Democrats stay at a respectful distance after Mamdani cruises

The top Democrats in the House and Senate, both New York City residents, had stayed out of the mayoral primary and refused to say who they voted for. After Mamdani’s victory, both Jeffries and Schumer acknowledged that he’d done a few things worth copying.

“The relentless focus on affordability had great appeal all across the city of New York,” said Jeffries on “Morning Joe,” whose hosts had covered Mamdani skeptically. “He also clearly outworked, out-organized and out-communicated the opposition.”

Jeffries and Schumer both said in their statements that they plan to meet with Mamdani in the coming days. The young Democrat is now preparing for a fall campaign that will pit him against incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, now running as an independent.

Mamdani’s win defied most public polls that showed the scandal-plagued Cuomo leading. Democrats, aware that Cuomo’s comeback bid was losing ground during early voting, had braced for a weeklong count that might start with the ex-governor ahead, and end with a narrow Mamdani win.

Instead, they awoke to a newly minted progressive phenomenon. Around 1 million New York Democrats showed up to vote, the highest raw total in a city primary since 1989, before Mamdani was born. The state assemblyman won 44% of the vote in an 11-way race.

Cuomo called him to concede the primary, dimming the chance that the former governor would also run in November as an independent.

If Cuomo opts against that, New Yorkers will face a November choice between Mamdani, Adams, independent businessman Jim Walden, and Republican public safety activist Curtis Sliwa. All three spent Wednesday warning that Mamdani would wreck New York.

“He’s a snake oil salesman,” Adams said on “Fox and Friends,” in his first post-primary interview. “He will say and do anything to get elected.”

On X, Sliwa warned that Mamdani was “too extreme for a city already on edge.” In a statement, Walden said that he wasn’t “selling unfundable and unrealistic socialist fantasies” and hadn’t “switched positions on topics of importance, like safety and anti-semitism.”

Mamdani was always aware that victory would make him one of the country’s most prominent Democrats. Adams courted that attention; Mamdani told Semafor this month that it was just inevitable, and it was up to him to prove that socialist governance could work.

“I cannot promise that you will always agree with me, but I will never hide from you,” Adams said at his victory celebration in Queens.

Democratic critics of Israel were thrilled by the victory, and by how Mamdani had refused to water down his position: that he did not support a system where Jewish citizens had more rights than others, and that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a war criminal.

But most Democrats focused on the campaign’s upbeat messaging. It started with man-on-the-street videos in which the candidate asked Trump voters why they had abandoned Kamala Harris. It continued with ads, designed by veterans of Bernie Sanders’ campaigns, that showed Mamdani traveling across the city to promise a rent freeze and lower prices.

“If Kamala Harris had talked about affordability with the same passion and consistently that Mamdani has, she would have won the 2024 election,” former Mayor Bill de Blasio told Semafor.

“He very consistently talked about life as it’s lived. He had sharp, clear ideas that people could touch and feel. It’s a message to the Democratic Party, that we can beat money and beat the negative attacks if we have something to say.”

The GOP woke up ready to pin an orange and blue ZOHRAN button on every vulnerable Democrat. Rep. Mike Lawler, the only New York Republican who represents a seat won by Harris last year, spent part of Wednesday tagging Democratic politicians on X and asking if they endorsed Mamdani.

“If you engineered the modern Democrat Party in a lab, you’d get Zohran Mamdani: Antisemitic, anti-police, and anti-American,” said National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Mike Marinella. “Every vulnerable House Democrat will own him, and every Democrat running in a primary will fear him.”

Mamdani’s old social media posts were re-circulated by Republicans after the win, including a 2020 post reacting to a protest halted by the NYPD: “Queer liberation means defund the police.” But other Republicans said that the possibility of a Muslim immigrant mayor, raised in New York but born in Uganda, showed why deportations were so important for social cohesion.

“NYC is the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller wrote on X.

Centrists and progressive Democrats both managed to find vindication in Mamdani’s anti-austerity, pro-housing message. Illinois Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a progressive who ran for mayor of Chicago in 2023, said that any Democrat should look at what worked for Mamdani.

“If Democrats want to win, there has to be a populist message that addresses the cost of living and the everyday problems that Americans are experiencing,” he said in an interview.

Until Tuesday night, the Democratic story in big city primaries was that the left had lost credibility — and elections. Pittsburgh and St. Louis Democrats ousted progressive black mayors this year, and San Francisco voters threw out a leadership team they blamed for crime and disorder to elect a multi-millionaire in the Mike Bloomberg mold.

Bloomberg was among the Democrats who got behind Cuomo to stop Mamdani; they were badly let down by the former governor. It was easy for Jeffries to say that Mamdani out-campaigned his rival, because he did.

Cuomo entered the race only after Adams quit it, kept a light schedule, skipped most candidate forums, and made basic campaign-finance mistakes that cost him resources. (His super PAC, funded in large part by Bloomberg, was supposed to make that irrelevant.)

Still, Democratic leaders had made their peace with a Cuomo comeback. Now they’re bracing for Republican attacks on Mamdani, wondering what will land outside New York media markets. Mamdani seems ready to give them space to separate from him — after all, he’s running in New York, not a swing seat in the Midwest.

What will those attacks look like? Republicans reacted to progressive primary wins during the first Trump term by warning that the Democratic Party was an incubator for socialism.

They did not make the argument that Miller and some other MAGA figures now are: That the incubator must be demolished by slowing or stopping immigration.