Outside Rep. Adriano Espaillat’s primary night party, four men on the sidewalk were dressed in full neon sequins, trying to get the party started. Inside, the bar had barely opened.
Espaillat spent 20 years trying to get to Washington and another 10 years in Congress. He arrived to give his concession speech and left in under 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, the real party was going on about three miles away. That’s where Zohran Mamdani was completing his victory lap of three celebrations with candidates who likely would not have gotten near Congress without his endorsements, just a year after he stunned the political world by beating Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary.
Oligarchs want it to seem like Mamdani is doing all this, and not that voters have always wanted candidates like this.
Yeah, organizing a bunch of people and getting them all behind the same candidates to disrupt a well entrenched political machine is an accomplishment, but I think the real story here is that that bunch of people that are still furious with Jeffries’ and AIPAC’s genocidal bullshit and all the terrible effects they’ve had on our politics, and Mamdani is just in the right place at the right time to seize on that anger and make it productive
No.
Mamdani is not special, the vast majority of people are closer to him than any neoliberal.
He ran a great campaign and is doing an amazing job. But voters choose to vote for him, and if they choose to vote for people similar to Mamdani, it’s not because Mamdani told them to.
It’s because this is the type of policy/candidate that people want.
It’s bigger than Mamdani and it’s bigger than NYC and the entire state.
The problem is thinking of him as a “power broker” rather than one part of a larger movement. Power is not something that can be “brokered”, it comes from the collective effort of people.
Who’s more terrified right now Republicans or the old Democratic party? to me it seems like the Democratic party is losing control and they don’t like it. Good
the GOP old guard died with trump, now it’s the democrats turn
What’s gross is all the politicians, even those “on his side,” saying that he’s wrong for bucking the establishment and “burning bridges.”
CNN.
The Billionaire Megaphone.
Don’t forget, that’s the, if you will, topspin on this.
I just want to say, Mamdani is excellent. But I feel like he’s getting a lot of undue credit when the candidates he endorsed are just great people. For example, Brad Lander was a similarly-strong candidate for NYC mayor who was arrested by ICE for attempting to prevent them from detaining someone. When Mamdani won the Primary for Mayor everyone kinda just knew Brad had a future somewhere else.
Mamdani deserves some credit for endorsing good people, and using his brand to boost them, but it seems like the accomplishments of those he endorsed are getting overshadowed in articles and headlines by what seems like an attempt to turn real progressive momentum into “Mamdani’s little club.”
Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Mamdani, or even him being the face of the movement. It just seems like there are people in power trying to undermine him and the movement by making him the face of it.
