Playing Dead to Undermine Mamdani

In the nearly three months since New York Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani trounced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, many of the state’s most prominent Democrats have withheld their endorsement for the upstart candidate. Gov. Kathy Hochul recently acquiesced to pressure and endorsed the mayoral candidate after dragging her feet since June, but other top Democrats — notably Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries — have remained conspicuously silent about the election in their own backyard. Other elected Democrats in the city and surrounding areas, meanwhile, have not only refused to endorse Mamdani, but have come out actively against him, despite his historic 12-point victory that involved winning more votes than any other mayoral candidate in New York City primary history. 

The irony here is rich, if not surprising. For decades, establishment Democrats have accused the “left” of disloyalty and acting as “spoilers” in general elections, even when progressives have overwhelmingly backed Democratic candidates that don’t align with their political preferences. The party’s centrists, meanwhile, have rarely had their allegiance questioned, mostly because it is so seldom tested: Their preferred candidates almost always win high-profile nominations with support from the party establishment. In 2020, they were spared a blue loyalty test when Joe Biden emerged as the nominee. Prior to that, centrists had reacted to the prospect of a Bernie Sanders nomination with alarm and trepidation; this included the previous nominee, who refused to commit to backing him. 

The current intransigence from powerful Democrats casts an especially harsh light on this historical fault line and raises questions about these self-professed centrists’ commitment to the party’s mantra to “vote blue no matter who.” 

The centrist holdouts, we’re told, aren’t acting on any profound disagreement over policy or goals, but are merely taking strategic stands that reflect their deep desire to win elections and defeat “MAGA Republicans.” As one top party consultant recently put it to Politico, Mamdani is “the greatest threat to Democrats probably since Ronald Reagan because he’s everything Democrats have been accused of being and in fact is — to the extreme.” Laura Curran, a Democrat who served as executive of Long Island’s Nassau County, echoed this sentiment, commenting that she had “never seen Republicans more giddy about the idea of a socialist mayor of New York City” and that they are “more excited about this than Mamdani’s followers or supporters.” 

According to these self-styled realists, any swerve left by the Democratic Party will result in a Republican landslide. The path back to political power, they maintain, is to support “moderates” like Cuomo, who has again become the choice of New York’s power elite and donor class, now as an independent. “I believe the future of our party is that we need to lead from the middle because that’s where the majority of Americans are,” said another Long Island Democrat, Rep. Laura Gillen, who insists she will “certainly not” endorse her party’s mayoral candidate. 

For Democrats who oppose the left, the secret to winning elections in the United States is to find that fabled middle ground in the center, where the all-important “median voters” supposedly reside. According to this theory, the Democratic Party’s electoral problems almost always stem from moving too far to the left and thus alienating the average swing voter. 

In many ways, Mamdani’s triumph was a direct rebuttal of this centrist theory of electoral politics. Instead of chasing after voters in the imaginary center, the democratic socialist advanced a populist strategy built on the belief that most voters are driven more by everyday concerns about affordability, economic insecurity and inequality than by the culture war disputes that Cuomo made central to his own campaign. This strategy was supported by polling, which has consistently shown that the majority of American voters support what would be described as populist economic policies, from raising the minimum wage and taxes on the rich to supporting labor unions and greater public investment. Mamdani’s dominant performance in many of the same neighborhoods that shifted toward Trump last year has gone a long way toward debunking the centrist claim that the 2024 election was a repudiation of the left and that voters desire more moderate candidates.

Ironically, but perhaps not surprisingly, the so-called moderate in the race has veered sharply to the right since losing in the primary, embracing a Trumpian persona and even vowing to cooperate with the president who has threatened to send troops into the city.  “I believe there’s a big piece of him that actually wants redemption in New York,” Cuomo recently said of Trump in a private meeting with his donors. “He feels that he was rejected by New York. … So I believe there will be opportunities to actually cooperate with him.” 

The former governor is hoping that he will appeal to enough Republicans and Democrats to stop Mamdani in November, and he has many powerful benefactors who are trying to make this happen. Even the president himself has reportedly been working behind the scenes to consolidate anti-Mamdani opposition around Cuomo, offering both sitting Mayor Eric Adams and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa jobs in his administration as an enticement to drop out. So far, these efforts have little to show for. The latest polling has the progressive candidate leading with a large majority of Democrats and a plurality of independents — and still winning by double digits in a race without Adams. 

Despite Mamdani’s clear ability to galvanize the base and appeal to disaffected voters that are essential for rebuilding the Democratic coalition — and despite the clear efforts by Donald Trump to undermine his candidacy — many older centrists continue to see him and the progressive left as an electoral liability. 

But that might be changing. Not all of the Democratic Party’s centrists or moderates have responded to the rise of Mamdani with hostility or alarm; some have even embraced him as an ally. Consider Rep. Pat Ryan, who represents a district on the city’s suburban outskirts. On social media last week, the congressman gave a ringing endorsement of Mamdani as the candidate who “fights for the PEOPLE,” while denouncing Cuomo as a “selfish POS who only fights for himself and other corrupt elites.” Though a moderate Democrat from a historically swing district in the Hudson Valley region, Ryan is no defender of the status quo. Since last year’s election, in which he outperformed Kamala Harris in his district by double digits, Ryan has championed a political vision much closer to Mamdani’s than to the party’s traditional centrists. 

“It is a populist moment right now, because of the near-unprecedented economic inequality that’s been created for multiple decades now,” observed the congressman in an interview last March, arguing that Democrats must respond to Trump’s “destructive populism” with a “constructive” and “patriotic populism” that calls out the “villains,” such as “greedy corporations” and “corrupt government leaders.” 

Ryan’s endorsement makes clear that the real divide in today’s Democratic Party is not between left and center but between a rising populist wing and an old guard that stubbornly clings to the politics of the past. For years, establishment Democrats have underestimated the rising appeal of populism, convinced that swing voters will always gravitate toward moderation over anything branded “radical” or “extreme.” A decade ago, this same conviction even led some Democrats to support Trump as the Republican nominee, so confident were they that his candidacy would result in an electoral landslide for Democrats and “make the Republicans the minority again,” as Schumer giddily predicted. 

Things haven’t turned out that way. If any party has obtained minority status over the last decade, it is the one that has stubbornly resisted and suppressed its populist wing. The smartest thing Democrats can do now is to stop resisting.