model associated with Bernie Sanders: name the oligarchs, attack the billionaire class, and try to build a mass movement that can overwhelm institutional veto points. It treats American politics less as a negotiation among elites and more as a class struggle that only ends when millions of renters, debtors, and workers are organized into durable power. The open question for 2028 is whether that model can break past the ceiling it hit in 2016 and 2020, or whether it becomes one strong current inside a broader coalition rather than the organizing principle of the party.

Those are all theories of power. I’m not sure any of them are sufficient on their own. But they’ll be competing for oxygen with the two “sub-primaries” the political class finds easier to cover: the vibes primary and the electability primary.

On immigration, policing, and transgender rights, Democrats aren’t actually that far apart on substance; nobody is running on family separation or bathroom bans. The fight will mostly be about affect. Do you sound nervous when you support or criticize campus protests? Can you talk about asylum and border security in the same sentence without blowing up on Morning Joe? Do you defend trans rights in a way that also reassures those who don’t follow the issue closely?

This is where the Joe Rogan question becomes a stand-in. “Who can hang with the bros?” is a dumb shorthand for a real test: which Democrat can walk into the new populist, bro-y digital media environment and talk about social and economic issues without sounding like a scold. Coverage will focus less on detailed policy differences and more on who passes the sniff test — which is really another way of asking whose theory of power can be sold outside the MSNBC audience.

Layered on top of that is the electability primary, which already reshaped the last race. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign didn’t collapse because Democrats suddenly rejected wealth taxes; it collapsed after one New York Times/Siena poll convinced them she probably couldn’t beat Trump, and that narrative hardened. In a Trump (or Trumpist) rematch, this obsession will be even stronger. Every swing-state poll will be treated as a verdict on who is “allowed” to have ambitious ideas, and thus which theory of power is considered safe to experiment with.

Meanwhile, in the background, the material politics of corporate consolidation and people’s bills will keep grinding on. If you look at Zohran Mamdani in Queens, or Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill in very different districts, the candidates who win tend to say the same simple thing: life is too expensive because someone is gaming the system, and I’m willing to use power to stop it. Mamdani runs on rent freezes, free buses, and universal childcare. Sherrill runs on freezing electricity rates. Ideologically they’re pretty far apart; structurally they’re doing the same thing — connecting affordability to a theory of power about rigged rules and whose side you’re on.

That kind of “abundance plus affordability” politics will obviously be part of the 2028 conversation. But it’s unlikely to be a key organizing axis of the race the way Medicare for All was in 2020. Too many media and political elites now assume that anything ambitious will get filibustered into oblivion. So attention will drift toward what feels more concrete: Which theory of power seems most plausible? Which candidate can survive a Rogan interview? Who is up five points over Trump in Wisconsin?

The risk for Democrats is that these three primaries — theory of power, vibes, and electability — end up running on separate tracks. Voters don’t just need to know who sounds good on immigration or who scares Trump the most. They need a single, coherent answer to a harder question:

In a country with a bad Senate map, a hostile Court, and a furious electorate, how are you actually going to use power to make life cheaper, safer, and more democratic — and can you explain that to people who don’t already like you?

We did the choreography. Coats on the chair, compliments traded like business cards. “You look amazing,” she said to my partner, which was kind, if not strictly true. My partner was at that point a construction site, held together with mesh and resolve. Our daughter lay in the middle of the couch in footed pajamas, blinking up at the overhead light with the grave attention of the very new.

“Do you want to hold her?” the wife asked her husband, maybe three minutes in.

He smiled at the baby, then at us, then looked down at his hands as though they had just arrived in his lap from somewhere else. “Yeah,” he said. “In a minute.”

“Come on. You have to start sometime.” Breezy, but there was a brick sewn into the pillow.

He laughed. “I just don’t want to, like, drop her.” He drew the last word out to make it a joke. The joke sat there on the coffee table where he’d set it down, and we all did the small polite laugh you do.

Our daughter, sensing ceremony, made a noise halfway between a hiccup and a dial-up modem. Everyone leaned in. Nobody moved. My own arms twitched, the way they do when someone reaches for a very full glass near the edge of a table.

Eventually he reached out. Watching him, I remembered my own first week, when I held her like contraband and waited for someone official to arrive and cite me for Illegal Neck Angle. His hands did the arithmetic mine had done. Then his shoulders climbed toward his ears, that doomed attempt to stabilize a situation by tensing every muscle you own. She flopped an arm against his wrist and he made a face that was half wince, half grin.

“That’s good,” she told him. “See? You’re doing it.”

If it had happened once I’d have forgotten it. But they kept coming. Different couples, same afternoon. One pair brought a Tupperware of soup the size of a helmet. Another brought expensive coffee and a plant that later died under our care. Always there was a version of the moment.

“Do you want to hold her?”

“Yeah, I will. In a bit.”

“You can now.”

“I’ll wait till she’s, like, less upset.”

“Just take her.”

And then a small tribunal on the couch, in front of our houseplants and their own future. She prosecuting, he hedging, my partner and me on a jury we hadn’t volunteered for.

What I started to notice, after a few repetitions, was how rehearsed their lines were and how little either of them was hiding. The women seemed to be using our living room as a rehearsal space. If he can’t hold this one, how will he hold ours? The men seemed to be sitting an exam that had been scheduled several years earlier than they’d been told. That, anyway, was my theory, and I liked it enough to keep testing it on people who had not asked to be tested.

There’s a word I keep wanting to use here, which is probably a sign I shouldn’t. Hayra: in Arabic and Persian and Urdu it sits next to the words for wonder, confusion as a kind of awe. I want it because “scared” isn’t quite right, and because a foreign word makes a better sentence than the true and boring one, which is that they looked lost and also astonished, and couldn’t decide which face to make about it. They were frightened of dropping her. Underneath that they seemed quietly amazed that this warm, breathing person existed at all and was, absurdly, trusting them.

Their wives were not lost in any forest. They were somewhere else entirely, out in the spreadsheeted tundra of ovulation apps and prenatal vitamins, of if we got pregnant in March that’s a December baby, which is bad for school cutoffs but good for taxes. They were living several months ahead of the room.

If you’ve done a long flight with someone you love, you know what it is to be in different time zones in the same row. One of you is starving, the other nauseous. One wants to sleep and the other is scrolling the movie menu. Same metal tube, same destination, different clocks.

Pregnancy made that permanent. Before my partner had even seen two lines on the stick, her body had recalibrated: food tasted different, rooms acquired hazards, time moved at a new speed. My body went on being my body. I could eat what I wanted and stay awake in the afternoons and pretend, for hours at a stretch, that nothing irreversible was underway.

So when a man on my couch says he’ll hold her later, some of what I hear is fear and some of it is lag. He’s still on West Coast time in a nursery that’s already had its morning.

Other things are going on, obviously. She’ll be judged for not wanting children; he’ll be teased for wanting them too much. Somewhere behind each of them is his own father — the roughhousing, or the absence, or the hug that landed at the wrong angle — and some half-made vow about it he’s never said out loud.

But mostly what I see is the expression that crosses a man’s face when his wife says, sharply, just hold her. It’s the fear of being seen in a moment of total incompetence by the one person whose opinion has any weight. They’re used to being evaluated on wit, on earning power, on what they listen to. Now the test is whether they can keep a small stranger’s head from flopping backward, and there’s no curve.

When they hand her back, fingers reluctantly uncurling, shoulders dropping to their usual width, there’s often a strange politeness in the thank-you. As if we’d let them drive our car around the block. Sometimes they say it was easier than they thought. Sometimes they say nothing, and then later, over the last cup of tea, one of them tells my partner: I can’t believe you made that. I can’t even hold her right.

She says, “You will.” It comes out somewhere between a promise and a warning.

After they leave the apartment is too quiet. Our daughter, overloaded, crashes hard, arms flung up in the startle reflex, a pose that looks like surrender and is apparently left over from falling out of trees. The couch holds the shape of everyone who sat on it.

“Do you think they’ll have kids?” I ask.

My partner shrugs. “I don’t know.”

Drafted is the word I keep landing on. There’s a knock at the door, and the knock is your baby crying, and you’re in it. You can say you’re good all you want. The only real decision left is whether you keep pretending you’re visiting the front or admit you live here.

I sit there feeling tender toward every one of them. When I think about my own first days I mostly remember waiting for someone to tell me I was doing it wrong, and my partner putting her hand over my hand and adjusting the angle of our daughter’s head without saying you’re bad at this. Fear and love were so tangled I couldn’t get them apart. I assume that’s true for the men on the couch too, though I’ve never asked.

It would be satisfying if I could report that on the fifth or seventh visit some man walked in, reached straight for her, and broke the spell. It hasn’t happened.

So the ritual continues. Someone knocks, hands over a Tupperware and a toy, sits down, and is quietly invited to decide what kind of person he is. Our daughter, who has no idea she’s become a test, chews her fist and watches the light move on the wall. None of this is her doing. She’s simply here, and the adults keep arriving, and keep trying not to drop anything.

The latest repackaging of that instinct is called “heterodoxy”—the notion that if Democrats sound less progressive and a little more centrist, voters will reward them for independence. It sounds clever, but it misreads both the politics we live in and the map we run on. At heart, it’s a rebrand of an old campaign reflex: chase what polls well now, trim what doesn’t. Strategists call it message discipline—talk up the popular stuff, distance yourself from “liberal orthodoxy” on immigration, abortion, guns, policing, gender, and energy—but the exercise always ends the same way. Instead of a substantive debate about the economy, justice, or safety, the storyline becomes whether Democrats have strayed “too far left.” The posture swallows the policy and the story becomes the spectacle. The voters absorb the headline—“Democrats in disarray”—long before they hear a single argument about what the party actually stands for.

The 2024 cycle showed how little this kind of “popularist, heterodox” makeover changes perception. Joe Biden campaigned on major investments in infrastructure, lower drug prices, and new manufacturing jobs. Kamala Harris echoed that record alongside ads promising tougher law enforcement and stricter border control. None of it shifted the fundamentals. The race fixed on Biden’s age, inflation, and Harris’s failure to claim a narrative that felt like her own. In that vacuum, immigration and debates over transgender rights filled some of the space. Meanwhile, Trump carried a bundle of unpopular positions without paying for them, buoyed by a right-wing media machine that cast him as the voice of “ordinary Americans” and Democrats as condescending elites. When one side dominates the channels that tell voters who represents them, a pivot can read like surrender, not strength.

Part of the problem is temporal. Heterodoxy belongs to an earlier order—softer partisanship, stronger local news, routine ticket-splitting. That world has receded. As political scientist Lee Drutman shows, nationalization has squeezed out candidate individuality: over the past quarter century, presidential and Senate results have moved toward lockstep, and the average gap between presidential and congressional margins has collapsed by roughly eighty percent. Voters now cast ballots less for people than for parties; most races function as referendums on national identity, not local representation.

Analysts keep treating that system as if it were still primarily issue-driven and candidate-centric. G. Elliott Morris calls the fixation on heterodox positioning a strategist’s fallacy—elite instincts projected onto an electorate sorted by team loyalty. Even the related “deliverism” hope is weak as well: research on Trump’s farm subsidies during the trade war found generous benefits barely moved turnout or support among beneficiaries.

Put the evidence together and it points one way: in a nationalized, identity-heavy politics, neither moderation nor material benefits reliably move outcomes. To change outcomes, Democrats will have to think beyond messaging and confront the deeper machinery of power itself: the electoral rules and information systems that define what’s possible.

The track record of “moderation” is less a theory than a list of decisions we now regret. The last rounds of triangulation weren’t costless experiments; they produced real harms. The list includes votes for the Iraq War; curbs on abortion access; opposition to marriage equality and DREAMers; more oil and gas drilling; a moral panic over an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan; the slow strangling of the public option.

Those choices translated into lives ended or derailed, care denied, communities scapegoated, carbon locked into the future. Call it “respecting local culture” if you want; the effect is to shift the cost of flexibility onto people with the least cushion. Compromise is part of politics. Compromise also has a body count. And when it came to taking “heterodox” stands that challenged power from the other direction—on Palestinian rights, the Iraq War, expansion of health care provision, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or the cryptocurrency boom—those weren’t the kinds of deviations that ever drew praise. We should be precise about what, in practice, these so-called “heterodox” positions entail and what trade-offs they demand from the party and its voters.

It’s also wrong to treat “heterodoxy” as some novel insight; in 2024 it was the operating system for the marquee purple and red-state races. Colin Allred campaigned in Texas with law-enforcement validators, promised to be tougher than Ted Cruz on crime and the border, and wrapped himself in sheriff badges and “secure the border” language. Sherrod Brown in Ohio sold the bipartisan border bill as “the most conservative in decades,” pointed to a fentanyl measure with Donald Trump’s signature, and defused the trans-sports hit by citing Ohio’s existing restrictions and kicking decisions to local leagues. Jon Tester in Montana leaned into distance from national Democrats, advertised pushing Biden to expand oil and gas drilling, and pitched himself as a check on his own party. All three ran the heterodox script; the results showed its ceiling. With ticket-splitting nearly gone and ballots read as choices over who controls the courts and committees, the gravitational pull of party ID prevailed. Their losses weren’t failures to moderate—they were proof moderation was already priced in, and that the map, not the message, was doing the work.

As Morris writes, you can see the pattern earlier too. Democrats lost Senate seats in Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota in 2018—before “woke” became a catchall insult. In 2012, Ben Nelson, one of the chamber’s most conservative Democrats, retired rather than lose badly in Nebraska. The obstacle wasn’t a leftward lurch; it was nationalization and affective polarization. Rebranding the same approach as “heterodoxy” doesn’t make it new. It renames a strategy that has already hit its ceiling. We are increasingly locked inside a rigged system.

If most red- and purple-state Democrats already play defense on cultural issues, moderate Abigail Spanberger’s 2025 race in Virginia offered an alternative: engaging the culture war on new terms. The attacks were predictable—claims she would “let biological males into girls’ locker rooms and sports,” demands to endorse Governor Glenn Youngkin’s directive barring trans girls from girls’ teams. Reporters pushed for a viral yes-or-no. Spanberger reset the ground to law and governance, reminding audiences that the Fourth Circuit’s Gavin Grimm ruling governs Virginia schools and explaining the tension between shifting Title IX guidance and binding precedent. She warned that pulling federal education funds would harm classrooms and the state economy. When the questions returned, she returned to the stakes she wanted: fully funded public schools, safe and well-run campuses, and a more affordable Virginia. She won without echoing culture-war language or staging a contrived break with transgender rights advocates. The campaign refused the bait, argued from competence and process, and kept returning to everyday concerns.

Spanberger’s clarity is instructive; it doesn’t change the terrain. A few rhetorical adjustments can’t overcome malapportioned chambers, nationalized party brands, and an information environment dominated by well-funded conservative media and donors. Those forces shape how voters perceive both parties long before campaigns start.

And even the “win by sounding different” theory runs into two hard constraints. First, if heterodoxy is more than tone, it has to win the party—carry a presidential primary and redefine “Democratic” from the top down. That is a tall order. The primary electorate is disproportionately liberal and heavily Black, deeply committed to climate, union, civil, and reproductive rights. A program that trims those commitments for “electability” will be rejected by the very voters asked to bear the cost. You don’t get a new brand without first winning the contest that creates the brand. Second, the idea that progressives in blue metros should simply quiet down is pure fantasy. Those cities set tomorrow’s middle because politics and policy get tested there—paid leave, childcare, rent control, $15 minimum wage, marriage equality, taking on ICE, decarbonization standards, small-donor systems, and decarceration. As Zohran Mamdani likes to say, it’s impossible until it isn’t. Heterodox strategists rarely acknowledge—let alone explain—that blue cities as laboratories of progressivism are part of the party’s heterodoxy too.

There’s a second lesson from Spanberger that the heterodoxy camp routinely skips: persuasion lives in infrastructure. In 2024, Republicans poured tens of millions into anti-trans ads and saturated swing markets with a simple story about identity and threat. Democrats offered almost no mainstream defense—few validators, fewer ads, and little year-round content translating trans rights into universal values like autonomy, dignity, and freedom from government interference. Voters update through people they trust: local anchors, Spanish-language hosts, church circles, union stewards, youth-sports coaches, the shop owner who knows everyone on the block. If those channels hear only one side, the brand is decided long before a campaign buys its first week of ads.

Persuasion isn’t an event that happens during an election; it’s an infrastructure problem. Democrats need institutions and networks capable of steadily making the case for the world they say they want: a humane immigration system, an end to mass incarceration, a society that embraces cultural change around gender and women’s equality, a real effort to repair the harms of redlining, a safety net that works so police aren’t asked to do social work, and a credible plan for a clean-energy transition. That kind of persuasion doesn’t come from six-week ad buys. It comes from organizing, local media, civic groups, churches, unions, and the cultural work that redefines what people see as normal. When elections are the only vehicle for persuasion, Democrats are playing with half their tools. The heterodox crowd often misses this point, or treats the organizing that builds public consent as a distraction from pragmatism. But if Democrats want voters to accept big change, they have to make the case for it long before anyone walks into a voting booth.

Heterodoxy endures because it sells a comforting illusion: that a little Keir Starmer-style “hippy-punching” can substitute for rebuilding power. It offers a fantasy of politics where messaging tweaks can reverse decades of nationalization, where posture outweighs geography, and where a party that’s lost whole regions can win them back with the right tone. This is not just theoretical. In the U.K., Starmer’s sharp rebukes of progressives and insistence on a tougher immigration frame haven’t stemmed the rise of far-right Nigel Farage’s Reform UK — the populist wave he leads is now outpacing Labour in the polls and local elections.

It’s nostalgia masquerading as strategy—a yearning for a kind of gentleman’s politics that belonged to a smaller, whiter, less polarized country, where civility was treated as substance and elites could settle the boundaries of debate among themselves. That world is gone, and the longing for it has become a substitute for power. The fantasy persists because it flatters those who already hold the microphone: if only the tone were right, the public would follow. Believing that is like the NYTimes essays after John Kerry’s 2004 loss, which floated the fantasy Democrats could win majorities by moving a few million New Yorkers and Californians to South Dakota and Nebraska—an elegant way of pretending structure can be solved by behavior.

Obviously we should support candidates that fit their local ecosystems. But what I think the “heterodox” project sadly tries to do is take the aliveness of democracy out of politics. As political philosopher John Rawls once wrote, “The only justification for a conception of justice is that it can be publicly recognized as such by everyone with reason to accept it.” In plainer terms, he meant that democracy depends on citizens arguing and explaining their positions to one another. Philosopher John Dewey took an even wider view: “Democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.” Politics, for him, wasn’t just about election math; it was also a daily practice of learning, arguing, and solving problems together. Both thinkers would likely see today’s heterodox impulse as hollowing that out—replacing persuasion with polling and treating democratic politics as something to be managed rather than lived. What remains is a thinner politics—technically strategic, but drained of the democratic argument that gives politics its soul and moral weight.

New York’s political life has always been a nexus of immigration, xenophobia, and realignment. Each new wave of arrivals has transformed the city’s parties and power structures, from the Irish Catholics who captured Tammany Hall in the late 19th century to the Jewish and Italian tenement workers who built the unions and socialist movements of the early 20th to Black and Latino transformations during the civil rights movement.

Mamdani’s rise comes amid its own modern strain of suspicion—Islamophobia, anti-immigrant politics, and the quiet bigotry that still shadows those whose faith or surnames mark them as foreign. It rhymes with the 19th-century fear of Catholic immigrants and the early-20th-century hysteria over “radical” Jews and Italians—each era finding new language for the same anxiety about belonging.

The first great breakthrough came in 1880, when William R. Grace, an Irish-born Catholic shipping magnate, became New York’s first immigrant mayor. His election was a crack in the wall of Protestant dominance that had ruled the city since its founding. Only a few decades earlier, the Know-Nothing Party had treated Catholic immigrants as a civilizational threat. Grace’s win was the city’s quiet answer: the immigrant could not only belong, but lead—a rhyme Mamdani would recognize in a new century.

For the first time, an ethnic and religious minority—despised by xenophobes as “drunkards and papists”—had seized control of City Hall. Within a decade, Tammany Hall had remade itself in Grace’s image, transforming from a genteel club into an Irish-Catholic machine that traded favors for votes and delivered something like democracy through patronage to people who’d never had it. For poor immigrants, Tammany wasn’t a story about corruption; it was proof that the system could finally see them.

By the 1920s, Irish immigrants became the political establishment, embodied by Mayor Jimmy Walker, the silk-hatted son of the machine. Walker was rakish, funny, and entirely at ease in the moral gray zone that had once scandalized elites. Under his reign, politics became a jazz-age spectacle of favors and excess. But his glamour disguised decay. The machine that had once fought for immigrants had become a gatekeeper against newer ones—Italians, Jews, and Eastern Europeans—whose sweat powered the city’s factories but who rarely saw their reflection in its politics.

Those white ethnic newcomers found their voice in Morris Hillquit, a Jewish socialist lawyer who, in 1917, ran for mayor on a platform of rent control, union rights, and opposition to the First World War. Hillquit’s 22 percent of the vote shocked the political establishment. He didn’t win, but he proved that a tenement-based working class—Jewish seamstresses, Italian dockworkers, the radical press—could function as a political bloc. For his trouble, he and his allies were branded traitors. Five Socialist legislators from immigrant districts were expelled from the state assembly. Yet the genie was out of the bottle: class solidarity and immigrant politics had become a political movement of its own.

In 1922, during a bruising congressional campaign, Fiorello La Guardia was accused of antisemitism by a rival who assumed the charge would stick. La Guardia’s answer was pure theater and pure New York: he dictated a reply in Yiddish, the language of his accuser’s own voters, and challenged the man to debate him in it. The invitation—audacious, funny, and devastating—went unanswered. It was La Guardia at his most revealing: turning the politics of identity into a performance of fluency, using wit to remind New Yorkers that he was not an outsider looking in but a reflection of the city itself.

La Guardia’s mother was Jewish and his father an Italian Catholic who had long since drifted from faith. He grew up navigating a world of languages and neighborhoods—Italian in the kitchen, Yiddish on the street, English in the classroom. Yet despite his mother’s Jewish roots, La Guardia never publicly identified as Jewish; historians suggest he avoided doing so because he believed it would be “self-serving” and preferred his identity to be rooted in his immigrant background rather than a single faith tradition.

When La Guardia finally became mayor—after the Seabury Investigations had shredded the old party machine and the Depression had destroyed the old ethnic and political loyalties—he drew on that same fluency. He built a coalition made not only of tenement renters but of middle-class reformers, spanning Italian, Jewish, Irish, and Polish neighborhoods. Backed by the New Deal, he transformed city government from a dispenser of jobs into a provider of public assets. As fascism darkened Europe, La Guardia turned his multilingual empathy into policy—denouncing Adolf Hitler, promoting boycotts of German goods, and making City Hall a kind of civic refuge for the city’s persecuted immigrants.

Every phase of political transformation in New York City was met with a wave of bigotry. Grace faced anti-Catholic hysteria; Hillquit, the Red Scare; La Guardia, whispers that he was too foreign to be trusted. But the city’s demographic tide kept rising, and each wave of immigrants redrew the boundary between outsider and insider.

Each of these figures widened New York’s circle of belonging, though never evenly. Grace’s rise gave Irish Catholics a seat at the table but left the city’s Black residents and Caribbean migrants untouched. Hillquit’s Socialists built interracial alliances with Black labor organizers like A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, even as their broader movement still treated race as secondary to class. La Guardia, decades later, went further—appointing Black and Puerto Rican officials, investigating discrimination in Harlem, and campaigning in Spanish—but even his reform coalition operated within a segregated city. The city’s circle of belonging widened in fits and starts, stretching to include new voices even as old hierarchies tugged at its edges.

Nonetheless Mamdani’s Queens feels like it rhymes with La Guardia’s base in East Harlem and the Lower East Side—blocks of working-class renters who keep the city humming and yet pass invisibly through it.

The tenement floor now lives on a scooter and in an app: delivery riders with plastic ponchos, rideshare drivers orbiting JFK at 2 a.m., home-health aides and night-shift nurses catching the dawn train. Many are immigrants; most are tired. They’re the heirs of the garment cutters and dockhands who once packed Socialist rallies and crowded Tammany ward halls, the same stubborn coalition of people who make the city run before the city remembers their names.

In his victory speech, Mamdani named them. “To every New Yorker in Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point, know this: this city is your city, and this democracy is yours too.”

New York has never changed by polite inheritance. Each coalition elbows its way in, and in doing so redraws the borders of “we.” Grace cracked the door; Walker swung it wide and nearly lost it; Hillquit mapped the immigrant tenement workers; La Guardia built a floor sturdy enough to stand on.

Now, in a city remade by migration once again, Mamdani’s bloc—bodega owners and nurses, young socialists, cabdrivers and the children of immigrants who bring your groceries to the fifth floor—is testing whether the city can still renew itself from the bottom up.

History’s answer tends to be yes. When New York seems sealed, someone new finds the key.

The first time Zohran reached out to me on his potential run for mayor, he wanted to talk about the New Yorkers who’d stopped believing politics was for them. He talked about the people checking out of Democratic Party politics—young people, Arab and Muslim communities, taxi drivers, the thousands of DSA volunteers who knock every door and rarely get treated as a serious bloc within the party, every single person worried about their rent and groceries who didn’t feel like the system was designed to help them in any way.

Zohran’s worry was simple: in a ranked-choice field with figures like Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams, there wouldn’t be a progressive coalition big enough to win unless a candidate held two firm lines—be firm on Palestinian human rights and relentlessly focused on affordability. The point wasn’t TikTok or even his own win; it was to expand who shows up to vote, and why.

In the New York of the 1910s and ’20s, ethnic politics was both ladder and ceiling, and Fiorello La Guardia learned to climb with his head brushing the rafters. Republican boss Samuel Koenig warned Fiorello La Guardia in 1921, “The town isn’t ready for an Italian mayor,” urging him to stand down from a mayoral bid; La Guardia answered, “Sam, I’ll run. So long as I have five dollars in my pocket I’ll be all right” Party bosses and patrician elites read the city through nativist arithmetic—“the town isn’t ready for an Italian mayor”—even as the electorate was tilting toward immigrants, women, renters, and reformers.

La Guardia tried to fuse those worlds: a war-hero son of immigrants who spoke to Italians and Jews in their own neighborhoods, and to “good-government” progressives about clean streets, honest budgets, and the five-cent fare. The machine treated him as an apostate when he defied direct-primary repeal and corporate transit interests; Republican leaders fretted over his independence; Tammany scorned his cross-ethnic appeal.

The same skepticism that kept La Guardia from the 1921 nomination fed a broader realignment: mobilizing women newly enfranchised, socialists and communists, renters overburdened by taxes and fares, and voters tired of bosses who treated City Hall as private property. His “not ready for an Italian” moment, in other words, marked the moment when a city built by immigrants began to demand representation equal to its labor, and a politics that served public goods over party discipline.

La Guardia, the half-Italian, half-Jewish son of immigrants who rose from a tenement to City Hall, saw in New York a living answer to the nativists’ sneer. In Congress, as the nation turned against newcomers, he railed against the hysteria that would later define the 1924 immigration quotas. It was “mob rule,” he said, “a blot on the history of the American Congress,” a betrayal of what he called the true American creed. He accused his colleagues of following “the rules of the Klan and not … the American Congress,” and warned that the architects of racial quotas were driven by “narrowmindedness and bigotry,” by a “fixed obsession on Anglo-Saxon superiority.” The spirit of the Ku Klux Klan, he said, “must not be permitted to become the policy of the American government.”

Decades later, as mayor of the most polyglot city on earth, he would turn those convictions into a civic gospel. “For here people live,” he told New Yorkers on the radio, “all their ancestors having come from every country and clime in the world, living in peace.” His multiracial democracy was not a dream deferred but a daily, crowded fact—Italians, Jews, Irish, and Poles composing a new coalition of white ethnics who, in his mind, could redeem the promise of America not by blood, but by solidarity.

In John Ford’s The Last Hurrah, Frank Skeffington—an aging Irish-Catholic mayor—faces the city’s Protestant establishment: bankers, a bishop, men who still see themselves as custodians of civic virtue. They dress their veto of a slum-clearance project in the neutral language of “credit risk.” Skeffington answers with the life behind the ledger: kids playing in the street for lack of a park; pneumonia dragged out of cold-water flats. Then he names what the room won’t—the city isn’t just theirs anymore—and vows to open the housing on St. Patrick’s Day, marching it past their windows so it can’t be papered over.

The scene isn’t very subtle, but it clarifies a long American rhythm: power shifting from a patrician order that governs by gatekeeping to immigrant-rooted coalitions that govern by numbers and need. Power upstairs calls for patience; power downstairs asks to be seen. The live questions—who counts, who decides, does the boardroom still rule the street—frame the context for Zohran Mamdani’s wager about coalition politics in New York now.

After Democrats lost to Trump last year, Mamdani took meaning-making to the sidewalk. One camera, a hand-painted “Let’s Talk Election” sign, a few hours on Hillside Avenue and Fordham Road. He asked why working-class voters, almost all people of color, had voted for Trump—or stopped voting at all. The answers were spare and exact: rent that eats half a paycheck, groceries that climb by the week, buses that don’t come, tickets that pile up. Gaza surfaced not as geopolitics but as proof of priorities: money for war moves instantly; money for living gets lost in process. The “culture war” so many pundits diagnosed looked, in the frame, like something simpler: a conversation about money, and what it means to be seen.

I sent the clip to every reporter and consultant I could think of still explaining the Harris defeat as mostly a backlash to “wokeness”—that the party had gotten too moral, too online, too interested in scolding. The replies that came back were half-embarrassed, half-awed. The culture war they’d been debating turned out to be something simpler: a conversation about bills, and what it means to be seen.

Outside the at-capacity hall on election night, the cold had a way of sorting who really wanted to be there. Dozens of twenty-somethings in borrowed coats—and, just as loud, South Asian and Arab aunties and uncles with thermoses and flags—stood in a loose crescent around a speaker on a window ledge, passing hand-warmers and gossip. The mood was buoyant, and beneath it ran a plainer claim about how the city and the country works.

Zohran Mamdani’s electoral success offers Democrats four lessons as they head into 2026. belonging, looting, rigging, cost. Each theme answers a different public intuition—who’s ignored, who’s stealing, how they get away with it, and what it costs the rest of us. Together they describe a politics of moral belonging and material relief—the kind Democrats once knew how to win with. The expression of these themes will differ by geography—not everywhere will sound like Queens—but wherever economic populism takes root, these are some of its core features.

The Belonging. Before corruption and costs, there’s a prior question: are you inside the “we”? Mamdani makes that explicit. Immigrants aren’t a problem to manage; they’re the story—the labor, language, and lived reality that make New York work. The Hillside/Fordham tape shows this. A city that takes your taxes and time but treats you as background won’t feel like home until someone names you in the first person.

Mamdani’s approach is deliberately simple and very old New York: widen the circle, then argue policy. He says it as a creed and a contract: “We will fight for you, because we are you.” In his victory remarks, he thanks the people politics forgets—Yemeni bodega owners, Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers, Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks, Ethiopian aunties—and tells neighborhoods from Kensington to Hunts Point, When people hear themselves in the “we,” they connect dignity to dollars—and the coalition that wasn’t invited becomes the one that ultimately might decide.

Where others reach for technocracy or moral panic, Mamdani starts from belonging. He reminds voters that the city’s collision of languages, histories, and hungers isn’t an accident of globalization but a democratic experiment—whether we came here merely to survive one another, or to build something that proves our common humanity was real all along.

The Looting. Zohran told a story about corruption that named names and showed the pattern. Adams, Cuomo, Trump—different specifics, same vibe. A check buys access; access steers a contract; the public finds out after the deal is done. Voters recognized the rhythm because they’ve seen versions of it for years. And when the camera shifts to Washington, the picture sharpens: a Mar-a-Lago “Gatsby” party the week SNAP and health care face cuts; a pardon that benefits a crypto billionaire linked to the first family’s business ventures; foreign money moving into that venture as export rules tilt. Taken together, it reads as one scheme: public power used to enrich a few.

The Rigging. The quiet heist of democracy has two faces: performance and procedure. The spectacle—the National Guard on standby, ICE raids staged for TV, talk of troops in cities, threats to networks from Air Force One, pressure on platforms to “turn the dial”—is meant to broadcast strength and frighten dissent. Behind it runs the quieter work: rewriting maps, purging rolls, criminalizing election workers, seizing local boards, inventing “fraud” squads, changing rules to reject more mail ballots, flooding voters with disinformation. One part terrifies, the other tilts. Both aim at the same end—control the system, punish enemies, reward friends, and keep power flowing upward.

The Cost is where the larger argument comes into focus. We don’t need to separate “corruption” from “groceries.” They feel both as the cost of a system that answers fast to donors and slow to everyone else. You can see it everywhere: a lobbyist’s client gets a meeting while a pharmacy denies a claim; insulin sells like jewelry; child-care bills climb as tax breaks tilt upward. When Trump says he “won on groceries,” he’s naming the terrain. Democrats should meet him there—showing, in plain numbers, how rules written for insiders land in the family budget, and how rewriting those rules could make a month’s expenses finally add up.

That thread held Mamdani’s policy narrative together. It started with his work on taxi-driver debt relief—a real win, with names and families attached—and moved to a list people could feel on a weekday: freeze rent, make buses faster and free, guarantee universal child care. The aim was simple but radical: restore a measure of order to lives lived on the edge.

They’re looting the place; they’re rigging the rules to keep looting; and while they do, working families are getting crushed month by month. Our job is simple: end the corruption, take power back from Trump and his corrupt billionaire friends, and make life affordable again for the people who make this country run.

What stayed with me after my meeting with Zohran was that he didn’t sound like a man auditioning for the part; he sounded like someone trying to gather a people who’d drifted from politics altogether—young voters, Arab and Muslim neighbors, taxi families, the tireless door-knockers—and teach them how to move together again. It felt less like ambition than stewardship: organize a bloc, return it to itself, and be ready—if that’s what the moment demands—to hand its power to another so the work can outlast you.

PS: If you’ve made it this far, here’s your bonus. Things are working out for ZOHRAN MAMDANI, who, like every self-respecting immigrant uncle, insists his name goes in your phone in ALL CAPS.

There’s wisdom in the call to moderation, but little novelty. I don’t even disagree with the instinct—it’s just that it doesn’t reckon with how Democrats already ran their 2024 campaigns.

Watch the highlight reel of some of the highest spend advertisements of Democrats in swing seats in 2024:

• In Ohio, Sherrod Brown sells “the most conservative border bill in decades,” backed by border agents, and points to a fentanyl law bearing Donald Trump’s signature. When hit on transgender inclusion in sports, he doesn’t sermonize; he notes Ohio already banned what the ad alleges and says local leagues should decide—citing Republican Gov. Mike DeWine.

• In Texas, Colin Allred stands with law enforcement and border officials who say, “Colin’s got our back” and insist that Allred will be tougher than Cruz on crime and the border.

• In Montana, Jon Tester boasts that he pushed Biden to expand oil drilling and says “no way to Democrats wanting to give people more money without requiring anything in return.”

• In New Mexico’s 2nd, Gabe Vasquez talks about hiring 20,000 border agents and cracking down on cartels, with law enforcement as witnesses.

• In Pennsylvania’s 7th, Susan Wild said it outright: she “broke with Democrats” to crack down on cartels and worked with both parties to hire thousands of border agents.

• In New York’s 17th, a police officer endorses Mondaire Jones in an ad saying he “voted for more border patrol agents.”

• In Arizona’s 6th, Kirsten Engel’s ad has a law enforcement official saying she will “fully fund police” and work with both parties on border security.

The 2024 record is straightforward: frontline Democrats campaigned largely as moderates. Border and police funding, fentanyl crackdowns, oil drilling permits, law-enforcement endorsements, bipartisan validators. The ads show badges and sheriffs. And yet the coalitions barely moved. It feels like talking into a headwind.

We reach for easy fixes because the alternative is a kind of vertigo. It is simpler to believe that swapping positions here and there unlocks the electorate than to sit with the possibility that the crisis is larger than message—that the map is unkind, that political identities have devoured localism, that the emotional weather is set somewhere offstage and rarely shifts on command.

It is comforting to explain losses as a failure of will or discipline on our side; it is harder to admit that much of what we can do, we already do, and the returns are thin. Because what remains is not a fix but a fog.

There are no shortcuts here. Democrats aren’t losing simply for lack of moderation. Perhaps the hardest truth is not a new tactic but a clearer view of the terrain: the sense that the problem may be bigger than our factions allow themselves to say, and the answers less obvious than any side’s catechism. If moderation were the key, the door would be open by now.

Look abroad for a cautionary tale. In the U.K., Keir Starmer—a center-left prime minister who replaced Labour’s Corbyn era with lawyerly, business-friendly pragmatism—won in 2024 on “stability and moderation”: tighter borders without Trump-style theatrics, more police and housebuilding, cautious budgets, and a fiscally bounded clean-energy push. Think competence and calm over activist or populist zeal—pro-NATO, wary of big tax hikes, careful not to spook culturally conservative voters over crime, transgender rights, or immigration.

And yet, a year on, Britain is flirting with something more disruptive. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK—a populist, anti-immigration vehicle roughly analogous to a MAGA spinoff—has surged in polls and seat models, projected to wipe out Labour’s majority if an election were held today. In an information ecosystem where culture wars dominate, a political class wary of offending donors or the right, and a “middle” that drifts with media salience, moderation is easily swamped by deeper currents of identity and grievance.

The takeaway for Americans is caution: “don’t scare the middle” works until the middle itself is being remade. The lesson may be that tinkering at the edges of message isn’t enough. It may demand a more radical break, or a kind of imagination politics has long since forgotten. Which is to say: the way through may be harder, stranger, and further from reach than we want to believe.

Realignment isn’t about clever curation to please in the moment. It’s the sound of factions and interests clashing, a noisy orchestra tuning through dissonance until, after hard rehearsal and bruising conflict, it can finally play in time. Realignment isn’t shuffling issues on a menu; it’s democracy testing its strength, renewing itself through organized struggle.

If that diagnosis sounds abstract, the scholarship gives it concrete shape: realignments aren’t about reshuffling issues on a menu; they decide who holds power and how it’s organized. Timothy Shenk shows they depend on brokers and coalition-builders who can translate movement energy into durable party coalitions. Daniel Schlozman shows they endure when social movements become “anchors” within parties—offering votes, money, and networks that parties need, and in return gaining influence over policy priorities and personnel. Stephen Skowronek argues that reconstructive leaders seize crisis moments to rebuild authority and remake institutions so a new regime reproduces itself. Corey Robin reminds us that these leaders define themselves by confronting entrenched regimes rather than triangulating within existing alignments. Taken together, their work shows realignments are forged as movements, parties, and leaders remake the architecture of American politics.

Measured against that standard, Searchlight’s own invocation of Schattschneider—“the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power”—lands short. It never names the regime its alternatives are meant to displace. In Robin’s telling, reconstructors define themselves against a ruling order—Lincoln versus the Slave Power, FDR versus the “economic royalists,” Reagan versus the liberal interest-group order—and then organize to break the institutions that sustain it. By contrast, Searchlight’s adversary looks less like a regime than a roster of progressive nonprofits—an intra-camp grievance, even as a Trump-led GOP targets many of those same civic organizations with Orbán-style tactics. If “defining the alternatives” is to be more than rebranding, it has to specify the oligarchic order to confront and the machinery for contesting it.

Searchlight’s own framework can’t quite hold together. Point two urges Democrats to “defy ideological boxes” and build a heterodox mix from first principles. Point three turns immediately to polling, insisting that leaders track where the public sits, even if opinion is “malleable.” The tension is never resolved. The underlying theory of realignment here is oddly bloodless: no sense of movements, institutions, or social forces, only the idea that the right combination of words in politicians’ mouths will shuffle the coalitional deck. That’s not how realignments have ever worked; it’s how ad campaigns work. It’s politics imagined as a television ad buy, not as a democratic struggle.

To be fair, some of Searchlight’s critique is real: parts of the progressive ecosystem have ossified into professionalized silos, as Jacobin’s criticism of the PMC has often declared, more accountable to funders and lists than to the people they claim to represent. But this isn’t just about “leftist activist groups.” As Sam Rosenfeld argues, today’s Democrats are a coalition of New Politics–era movements—feminism, environmentalism, Black and Latino civil rights, labor, consumer advocacy—now institutionalized inside the party (leaders like Jim Clyburn and the Congressional Black Caucus, UnidosUS, Randi Weingarten’s teachers’ unions, Planned Parenthood, EMILY’s List, LCV/NRDC, MoveOn, etc).

The challenge isn’t that these organizations lack legitimacy—they’re crucial power centers—but that, taken together, they leave gaps in everyday democratic practice. That gap helps explain why new efforts—Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Indivisible, DSA, Sunrise—have surged in the past decade, seeking to build participatory vehicles where legacy groups sometimes operate more as partisan mobilization arms for the Democratic Party. In an attention economy shaped by social-media silos, inequality, and atomized late capitalism, the task isn’t to abolish “the groups” but to re-root them in civil society: unions that organize, neighborhood associations that convene, tenants’ and parents’ groups that act.

These new forms of association won’t look like the past—an influencer or a Twitch stream can now mobilize more authentic participation than many legacy groups, and the next surge of collective action may look as unruly and unexpected as the GameStop squeeze. But whatever form it takes, we can’t cede democratic life to technocrats, pollsters, and consultants; politics endures only when people organize themselves into something larger than their own atomized lives. As Hannah Arendt wrote: “Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.”

Seen historically, the difference between branding and realignment becomes clearer. Searchlight’s Social Security case study on their website, for example, shows how thin the analysis gets. It implies that groups to Roosevelt’s left would have rejected Social Security and that only FDR’s choice to target the elderly and rely on payroll taxes made the program possible. The record runs differently. The Townsend movement wasn’t the CIO’s labor-left; it was a populist surge of older and middle-class Americans that Washington couldn’t ignore.

As FDR’s Labor Secretary Frances Perkins recalled in her memoirs, “One hardly realizes nowadays how strong was the sentiment in favor of the Townsend Plan… The pressure from its advocates was intense. The President began telling people he was in favor of adding old-age insurance clauses to the bill and putting it through as one program.”

President Roosevelt himself admitted to Perkins, “We have to have [old age insurance]. The Congress can’t stand the pressure of the Townsend Plan unless we have a real old-age insurance system, nor can I face the country without having devised…a solid plan which will give some assurance to old people of systematic assistance upon retirement.”

This is precisely how bottom-up organizing gives democracy its force. As Edwin Amenta argues in When Movements Matter, the Townsend Plan shows movements shape outcomes less by winning maximal demands than by forcing action and creating space for feasible reforms: “The fledgling old-age insurance program…would not have been added…without the rapid mobilization behind the Townsend Plan.”

Meanwhile, the CIO and the labor-liberal left treated Social Security as a landmark, even as they criticized racist exclusions for farm and domestic workers and worked to expand coverage. Perkins recalled that Treasury Secretary Morgenthau insisted on omitting those groups, despite early agreement on universal coverage: “This was a blow…universal coverage had been agreed upon almost from the outset.” In practice, Townsend’s populists opened the window, left and labor critics refined the design, and the CIO’s institutional heft carried Social Security from precarious start to durable cornerstone—like an orchestra lurching into tune, dissonant sections converging on a shared score.

Which brings us to conflict. Searchlight’s website insists it is not afraid of it: “Rather than shy away from conflict, we must embrace it in good faith.” The test isn’t the line; it’s whether conflict is converted into institutions. Too often, elite coalition management waits out energy and trims hard issues to keep a tidy brand. But politics doesn’t work that way. The mistake in the “play down divisive issues” advice is assuming those fights can be avoided. What’s happened to Kilmar García and Mahmoud Khalil, or the treatment of Los Angeles residents and Brad Lander and Alex Padilla on immigration and ICE, isn’t background noise—it’s the raw material of politics. Realignment often requires the opposite of waiting out controversy: choose the ground, frame the fight so your bloc holds, deliver fast, legible wins, and build organizations that can withstand backlash.

The record of Searchlight’s leadership tells another story. Many of the alumni of Fetterman’s office who now steer Searchlight spent 2023 and 2024 not merely avoiding conflict but working to contain it. They rolled their eyes at Democrats advocating for a ceasefire and weapons restrictions, dismissing them as unserious or ill-strategized, all while serving a boss who was the Senate’s loudest champion of Israel’s horrific war crimes. They offered cover for him, waving around polling to insist Fetterman’s violent positions on Israel made him more popular, sneering at dissent as unserious, childish Group-think, even as the bombing of Palestinian civilians worsened.

Conflict, for them, was not democracy’s lifeblood but an obstacle to be neutralized, a branding problem to be managed. And now, like so many Democrats, they stand apart from the wreckage, hands scrubbed clean—as though cover were not a choice, as though complicity were not a position—and still decline to take a substantive stand. As Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it, “If you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.”

The same lesson applies to strategy and message. Politics has craft, but it isn’t only craft. Yes, smart operatives try to split the other side and avoid gratuitously fracturing their own coalition. But some fights are defining, and opinion moves when organized actors force it to move. In 2006, it made little sense to tell a New York Democrat to hide support for marriage equality; just as it was wrong to ask Muslims and liberals to accept Harry Reid’s opposition to the so-called “Ground Zero mosque.” The point is simple: if politics is only vibes and risk minimization and “hippie-punching,” nothing consequential ever changes about the dynamics of power.

Nor is this just theoretical. The same blind spot has led centrists, at various points over the past decade, to wave off proposals like Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, debt relief, rent freezes, breaking up Big Tech, or ending U.S. weapons aid to countries Israel and Saudi Arabia. They’re dismissed as unrealistic or too divisive—just as Townsend’s pensions were caricatured in the 1930s. But realignments don’t emerge from consensus; they move through conflict and the opening of space. Movements elevate demands at the margins, force parties to grapple with them, and through struggle reshape coalitions and institutions. Social Security, collective-bargaining rights, clean energy programs, civil-rights statutes—none were born as consensus policies. They became durable because agitation created pressure, parties absorbed it, and leaders rewrote the rules to embed it.

Sara Miles’s account of the 1990s shows what happens when Democrats try to short-circuit the realignment process with a donor-anchored, top-down refit. The “Atari Democrat” turn gave the party a fluent idiom of growth and innovation and a recognizable partnership with a rising industry in Silicon Valley. But the real shift was organizational. The New Democrat Network was built as a “mini-campaign operation” to assemble a congressional bloc and keep a New Democrat White House from backsliding toward labor-aligned priorities. Silicon Valley intermediaries professionalized access and signaling; high-profile policy flips and choreographed endorsements announced who had the inside line.

That history matters because it names the model Searchlight is at risk of reviving. It changed who Democrats listened to and built a D.C. apparatus to enforce that change, while bypassing the democratic anchoring and rule-rewiring that make eras durable. Think of the distinction this way: patron networks replaced mass membership organizations, and neoliberals displaced strategies to overcome veto points that root new policies in constituencies able to defend them. Searchlight’s “supermajority thinking”—heterodox bundles, cleaner polling, hostility to “the groups”—is at risk of a similar operating system with a new interface. It’s elite coalition management: good at message control and donor reassurance, thin where it counts—turning conflict into organization, organization into policy, and policy into a regime that can endure.

It is, of course, too early to know what the Searchlight Institute will ultimately become. We may actually agree more than we disagree. But the test of democratic institutions requires the organization of ordinary Americans into forms capable of exercising power. On that score, given the record, it is not yet clear whether Searchlight will strengthen or weaken the conditions that sustain a just democracy.

If you want a contrast between curation and coalition-building, look at Harry Reid’s 2010 gamble on the DREAM Act. The polling was bad and his advisers said to steer clear. DREAMers protested his office anyway, and Reid chose to stand with them. That choice worked because democracy’s three legs were there: organized people who could make claims and be seen; skilled staff who could turn those claims into a legislative path; and a leader willing to take a public risk and be accountable for it. The strength of the groups mattered—they created a mandate no memo could invent. Without them, operatives have no charge and politicians no obligation. Given a real stake and a real reason, Latino voters showed up and rewarded him. That is what a realignment instinct looks like: strong organizations that hold leaders to account, operatives who channel that pressure into strategy, and a courageous politician who answers with action.

It is also hard to take seriously the idea that “the groups” cost Harris the 2024 election, when the overwhelming liabilities were inflation, Biden’s age, and a White House inner circle that often sneered at dissent (not to mention that Searchlight-adjacent thinkers like Matt Yglesias and David Shor had the ears of Democratic Party leaders). Still, in a two-party system, there will always be groups organizing constituencies to have their needs met across a range of issues; that is not a pathology but the basic structure of democratic politics. The task is not to ride the vibe-shift and wish groups away but to build better ones, bring them into greater synchronicity, and accept that conflict will always exist. How leaders navigate that conflict is what makes realignments possible.

But realignment likely won’t be born in conference rooms where operatives draft memos about “supermajorities.” It will be found where people already wrestle with the hard edge of American life: where immigrants and their allies stand against ICE raids, where Indivisible moms organize neighbors, where Palestinian and Lebanese families in Michigan grieve their dead, where tenants fight rent hikes, where women defend their health care, where the indebted refuse their burdens, where families demand release from mandatory minimums, where young people fight for a livable planet and social media platforms that serve us, where workers organize unions against the odds. These are the places where power lives.

Leaders untethered from many of these struggles, like John Fetterman, may win in the short-term, but they can’t deliver realignment. Even with imperfect groups, the further we drift from these fights, the further we drift from power.

Before we argue about the 1850s, it’s worth asking why we’re talking about them at all. In an interview, Eric Foner recalled that George W. Bush’s senior political operative Karl Rove “said he learned how to build a political coalition” from the book Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. Foner’s seminal work is a deep dive into how movements, factions, and parties can turn many interests into a political force that can win, govern, and transform a nation.

Yglesias makes three core claims. First, “There just is not a singular transcendent issue of our time,” so analogies to the 1850s falter because “the Abolitionists and Radicals were singularly focused on the slavery issue.” Second, today’s left “is not making a specific ask.” Third, it often seems “we’re not bargaining over issues at all, but over control.” I agree on the premise: slavery’s moral, economic, and political place has no modern analogue. I said the same in my piece. But the way he uses the history of the 19th century misses how the Republican Party’s purpose was forged and then debated inside a contentious coalition rather than pre‑agreed by everyone from the start.

1) The 1850s were not “one issue.” Republicans forged one politics.

In the 1850s, Republicans did not begin with consensus that slavery was “the issue.” Abolitionists and Radicals pressed for immediate emancipation, while moderates wanted to contain slavery in the territories, and conservatives hoped to tamp the conflict down so the government could return to tariffs, railroads, and banking.

For example, as Foner argues in Politics and Ideology in the age of the Civil War, Northern labor activists thought slavery was just one symptom of a larger economic system that also degraded northern workers; abolitionists insisted slavery was the root cause of all labor’s problems and had to be eradicated first. Each side even drew different lessons from the “Lords of the Loom and Lords of the Lash” alliance: labor saw northern capital and southern planters as partners in exploitation, while abolitionists cast slavery as the singular source of corruption. That tension helps explain why abolition remained a minority cause for decades—evangelical reform could break the silence around slavery, but it also alienated many northerners wary of moral absolutism.

The breakthrough came with free-soil politics in the late 1840s and early 1850s. By making the expansion of slavery into western lands the central issue, Republicans created a meeting ground where abolitionist moral fervor and labor’s demand for independence converged. They also dropped the Radical push for equal rights for free Black people but adopted labor’s broader definition of freedom (“free labor”) as economic independence.

Lincoln sharpened the point: the workingman’s right to the fruits of his labor could not coexist with a system that turned people into property. Republicans turned labor’s fears about wages and land into a critique of the Slave Power. The genius of the coalition was inventing that adversary: a Southern oligarchy that had captured Washington through minority rule. As Eric Foner writes, this became the “glue” that bound abolitionists, radicals, moderates, and conservatives who otherwise clashed over pace and scale.

The focus on “no extension” didn’t emerge naturally; it was hammered out through years of factional struggle, then turned into law—Homestead, the Pacific Railway, land-grant colleges, and, in wartime, emancipation and civil rights. Republicans fused moral urgency with material interest, channeling farmers, workers, industrialists, and abolitionists into one majoritarian project. They also cast it as mass and class politics, as historian Matt Karp argues: the many against “a tiny aristocracy of slave lords.” That coalition logic, more than a single-issue crusade, made antislavery into a winning politics.

By 1860, Republicans had to decide what they stood for beyond stopping the spread of slavery. As Foner notes, the Chicago party convention adopted planks for “a tariff, internal improvements, a Pacific railroad and a homestead law.” Former Whigs demanded a national economic program, while even ex-Democrats conceded the party “would have to broaden its platforms.” As Chicago’s mayor John Wentworth admitted, “I do not see what we are to do without some financial policy.”

The hardest fight was over tariffs. To carry Pennsylvania without splitting the coalition, Republicans settled on “some incidental protection to the iron interest, avoiding, nevertheless, the idea of a high tariff.” The word “protection” never appeared in the platform at all.

Strategically, the party stressed anti-slavery in the radical North and West, while foregrounding tariffs in more conservative districts. The result was a deliberately blended agenda: antislavery at the core and an economic program broad enough to win. The coalition also gestured toward pro-immigration policies that would echo later in Frederick Douglass’s 1869 “Composite Nation” speech, which urged Americans to embrace Chinese immigration and a genuinely multiracial democracy:

I want a home here not only for the Negro, the mulatto and the Latin races, but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours. Right wrongs no man. If respect is had to majorities, the fact that only one-fifth of the population of the globe is white and the other four-fifths are colored, ought to have some weight and influence in disposing of this and similar questions.

We are a country of all extremes, ends and opposites; the most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world. Our people defy all the ethnological and logical classifications. In races we range all the way from black to white, with intermediate shades which, as in the apocalyptic vision, no man can name or number.

2) Junior partners tend to demand, senior partners decide and forge.

Yglesias argues the left today “is not making a specific ask,” unlike the Radicals and the Republicans of the 1850s. But that blurs the lines. With much fewer seats than moderates, Radicals functioned as the junior partner: ideological, horizon-setting, relentless about forcing the party to confront slavery and transform American society. The Republican Party’s moderate leadership was the senior partner: focused on electoral majorities, winning elections, and passing laws.

Radicals made clear they wanted far more than stopping slavery’s spread—Foner notes they demanded “abolition in the nation’s capital, an end to the use of slaves in federal employment, and eventually…emancipation in the South itself.” Once war began, those aims widened into Reconstruction: “restricting the power of the planters, protecting the rights of the freedmen, and transforming the South into a democratic (and Republican) society.”

The party, meanwhile, had to distill this into something a majority could vote for. That’s why the focus was “no extension,” and why Lincoln—who knew “no politician is going to kick his base out”—translated radical pressure into moderate language and policies.

Foner puts the Radical role split plainly in an interview with Jacobin Magazine: “The abolitionists show you that a very small group…can accomplish a lot by changing the discourse…the role of radicals is to stand outside…and put forward the moral imperative.” If they persuade people, “then politicians will come up with a plan to do it.” Politics, he adds, is “people acting together, even if they don’t love each other, for a common purpose.” Lincoln, a moderate, still knew abolitionists were part of his base—“no politician is going to kick his base out.”

As Lincoln himself famously described his party’s radicals, “They are utterly lawless--the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with--but after all their faces are set Zion-wards.”

The lesson isn’t that today’s left has too many causes. It’s that Democrats haven’t done the senior-partner job of choosing a unifying program and turning movement energy into governing power.

After Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated Joe Crowley and began using her platform to push inequality and the Green New Deal, I went to see historian Barbara Fields at her office hours and asked whether the 1850s and 1860s offered any lessons, albeit not straightforward, for today—with AOC in the lane of the Radicals and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi in the lane of moderates like Lincoln. Fields agreed that there were some parallels, but her response was blunt: “Schumer and Pelosi don’t have a Lincolnian bone in their body. They don’t feel the forces of history moving beneath their feet.”

Her point wasn’t mystical. Lincoln’s strength was taking radical pressure and turning it into a program a majority could vote for. By contrast, she suggested, today’s Democratic leaders treat politics as a permanent red–blue campaign of fundraising rather than defining, defending, and advancing a majoritarian program that reshapes America’s political economy and the lives of the American people.

3) What Yglesias Calls ‘Control’ Is How Coalitions Work.

Yglesias says the left and center today are “not bargaining over issues at all, but over control.” But that’s exactly how junior partners behave in American parties without formal coalition agreements. Factions fight for leverage so the senior partner can’t pocket their votes and paper over divisions with a lowest-common-denominator program—one that tries to please everyone, satisfies no one, and leaves the deeper contradictions in the political economy untouched.

The mid-19th century Republican Party had this internal fight all the time. Conservatives wanted a quick win to “end the slavery controversy and allow the federal government to turn its attention to…national economic development.” Radicals saw that same victory as “only the first step in a relentless crusade” to transform Southern society. That was a fight about agenda-setting power—control, in Yglesias’s word—inside a coalition that still had to stay majoritarian. As political scientist Daniel Disalvo writes in Engines of Change: factions are “agenda-setting vehicles and engines of political change.” They generate new ideas, push them onto the agenda, and contest over what the party actually does. When party leaders can’t synthesize factional conflict among the senior and junior partners, the pressure looks scattered and gets mislabeled as nihilism.

Because of how U.S. parties work in a winner-take all, two-party system, the party leadership optimizes for swing seats, donors, and governing bandwidth, which means sanding off sharp edges and deprioritizing issues that complicate a majoritarian message; the American left then often is left on precisely those neglected, deprioritized, or slow-walked items--clean energy economy, Medicare for All, Palestine, rent control, antitrust--not as hobbies, but as leverage to force agenda inclusion and build constituencies the party would otherwise under-resource. In practice, much of that agenda looks less like scattered and utopian wish-casting and more like the platforms of social democratic and democratic socialist parties across much of Latin America and Europe.

TLDR;

There is no modern equivalent to slavery’s central role in 1850s politics. Lincoln’s GOP is not Jeffries’s Democratic Party, today’s left is far weaker than the Radical bloc (I would like for it to get sharper), and slavery’s unique evil has no peer. But the history is still instructive. Republicans didn’t win because the movement had one demand; they won because Radicals expanded their influence, forced moderates to confront the Slave Power as the defining political problem, and pushed the party to translate many demands into a majoritarian program—the Free Soil, Free Labor agenda—and then govern on it.

That’s the part of the analogy that carries forward. In a big-tent party, junior partners—the ideological factions—press contradictions, draft concrete policies, and fight until the leadership has to pick sides on issues they’d rather avoid. Senior partners focus on holding majorities, smoothing risk, and keeping the message broad. The senior partner optimizes for swing seats and risk control—count votes, calm donors, keep the message and vision broad (“better health care”) rather than binding (“single-payer with X”). Understanding this helps explain why the party doesn’t really have a clear message or platform until the presidential nominating contest, after the party’s factions battle it out for influence.

When party leadership and its junior partner can’t synchronize their roles, the push for clarity gets mislabeled as a power grab, the agenda drifts, and blame flows. But when the bargain works, movement-aligned factions provide substance and energy, and the party turns that into votes, legislation, and durable governing power.

In the fall of 2023, I was pitching stories to mainstream media outlets about anti-war protests and how Muslim, Arab, and young voters were souring on the Democratic Party over Biden’s Israel policy. Meanwhile, at Thanksgiving, several of my own relatives told me outright this would be the first election where they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the Democrat at the top of the ticket. Around the same time, a producer at a major network told me that soon I’d have a harder time getting Gaza stories on air, because by January “everything will be about the election.”

That was the strategic dilemma. We knew mass mobilizations, marches, and campus protests had moral power, but inside the party they weren’t treated as political power. Most party elites, mainstream media journalists, and the White House itself didn’t believe Gaza would matter in November; they thought the issue would fade and that the anger was confined to young, leftist activists “who are always mad about something.” So the challenge was to make it political in the language the party does understand: votes and elections.

We first explored whether a progressive primary challenger to Biden might emerge from the ranks of elected officials, celebrities, unions, or activists. Every avenue came up empty. Most people felt like it was career suicide. Then we remembered a precedent: Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008 had used the “Uncommitted” line on the Michigan ballot to signal dissent against Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was available.

We took that option and built it into a grassroots campaign with about $200,000–tiny by presidential campaign standards but enough to get a message across. The logic was straightforward: use the primaries to register dissent in the most legible currency the party understands, convert those votes into delegates, and turn that presence into leverage for a course correction on Gaza. “Abandon Biden” campaigns were already underway, but they didn’t fit our theory of change, which was that the party needed to save lives in Gaza in order to save democracy from Trump.

The work was far from simple. It meant thousands of conversations with disaffected voters, constant pushback that it was “pointless,” and accusations of disloyalty from every wing of American politics at every turn. Yet the results began to accumulate. In Michigan, more than 100,000 Democrats--roughly thirteen percent--marked “Uncommitted.” In Minnesota, it was nearly one in five. Across several states, even with the option unavailable on most ballots, those votes translated into close to thirty delegates. What looked improbable at the outset had started to become a visible bloc inside the party.

Our thesis was straightforward. We set out to forge a permission structure that would change the top of the ticket’s policy and then let Biden (and then Harris) win back anti-war voters whom the White House’s weapons policy had driven out of the tent. That required pressure with a carrot and a stick. The carrot was obvious: hundreds of thousands were ready to return if Biden (and then Harris) drew daylight from a blank-check policy and put U.S. weapons under U.S. and international law. The stick was equally clear: this bloc was organized, visible, and not going away. We carried two obligations at once: push to stop U.S. weapons from being used to commit war crimes in Gaza in order to unite the party to defeat Donald Trump. Our task was to make a pivot toward both possible, credible, and safe.

But we weren’t running against Biden, Harris, or the Democratic Party. Most of the Uncommitted delegates were longtime Democratic Party organizers. We were Democrats trying to warn them. The coalition had a fracture, plain as the polling on Biden’s age or the price of groceries. But as with those concerns, party leaders brushed them aside--sometimes by looking the other way, sometimes with a condescending sneer.

We came to the convention with American doctors who had walked bombed hospital corridors of Gaza, who had pulled shrapnel stamped “Made in USA” from the bodies of Palestinian toddlers. They carried testimony, not politics—moral witness to what the world was already beginning to call war crimes, even as Democratic Party leaders refused to. And yet in a press conference, after they described these scenes, the question from mainstream reporters was whether they thought Harris or Trump would be better. The question felt surreal: as if the point of their witness was partisan calculus, not the human cost they had just laid bare.

Alongside them, we carried a list of steps the Harris campaign could have taken before November: sit with Palestinian and Lebanese American families in Michigan who had lost loved ones; draw daylight from a blank-check weapons policy; say out loud that American weapons must not be used to break American and international law; allow a Palestinian American voice on the stage of a party that claims to speak for multi-ethnic democracy in the face of fascism and racism.

Every request we made was denied, except for one: the DNC agreed to host the first official convention panel on Palestinian human rights, which became one of the most heavily attended events of the week. But even DNC officials admitted to us directly that the panel was not our main ask and could not substitute for a Palestinian speaker onstage. That acknowledgement mattered: it showed they knew exactly what we were asking for, and that they knew this wasn’t it.

The Harris campaign’s posture was even clearer. In private conversations after the Convention, when questions of endorsement were raised, their position was essentially, we understand if you don’t endorse. It was a polite way of saying the campaign wasn’t going to change its approach and that they did not want—or need—our support.

For two months we sent the DNC names of Palestinian American leaders rooted in this party. Members of Congress supplemented their own names. To our knowledge, not a single Palestinian American elected official was called. Not a single draft of a speech was asked for. Not one word was invited onto the party’s convention stage.

On the Wednesday night of the convention, around 7 p.m., the decision finally came: “It’s not happening.” Uncommitted delegates and allied Harris delegates began a sit-in at the United Center. From 8:30 p.m. to nearly 4 a.m., senior staff rotated through with offers of meetings--with senior DNC and Harris staff, with Congressmen and Senators--but never about the one thing that mattered.

We were told the vetting didn’t go through. Later we were told our movement could not “define the vice president’s biggest speech of her life.” At another point we heard that any Palestinian American we proposed had used the word “genocide,” and that alone made them “nonstarters because it caused offense to Jewish Democrats.” The explanations shifted, but they all missed the point. The issue wasn’t the logistics of vetting—it was the fear of a Palestinian voice itself. And if the party was so afraid of even symbolic inclusion, how could anyone believe it would ever take on the harder work of policy change? Allies saw the contradiction immediately. Major unions, members of Congress, relatives of Israeli hostages, even liberal Jewish groups urged the DNC to allow a Palestinian speaker.

For many older Black Democratic leaders, the symbolism was what cut especially deep. They were caught between celebrating the historic moment of the first Black woman nominee and watching Palestinians barred from the stage for who they were, not for what they might say. The memory of Fannie Lou Hamer’s exclusion in 1964 hung in the air. The Democratic Party, once again, was broadcasting who counted and who did not—and that contradiction dramatized the stakes more clearly than any speech we could have given.

All year we heard the same message from voters Democrats count as their coalition--Muslims and Arabs, and many young people across backgrounds. They said they could not vote for a party they believed was arming and defending a catastrophe that international bodies were investigating as genocidal. By November 2023, polling in Michigan made the drift plain among Arab, Muslim, and young voters. Inside donor and media rooms, the confident reply was that a debate between Trump and Biden would bring everyone “home” against the Muslim-ban candidate. And what a debate that was.

Coalitions and party unity depend on trust, and the Democratic Party’s history makes that clear. In 1964, civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party arrived in Atlantic City without numbers or money but with enormous moral authority. They demanded that the national party seat Black delegates from Mississippi instead of the all-white delegation that had been sent by the state party. The party did not concede to their demands, but their presence cracked the door open. Within a few years, Black Democrats were inside the party structure, reshaping who had standing in the coalition. They lost in the moment, but they created the conditions for a future realignment.

Uncommitted was modeled far more on 1964 than on 1968. We hadn’t set out to stage a sit-in, and we never intended one. Our aim was not to rage from the outside but to walk through the gates with the tools the party itself provides--ballots, delegates, media, convention seats--and force it to confront what it preferred to ignore. Street protest can stir the conscience, but without a ledger of votes and leaders at the table to forge a new path, conscience alone is too easily dismissed. And yet in Chicago we collided with the truth that a convention is no longer a forum for democratic argument but a spectacle of control. It is choreography masquerading as deliberation, a stage set to display a script while banishing dissent to the wings.

The deeper problem was a democratic deficit. In a presidential election year, there was no meaningful way to force accountability on the party, no lever that could compel leaders to hear our voices or adjust course. The convention was stage-managed, primaries were designed to ratify more than to debate, and the big donors and outside groups were already setting the boundaries of “acceptable” dissent. AIPAC openly pledged to spend $100 million--much of it Republican money--to oust anti-war candidates in Democratic primaries.

One night after the convention, a senior Democratic insider took us aside and described being in a gathering at the convention with the people who “really run” the party--its top funders, strategists, and operatives. Two-thirds of them, he said, were tied to AIPAC and DMFI’s networks. “And they were never going to let a Palestinian American on that stage,” the operative said. That’s the imbalance. Our movement had the moral energy of protests, but not the institutional muscle: no donor or voter or elected network to rival theirs, no deep bench of operatives, few electoral victories, not a large enough Washington presence strong enough to shift the balance.

Other party insiders were blunt to us. Most Democrats in Congress didn’t oppose U.S. weapons for Israel, and any daylight would have triggered immediate backlash from swing-state moderates. They said, imagine John Fetterman or prominent Jewish leaders on TV accusing Kamala Harris of “abandoning Israel,” backed by suburban Democrats warning that the election was at risk. In their eyes, that coalition of voters, donors, and elected officials was larger--and more decisive--than ours.

I will not pretend Chicago left no mark. While the hall danced to pop songs, my phone lit with messages from delegates bracing for censure by their local and state parties back home, punished for saying aloud what their state and local parties wanted left unsaid. The labels came quickly--“terrorist sympathizer” and “antisemite” from the right, “Russian asset” from the center, “sellout” from parts of the left for trying to fight inside the party at all. It was humiliating, and it was exhausting. The hardest part was the loneliness of returning with no policy win to hold, only the burden of the struggle—its grief, its arguments, its unrelenting weight, and the conflicting theories of change from those within the anti-war tent.

But what stays with me are the faces of our Palestinian and Jewish delegates who would not move. Democratic Party delegates with red eyes from sleepless nights, shoulders squared against the weight of rejection, yet carrying themselves with the power that comes from knowing you are right. They sat not in anger but in conviction: that to exclude a Palestinian voice from the Democratic Party’s stage not because of what might be said but because of who would say it was a moral wrong too grave to accept. Their stillness was a kind of defiance. Their persistence, a declaration that dignity, once denied, does not quietly retreat.

That night clarified for me what politics at its most honest really is--not the bright lights or the speeches sanded smooth for unity, but ordinary people risking censure, humiliation, even a form of political exile, to insist that their grief be seen. The sit-in was weary, it was painful, and it was real. And in those faces I saw the lesson: power without conscience breeds injustice, but conscience without power is a sermon no one hears.

Yes, some Arab and Muslim Americans voted for Donald Trump. So did some right-leaning, pro-Israel Jewish voters who felt that the left had become antisemitic. That isn’t symmetry. It’s alienation, expressed in different ways. In each case, people felt dismissed by institutions they once trusted. Trump became a blunt instrument--a way to punish a party they believed would not hear them. You don’t have to think he cares about you; you only have to believe he rattles the people who won’t acknowledge your pain.

Uncommitted didn’t elect Trump. Ignoring the Democrats who checked off the “Uncommitted” ballot helped create an opening he exploited. We warned our base about Project 2025, urged against third-party detours, and even ran ads to that effect. What we couldn’t do was give a formal endorsement and hand our field operation to a campaign that shockingly refused even basic recognition; that would have torched our credibility in the communities we organize and damaged the relationships we need to build durable power.

After the convention, a group of senior Democratic operatives--frustrated by the party’s drift on Israel-Palestine--met with us and laid out a simple forecast. If Harris won, Netanyahu would test her in the lame-duck window or the first 100 days; her response would set the tone for the term. The question wasn’t abstract: would she spend scarce early political capital on a public break with Netanyahu, and did she have the “war room” infrastructure to absorb AIPAC/DMFI attacks the way Obama’s team did during the Iran-deal fight?

These party insiders were extremely skeptical that Harris would break with Biden or Netanyahu in a major way without being pushed in that direction from outside and within (donors, voters, networks of leaders). What they saw in Uncommitted was the beginnings of that infrastructure: a multifaith, multiracial, multi-issue coalition--left and center-left, elected officials and community leaders, Black, Jewish, Arab, Muslim, Christian, with major labor unions--that could speak the party’s language to create both cover and pressure for a real shift on weapons transfers.

The lesson isn’t that protest fails. It’s that protest without power hits a ceiling. Moral clarity must be translated into leverage--votes, donors, validators, and a multiracial and multifaith network that includes labor, Black institutions, and Latino organizations. Primaries are where that leverage is built. If party elites respond to money and votes, movements must organize both. The alternative is the democratic deficit we saw up close: a stage managed for a false sense fo unity, boundaries set by outside money, and no reliable channel for accountability in a presidential year.

Looking back, I keep returning to one hard truth: too many on the center-left did not do what the moment required. They mistook access for influence, statements for strategy, partisanship and proximity for power. From a middling position between Netanyahu and AIPAC on one side and the cease-fire movement on the other, they hoped a careful, triangulating sentence could stand in for public pressure. They told themselves they were holding the line; in fact, they held the coat. The White House and the campaign needed to feel pressure from within as well as concern. Instead, they buried their heads and called it pragmatism. It was always five minutes to midnight. And restraint without leverage produced exactly what it always does: policy that moved too little, too late, and a politics that left the most wounded parts of the coalition to fend for themselves.

A year ago, the message was clear: challenge U.S. policy on Gaza and you risk your seat. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush paid that price. What’s changed since then is not that the moral case has grown stronger—it was always strong—but that the political risk has shifted. Zohran Mamdani’s victory showed that standing up for Palestinian rights could survive contact with the electorate, even in one of the most Jewish constituencies in the country. That win cracked the narrative of inevitability, and with it the fear.

As with the Iraq war, few will ever be held accountable; soon the story will be that everyone was always against it, or that it was ‘justified at the beginning and then lost its way’—a soothing fiction that allows leaders and institutions to preserve themselves while erasing the people who paid a real price.

Politics at its truest is not the light show; it is the faces that refuse to be erased. A party that claims to speak for the many must do more than applaud itself under a bright stage. It must listen. In the end, Biden and Harris lost anti-war voters for the same reason they lost voters upset about the economy and Biden’s age: they simply did not listen to what voters were telling them. Democrats can treat Uncommitted as a trespass to punish, or as a map back to a coalition built on recognition, reciprocity, and shared purpose. We chose the map. The door is still open for those willing to walk through it.

A year later, another NYTimes piece warned that if Lincoln won, “he will have to cut off the Abolition and extreme wing of his party; otherwise he will go by the board,” because a “practical, common‑sense man, and an old Whig, would reject the radical Republicans.”

NYTimes, 1860: "[The abolitionists] are as rancorous and abusive as if they were on the point of utter annihilation. Their speeches sound more like the ravings of Bedlamites than the utterances of men seeking the accomplishment of a practical object."

Slavery’s unique horror and the politics it produced have no modern equal, and the Republican Party of the 1850s was forged for a singular purpose: to resist and ultimately destroy the “Slave Power.” And today’s Democratic Party lacks a comparable unifying moral and ideological project. What carries over is the strategic problem that confronted the new Republicans: consolidate power first in safe seats or stretch into contested terrain? How do radicals, moderates, and conservatives best divide labor inside a big‑tent, two-party system—with what conflicts and in what sequence?

The electoral map of the new party—and the strategic choices

Some context: the 1850s Republican coalition fused ex‑Whigs (a collapsing national party that had tried to sidestep slavery), anti‑slavery Democrats (a minority rebelling against Southern leadership), Free Soilers (a short‑lived movement devoted to barring slavery from western territories), and a smaller band of abolitionists committed to immediate emancipation.

Political scientist Daniel DiSalvo’s framework helps: factions are “‘engines of change,’ the prime movers in American politics,” a level “between” parties and lone politicians that act as “‘conveyor belts of ideas.’” They are “coordinated network[s] that tie together elites from a variety of institutions,” capable of moving “the whole party along a left‑right spectrum.”

Historian Hans Trefousse sketches the GOP’s factions as “radicals, moderates, and conservatives” who “differed in both ends and means”—with radicals pressing the attack, moderates forming the majority, and conservatives hoping to turn back the clock.

They broadly agreed to stop slavery’s expansion (“containment”), while they fought over scale and pace (radicals), coalition (moderates), and tone (conservatives). For radicals, “‘No compromise!’ was their motto—‘not even with friends if it involves the sacrifice of principle’,” a cohort “of former Free‑Soilers and other determined antislavery politicians” who refused “to recede in any way” from keeping slavery from spreading.

Crucially, where each wing lived shaped how it talked. Historian Eric Foner locates the Republican center of gravity in the Yankee villages of central and western New York, and those of Michigan, Wisconsin, and the northern counties of Ohio with echoes in northern Illinois and rural New England. Places where abolitionist sentiment ran so deep that bold antislavery positions posed no electoral risk.

“Urban political leaders, many of whose constituents were either [white] immigrants,” worried that letting “New England abolitionists” define the brand would be “political poison.” In short: abolitionist‑leaning safe seats became foundries; white immigrant‑heavy and “lower North” swing seats demanded different rhetoric.

In the mid-19th century, the Radical Republicans were never a majority of their party, but in the right circumstances they shaped the GOP’s direction as decisively as any party faction before or since. From those safe perches, radicals set the horizon of anti-slavery politics. Historian Bruce Levine’s portrait of Thaddeus Stevens is blunt: he created public opinion and molded public sentiment” and was almost invariably out in front of public opinion…on all the great questions of the war.

Charles Sumner played a similar role in Massachusetts, indicting what he called the “Slave Oligarchy”: “It organizes the Cabinet, directs the Army and Navy, controls the Treasury and the Post‑Office …holds the keys to every office, from President down to postmaster...Our first political duty, therefore, is to oppose this Oligarchy…Prostrate the Slave Oligarchy, and Liberty will become the universal law of all the national Territories.”

Moderates and conservatives aimed at different voters—especially in the swingier “lower North.” Foner is direct about their approach: parties there reorganized around less polarizing banners and trimmed sails to compete for former Democrats; several states even adopted “People’s Party” labels to mute “New England abolitionist” associations. Republicans tailored the message to the free‑labor common sense of swing constituencies—1850s shorthand for an economy in which ordinary people could work, save, and own, as opposed to a slave system that fixed status at birth and depressed wages and dignity.

In lower-North battlegrounds like Illinois, Democrats worked to make even a Republican moderate sound like an abolitionist firebrand. The Illinois State Register blasted Lincoln’s argument to restrict slavery as “black abolitionist propaganda,” insisting his speech “has as dark a hue as that of Garrison or Fred Douglass.” Stephen A. Douglas hammered the linkage on the stump, peddling a rumor that “one of Fred. Douglass’ kinsmen…is now traveling in this part of the State making speeches for his friend Lincoln as the champion of black men,” and at Charleston claiming he had found Lincoln’s ally “in the person of Fred. Douglass, THE NEGRO.”

Lincoln’s opponent pressed the point further by associating Lincoln with several radicals and abolitionists: “Did Lovejoy, or Lloyd Garrison, or Wendell Phillips, or Fred. Douglass, ever take higher abolition grounds than that?” The goal was to brand the GOP in swing counties as synonymous with Black equality and abolitionist “extremism,” attempting to impose a political tax on Republican moderates that radicals in safe New England seats didn’t have to pay.

Policy and ideology tended to follow demographics and geography. James Oakes sums up the party’s containment strategy: “The Republican Party called upon the ‘national forces of freedom’ to hem slavery in, to confine it, to ‘localize’ it, and to surround it.” Hemmed in, slavery would be “on the path to ‘ultimate extinction.’ Like a scorpion girt by fire…slavery would inevitably sting itself to death.” Republicans as a big-tent party “were not proposing to abolish slavery in the states”; the aim was to strip national “special protection” and turn federal levers—territories, D.C., commerce—toward freedom.

Coalition math—and the near‑misses

Because partisan electoral math can be brutal, the GOP repeatedly slammed into the dilemma any junior partner recognizes: how far can you stretch without dissolving what you are? After Lincoln’s election—but before the Civil War—Republican moderate leaders across the spectrum “urged one another to keep quiet and even to assume a conciliatory posture,” stressing that they “would never directly abolish slavery in the states where slavery already existed,” in hopes of “limit[ing] the scope of secession.”

Conservatives sometimes turned that caution into a cudgel against the left flank; one familiar complaint, Foner notes, was that “the doctrinaire morality of the Sumners…[was] doing the Republican party more harm than good.”

But radicals, for their part, saw excessive accomodation as a hollowing‑out risk. In 1860, conservative Republicans floated Edward Bates of Missouri to broaden the map. Foner again: “the radicals made it clear that they would bolt the party if Bates were chosen. While they did not insist on one of their own, they ‘demanded that a Republican candidate’ be chosen, one who had supported Frémont in 1856.” Bates’s nativism, reflecting many of his own voters views, made him “anathema to German‑born Republicans” like Carl Schurz—stretch one way, risk losing another constituency.

How movements anchor within parties

Why fight inside the party at all? As Daniel Schlozman argues, in American politics movements change the country when they become “anchoring groups” inside parties that actually hold power. Parties control the levers of the state; factions that anchor within them can trade votes, money, networks, ideas, and moral urgency for influence over the party’s agenda.

But anchoring comes with a price: you inherit all the coalition’s internal friction. In the early months of the Civil War, New York Republican Alexander Diven made the classic moderate’s case against letting the radical flank set a distinct party program: “I am not willing to open the floodgates of discussion upon all these questions…Let us not have a policy of our own, but unite with the thousands…of War Democrats; for if we have a policy of our own, we shall divide the Union cause.” The very structure that gives an anchored movement access to governing also forces it to navigate — and often defer to — the broader coalition’s electoral and strategic anxieties.

Radicals pushed back just as hard from the other side. Sumner, exasperated in 1862: “I am pained inexpressibly at the delay which gives to our marvelous advantages the aspect of failure…How vain to have the power of a God, and not to use it wisely!”

Governing re-sorted the coalition fast. The first Radical program—Black suffrage, land redistribution, and overturning Johnson’s Southern governments—hit a wall. “No party, however strong, could stand a year on this platform,” one Republican paper warned. Leadership soon shifted from the Radicals to moderate Republicans, who ultimately steered Reconstruction onto a narrower path and dismantled much of its transformative agenda.

Moderates thought the country had “suffered too much from ultra-ists and wranglers,” aimed to judge Southern whites by “present loyal purpose” rather than “past disloyalty,” and wanted Reconstruction settled quickly so the nation could turn to economic growth. “If ‘Sumner and Stevens, and a few other such men do not embroil us with the President,’” Senator William P. Fessenden wrote, “matters can be satisfactorily arranged—satisfactorily, I mean, to the great bulk of Union men throughout the States.”

That’s the junior-partner burden in a sentence: in a broad coalition, they carry the ideology but credit diffuses and blame concentrates. A bloc can move the platform, message, and the law—and still watch others set the timetable.

Why does any of this matter today?

Sequence and focus matter. If there’s one lesson the 1850s offer about safe seat primaries vs purple and red general elections, it’s sequencing. First consolidate a coherent bloc and infrastructure of voters, donors, and networks of leaders; then negotiate from strength to make national majorities possible and grounded in an ideological vision. That’s how abolitionist insurgency created the political space for a moderate Republican like Lincoln to take the presidency four years after its first national run. And when the test came, the party as a whole held its line. Foner’s verdict on the secession crisis: “While the conservatives would sacrifice anti-slavery to save the Union, and the radicals would endanger the Union to attack slavery, the moderates, with Lincoln at their head, refused to abandon either of their twin goals: free soil and the Union”

From its founding in the 1850s, the Republican Party was a coalition at war with itself over how to turn antislavery conviction into national majorities. The nominating contests of 1856, 1860, and 1864 each revealed the push and pull between radicals, moderates, and conservatives. In 1856, radicals arrived at the first convention expecting compromise, only to win a platform denouncing Southern slavery and Mormon polygamy as the “twin relics of barbarism” and calling for slavery’s “complete denationalization,” while moderates put forward John C. Frémont to test it nationally.

In 1860, moderate William Seward’s approach was embraced but he was seen as too personally polarizing; Abraham Lincoln emerged as the swing-state candidate who could carry certain parts of a radical platform without the radical’s baggage.

By 1864, many Radicals were frustrated with Lincoln’s cautious pace on emancipation and Reconstruction, and some seriously considered mounting a challenge to his renomination. Rather than risk a split in the middle of the war, Lincoln absorbed portions of their agenda—most notably accepting a party platform that called for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery.

The episode reinforced a recurring sequence in Republican politics: radicals consolidated their base and set the ideological horizon, moderates expanded the coalition to win nationally, and together they hammered the platform into clearer, bolder form. Even as the junior partner, the radicals showed they didn’t necessarily need to carry battleground states on their backs or the top of the ticket to shape the party’s governing commitments in lasting ways.

But the costs can be real: over-invest in blue strongholds and you risk moral clarity without governing power; over-invest in purple seats and you risk power without a project. The 1850s Radical Republicans addressed it by sequence—build the edge that pulls the center, then build the center that carries the edge into power and knowing when to bend and adapt to keep the tent from collapsing.

Bottom line

Much of what determines a party’s ideological direction—the selection of candidates in primaries, the protection of incumbents, the setting of strategic priorities—happens upstream, well before the general election, and often in rooms where access is far more limited. Without independent resources, a loyal and identifiable voter base, or a slate of aligned candidates, a seat at the table without power can end up more advisory than directive.

This is especially true in primary season, when party leadership tends to close ranks early in battleground seats around favored candidates and resource flows are locked in months before the public phase of the race. Historically, factions that successfully influenced a party’s direction first built their own infrastructure in safe strongholds, developed a network of aligned candidates, voters, donors, and networks of leaders and demonstrated the capacity to win and govern. Only then did their presence at the table carry real weight, because they arrived not just as participants in someone else’s strategy, but as power centers in their own right.

That’s not a one-to-one script for the present. But it is a usable past: safe-seat consolidation to set an urgent, ideological horizon; contested-seat pragmatism to assemble the majority; and intraparty struggle over speed, scope, and risk. Factions are where the devil lives in the details—they force the party’s moderates to take sides on uncomfortable questions they’d rather avoid, preferring instead to unite the coalition through negative partisanship against the other side. The NTTimes begged Radical Republicans to stop talking. They didn’t and then they governed.

Waleed’s Substack

The Burden of the Junior Partner

To understand the last decade of progressive politics, you have to begin with a structural reality too often ignored: in the American system, there is no such thing as governing from the outside. Power flows through the Democratic Party, and for the left, that means entering as the junior partner in legislative and party coalitions it does not control. …

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a year ago · 26 likes · 1 comment · Waleed Shahid

Progressives know something they rarely say aloud: if the left—by which I narrowly mean the political project anchored by figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, Summer Lee, Bernie Sanders, and their allies and institutional networks—wants to meaningfully shape national politics, it must be ruthlessly strategic about where it invests its limited energy. For years, left-aligned groups have poured time, talent, and money into swing districts—trying to flip red-to-blue seats or elect populist champions in purple states. The impulse is understandable: winning on hostile terrain promises legitimacy, proof that left ideas can go mainstream.

Progressives have been playing away games when they should be fortifying home field. Safe Democratic districts aren’t consolation prizes; they’re launchpads. They’re where ideas get tested, organizers get trained, policy gets implemented, and new leaders get built. In an era of extreme polarization and limited institutional support, concentrating in these strongholds isn’t retreat; it’s sequencing. You don’t realign a party by winning over the center first. You do it by locking down your edge and pulling the center toward you.

Too often, these races follow a familiar script. Charismatic, inspiring candidates--praised by progressives--struggle to break through because their seats are structurally difficult to win, often simply due to the high number of registered Republican voters. Or, even if they do win, they find themselves boxed in, unable to govern as movement leaders or shift the party’s ideological center. The result: limited coattails, few enduring gains, and little infrastructure left behind.

Centrist Democrats are borrowing tools from sports analytics to assess political candidates with greater precision. In baseball, “Wins Above Replacement” (WAR) measures how much better a player is than a typical substitute. In basketball, Plus-Minus tracks how the team performs when a specific player is on the court. Both metrics look beyond raw stats to capture a player’s broader impact. By controlling for district partisanship, incumbency, demographics, and fundraising, analysts aim to identify candidates who consistently outperform expectations.

This framework is valuable for the social-democratic left. But for progressives, the "WAR" concept operates somewhat differently. While centrists measure candidate quality primarily by the ability to secure marginal swing districts, social democrats recognize that ideological effectiveness matters too. Leaders elected from reliably Democratic, strongly progressive districts--such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14, D+19) and Greg Casar (TX-35, D+19)--provide a distinct ideological form of WAR. Their contribution isn't merely in winning individual congressional seats; rather, it’s their ability to fundamentally shift national policy conversations, energize previously marginalized constituencies, and recalibrate the Democratic Party’s center toward a governing vision of multiracial social democracy (Medicare for All, clean energy, anti-war policies, Big Tech reform, anti-authoritarianism, and shared economic prosperity).

Progressive lawmakers in safely blue districts face little threat from Republican challengers and operate with more independence from the pressures of the DCCC and its donor networks. This insulation allows them to maintain ideological clarity and advance bold policy agendas without constant recalibration for swing voters. While left-wing organizations often lack the financial muscle or institutional leverage of the party establishment, knocking out a Democratic incumbent in a secure blue district offers a rare advantage: the ability to project disproportionate ideological influence, shaping the broader political conversation in ways that most legislators cannot.

Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 primary upset over Joe Crowley wasn’t just a symbolic victory. It was a strategic inflection point that launched the most effective left-wing political project of the decade. That single win enabled her to become not just a legislator, but a force multiplier: helping elect allies like Greg Casar, Summer Lee, and Mamdani; helping build independent political infrastructure across New York; brokering ambitious climate policy with the Biden administration; shaping national debates on immigration and inequality; and playing a pivotal role in electing the first socialist mayor of New York City—a metro region with a GDP larger than Canada’s.

Her rise—from a safe-seat primary challenger to a potential 2028 presidential contender—proves that ideological realignment doesn’t start in the middle. It starts at the edge, with disciplined investment in safe districts that function not as dead ends, but as launchpads. Figures like AOC, Mamdani, Pressley, and Jayapal have used these seats to grow new leadership pipelines, build lasting independent political infrastructure, and redefine the horizon of Democratic politics. This model doesn’t just win votes; it consolidates and coheres a bench, a base, and a future.

By contrast, progressives running in swing districts and purple states face considerable structural constraints that limit their ideological impact. Candidates like Dan Osborn in Nebraska exemplify this challenge. Though appealing and genuinely populist in outlook, Osborn adopts notably more moderate positions on policing, immigration, taxes, and health care, clearly distinguishing him from unabashed social democrats such as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Osborn has not endorsed Medicare for All or a Green New Deal. His pragmatic policy profile aligns more closely with the AFL-CIO oriented populism of Senator Sherrod Brown than Sanders or Warren’s ability to make the party reoriented toward their agitation. The moderation is perhaps necessary to remain competitive electorally, it inevitably reduces such candidates’ ideological influence and their ability to sustain powerful grassroots activism or shift broader national debates. Thus, their ideological "Wins Above Replacement"--their strategic ideological value--is inherently limited. While his campaign deserves support, the real question is whether left-wing progressive organizations—with their limited resources—should shoulder the largest burden, especially when the Democratic Party™ has exponentially greater reserves already being invested in those races.

The question isn’t whether purple seats matter. It’s whether the left’s limited resources and value-add in those contests actually moves the needle relative to what would happen anyway with party and donor muscle behind the scenes. If those seats are already prioritized institutionally, does progressive investment actually obtain ideological leverage of any kind?

This strategic distinction clarifies a crucial insight that progressives must internalize: not all electoral victories offer equal ideological returns. Although swing-seat Democrats are vital for numerical majorities, their risk-taking, ideological clarity, and leverage within the party remain limited. By contrast, progressives elected from safely Democratic districts deliver consistent ideological strength and influence. Such seats serve as critical force multipliers, establishing ideological clarity, securing key negotiating positions within the broader Democratic coalition, and creating conditions for transformative policies to become politically feasible.

Political science literature frames this clearly through what is known as the "junior partner dilemma," frequently observed in multiparty parliamentary democracies. Junior coalition partners, typically smaller, more ideological parties, must constantly balance pragmatic governance with maintaining ideological identity. Initially, junior parties gain significant policy influence by entering governing coalitions. But over time, ideological compromises blur their distinct political identity, confuse their voters, and erode their electoral support. The outcome often weakens their negotiating leverage and diminishes their long-term influence.

However, comparative politics reveals that junior partners gain substantial negotiating power when they have clearly defined leadership, coherent ideological platforms, and identifiable electoral bases that can be brought to party negotiations (for example: AOC brokering climate politics with the Biden administration as a representative of young people). Clear ideological branding and secure seats provide junior parties with greater leverage in negotiations with senior coalition partners, who tend toward pragmatism and moderation. By consolidating a coherent bloc of seats aligned with their core ideological principles, junior partners can influence policy without ideological dilution, maintaining strong electoral bases and clear voter identification.

Within the Democratic Party, the progressive faction faces a similar strategic dilemma. According to the Cook Political Report (2025), of the 94 House members in the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), 89 represent deep blue districts rated D+5 or higher. Only a handful represent more competitive seats below that threshold, and those representatives all vote, to no surprise, in a less progressive manner than members of The Squad. This stark partisan and electoral math translates directly into legislative behavior. For example, the more red your district, the less progressive or populist votes you’re going to take. And the more secure your district is, the more likely you will buck the party establishment on some votes (the farther down you are in the graph the more likely you are to challenge your own party’s behavior, one key metric of realignment):

Historically, transformative political movements have consistently followed a similar pattern. Abolitionists, labor unions during the New Deal era, LGBTQ advocates, and environmentalists first built their strength and ideological coherence within politically secure regions--often in multiracial, working-class, and younger urban districts. These areas served as laboratories of policy innovation, constituency consolidation, demonstrating the voter depth, viability and effectiveness of ambitious policy ideas and creating foundations for broader political shifts nationally. Radical Republicans consolidated abolitionist strength in northern cities before moderate Abraham Lincoln expanded that coalition nationwide.

The Tea Party didn’t begin with broad national popularity. It built ideological coherence from within the safest Republican districts. Many of its most influential figures, especially those in the House Freedom Caucus, represent the deepest red seats with Cook PVI scores of R+18 or higher. These strongholds gave them the political freedom to champion radical ideas without fear of general election backlash. By focusing on primary challenges, they reshaped the Republican Party from within. Their ideas—once marginal—eventually became mainstream, laying the groundwork that Donald Trump would later scale nationally in the 2016 presidential primary. The Tea Party’s biggest leverage point was shaping the Republican primary electorate in deep red areas.

Centrists often frame the left’s strategic focus on safe Democratic districts as a quiet admission of failure. If progressive ideas can’t compete in swing districts, the logic goes, why should the Democratic Party take them seriously? It's a tidy argument–but a misleading one. The partisan or geographic origins of an idea say little about its long-term political viability. The reality is that bold agendas, whether from the left or the right, almost always begin in strongholds. Political transformation is rarely instantaneous. It moves through stages: incubation, demonstration, and diffusion. Safe seats offer the left not just shelter from backlash, but room to govern, test policies, bring new constituencies from margins into mainstream, and build infrastructural proof points. Universal preschool, tenant protections, paid family leave, and municipal Green New Deals didn’t gain traction by starting in purple districts. They started where progressive majorities already existed and then moved outward. That’s not retreat–that’s sequencing.

Prioritizing swing-seat battles without first establishing a durable ideological base and infrastructure is a classic case of putting the cart before the horse. Persuasion and coalition-building require proof of concept. The left needs to show—not just argue—that its leaders and policies work, and that requires starting from terrain where those policies can be implemented and defended.

There’s also a matter of measurement. In a party as ideologically sprawling as the Democratic coalition, power can be diffuse, performative, or symbolic. But real independent political power and influence–the kind that shapes policy and budgets–is counted in votes, caucus blocs, and governing coalitions. The growth of the Squad or Congressional Progressive Caucus, driven largely by primary victories in solidly blue districts, offers a simple but important metric: how many seats can reliably be counted in favor of a clearly ideological vision? This number matters–not just for messaging, but for whip counts, committee assignments, and the shape of legislative fights.

Given extremely limited resources, progressives should reconsider whether their best use of funds and energy involves replicating tasks--such as candidate recruitment, voter mobilization, and extensive fundraising--that the established Democratic Party apparatus already performs. As strategic analyst Richard Rumelt emphasizes, effective strategy involves making disciplined choices, carefully prioritizing certain objectives for maximum leverage while clearly setting aside others. Instead of replicating Democratic Party functions with limited ideological returns, progressive resources would yield far greater ideological influence by investing deeply in independent political power and safe districts, creating a clear, coherent ideological bloc that the broader party cannot easily ignore.

None of this is to say that progressives should ignore swing districts or abandon general election coalitions. The Democratic Party needs to win purple seats to govern nationally, and moderates will remain essential in that effort. But strategy is also about focus, leverage, and prioritization. Swing districts offer low ideological return on high investment. Blue seats, by contrast, deliver durable power: clear votes, unambiguous mandates when you defeat an incumbent, and room to govern without apology. Progressives should treat those seats the way any serious political faction would—with focus, discipline, and the understanding that realignment begins at the core before it moves to the margins.

The 2023 Gaza ceasefire resolution exemplifies this dynamic vividly. Blue-seat progressives used their secure electoral positions to advocate boldly, clearly defining progressive stances on controversial foreign policy issues. Swing-district Democrats largely refrained, wary of risk and political backlash. This underscores that relying primarily on purple-district populism is unlikely to generate the coherent ideological bloc or sustained political leverage necessary for transformative change.

Today, even liberal factions like the "Abundance" coalition--focusing on supply-side housing reforms and effective governance in blue states and cities--and the generational-change movement exemplified by Run for Something and youth activists like David Hogg, recognize this strategic imperative. These groups are responding to deep dissatisfaction among Democratic voters in blue districts and states by beginning to challenge entrenched incumbents, prioritizing generational turnover and ideological renewal, as exemplified by recent efforts to primary long-serving Democrats like Representative Jerry Nadler.

Yet in Nadler’s case, the primary challenger reflects a diluted imitation of genuine progressive insurgency, lacking serious ideological grounding or a coherent progressive policy vision. Given that others are actively contesting this crucial terrain--investing significant resources in primary challenges within safely Democratic districts--it would be strategically unwise and counterproductive for the broader progressive left to neglect it. Only through this disciplined and coherent ideological consolidation can ambitious progressive ideas become the new mainstream consensus nationally.

Ultimately, history, political science, and strategy frameworks all point in the same direction: progressives should prioritize consolidating ideological strength in safe Democratic districts. Success begets success. It’s a difficult case to make in an era dominated by philanthropic incentives and media narratives focused almost exclusively on defeating Trump and not challenging relationships of access with the Democratic Party establishment. But durable political power doesn’t come from chasing large donors or the news cycle. It comes from creating the conditions under which realignment can thrive. Throughout American history, transformative movements have succeeded by establishing ideological clarity, policy credibility, and negotiating leverage in politically secure territory. For today’s social democrats, that means consolidating real independent power.

As Queens Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani gets closer to becoming the next Mayor of New York City, the detailed case study of Johnson’s tenure—recently dissected by Chicago organizers Alex Han, Asha Ransby-Sporn, and Alderwoman Jeanette Taylor in a revealing live interview on Daniel Denvir’s The Dig podcast—offers urgent lessons.

Alex Han, executive director of In These Times, described Chicago progressives’ vulnerability succinctly: “There is not going to be a break. You don’t get to take off on Sunday. At every moment, these people are going to be trying to undermine you. They have the resources to do this.”

"These people," as Han and his colleagues explained, constitute a formidable opposition: a well-funded and carefully organized coalition of real estate interests, the charter school industry, pro-Israel political networks, the Democratic Party establishment, and corporate media outlets. They operate primarily through 501(c)(4) entities that strategically shapes public perception through relentless communications.

Asha Ransby-Sporn detailed how thoroughly this infrastructure influences political narratives: “Two and a half years before the next election, they are sending mailers, sending text messages…everything newsworthy that's happening in city council, they are sending negative messages to every single city council person in the Progressive Caucus. Fear-mongering, spreading misinformation, literally lying.”

This campaign of misinformation was not isolated or reactive; it was strategic infrastructure. Every policy action by Johnson's administration was immediately reframed negatively. Ransby-Sporn emphasized how critical this infrastructure became, noting, “We are facing a $10 million C4 entity…I just can't understate how active they are, how threatened they are, and how much energy they are putting into interpreting our political reality.” There have been allegations of paid protesters, mobilization of suburban Republicans to disrupt mayoral events, and the use of bot farms to fabricate the appearance of organic outrage from within the mayor's own coalition.

The organized opposition’s power to shape public perception was vividly demonstrated in the defeat of the Bring Chicago Home referendum in March 2024. Despite robust polling support, clear ballot language, and a massive grassroots campaign contacting over a million voters, the referendum lost. Ransby-Sporn explained the mechanics of this defeat: “There was a ton of misinformation. There were ads run making people think it would make their property taxes go up…playing up anti-migrant sentiment, Black-brown tensions, and this idea that this was money that was not gonna benefit long-term Chicagoans. Which is absolutely not what it was.”

The opposition’s campaign relied on exploiting deep-seated fears and racial divisions, successfully redefining a popular, well-crafted housing initiative into something voters rejected. Ransby-Sporn admitted strategic shortcomings on their side: “We were just trying to be like, ‘We're right on the policy and we know people agree with us.’ And they then took up the space of tapping into how people were feeling.”

This fundamental gap between policy and emotional narrative is a defining lesson for Mamdani. Chicago’s progressive coalition lacked the ability to effectively shape how voters interpreted their actions, ceding control of the narrative to their opponents.

The opposition’s influence extended even into realms typically insulated from partisan media battles. Alex Han underscored one unprecedented incident: during a recent leadership challenge inside the Chicago Teachers Union, the opposition’s candidate received a primetime interview on local Fox 32 News. “I have never seen a candidate for internal union office be interviewed on primetime local news,” Han noted. “These things happen on a weekly basis here in Chicago.”

Chicago Alderwoman Jeanette Taylor underscored another structural barrier Johnson faced—an entrenched power structure resistant to change: “Just because you changed the top, cutting off the head, the body's still wiggling. They've been wiggling shit for 30, 40 years.” Taylor argued passionately that Johnson was hampered not simply by his intentions or promises, but by the formidable resistance embedded deep within the municipal government: “Politics and government are two fucking different things. What I say I'ma do when I'm on the door is rainbows and sunshine. When I get in office, I don't realize there are 26 fucking (legislators) who might vote against the interest of what I'm trying to do.”

Taylor also stressed Johnson’s political isolation due to inadequate planning during the critical transition period: “I think the part that we failed on, and I failed, that's taken us a little longer is to just learn those systems.” Ransby-Sporn similarly reflected on the Johnson transition: “It involved so many people that they wanted to feel like had a seat at the table, that it ended up being more about generating that feeling for a bunch of people than developing a solid plan.”

“When progressives run for high office it’s critical to be ready to govern,” Representative Chuy Garcia told NBC News. “Governing entails striking a balance between promises made (ideals) and making the wheels of government turn. Need to assemble a team that understands your priorities and deliver services, keep relationships with stakeholders especially a base while expanding through engagement. Intergovernmental relationships need to be really keen.”

For Mamdani, these insights are critical. The lesson from Johnson’s tenure is not simply about winning office; it is about creating robust infrastructure to control political narratives and counteract deeply entrenched opposition. Mamdani must build an infrastructure that proactively defines his policies and counters misinformation.

As the American Prospect noted:

Johnson allies think his successes have been rarely covered by national media. Johnson ended the subminimum wage for tipped workers and mandated ten days of paid leave for workers. He reopened several city-run mental health clinics and increased funding for youth summer jobs. The city council approved his $1.25 billion housing and economic development bond, and recently passed a plan to build “green social housing” through public-private partnerships.

Chicago’s experience starkly illustrates that progressive leaders must anticipate a sophisticated opposition that will not wait for failures—it will create them. As Taylor emphasized, Johnson’s opponents were organized and active from even before Day One. Mamdani must be ready for opponents who will use dark-money super PACs, misinformation, and AI-driven information warfare to keep him constantly reacting and on defense—unable to proactively advance or deliver on his agenda. Without strong political and communications infrastructure, he risks losing control of the narrative, with perceptions dictated by whoever pays the most.

Yet, the experience of Chicago is far from unique. Just two months into Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration in early 2014, he faced a multimillion-dollar independent expenditure campaign launched by the charter schools sector. Funded primarily by Families for Excellent Schools (FES)—an advocacy group bankrolled by wealthy philanthropies and hedge-fund executives closely aligned with Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy—over $3.6 million was spent within just three weeks on emotionally resonant TV ads branding de Blasio as an obstacle to educational opportunity. These ads aired prominently across New York City, often deploying narratives featuring young Black and brown children and their anxious parents, effectively framing the new mayor’s early decisions as harmful to the city’s most vulnerable:

“Mayor Bill de Blasio talks about the Tale of Two Cities, but yet he wants to take away options from the communities that need it the most.”
“My daughter would have better opportunity at a charter school.”
“Charter school is doing so great for my son. I don’t know why he wouldn’t be supportive of that.”

The swift, well-financed campaign succeeded in forcing a significant legislative concession, demonstrating that the sophisticated opposition network Mamdani may face is neither unprecedented nor confined to Chicago.

Ultimately, progressive leaders like Johnson and Mamdani must recognize that winning office isn't the finish line—it's just the starting point. It's like carefully building a fortress but never staffing or maintaining it. The day you celebrate victory, subtle erosion begins, quietly weakening the structure from within. Without proactive political and communication infrastructure to shape public perception and swiftly counter misinformation, progressive accomplishments become fragile, easily reframed by wealthy opponents eager to tell their own stories. The real contest, then, isn’t merely securing power or passing policy; it’s preserving your ability to define reality itself.

Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary by defying the rules of local politics—unseating the establishment, energizing overlooked neighborhoods, and reimagining what a successful progressive campaign can achieve. But the primary was just the first test. If Mamdani wins in November, he’ll face an even tougher task: turning an insurgency into a governing coalition, and proving that a different kind of politics can deliver real change in America’s biggest city.

The demands of campaigning, however grueling, are ultimately straightforward. Governing is messier—but also richer in possibility. If Mamdani becomes mayor, he’ll have the chance to prove something few American socialists have ever gotten close enough to power to demonstrate: that progressive values aren’t just compatible with effective governance—they’re strengthened by it.

By winning over voters in neighborhoods like Brighton Beach and Bensonhurst that had shifted toward Donald Trump in 2024, Mamdani showed that a progressive could appeal to a much wider constituency than conventional wisdom suggested. His relentless focus on economic anxieties and material concerns challenged assumptions about what kind of coalition a young democratic socialist could build in a city as complicated as New York.

That skill will be tested over and over again in office. Governing New York City requires navigating entrenched interests that rarely agree: real estate developers, teachers’ unions, immigrant advocacy groups, police officers, and state legislators in Albany. Each of these constituencies brings distinct priorities and incentives to the table. Mamdani’s success as mayor will hinge on his ability not just to balance competing demands, but to build a governing majority strong enough to neutralize or overcome the groups determined to block his agenda. The real test won’t simply be finding common ground; it will be knowing when to forge alliances, when to compromise, and when to fight.

Not every stakeholder is going to like him. That’s a given in any city or coalition this broad. The real challenge is holding the alliance together while still delivering results. That takes more than big ideas. It requires strategic clarity, patient outreach, political infrastructure, and a commitment to bringing people in, even when they disagree. Without that, ambitious plans can get watered down and ultimately lose their impact.

And because of Mamdani’s politics and his identity, the pressure on him is even greater. His success or failure will shape how people judge the kind of leadership he represents—and what’s possible for the left going forward.

Mamdani is a sharp student of politics. He will have to take this same approach to governing if he becomes mayor, by drawing a few key lessons from his predecessors.

Three former New York City mayors—Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio, and David Dinkins—offer useful case studies in the challenge of turning progressive ideals into practical governance. Their legacies are mixed: Some left lasting reforms; others, deep frustrations. But across their very different tenures, a few core lessons stand out. Effective leadership requires a clear governing structure, disciplined communication, the ability to make tough decisions, and the skill to manage coalitions in motion. These are not about ideology or specific policy choices. They’re about execution. The point isn’t for Mamdani to emulate his predecessors’ agendas. It’s to understand what it takes to govern well, so he can deliver on his vision with the urgency and credibility it demands. 

Building an Executive Structure That Delivers

One foundational lesson is the importance of executive structure—how a mayor organizes City Hall and delegates authority. Consider Bloomberg, whose former deputy mayor, Dan Doctoroff, argues explicitly in his book, Greater Than Ever: New York’s Big Comeback, that administrative success “largely rest[s] on the structure” of City Hall.

Bloomberg empowered strong deputy mayors, clearly delineating responsibilities and allowing swift, autonomous decision-making. Bloomberg famously reorganized City Hall into a “bullpen,” an open workspace modeled on a Wall Street trading floor, where he and his senior staff worked side-by-side without walls. This setup allowed for quick communication, immediate decisions, and clear accountability. Doctoroff recalls how issues could be resolved by walking across the bullpen for Bloomberg’s direct input, enabling ambitious initiatives—from neighborhood rezonings to infrastructure projects—to move forward efficiently.

Nathan Leventhal, Bloomberg’s transition chair, reorganized City Hall into five clearly defined domains, each overseen by a deputy mayor with substantial autonomy, while critical officials like the police commissioner reported directly to Bloomberg himself. This intentional design aimed to break down bureaucratic barriers, giving a single empowered leader the authority to swiftly coordinate policy across multiple agencies.

Doctoroff describes the structure as a “true hub-and-spoke organization,” with the mayor serving as the central “hub,” providing strategic oversight and quick decisions, and the deputy mayors acting as the “spokes,” each responsible for driving their own area forward.

Structure and staffing were also closely linked under Bloomberg’s management philosophy, which prioritized meritocracy. Doctoroff distills this approach into simple principles: “Recruit the best people you can find; support them; provide incentives for good work; protect them from outside interference; and hold them accountable for the highest standard of performance.”

Trusting competent appointees--combined with data-driven performance metrics--created a City Hall culture of both accountability and creativity, as Doctoroff recounts:

Buried in a longer interview (as a courtesy) were four questions, the only ones I really cared about: (1) How would your coworkers describe you? (to understand the applicant’s depth of self-awareness, which I consider the most valuable attribute someone can have, particularly as part of a team); (2) Describe in detail your most recent performance evaluation (I want diligent, hard workers; if someone doesn’t get a great review, I assume they are not); (3) What is the best idea you have ever had? (to test creativity; you would be surprised how many people get stumped on this one, and I ask it because I only want people who can connect unobvious dots); and, finally, (4) Address a specific question on our agenda (to determine that the candidate had given real thought to what we were doing and actually was passionate about it).

On each of the four dimensions--self-awareness, diligence, creativity, and passion--I rated them on a –1 to +1 scale. If a candidate didn’t score 3.5 (half points were allowed) or higher, we didn’t hire him or her.

Building the right administrative team is critical to navigating the complexities of governance. Juan Gonzalez notes in Reclaiming Gotham that when Bill de Blasio assembled his City Hall team, he placed immense value not only on competence but also on ideological alignment. “When Bill interviews, he likes to go back to the beginning and understand what your personal motivations are,” Gonzalez writes, quoting Anthony Shorris, De Blasio’s first deputy mayor. “It was very important to him to ensure there was alignment on perspective and political point of view, and ideology. And that has to be not just a new suit you put on because there’s a new guy in city hall--it has to be something that is very core to your values.” To succeed, Mamdani needs leaderswith both expertise and alignment with his vision. The core lesson: choose strong people, define clear roles, and build a solid structure. Without that foundation, bold ideas won’t hold.

David Dinkins’s mayoralty (1990–1993) illustrates the dangers of governing without clarity of structure and organization. Dinkins was elected on an idealistic vision of unity, pledging to weave New York’s diverse communities into what he poetically termed a “gorgeous mosaic.” Yet as Chris McNickle highlights in his comprehensive study, The Power of the Mayor: David Dinkins: 1990–1993, his administration quickly became mired in ambiguity and indecision. McNickle observes that Dinkins “never established a clear statement of the policies he wanted his senior staff to pursue.” Nor did he implement robust decision-making processes capable of navigating complex policy choices. Without explicit priorities nor firm internal leadership structures, the administration was often reactive rather than proactive, severely limiting its ability to deliver on its promises.

Much of this difficulty arose from Dinkins’s deep ties to the traditional Democratic political machine, making him inherently cautious about pushing reforms that might disrupt entrenched interests. According to McNickle, Dinkins exhibited “a Tammany leader’s reluctance to commit,” which undermined both his agenda and his effectiveness. Even supporters acknowledged the mayor’s personal graciousness and thoughtful demeanor, yet admitted these same qualities often resulted in hesitation precisely when bold, immediate decisions were required. Consequently, the city bureaucracy drifted, lacking both strategic direction and a sense of urgency, and external entities began setting the city’s policy agenda by default.

Late in his term, Dinkins acknowledged the damaging perception that he was not fully in control, stating in a televised address that he needed to demonstrate clearly he was “on top of things” because “sometimes some have the impression that’s not the case.”

The lesson here for the new mayor is to avoid an unstructured, passive approach. A mayor must shape the government’s structure and decision processes consciously; if you don’t, they will shape you.

Building Coalitions, Brokering Power, and Forging Consensus

Effective coalitions move swiftly but strategically, balancing ambitious goals with inclusive, early outreach. Like co-authors handed a half-finished manuscript, stakeholders brought into the process too late often react defensively. They feel little ownership and are more likely to criticize than contribute, complicating policy implementation and diluting impact. Successful governance thus depends on disciplined, proactive consensus-building–clarifying priorities upfront, engaging key players early, and aligning diverse interests before tensions harden into opposition.

Stakeholders excluded from initial conversations often react defensively, opposing or complicating policies, causing initiatives to become overly complex and diluted. Effective governance, therefore, requires the strategic patience and discipline to build early consensus around clear priorities. Doctoroff describes how the Bloomberg administration built a broad, unconventional coalition for the PlaNYC sustainability initiative, notably by including “strange bedfellows such as labor unions and environmentalists, who provided political air cover.” By engaging key City Council members and potential critics well before publicly announcing initiatives—including a controversial congestion-pricing plan—the administration created a buffer of support around its ambitious policy goals.

By contrast, when coalition management falters, it can derail an entire mayoralty. The cautionary tale often cited is again Dinkins, whose historic 1989 victory as the city’s first Black mayor was powered by a multiethnic liberal coalition of African Americans, Latino voters, and progressive whites.

In effect, Dinkins governed as if his initial coalition would sustain itself, but politics is never static. A mayor must continually tend and adjust their coalitions—assuaging one group’s concerns, embracing new allies, and sometimes confronting former friends. Failing to do so will alienate even natural supporters.

Crime and racial tensions in the early 1990s stressed the bonds of the Dinkins coalition. His handling of flashpoints like the Crown Heights riots of 1991 left many in his base dissatisfied and others questioning his leadership. Over time, white liberal voters and even some Latino communities drifted from him, and support from his core Black voting base dropped. McNickles writes that, by 1993, even before Dinkins narrowly lost re-election, “Dinkins’s coalition never collapsed, but it sagged and weakened as a result of his poor leadership.”

Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty offers other important lessons here. Elected in 2013 on a populist wave anchored by his compelling promise to end New York’s “tale of two cities,” de Blasio swiftly assembled a diverse coalition that included labor unions, grassroots activists, community organizations, and communities of color. The greatest test of this coalition was his ambitious push for universal pre-kindergarten, an initiative requiring the rapid mobilization of broad civic support. Despite substantial political resistance and logistical obstacles, his administration’s intensive outreach efforts and careful coordination with both civic and labor groups proved decisive.

Detailed accounts by David Freedlander in New York and Joseph Viteritti in The Pragmatist: Bill de Blasio’s Quest to Save the Soul of New York underscore the complexity of de Blasio’s strategy. Immediately after the election, de Blasio formed a high-level working group of experts, including Sherry Cleary of CUNY’s Early Childhood Professional Development Institute, convening as frequently as 10 times per week. Although the specialists initially proposed a three-year timeline—already considered aggressive—the mayor insisted on launching within his first year, and, crucially, made that goal public.

“By saying that publicly,” de Blasio told Freedlander, “we put everyone on the hook. If you want your bureaucracy to move, make everyone responsible with a public goal they can’t squirm out of.”

But managing city-level coalitions inevitably requires navigating state politics–a lesson Mayor Bill de Blasio learned through his toxic relationship with Governor Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo initially opposed de Blasio’s proposed tax on the wealthy, eventually granting state funding but denying the mayor a political win on the tax itself. De Blasio invested substantial political capital in this battle, later reflecting, “I was told a thousand times it was not viable…but we won,” thanks largely to sustained grassroots advocacy and public pressure.

To overcome resistance from Albany, de Blasio strategically mobilized public opinion through the Campaign for One New York, a contentious 501(c)(4) backed by unions, philanthropy, and civic groups. This inside-outside approach amplified public support, demonstrating that entrenched political obstacles could be overcome by mobilizing a broad coalition of residents, labor, and influential stakeholders to pressure Governor Cuomo.

De Blasio’s experience provides a clear roadmap for Mamdani: effective governance demands skillfully balancing internal negotiation with external pressure. If elected, Mamdani will face an even more challenging political landscape, making this strategic interplay between grassroots mobilization and institutional maneuvering critical to his success.

But de Blasio also discovered that even a strong public mandate does not shield a mayor from well-funded and organized resistance. As Gonzales recounts, Bradley Tusk, a former Bloomberg aide, led a multimillion-dollar campaign to erode public trust in the mayor. Charter advocates like Eva Moskowitz and Families for Excellent Schools launched legal challenges and ad blitzes, painting de Blasio’s education agenda as a threat. Police unions staged public acts of defiance, including turning their backs on him at funerals, to portray him as anti–law enforcement.

Mamdani, whose politics and identity represent an even sharper break from the status quo, should expect similar attacks. He’ll need a disciplined strategy and strong support from civil society to counter well-funded campaigns aimed at derailing his agenda and making him a one-term mayor. And he’ll need to know when to negotiate within existing power structures and when to harness grassroots, grasstops, and elite support outside of them to achieve transformative policy victories. Building a resilient inside/outside infrastructure—one that can mobilize public support and apply pressure when special interests push back—will be essential. 

Framing Attention

Effective city governance isn’t just about delivering policy—it’s about shaping attention and clearly framing the narrative around those policies. Mayors must tell a compelling story about what they’re doing and why it matters, making their vision understandable and meaningful to voters and stakeholders.

As de Blasio told NY1 shortly after taking office, “the public would like to see…forceful leadership with clear values, and less horse trading, and less domination by special interests.” Regardless of one’s view of de Blasio’s record, this statement captures a key insight: A mayor’s narrative should project clear values and a sense of direction. Universal pre-K wasn’t just an education policy; in his narrative, it was a battle against inequality. It told the public not just what de Blasio was doing, but why.

Bloomberg, by contrast, presented himself as a pragmatic problem-solver, a data-driven manager who would make the city “great” in measurable ways. This, too, was a narrative, albeit a technocratic one: that city government can be run like a high-performing business. Bloomberg’s story was summarized in one word: “Comeback.” It lacked emotional warmth, but it reassured many New Yorkers in the uncertain post-9/11 era that someone serious was at the helm.

Dinkins’s mayoralty highlights the delicate but crucial challenge leaders face in defining their own narratives, particularly in a city as divided and complex as New York. Dinkins entered office framing his tenure around themes of racial healing and unity. But as crises mounted, this uplifting narrative unraveled quickly. McNickle notes that despite Dinkins’s sincere intentions, his administration was increasingly depicted—fairly or not—as chaotic and overwhelmed.

The media played a central role in reinforcing this perception; Dinkins frequently expressed frustration that reporters exaggerated his missteps while minimizing his accomplishments. McNickle’s book cites Wilbur C. Rich, who argued in David Dinkins and New York City Politics: Race, Images and the Media that deep-rooted racial stereotypes made it “permissible for the public to hold reservations” about Dinkins’s competence—reservations a white mayor might not have faced. Mamdani, having already dealt with a torrent of Islamophobic bigotry during his campaign, is no doubt preparing for similar challenges in office.

Yet Dinkins’s troubles were also amplified by internal divisions within his base. Prominent Black leaders and activists, most notably Al Sharpton, harshly criticized Dinkins. Sharpton once denounced Dinkins as an “Uncle Tom,” accusing him of abandoning Black constituents. Sharpton’s tone shifted dramatically after a 1991 stabbing incident in Bensonhurst forced him into deeper reflection, leading him to declare his intent to “bring down the volume and bring up the program.” But by that point, the damage had been done.

Ultimately, Dinkins’s cautious and dignified personal style compounded these narrative problems. McNickle describes his demeanor as a “fetish-like commitment to projecting a courtly demeanor,” a trait that inadvertently conveyed aloofness at moments demanding decisive action. During crises like the Crown Heights riots, Dinkins’s careful deliberation was portrayed as weakness. One damning editorial from a Black newspaper in Brooklyn captured this succinctly, warning: “Frankly, you are beginning to look like a wimp.”

Attempting to reclaim his narrative, Dinkins sought alternative channels of communication, directly engaging local radio stations to moderate inflammatory rhetoric and releasing an optimistic, detailed 27-page report titled New York City ROARING BACK: Changing the City for Good. Yet these efforts arrived too late to overcome entrenched skepticism. Despite his genuine efforts and personal dignity, Dinkins struggled profoundly to communicate a compelling and authoritative vision to the city he sought to unify.

Mamdani has shown an extraordinary skill for exciting, disciplined narrative-building during his campaign. He must bring those skills to City Hall.

Governing Competently

Finally, all the structural planning, coalition-building, and messaging in the world will amount to little if a mayor cannot deliver competent governance. This is perhaps the most pragmatic lesson of all: Show results.

The people of New York can forgive a lot—ideology or style or even the occasional scandal—but they do not easily forgive incompetence. New Yorkers have famously little patience for excuses. They expect the trains to run, the snow to get plowed, crime to stay down, and the trash to be picked up. Competence also means the ability to handle crises calmly and effectively. Here again, historical examples are instructive.

Bloomberg’s administration, for all its faults, was widely viewed as managerially competent. A telling anecdote: Bloomberg installed a countdown clock in the City Hall bullpen, ticking down the days of his term to instill urgency in his team. By his last year, they could publish a comprehensive progress report boasting of hundreds of targets met, from hundreds of new playgrounds opened to a million trees planted. The details of those initiatives mattered less than the overall impression: This mayor got things done.

Doctoroff reflects on why they got things done, and again, it circles back to management fundamentals. “Plans don’t usually fail because of bad faith or even disagreements…Most often, different parts of the bureaucracy simply have different priorities… There has to be a mechanism to quickly identify the gaps and resolve them,” he writes.

In Bloomberg’s City Hall, that mechanism was the structured system of deputy mayors and the bullpen’s culture of constant communication. When an interagency dispute arose, Doctoroff could literally pull all the relevant commissioners into a room and hash it out, since nearly all of them ultimately reported to him. This meant problems got solved fast—an efficiency that New Yorkers noticed in the smooth rollout of many services.

De Blasio’s tenure highlighted the tension between progressive ambition and managerial competence. While he pursued widely popular initiatives—such as universal pre-K, affordable housing, and expanded ferry service—his administration often faltered operationally. Samar Khurshid and Ben Max describe de Blasio as “an incrementalist addressing crises in dire need of bold action,” often correctly diagnosing problems but failing to effectively address them. They write, “Whatever the crisis or opponent, de Blasio often—though certainly not always—proved his own worst enemy, struggling to build alliances, getting mired in ethical scandals and misguided political pursuits, being unnecessarily combative with the press corps… and attacking problems either too late, too timidly, or (nearly) not at all.”

No incident illustrated these weaknesses more clearly than the Rivington House scandal. In 2015, city officials quietly removed a deed restriction protecting a Lower East Side nursing home, allowing developers to convert it into luxury condominiums. The controversy exposed major administrative breakdowns, particularly in the overloaded office of First Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris, who acknowledged struggles with oversight and delegation. Ultimately, Rivington House became symbolic of how a mayor could understand the city’s challenges yet falter in addressing them.

Ultimately, mayoral competence in New York boils down to two essentials: operational effectiveness and political skill. To succeed, a mayor must excel at both. One former Dinkins aide lamented that Dinkins “doesn’t see his own power and his own choices.” That critique hits at the heart of executive leadership: owning your decisions and their outcomes. Mamdani should take note.

The four years of a mayor’s term go by quickly, and most political arcs follow a familiar rhythm: year one is spent staffing up and learning how government actually runs; year two focuses on pushing signature policies through the legislature; year three demands the gritty, unglamorous work of implementation; and year four is dedicated to defending the record while seeking re-election.

Mamdani’s campaign success provides strong evidence that he understands the essential principles of governance: strategic structure, attentional and narrative discipline, clear decision-making, and expansive coalition-building. To deliver transformative leadership, Mamdani must channel that understanding into navigating and holding together this broader, more intricate political ecosystem. If he succeeds—maintaining clarity of purpose, making smart compromises when necessary, building effective organization and infrastructure, and articulating a compelling vision that neutralizes his adversaries—he will prove not only that progressive ideals can win elections, but also that they can yield effective, enduring governance even in a city as complicated, demanding, and extraordinary as New York.

In the week following Zohran Mamdani’s decisive victory in the 2025 New York City Democratic mayoral primary, broadcast media coverage both nationally and locally converged around a single dominant theme: Mamdani’s purported views on Israel and allegations of antisemitism. A review of more than 25,000 broadcast mentions—19,600 national and 2,730 local—reveals a media landscape more preoccupied with a single narrative than with the everyday realities facing New Yorkers.

Nearly 60% of national broadcast mentions of Zohran Mamdani centered on Israel or antisemitism, eclipsing nearly every aspect of his actual platform. Core issues like housing affordability, public transit, childcare, and food access—the very pillars of why New York Democratic voters chose to nominate him—were pushed to the sidelines. When Mamdani’s policy agenda was acknowledged, it was often treated with skepticism or reduced to ideological branding, rather than engaged as a serious response to New Yorkers’ material needs.

Methodology

This analysis examines television broadcast media coverage of Zohran Mamdani during the seven-day window following his victory in the June 24, 2025 Democratic primary for New York City mayor. The dataset consists of all national and New York-based local broadcast mentions of “Mamdani” collected between June 24 and June 30 via Meltwater, a media analysis platform that compiles transcripts from major news networks. Mentions include headline summaries, segment transcripts, and in-show dialogue across morning, evening, and primetime programming.

Mentions were categorized using a keyword-based tagging method aligned with six distinct themes:

1. Israel/Antisemitism – Mentions including terms such as “Israel,” “Israeli,” “Gaza,” “Hamas,” “Jewish,” “antisemitism,” “antisemitic,” and “Intifada.”

2. Islamophobia – Mentions including “Islamophobia,” “Islamophobic,” or clear references to Mamdani’s religion or national origin in a prejudicial or suspect framing.

3. Housing – Mentions of “housing,” “rent,” “tenant,” “evictions,” or references to public housing programs such as NYCHA.

4. Groceries – Mentions of “groceries,” “grocery,” “food prices,” “food access,” or city-run grocery proposals.

5. Childcare – Mentions of “childcare,” “child care,” or “early childhood education.”

6. Transit – Mentions of “transit,” “bus,” “buses,” “subway,” “subways,” or “fare-free.”

Mentions were manually reviewed and tagged based on primary framing. Mentions that included multiple categories were coded according to the most dominant theme in the context of the sentence or segment (e.g., a mention of rent within a longer discussion on foreign policy would be classified as Israel/Antisemitism). Duplicate headlines across affiliates were deduplicated where applicable.

In total, 19,600 national broadcast mentions and 2,730 local New York broadcast mentions were analyzed. These mentions were then cross-tabulated against their thematic tags to generate frequency counts and share-of-coverage estimates for each category.

Limitations of this analysis include the exclusive focus on broadcast media (excluding cable web platforms, print, or social media), and the reliance on keyword-triggered matches, which may undercount more veiled or dog-whistle framings. Nonetheless, this method captures the dominant contours of elite media coverage and allows for clear quantitative comparison across issues voters actually cited—like housing and transit—versus the narratives that dominated national discourse.

Three Patterns that Defined Mamdani Coverage

1. The Israel/Antisemitism Frame
A striking 59% of national broadcast segments—and nearly half of local coverage—centered on Mamdani’s statements about Israel or antisemitism. Often these segments conflated critiques of U.S.-Israeli policy with antisemitism, rarely providing context or detail.

• Fox News (June 25): “You’ve got Hamas sympathizers winning in NYC, and the media’s silent about it.”

• CNN (June 26): “Mamdani’s prior statements about Israeli airstrikes are under new scrutiny.”

• NBC4 New York (June 28): “Jewish groups voice alarm about the Democratic nominee’s past comments about Gaza.”

2. Affordability Dismissed as Radicalism
Although housing, transit, and grocery affordability defined Mamdani’s platform and voter appeal, coverage treated these as controversial or ideological rather than pragmatic or responsive to voter concerns.

• NY1’s Inside City Hall (June 27): Mamdani highlights investments in transit, housing, childcare; the segment swiftly pivots to pundits characterizing these policies as politically risky or "radical."

• CBS2 (June 29): City-run groceries presented briefly before being dismissed as "socialist overreach."

3. Strategic Islamophobia: Quietly Marginalizing Through “Otherness”
While explicit references to “Islamophobia” appeared in only about 1% of coverage, the impact was outsized. Segments often relied on coded language and insinuation to cast Mamdani’s religion and immigrant background as sources of concern—amplifying a narrative of foreignness without directly naming it.

• Newsmax (June 26): “What does it say about our politics that a man with...foreign sympathies is the face of Democrats in New York?”

• WABC (June 29): “It’s not racist to ask about someone who has family ties to countries hostile to our values.”

The Disconnect: Media vs. Voters’ Priorities

The analysis revealed a major disjunction: voters overwhelmingly emphasized cost-of-living concerns, yet media pivoted repeatedly to foreign-policy controversies:

• PIX11 (June 29): Voter says Mamdani was the only candidate addressing soaring rents; the coverage quickly shifts to Israel.

• ABC7 (June 30): Mamdani’s economic platform given fleeting airtime before the anchor pivots back to accusations of antisemitism.

In short, media priorities diverged sharply from the voters’, elevating Israel over other issues.

Key Facts: Network Analysis (June 24–30, 2025)

National Networks

CNN
CNN referenced Mamdani 84 times during this period, with 64% (54 segments) explicitly focusing on Israel, Gaza, Hamas, Jewish identity, or antisemitism. By contrast, only about 39% of segments mentioned housing-related issues (e.g., rent, housing, tenants), and transit concerns (MTA, subways, buses) were covered even less, appearing in just 14% of mentions.

• Israel-related (e.g., Israel, Gaza, antisemitism): 54 mentions → 64.3%

• Housing-related (e.g., rent, evictions, NYCHA): 33 mentions → 39.3%

• Groceries: 21 mentions → 25.0%

• Transit (e.g., subway, fare-free buses): 12 mentions → 14.3%

• Childcare (e.g., early childhood education): 13 mentions → 15.5%

MSNBC
MSNBC mentioned Mamdani 87 times during this period, with 62% of those segments focused on Israel or antisemitism—making it the dominant frame. By contrast, housing and rent issues, central to Mamdani’s campaign, appeared in 54% of coverage.

• Israel-related: 54 mentions → 62.1%

• Housing-related: 47 mentions → 54.0%

• Groceries: 26 mentions → 29.9%

• Transit: 14 mentions → 16.1%

• Childcare: 34 mentions → 39.1%

Fox News
Fox News provided the highest overall coverage, mentioning Mamdani 154 times, with 64% explicitly highlighting Israel or antisemitism-related controversies. Housing and rent issues were present in just over half of the segments (51%). Transit-related references appeared in approximately 37% of segments.

• Israel-related: 98 mentions → 63.6%

• Housing-related: 79 mentions → 51.3%

• Groceries: 73 mentions → 47.4%

• Transit: 57 mentions → 37.0%

• Childcare: 39 mentions → 25.3%

Local New York Broadcast Affiliates

Local coverage patterns largely mirrored national trends but varied by station:

• WABC (ABC) led in total mentions referencing Israel and antisemitism (40% of their coverage). Transit featured prominently, appearing in nearly 60% of segments, though mentions of housing or rent issues were lower (21%).

• WCBS (CBS) had slightly lower coverage of Israel and antisemitism (36%) but emphasized transit heavily (75%). Housing and rent affordability appeared in about a third (32%) of their segments.

• WNBC (NBC) segments referenced Israel or antisemitism in 42% of coverage. Transit-related issues were mentioned frequently (59%), though housing concerns were notably less prominent (24%).

• WNYW (FOX) featured Israel or antisemitism in 43% of mentions. Transit and housing issues appeared roughly equally (42% and 41%, respectively).

• NY1 had a lower overall rate (32%) of coverage focused on Israel and antisemitism. Transit issues appeared in half (51%) of NY1 segments, while rent and housing references appeared in approximately 27%.

• Radio stations WABC-AM and WNYC (FM+AM) each had the highest frequency of antisemitism or Israel-related references, totaling 156 mentions each, followed by WOR 710 AM (98 mentions), NY1 News (89 mentions), and WINS-AM (73 mentions).

Across the board, local affiliates largely reflected national media’s prioritization of symbolic and ideological controversies, frequently marginalizing Mamdani’s substantive local policy issues.

Conclusion: A Familiar Media Blind Spot

Zohran Mamdani’s primary victory underscores a familiar pattern in political media: progressive, immigrant, and Arab or Muslim candidates are often framed less by their policy agendas than by ideological controversies—especially those related to foreign policy. Although Mamdani campaigned on rent relief, transit access, childcare, and grocery affordability, coverage largely centered on Israel and antisemitism, sidelining the issues that defined both his platform and his appeal to voters.

This misalignment may have real world consequences. In the days following the election, Muslim advocacy groups recorded 127 hate-related threats linked to Mamdani, alongside thousands of Islamophobic online mentions. By prioritizing symbolic conflict over local substance, the media not only distorted the meaning of Mamdani’s win but risked deepening polarization and undermining public understanding of the race itself.

That day, they gathered outside Brooklyn’s Borough Hall under a winter sky, praying in the cold and waving American flags. It looked like a protest, but it felt like something deeper. It was a collective act of defiance—and belonging. For years after 9/11, Arab and Muslim New Yorkers had lived under the long shadow of surveillance and suspicion, told to keep their heads down, stay quiet, and be grateful. The 2017 bodega strike broke that silence. Here were Muslim workers and small business owners—unapologetic, organized, and standing shoulder to shoulder—not asking for permission but asserting their place in the city they helped build. It wasn’t just about Trump’s ban. It was a rupture with the post-9/11 politics of fear. It marked the emergence of a new kind of Muslim American politics—rooted in solidarity, visible in public, and grounded in power, not just presence.

Few saw it for what it was. But that day was not only an end to hiding. It was the quiet beginning of a realignment that would take clearer shape years later, when New York Democrats chose Zohran Mamdani as their nominee for mayor.

New York City just got a huge step closer to electing its first Muslim mayor, its first South Asian mayor, and the first democratic socialist to lead a major American city since the Great Depression (the last was Milwaukee). But Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary isn’t just a series of firsts. It’s a break from the city’s entrenched political order. It’s a direct rebuke to the corporate-backed Democratic machine that propped up Andrew Cuomo’s comeback, despite his record of corruption and mismanagement, and a rejection of the kind of politics that prioritizes fear and donor appeasement over vision.

When Andrew Cuomo launched his comeback bid, the Democratic establishment seemed eager to pretend the last decade hadn’t happened. Cuomo ran as if it were still 2010, leaning on the same donors, repeating the same talking points, spending millions on television ads, and betting that a weary electorate would settle for the devil they knew.

But Mamdani saw something they didn’t. He recognized how much the ground had shifted. That shift began, in part, with the bodega strike in 2017. Some of the people who had organized or participated in that protest helped power his campaign. Others, who had been politicized by it or had been ignored since, joined his coalition. The memory of that moment—when immigrant communities stood up to say, “We belong here”—did not fade. It deepened. It matured.

Mamdani’s campaign grew from years of organizing, frustration, and grief, especially among young progressives, immigrants, and Arab and Muslim communities who had long been pushed to the party’s margins. He didn’t just run against Cuomo. He ran against the political amnesia that forgot the people who showed up when it mattered.

One of the biggest mistakes the Democratic Party establishment made was trying to smother their base’s outrage over US support for Israel's assault on Gaza. An outrage that felt like basic moral common sense. Mamdani gave it a voice. Without that, there’s no campaign. As a Bangladeshi Uber driver told me on election night: “Our entire community voted for Zohran. He’s for ordinary people. He’s for peace, not war. We don’t want more wars killing innocent people. We need help here in New York.” This voter, and countless others, heard Mamdani speaking not in the language of focus groups, but in the language of shared humanity and lived struggle. At a moment when the establishment flinched from even acknowledging the mass death in Gaza, Mamdani said plainly: solidarity is not a slogan. It’s a commitment. It means seeing Palestinians, not erasing them. It means listening to voters who are tired of being told their grief is too controversial to name.

Mamdani’s victory redrew the map of what’s possible in New York City politics. He didn’t win on the backs of white gentrifiers alone; he built a multiracial, cross-class coalition that reached from the brownstones of Park Slope in Brooklyn to the apartment towers of Jackson Heights in Queens. He ran up margins in progressive enclaves like Park Slope, East Village, and Cobble Hill, but also won working-class, immigrant-heavy neighborhoods across Queens and Brooklyn – Bangladeshi, Chinese, Latino, Arab, Indo-Caribbean. He was the highest performer in Queens among Latino and South Asian precincts and carried South Asian strongholds like Richmond Hill and Jackson Heights, and East Asian precincts like Sunset Park, Chinatown, and Flushing. Most strikingly, he flipped Oakland Gardens, a swing district in Queens that went from supporting Joe Biden in 2020 to Republican Lee Zeldin in the 2022 New York gubernatorial race to Trump last year, is majority Asian, and long seen as part of Cuomo’s base. Mamdani didn’t just activate the left; he broke into communities that conventional wisdom says don’t vote socialist. And he did it with a disciplined message on public goods and affordability, backed by a massive, relentless volunteer field operation.

The 2017 bodega strike was a turning point, but it wasn’t the last time immigrant New Yorkers reshaped the city by refusing invisibility. In 2021, a 45-day protest and hunger strike led by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance—composed largely of Muslim, South Asian, and Black drivers—forced the city to confront the medallion debt crisis it helped create. At the heart of the effort was Zohran Mamdani, then a freshman assemblymember, who didn’t just lend his voice but became an architect of the win. As the strike neared collapse, Mamdani and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer formed a rare coalition—grassroots urgency meeting institutional leverage. Schumer, whose father-in-law had been a cabbie, picked up the phone to pressure Mayor de Blasio directly. It worked. The city adopted nearly every element of the union’s debt relief plan. The result was something rare in modern politics: a coalition that turned protest into policy, and made a radical demand look like common sense.

Mamdani’s victory is not an isolated event – it’s the product of nearly a decade of sustained organizing that reshaped the political terrain in New York City. It began with the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, which galvanized thousands, triggered explosive growth in the Democratic Socialists of America, and seeded a new generation of organizers who would go on to power campaigns across the city. Justice Democrats emerged from that wave, helping to elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018 and Jamaal Bowman in 2020. At the same time, the Working Families Party and grassroots allies took on the Independent Democratic Conference, a coalition of Cuomo-backed Democrats who had empowered Republicans in Albany. Their successful ouster ​​showed the left could not only protest but also win.

By 2023, eight NYC-DSA–endorsed legislators held seats in the state legislature, forming the largest socialist caucus in New York in nearly a century. The group included Senators Julia Salazar, Jabari Brisport, and Kristen Gonzalez, and Assemblymembers Zohran Mamdani, Phara Souffrant Forrest, Marcela Mitaynes, Emily Gallagher, and Sarahana Shrestha. Alongside this rise in left electoral power, Bangladeshi and Muslim communities began building their own political infrastructure, culminating in Shahana Hanif’s groundbreaking win in 2021 as the first Muslim woman on the New York City Council. Mamdani’s mayoral campaign is the culmination of these efforts – a candidate forged in movement politics, buoyed by communities long pushed to the margins, and backed by an increasingly disciplined, electorally savvy grassroots left that has spent the past decade learning how to organize and win.

Solidarity across differences doesn’t happen by accident. Solidarity must be forged. It requires leadership, trust, and a willingness to step into uncomfortable terrain. The partnership between Mamdani and Brad Lander, the city’s progressive Jewish comptroller, was a conscious decision to reject the narratives that have long kept Muslim and Jewish communities politically estranged. In a climate where speaking out on Israel’s assault on Gaza is seen as a political risk, they stood side by side and said what too many others would not. Their alliance didn’t flatten their differences or ask either to compromise who they were. It demonstrated that a real coalition is not about agreement on everything – it’s about acting together with purpose, even when it’s hard. At a time when powerful interests insist that Muslims and Jews cannot share political space, Mamdani and Lander chose to prove otherwise. They showed that solidarity is not symbolic. It’s a practice, built through shared commitments, sustained by courage, and animated by a belief that politics can be more than fear management.

The same clarity and courage that defined Mamdani’s alliance with Lander also defined his campaign. He didn’t just model a different kind of politics – he ran on one. And his victory offers several practical lessons for how progressives can move from protest to power.

1. Know why you're running

Cuomo never made a case for himself beyond name recognition and experience. Voters couldn’t tell you what he’d actually do in office because he didn’t really care to tell them. Mamdani, by contrast, had a clear, repeatable agenda: freeze rents, make buses free, build publicly owned grocery stores. No jargon, no guesswork. He named those who were in the way – Cuomo’s billionaire donors, real estate PACs, and Trump-aligned backers – and laid out who he was fighting for. It wasn’t complicated. But it was grounded in his democratic socialist politics and searing critique of inequality. That’s what made it work.

2. Be who you are

Mamdani’s campaign felt like an indie breakout film, combining authenticity, democratic-socialist conviction, and pop-cultural fluency. He didn’t pretend to be a typical politician; instead, he presented himself candidly and humorously through TikToks and influencer collaborations, as well as platforms such as Gaydar and Subway Takes. Unlike the heavily staged approach of Kamala Harris in 2024, Mamdani’s integration of ideology and substantive policy with everyday culture built trust and genuine influence.

3. Be available

In the 19th century, political insiders used the word "available" instead of "electable" to describe a candidate who could bridge divides—someone open to different factions, ideologies, regions, and moments in time. It’s a richer term than electable because it emphasizes a candidate’s flexibility and usefulness to a coalition. Progressive campaigns often fall into the trap of rigidity, treating politics like a checklist rather than an invitation. Mamdani did the opposite, but mostly in tone and affect. He didn’t give up much of his core beliefs. He practiced availability, not just in showing up across neighborhoods, but in how he carried himself: open to disagreement, receptive to criticism, and genuinely curious about people who didn’t already agree with him. He didn’t demand ideological purity, even as he offered a clear political ask – support a rent freeze. It was, in effect, a litmus test, but it didn’t feel like one.

Framed through a charm offensive rather than a purity contest, Mamdani made his politics feel like common sense, not a checklist. He invited people in, not to agree with everything, but to agree on enough, and made them feel good about saying yes. He liked to quote Ed Koch: “If you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, vote for me. If you agree on all 12, see a psychiatrist.” It wasn’t just a good line. It reflected his whole approach: build coalitions through dialogue, not dogma.

4. Stay disciplined

Mamdani’s campaign avoided the classic traps that sink insurgents – overreach, overexposure, and endless side arguments. Even under heavy fire, from attacks on his economic agenda to smears over his stance on Israel, he stayed focused on the message: affordability, dignity, solidarity. He didn’t take the bait. He modulated some of the maximalist rhetoric from the activist left on economics, policing, and foreign policy. Instead of engaging in academic back-and-forths or overly defensive clarifications, he answered with clear, grounded language. That discipline denied his opponents easy headlines and made him look less like an activist and more like a mayor.

Substance Over Style.

Reducing it to “vibe” politics, a Cuomo collapse, or simply generational change erases what actually happened. Zohran Mamdani didn’t win on style alone, he won on substance. Rent freezes, free buses, public groceries, and a clear stand against billionaire politics and U.S. support for Gaza’s destruction. Journalists and Democratic pundits are right to identify this as a generational change election and right to note that voters are rejecting a tired political class that has overstayed its welcome. Mamdani’s campaign wasn’t cool for cool’s sake; it was cool because it told the truth, named power, and offered people a stake in something real.

Unfortunately, the DNC may see Mamdani’s win and think, “Ah yes, the secret was TikTok.” So now they’re workshopping a crypto-friendly, AI-generated meme about the “Opportunity Economy” set to a Lizzo song—sponsored by JPMorgan.

In 1935, at the end of NYC Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's first year in office, the New York Times editorial board assessed him bluntly: “[He is] fond of toying with haphazard proposals that may be benevolent in intention but are dangerous or impossible in practice. He seems always to want to have in hand some socialistic plaything or other. Just now it is a municipal power plant.”

In a reflective moment in 1933, La Guardia lamented to the Times, "The worst part of the entire matter is that when anyone raises a question about the existing order, he is called either a reformer or a radical. It has been my lot to be called the latter. Why? Only because I have consistently objected to things which I believe unjust and dangerous." Such candor is rare among politicians, but La Guardia leaned into it. He owned the label of radicalism, famously declaring, "If fighting against existing evils is radical, I am content with the name."

Today, of course, La Guardia is remembered not as a dangerous radical but as perhaps the greatest mayor in American history, the archetype of bold and effective urban leadership. First, they call you radical. Then they name an airport after you.

The coalition that carried Mamdani to victory is the most politically significant aspect of his campaign. It brought together two forces that rarely align at scale: young Millennial and Gen Z voters, and working-class immigrant communities. Mamdani proved that a populist, common-sense agenda – rooted in material need and moral clarity – can win.

They remembered the bodegas. They remembered the prayers in the cold. They remembered what it felt like to be left out—and what it felt like to fight back. And this time, they didn’t just protest. They voted.

The question now is whether Mamdani’s coalition can govern. I think it can. And if it does, it might not just change New York. It might change what’s possible everywhere.

“[He is] fond of toying with haphazard proposals that may be benevolent in intention but are dangerous or impossible in practice. He seems always to want to have in hand some socialistic plaything or other. Just now it is a municipal power plant.”

Today, of course, La Guardia is remembered not as a dangerous radical but as perhaps the greatest mayor in American history, the archetype of bold and effective urban leadership. What was once derided as a "socialistic plaything"—a publicly-owned municipal power plant—has returned in new form as a central plank of contemporary policy. New York’s recent Build Public Renewables Act, championed by Zohran Mamdani, the city's chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, a broad coalition of labor unions, and even Governor Kathy Hochul herself, embraces the very model that once drew scorn. Yesterday’s radicalism, as it turns out, often becomes today's mainstream consensus.

The treatment Mamdani now faces—accusations of radicalism, communism, terrorist-sympathies, naiveté—is strikingly similar to the language once aimed at La Guardia. In the fierce mayoral campaign of 1933, La Guardia's opponent Joseph McKee mocked him as "Comrade La Guardia," calling him "a menace…to the cardinal principles of American life."

As historian Joshua Freeman writes:

Ironically, the mayor who governed like a socialist of sorts — Fiorello La Guardia, who served 1934 to 1946 — was a lifelong Republican. Throughout his career, first in Congress and then as mayor, La Guardia had strong ties with those to his left. In 1924, he even successfully ran for reelection to the House of Representatives on the Socialist Party line, after his own party denied him the nomination because of his support for Progressive Party presidential candidate Robert M. La Follette.

(Though LaGuardia asked to be listed in the House as a Progressive, the clerk put him down as a Socialist, leading the only actual Socialist in Congress, Milwaukee’s Victor L. Berger, to drolly declare the New Yorker “my whip.”)

La Guardia himself understood exactly how this rhetorical game worked. In a reflective moment in 1933, he lamented to the Times, "The worst part of the entire matter is that when anyone raises a question about the existing order, he is called either a reformer or a radical. It has been my lot to be called the latter. Why? Only because I have consistently objected to things which I believe unjust and dangerous." Such candor is rare among politicians, but La Guardia leaned into it. He owned the label of radicalism, famously declaring, "If fighting against existing evils is radical, I am content with the name."

But these rhetorical attacks didn’t stop at domestic policy. When La Guardia spoke forcefully against fascism abroad in 1938, conservative ethnic groups, including the German-American Citizens League, dismissed him as "un-American, socialistic, and communistic." One Brooklyn Republican accused him of making "unwarranted and unnecessary utterances," effectively casting La Guardia’s anti-fascist statements as irresponsible provocations on the global stage. To La Guardia’s critics, his radicalism was always two-fold: a threat both domestically and internationally.

His opponent in the 1937 mayoral race, Joseph Mahoney, explicitly linked radicalism with disorder and chaos:

"The radicals are those who are opposed to law and order and who endeavor by force to impose their will upon us. I am as liberal as any man, but I refuse to permit my city to be made unsafe for the law-abiding citizen by men who have no respect for authority."

La Guardia responded defiantly, embracing the label thrust upon him:

"I was pronounced dangerous. Was I half as dangerous as the men who were carrying on these manipulations? I have been called a radical. If fighting against existing evils is radical, I am content with the name."

When La Guardia, then president of the Board of Aldermen, proposed funding snow-removal equipment ahead of winter storms, Comptroller Charles Craig reacted furiously, labeling the idea "the wildest kind of radical, socialistic, BlackGuardia statement." The accusation crystallized a widespread fear among La Guardia's contemporaries: that expansive government initiatives were inherently reckless, costly, and ideologically suspect. Yet those very initiatives, dismissed as ideological whims at the time, built much of the essential infrastructure upon which modern New York still relies.

La Guardia consistently responded to these charges with moral conviction. Speaking at a police breakfast in 1938, he drew a striking parallel: "I believe [Christ] was sincere in His denunciation of the powerful few who exploited the masses. What some of us who are called radical are trying to do is to answer that call in His name."

Today, Zohran Mamdani’s platform—universal childcare, expanded transit, a rent freeze—is met with the usual cries of radicalism. Opponents cast him as naïve, extreme, out of step, a risk to the city’s stability. But this is a familiar story in American politics. What gets dismissed as reckless idealism in one era often becomes the infrastructure of civic life in the next.

La Guardia wasn’t just aligned with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal; he anticipated it, shaped it, even inspired it. As biographer Jay Franklin observed, La Guardia was a “New Dealer before there was a New Deal,” pioneering progressive policies at the municipal level that Roosevelt later scaled into a national blueprint.

At a time when America’s political landscape seemed poised for transformation, La Guardia understood the potential of fusing labor and progressive politics into practical, pragmatic governance. Roosevelt didn’t simply find an ally in La Guardia; he found a forerunner and collaborator: a mayor whose bold experiments became foundational to FDR’s sweeping national agenda. Their partnership, warm enough for Roosevelt to affectionately call him “Fiorello,” symbolized how local innovations in governance could ripple upward, reshaping an entire country. As historian Joshua Freeman writes:

Buildings, infrastructure, and social services were important, but La Guardia believed ordinary people deserved more. Running for mayor, he declared, “I want justice on the broadest scale. . . . justice that gives to everyone some chance for the beauty and the better things of life.”

La Guardia’s ideas aged well; his critics did not. La Guardia’s lasting achievements—from creating a unified, publicly owned transit system to establishing the boldest housing and health programs in the country—illustrate precisely what a socialist-inflected mayoralty can accomplish, even under constraints, making him a compelling model for contemporary progressive and socialist politicians today.

That’s the political history Mamdani is stepping into. The resistance to his campaign isn’t about the specifics of his policies; it’s about the threat they pose to a political class that long ago stopped thinking in terms of possibility. What we’re watching isn’t a clash between pragmatism and idealism, but between stagnation and the kind of reform that, given time, tends to look like common sense.

The pattern is consistent: when traditional coalitions grow complacent or compromised, new actors emerge to articulate the unmet needs of the moment. Mamdani’s campaign reflects precisely this kind of historical rupture: an effort to realign political priorities around affordability, public goods, and working-class power. The opposition he faces says less about the viability of his ideas and more about a status quo incapable of renewing itself.

That was Charlamagne Tha God on The Breakfast Club, cutting through Democratic Party messaging in a single line. He was responding to the idea that electing Hakeem Jeffries Speaker of the House in 2026 would bring meaningful change. His answer? It won’t. Because too many Democratic leaders, even when handed power, are paralyzed by the same caution that defined them before they got it.

A day later, on Brilliant Idiots, Charlamagne drove the point home with Andrew Schulz. “Bernie said it…This ain’t a Democrat thing. It’s not a Republican thing…government has failed the people,” he said, in a conversation about homelessness, capitalism, and the outsized wealth of Elon Musk.

“We live in a capitalist society where you got all these motherfuckers with all the wealth…how can we live in the wealthiest society on Earth and still not fix something as basic as homelessness?”

A producer chimed in: “In that case, the Democrats pivot should be to go more socialist. That’s Bernie”

”Yes! That’s what everybody is saying.”

”Because the Republican solution is going to be: more capitalism, deregulation.”

These weren’t think tank panels. These were viral podcast moments—broadcast by some of the most influential new media figures in the country. And they reflect a reality that much of the Democratic establishment still fails to grasp: the closest things to the Joe Rogans of the Left. They’re system critics. And that’s precisely why they matter.

And their criticism of Republicans came only after a broader indictment of the entire political establishment—including Democrats. That sequencing matters. This audience doesn’t want spin. They want acknowledgment that yes, Republicans are a problem—but so are Democrats who’ve grown comfortable in a system that fails the people they claim to serve. That recognition doesn’t alienate them—it earns their attention. Because the baseline demand isn’t for perfect ideology. It’s for someone to tell the truth.

The blue-bubble creators on the Media Matters chart—Hasan Piker, The Young Turks, Sam Seder, Trevor Noah, Mehdi Hasan, Charlamagne Tha God—don’t command large audiences by echoing Democratic Party messaging. They do so by separating themselves from it — being independent. What makes them compelling isn’t party loyalty or discipline—it’s their willingness to name what the party avoids: economic inequality, elite capture, political cowardice, and the moral failure of U.S. policy, including often on Israel.

Their success reflects a broader appetite for emotional honesty and anti-system affect, not technocratic reassurance or partisan campaigns. These are not party surrogates—they’re populist, heterodox critics. And that’s precisely why their audiences trust them, and why Democratic donor money can’t manufacture a more palatable version in a lab. Their influence depends on being outside the tent, saying what those inside won’t.

A new report from Media Matters shows just how dominant this vertical has become. Among the 320 most-followed ideologically-inclined online shows—across YouTube, Spotify, Rumble, Twitch, and TikTok—right-leaning content commands 82% of total followers. Joe Rogan alone reaches nearly 40 million people. Only one left-leaning voice—Trevor Noah—breaks into the top ten, and even then, he’s dwarfed by his right-wing counterparts.

But raw numbers obscure a deeper truth. Many of these media figures—on both sides—are not entertainers who occasionally flirt with politics. They are ideologues first, building platforms explicitly designed to move worldviews, shape identity, and drive political outcomes. Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk (the big red bubbles) are not accidental influencers or entertainers first. They are the architects of a new kind of media politics, one that doesn’t wait for party permission to define what’s at stake.

Even hybrid figures like Rogan or Russell Brand are deliberate in their choices, using long-form, unscripted interviews to frame the state as overreaching, the elite as unaccountable, and mainstream media as complicit. These shows may live in the “comedy” or “culture” category—but the content is often highly ideological.

There’s a persistent myth—especially in Democratic consultant circles—that these formats are unserious, chaotic, or just about vibes. But that misses what podcasting, YouTube, and TikTok actually offer: intimacy. Authenticity. Control. These platforms succeed because they cut through institutional polish. In a world of splintered trust and social isolation, they create the illusion of direct access. The listener isn’t just hearing a message—they’re having a conversation, often one-on-one, in earbuds, during a commute or while folding laundry. It’s not propaganda. It’s companionship.

And unlike traditional media, which often flattens political discourse into left vs. right, these creators offer something messier but more real: a worldview. One that often sees capitalism, elite impunity, and institutional drift as more fundamental divides than Democrat vs. Republican.

Progressive media figures like Piker aren’t successful because they mimic the left-wing version of Shapiro. They’re successful because they reject the frame entirely. They name power. They speak from experience. And they sound like real people. They say what many people already believe but rarely hear affirmed: that the system is rigged against ordinary people, that activists can be annoying and self-righteous, that most politicians are useless, and that the rich and powerful have far too much control.

Yet instead of embracing this media insurgency, too many Democrats treat it as a threat. Sanders supporters were maligned as “Bernie Bros.” Now it’s “podcast bros.” The instinct is still to pathologize dissent rather than recognize it as a sign of democratic vitality. But this isn’t just bad politics—it’s strategic malpractice.

The right understands that media is not a message channel. It’s a power base. The Daily Wire doesn’t just make clips—it makes movies. Turning Point USA doesn’t just go viral—it organizes high schools and college campuses. These outlets don’t work for the Republican Party—they push it, shape it, and often drag it further right. Meanwhile, the donor and party conversation about infrastructure too often thinks of the Joe Rogan of the Left question as simply a communications arm for Democratic incumbents rather than as a real medium.

This is especially dangerous in a moment where legacy institutions—Congress, cable news, mainstream journalism—are hemorrhaging trust. Voters haven’t stopped paying attention. They’ve just tuned in elsewhere. A viral YouTube clip can reframe a debate overnight. A Twitch stream can reach more disaffected young men than months of canvassing. In 2024, Trump reached over 23 million online listeners a week. Harris reached just 6.4 million.

The answer isn’t to copy the right’s style. It’s to invest in a left that sounds like itself: pluralist, irreverent, morally serious, rooted in everyday struggle — and likely more feminist than the existing network of popular podcasts and shows. That means building media ecosystems that don’t take marching orders from the DNC. It means treating creators not as influencers to manage, but as movement partners to empower. And it means recognizing that in 2025, political persuasion doesn’t begin in campaign headquarters—it begins in someone’s headphones.

The populist media future is already here. The only question is whether the Democratic Party is willing to hear what the base we need to organize and persuade is already listening to.