Can the Mamdani machine kill the Democratic establishment?

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Last year’s New York primary night, when a young Muslim socialist beat the odds and toppled the worst kind of establishment candidate, was a hard act to follow. But last Tuesday proved worthy of its own place in the city’s political history.

A slate of young and largely unknown socialists up and down the ballot swept through bitterly contested races, with the boost of America’s most popular mayor — most notably the eccentric Ph.D. student Darializa Avila Chevalier in the 13th District and Assemblywoman Claire Valdez in the 7th District. The wins should leave leftists across the country wondering whether the surest career move is to become a Democratic Socialist of America and Justice Democrats recruit. Both of this year’s star “Mamdanites,” as the New York Post dubbed them, are transplants to the city they are poised to remake.

The Democratic Socialists have proven to be anything but amateur, outorganizing and out-messaging a flailing municipal Democratic establishment still reeling from its failed effort to install Andrew Cuomo in Gracie Mansion. But are they poised to “kill” the Democratic establishment nationally? Or will what happened in New York stay in New York?

Establishment leaders were quick to point out progressive candidates’ worse results elsewhere across the country. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) described the New York socialist wave as high-income, transplant-centered and confined to “the most gentrified district in the nation, by far” (the 13th District, worth noting, sits near the top of the national poverty scale.)

And yet, as Peter Rothpletz observes, New York is hardly some uniquely radical city. It elected Eric Adams four years ago. I agree with him that the prevailing Democratic “Tea Party of the left” narrative remains too crude, and too premature, to explain what is happening, but the Mamdani machine can indeed become the national archetype for a new city politics. Valdez and Chevalier faced different establishments, one progressive, one moderate.

In both districts, however, voters turned away from the familiar rituals of ethnic patronage and machine politics and toward a socialist operation powered by a younger, educated electorate. Whatever force the old machines retain, the left has developed organizing muscle to counterbalance it. The 7th has become the “Commie Corridor.” Parts of the 13th, as the phrase’s coiner Michael Lange now suggests, may qualify as “Commie Corridor lite.”

Chevalier defeated Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), an entrenched five-term incumbent and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus who had done little to invite a challenge. His seat had long been shaped by ethnic machine politics. Espaillat, the first Dominican American elected to Congress, had spent years cultivating a local squad of Latino politicians while fiercely battling the Harlem machine and Black political establishment. In this primary, that establishment more or less lined up behind him — though Keith Wright, the Manhattan Democratic Party boss and a former Espaillat rival, withheld his support.

Espaillat reached for the old playbook, unleashing a blitzkrieg of attacks falsely casting Chevalier, the daughter of Dominican immigrants, as Haitian. But when I went to Harlem on election night, new and longtime residents of the district alike had been inculcated in Democratic Socialist messaging and were sick of Espaillat’s establishment politics, as they saw them. The former’s Dominican machine could run up votes in more Latino precincts, but Harlem was always a more complicated inheritance. There, Mamdani’s coalition was readily transferable. Chevalier won the Black vote and held her own among Hispanics, even as the Bronx kept Espaillat in the running.

Valdez faced Antonio Reynoso, a progressive endorsed by retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez and an alphabet soup of union endorsements, as well as that of the Working Families Party. But in a district remade by transplants and gentrification, the community associations and union networks of the “progressive establishment” can look almost as hollow as Espaillat’s moderate ethnic politics when set against the intensive, volunteer-driven mobilization by the socialists. The former’s constituency has vanished, while the latter has proved adept at absorbing newcomers with little attachment to the old neighborhood institutions.

Reynoso cast himself as the authentic local flavor of the district —”born and raised.” New York journalist Alex Bronzini-Vender found this attempt to manufacture district identity amusing. “Buddy,” he wrote, “most people in NY-7 don’t even know they live in NY-7!”

Many places have the social conditions upon which the left can build and discipline a political machine. In the Utah race erroneously cited as evidence against the Mamdani model’s national portability, the victorious Blue Dog barely won half the vote. Nate Blouin, the runner-up, has since joined the Democratic Socialists of America.

After last week’s victories, socialist activists hit their next big target in Colorado’s 1st District, where graduate student Melat Kiros beat her hapless incumbent opponent by more than ten points despite being significantly out fundraised. The only big exception to such a claim that the left is all too well-positioned to exploit the decay of old machines may be Mamdani’s centrist twin on the West Coast: the popular outsider San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, whose new coalition vanquished the city’s left coalition in primaries earlier this month.

The organizers of the socialist left beat the odds in building a municipal political machine in the largest city in America within the Democratic system, much to the chagrin of Jaime Harrison-style party apparatchiks. Somewhere, Boss Tweed is looking down, or possibly up, at the Big Apple and wondering how the old crimson-brick face of Tammany Hall — once the rough political home of immigrant New York — would burn in this feverish shade of red.

William Liang is a writer living in San Francisco. He volunteers for Connie Chan’s congressional campaign in California’s 11th District.