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When State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani beat former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the New York Democratic mayoral primary, the elite media takes were hot, triumphal, and categorical.
“The Democratic Party is ripe for a takeover [ [link removed] ]” cheered Vox.
“What centrist Democrats need to learn [ [link removed] ] from Zohran Mamdani” The New Republic admonished.
“The death of centrism” [ [link removed] ] trumpeted one New York Magazine headline.
Really? The death of centrism?
Step across the Hudson River and imagine a similar statement about Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill, who recently secured the Democratic nomination for the governorship of New Jersey. Sherrill is a pragmatic representative of the center-left, endorsed by county-level party organizations, but willing to break with the establishment where it matters (she was one of the first Democrats on the Hill to call for Joe Biden to drop out [ [link removed] ] of the 2024 presidential race).
Where are the chattering classes declaring “the death of progressivism”? Why isn’t the Democratic Party “ripe for a takeover” from someone like Sherrill?
The notion that a primary win alone means that a far-left rebel like Mamdani can upend the Democrats on a national level makes for a cute narrative for elite media, which never misses an opportunity to run a “Dems in disarray” story. And this line is convenient for Donald Trump. The president and his allies are already tarring his opponents [ [link removed] ] as socialists and radicals in the Queens assemblyman’s mold.
I remember similarly confident affirmations of far-left dominance when Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the Squad made their debut in 2018. Then, as now, Trump was quick to make AOC interchangeable with the DNC in the eyes of his impressionable audience. While Ocasio Cortez’s national profile has grown, the Squad remains a small presence in DC. Far from becoming a bellwether, AOC has watched her mentor, Bernie Sanders, lose a second presidential nomination to more moderate Joe Biden.
As far as actionable political wisdom goes, there’s not much there.
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Yes: Democrats should take notes on Mamdani’s style. He ran an energetic campaign. On election day, he was out at a predawn press conference while Cuomo dithered around until about noon before finally making an appearance to cast his ballot. The other candidates were non-entities or even became surrogates [ [link removed] ] for Mamdani [ [link removed] ]. More than one reason not to treat the DSA candidate’s win as more than it actually is.
Many New Yorkers may have been energized by Mamdani’s far-left-wing platform. There is a strong case to be made that many more were also rejecting Cuomo. You could not have come up with a more unlikable stand-in for voter frustrations if you cooked one up in a lab.
The same sort of negative polarization was not at work next door in the Garden State.
Sherrill, in contrast to Mamdani, beat a number of serious challengers, both on the left and in the center. Unlike Cuomo, her rivals were not dogged by serious scandals that made them unpalatable to voters. Unlike Cuomo, Sherrill’s opponents actually ran campaigns. Democrats looking for a path forward might also turn to Elissa Slotkin. The Democratic Michigan senator ran in the middle and won a tight race in a state that Kamala Harris lost. It is certainly harder to find wedge issues in Sherrill and Slotkin’s politics to divide Democratic politicians and voters.
Still, I’d caution against bombastic pronouncements. Even with candidates like Slotkin or Sherrill, where my own priors are more closely aligned. Each race comes with its own nuances. We can extract lessons from those campaigns, but we can’t ignore the individual circumstances. If a headline like “Mikie Sherrill and the death of progressivism” raises an eyebrow for you, that’s good. It should. Such a statement is too far-reaching and definitive to be analytically useful.
We might consider applying the same scrutiny when New York Magazine makes a similarly bold pronouncement—with far less factual basis—about Zohran Mamdani.
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