The stunning defeat of Rep. Haley Stevens by insurgent progressive Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic primary for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat represents the latest in a string of establishment losses within the party that show no sign of slowing across the country.

While the Michigan race for U.S. Senate was the blockbuster event, the Democratic Left notched a series of additional wins. Donavan McKinney, backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, unseated incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar in Michigan’s 13th congressional district. Sunrise Movement co-founder William Lawrence won a competitive Democratic primary for Michigan’s swing 7th congressional district. Down-ballot races also produced a series of Left victories, including Uncommitted Movement co-founder Abbas Alawieh’s win in Michigan’s 2nd State Senate District.

The Left’s most prominent loss came in Missouri, with the defeat of flawed former Rep. Cori Bush in a rematch with incumbent Rep. Wesley Bell.

On balance, last night was a major step forward for the American Left, continuing a pattern that finds itself reaching well beyond the supposed “coastal elite,” as Rep. Stevens suggested heading into election night.

As establishment Democratic figures wring their hands about whether or not “moderate” voters will vote for the party’s successful primary candidates, one is left to wonder which voters they mean, or if they’re signaling a subconscious wish for Republicans to defeat the ascendant Left. The party’s dreadful 2024 featured presidential nominee Kamala Harris proudly emphasizing her gun ownership and demanding that America maintain the world’s most “lethal fighting force,” even as the party platform dropped its opposition to the national death penalty.

In a shock to absolutely no one outside Democratic Party stalwarts, Harris was defeated by former President Donald Trump, who promised a reversal of the enfeebled President Joe Biden on international and economic policy.

Of course Trump wouldn’t deliver. But the promise was more appealing than the Harris campaign’s perceived guarantee of an additional four years of Biden’s disastrous foreign policy combined with a lack of perceived immediacy on domestic policy, such as the administration’s unimpressive response to the end of the national right to abortion in the United States following the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.

Why would the public believe the impeached and criminally convicted Trump would keep his promises? I’m not so sure they did. Trump expanded his vote total, but Harris’s larger problem was attrition: she lost millions of voters who supported Biden, many of whom sat out 2024 altogether. Trump’s victory depended less on any turn toward moderation than on his retaining more of his previous coalition while Democrats failed to mobilize theirs.

Overnight global celebrity and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani represents a similar casting out of a broken establishment, albeit with a much deeper degree of seriousness and empathy than Trump has ever managed to muster. His joyful, unabashed democratic socialist politics resonated well beyond a socialist base and into everyday voters grateful to see a leader who demonstrated a genuine care for others, devoid of obvious triangulation or fearmongering. His positive job ratings in New York and national favorability numbers provide evidence that the charm offensive continues to pay dividends, including his megaviral video about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (ironically, in which the mayor walks back a campaign promise to arrest him).

The two parties’ electorates are not converging around a coherent isolationism. They are converging, unevenly, around exhaustion with open-ended military commitments and wars that bear little relationship to Americans’ material security. Democrats have moved especially sharply against unconditional military support for Israel amid its genocidal campaign against the Palestinians, while Trump’s second administration has alienated voters who interpreted “America First” as a promise of restraint rather than another cycle of intervention.

Democrats have a unique opportunity to seize on this issue, specifically because Trump 2.0 took a hard turn into interventionism that spits in the face of the MAGA voters who expected a redux of the president’s first administration. Instead, cynical establishment Democrats are lobbing accusations of antisemitism and “far -Left” ideology at emerging figures, especially Muslim politicians, in an attempt to stir controversy and animate warmongering special interests. They warn that scared “moderates” will vacate the party and find refuge in the arms of far-Right Republicans.

Democratic voters’ disgust with Israel’s genocide in Gaza is difficult to overstate, and the party’s electorate increasingly rejects financing the atrocities. Nearly three-quarters of Democrats favor reducing or outright ending military support for Israel. Catering to the party’s shrinking pro-war constituency risks depressing substantially more turnout than it generates.

The shift in what constitutes a popular Democrat today—consider the successes of Mamdani, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders—speaks to the way in which the demographics of parties are in constant flux due to generational turnover, ideological evolution and a host of other issues. These are not static, unchanging pools of people that need to be held in balance. They are matrices of constant movement. And with an energized primary electorate propelling insurgents to victory, perhaps it stands to reason that the candidates they actually want are most competitive with a post-neoliberal electorate.

As Democratic primary after primary demonstrates, voters are done with stuffy bureaucrats who use their tax dollars to bomb children abroad while delivering nothing for them at home. Americans are struggling to manage basic economic survival in this nation. It should surprise absolutely no one that they’re turning toward the candidates who speak to their needs and values, instead of a broken party apparatus too busy playing war games to deliver for their own people.

Unless establishment Democrats adapt, they will continue to be displaced by a populist electorate in which both the MAGA right and an anti-oligarchy, anti-war Left are competing to consign the old political order to history.

New York City is home to more than eight million people and represents one of the largest concentrations of political power in the United States. The city government oversees a gargantuan budget, the country’s largest public school system, the largest municipal police force, and makes decisions that affect everything from housing affordability to public safety. Yet, despite the extraordinary influence of city government over residents’ everyday lives, relatively few New Yorkers participate in choosing its leaders.

Low voter turnout has been one of the defining characteristics of New York City’s political system. While federal elections generate substantial participation, engagement falls sharply in state, municipal, and especially primary elections. In many legislative districts, City Council races can be decided by only a few thousand voters, while competitive special elections and local primaries generate single-digit turnout percentages.

Paradoxically, some of the elections with the lowest turnout choose the officials with the greatest influence over daily life; City Council members, borough presidents, district attorneys, and state legislators often attract the least public attention. Decisions about zoning, policy, public schools, and transit funding are made by officials whom many residents either know little about or never vote to elect.

Understanding why so few New Yorkers vote requires looking beyond reductive explanations such as apathy. The city’s low turnout is the product of history, institutions, demographics, and political culture. It also reflects the decline of the neighborhood political machines that once mobilized voters, dominance of one political party in the city, barriers created by election rules, and a growing sense among residents that their individual vote carries little weight. Together, these forces have transformed participation from a civic expectation into an increasingly optional act.

The modern turnout record is stark. An analysis of public and quasi-official sources together demonstrates a long record of weak municipal participation, punctuated by occasional spikes when contests become unusually competitive.

This time series tells two stories at once. The first is long-run decline: from older mid-century participation to a modern norm in which nearly three-quarters of registered voters routinely sit out of municipal elections. The second is conditional: turnout is not fixed. Turnout rises when the race is unusually competitive, polarizing, or nationally visible, as in 2025; it collapses when elections lack salient or competitive contests, as in 2023. That pattern implies that New York City’s turnout is heavily influenced by election timing, competition, and information.

The borough pattern is also heavily unequal. In 2017, turnout ranged from 19% in the Bronx to 32.4% in Staten Island, compared to a city-wide average of 25.2%. Turnout decreased city-wide in 2021, while the same broad geographic hierarchy persisted. In 2025, turnout in every borough sharply increased, but the gap persisted: 30.3% in the Bronx, compared to 48.5% in Manhattan and 45.6% in Staten Island. The data demonstrate that the city’s turnout problem is geographically concentrated, with the greatest disengagement in neighborhoods that also tend to have lower incomes, more residential churn, and weaker long-run participation habits.

Age is even more stratified. In the 2017 general election, turnout ranged from 13.5% among voters aged 18-29 to 35.9% for voters aged 60-69. This age gap remained stark in 2021, where youth turnout fell to 11.1%, while turnout for voters aged 70-79 rose to 37.9%. In the 2025 general election, youth turnout surged to 41.9%, slightly outpacing the city-wide average of 41.6%, but it still lagged behind turnout for voters aged 70-79 at 48.7%. It is not that young New Yorkers do not vote; 2025 shows that they can and do when conditions change, but the average New York election is bad at activating them.

The single most important structural fact is that many elections are held in off-cycle, odd-numbered years, outside the high-salience federal calendar. In recent decades, New York City mayoral general-election turnout has hovered in the mid-20s as a share of registered voters, while presidential turnout has been roughly twice as high. Just 23% of the city’s eligible voters voted in 2021, compared to 60% in the 2024 presidential election. That issue is persistent, as turnout has consistently been around 30% since 2005 (excluding 2025), while the city’s presidential election turnout has consistently exceeded 50% over that same period. In other words, the city’s turnout problem is not that New Yorkers never vote; it is that many do not vote in local elections held on low-attention dates.

A second major driver is institutional exclusion in primaries, which are often the real election in a heavily Democratic city. New York’s primaries are closed, and party enrollment changes for a June primary must be received by February 14, months before most voters know who the candidates are. Official and semi-official New York City election research repeatedly identifies this as one of the country’s more restrictive primary systems. Meanwhile, unaffiliated voters are a very large bloc: the New York City Campaign Finance Board reported that they were 20.6% of registered voters in 2025 and 21.1% in 2024, with younger voters disproportionately represented among them.

Third, turnout is shaped by who is asked to bear the costs of participation. Recent city studies show that low participation is concentrated among the young, the mobile, the less educated, naturalized citizens, and neighborhoods with weaker voting habits. Earlier tract-level New York City research similarly found lower turnout in areas with more younger adults, men, low educational attainment, naturalized citizens, and recent movers. These patterns suggest that the burdens of participation, such as maintaining registration and familiarity with local politics, are not evenly distributed among the electorate.

Fourth, competition matters enormously. When ballots are uncompetitive, turnout collapses; when local races are high-stakes and salient, turnout rises sharply. The CFB found that the 2021 mayoral primary reached 26.5%, the highest mayoral primary turnout in decades, but the 2021 mayoral general fell to a then-record low 23.3%, which the report explicitly linked to the race’s relative lack of competitiveness. In 2023, when there were no citywide offices and few competitive council contests, turnout fell to 7.2% in the primary and 12.8% in the general. By contrast, the highly publicized and competitive 2025 mayoral election pushed turnout to 41.6%, the highest city-election turnout in over half a century.

Fifth, the city’s low-turnout equilibrium is reinforced by administrative complexity, information gaps, ballot design, language-access limits, and weakened local media. Early voting and no-excuse vote by mail have reduced friction, but official reports show persistent burdens: unequal early-voting site distribution in 2019, long travel distances in some neighborhoods, confusing party-change deadlines, lagging ballot-tracker information, and continuing language-access gaps outside federally protected languages. At the same time, research on local journalism finds that declining local political news reduces civic engagement, and city-specific election research notes that simply communicating the existence and timing of off-cycle elections has become harder in the contemporary media environment.

The modern turnout record is stark. Public sources show a long period of weak municipal participation, punctuated by occasional spikes when contests become unusually competitive. But turnout in earlier New York was higher for reasons that were not wholly democratic in the modern normative sense. Under Tammany Hall and related machine structures, local politics were deeply embedded in neighborhood life, ethnic networks, patronage, and material exchange. Recent historical work on Tammany Hall finds that the city’s machine relied on district leaders who oversaw voter mobilization in primaries and general elections, often through patronage networks and reciprocal obligations. Incentivized to mobilize their neighbors by direct rewards, Tammany-era New York often reported over 80% turnout among registered voters.

That helps explain why “turnout used to be higher” is the wrong lesson if read without the relevant context. Earlier turnout was elevated not only by stronger civic attachment, but also by strong parties, denser ward organizations, social pressure, and the exchange of jobs or favors for mobilization. Historical scholarship on urban patronage machines generally ties their rise and fall to immigrant urban electorates and patronage-based organization. Election-timing scholarship further shows that local election calendars themselves were historically manipulated by parties seeking advantage, highlighting that turnout levels have always been partly manufactured.

There is also a less machine-centered explanation for the mid-century peaks: some historical races were genuinely gripping citywide contests. For instance, 1965 and 1989 are used as the relevant historical years because those mayoral contests were unusually competitive and city-defining. That is consistent with the modern record: New Yorkers vote when they believe the stakes are immediate and the result is uncertain. What has changed is that later municipal elections have often featured less competition, weaker local party organizations, and a much more fragmented local information environment.

The long-run decline, then, is best understood as the combined effect of the demise of machine-era mobilization, the professionalization and depatronization of government, the migration of political attention to state and national arenas, and the persistence of off-cycle local elections. That shift removed coercive forms of mobilization, but it also left the city without a comparably strong, legitimate infrastructure for habitual local participation.

There are several explanations as to who votes and who doesn’t. Of those, the clearest consistent pattern is age. New York City official analyses across multiple cycles repeatedly show that older voters participate at higher rates than younger voters. In 2023, only 6.1% of eligible registered voters ages 18-29 voted in the general election, while the average age of 2023 general-election voters was 57, compared with 50 for all registered voters. In 2021, the average general election voter was 55. In 2025, youth turnout improved dramatically, reducing the average voter age from 55 to 50, but even that surge underscores how abnormal ordinary local elections are for young adults.

Past voting records can also indicate future participation. The CFB’s ten-year participation-score study found that only 3.1% of voters cast a ballot in every election for which they were eligible from 2008 to 2018, while 21.4% never voted once during that span despite being registered and eligible for at least one election. They created a participation score by dividing how many elections a voter participated in by how many they were eligible for, and they found that the average participation score was approximately 29, with Manhattan highest (34) and Bronx lowest (24). That is strong evidence that the city suffers not just from one-off abstention but from a pattern of habitual nonparticipation.

Education and income matter, but the city evidence is more nuanced. In the CFB’s 2012 report, less educated tracts voted at lower rates, and chronically low-voting tracts had lower median household incomes and much higher shares of residents with no education beyond high school. In the 2008-2018 participation-score model, educational attainment remained a key positive predictor of participation, while higher-income households were a positive but weaker predictor. The takeaway is that socioeconomic resources matter, but education appears especially central because it overlaps with political knowledge, efficacy and administrative capacity.

Residential mobility is another important but under-discussed factor. The CFB’s 2012 analysis summarizes the broader literature showing that moving reduces turnout because re-registration is inconvenient and because movers are less rooted in neighborhood social networks. The same report found that high-voting tracts had a larger share of voters living in the same home as one year earlier. This matters especially in New York, where high rents, frequent moves, and address changes can interact with registration maintenance and primary-enrollment rules. Official state deadlines still require change-of-address notices to be processed at least 15 days before an election.

Similarly, language access is both a demographic and logistical issue. The CFB estimated that of the city’s 1.8 million limited-English proficient residents, roughly 300,000 spoke languages not protected by the Voting Rights Act. New York now offers services at select sites in eleven languages in addition to Spanish, Bengali, Chinese, and Korean, but this still excludes the broader population.

New York City’s party system depresses turnout in a distinctly local way. The city is so Democratic that the general election frequently feels secondary, yet one in five registered voters is unaffiliated and cannot participate in the Democratic primary without having enrolled months earlier. That combination weakens the sense among many voters that their participation is both possible and consequential.

Candidate quality and campaign strategy matter too. The campaigns of 2025 included heavy mobilization, cross-endorsements, and a race framed around affordability, bringing young and first-time voters into the electorate. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign demonstrated how candidates can also circumvent some of the weaknesses of the traditional local media ecosystem. His campaign made extensive use of social media to communicate directly with New Yorkers, particularly younger voters. That strategy helped make municipal politics visible in the places where younger New Yorkers already encounter political information. By contrast, the 2021 general election and the 2023 municipal cycle were less competitive, had lower enthusiasm, and featured limited voter education. Local turnout is contingent on whether campaigns make city politics feel urgent and relevant.

The media environment reinforces all of this. Broad research shows that declining local political news reduces civic engagement, and New York is among the metro areas most affected. In an era of local-news decline, simply informing residents that an off-cycle election is happening and why it matters is itself a daunting task. While digital channels can partially fill the gap, they do not create a broad civic-information commons in low-salience years.

New York City’s turnout problem has no single cause. It is the cumulative product of elections held when fewer people are paying attention, a dominant-party system that shifts meaningful competition into closed primaries, barriers to registration and participation, and campaigns that too frequently fail to make elections feel consequential. These forces reinforce one another: when an election feels unimportant or difficult to navigate, fewer people participate — and it becomes easier to ignore the next cycle.

If New York City wants to meaningfully increase turnout, the evidence first turns to election timing. Comparative evidence is consistent in saying that municipal turnout increases when local elections coincide with higher-salience federal elections. But New Yorkers rejected a proposal in 2025 to align municipal elections with the presidential cycle. Since this proposal failed, it will likely be some time before it comes up for referendum again.

Other solutions remain accessible in the meantime. Lowering registration barriers could expand participation even without changing the election calendar. While same-day voter registration would require a New York State constitutional amendment, switching the party registration deadline to match the general deadline of 10 days out could be accomplished by changing the state election law. Easier still, institutional changes, such as increasing the number of languages included on a ballot, can be amended by the Board of Elections.

Many of the other measures discussed here, such as switching election timing, increasing the number of candidates, and easing turnout, can only be fixed through civic engagement, whether that be more candidates running or direct advocacy. Solving the problem of political disengagement requires participation from the very people the current system fails to engage.

That paradox might seem impossible to overcome, but New York’s recent elections suggest that low turnout is not an immutable city fixture. When voters believe an election is competitive, when a candidate gives them a compelling motive to vote, and when information about the stakes reaches them where they are, people vote. The question, then, is not only why turnout is low, but why the political system fails to convince people that their votes will matter.

No single reform can fix that. Election timing can bring more voters to the polls, registration reform can make participation easier, stronger local media can increase election visibility, and competitive campaigns can make their outcomes feel tangible. But each addresses a different dimension of the same underlying problem: too many New Yorkers experience democracy as something distant from their everyday lives, even though the decisions made through that democracy shape daily life.

New York has a politically active population. Its citizens organize, protest, celebrate, debate, volunteer, and advocate constantly. The challenge is translating that political fervor into sustained electoral participation, not only when a presidential race dominates national media or a polarizing candidate motivates turnout, but in the quieter elections that determine who governs neighborhoods, writes local laws, and controls the institutions closest to quotidian life.

Turnout is more than a measure of how many people cast a ballot. It is a measure of how many people believe our political system is something worth showing up for. Increasing turnout in New York City, therefore, is not simply about getting people to vote. It is a matter of building a civic system that gives people a reason to go to the polls.

As of 8:10 p.m. on July 08, 2026, the campaign of soon-to-be U.S. Senate Democratic nominee Graham Platner came to an end. In a rambling, conspiratorial social media video dripping with self-pity and grandiosity, Platner conceded that his path to victory had completely closed. Following a credible allegation of rape, his campaign had become radioactive.

Questions remain about why members of his team remained with the campaign following the allegations, whether they attempted to hold the party hostage by demanding concessions for a drop-out, and how much damning information the campaign might have had in its possession throughout what felt like a never-ending stream of personal controversies.

Political rumblings about Platner’s personal life have swirled for months as scandals mounted and prognosticators opined, sometimes with startling callousness, that nothing short of a credible allegation of sexual assault would get him out.

The hypothetical became a dark reality when Politico reported that one of the sources featured in a disturbing New York Times article about Platner’s behavior towards women came forward to say she was ready to tell her full story.

Jenny Racicot alleged that Platner broke into her home while drunk, raped her, and later claimed no memory of his actions. Racicot says she allowed a drunken Platner to stay in her home to avoid him driving in that state, then threw him out of her home after he woke up the next day.

In addition to the Politico reporting, Racicot told her story on camera to CNN, including the internal turmoil she experienced as she decided to share her experience, despite being a Democrat who agrees with Platner’s politics.

Platner, who previously told the public no more scandals were coming, denied the allegations and attacked the accuser.

Following Racicot’s allegations, Lyndsey Fifield expanded upon earlier claims of troubling behavior by stating that Platner removed condoms without consent. Removing condoms without consent is charged by prosecutors under general sexual assault and battery laws in jurisdictions that don’t yet have specific laws targeting this form of assault.

The morning that led into Platner’s campaign suspension, a woman he previously dated penned an op-ed in Newsweek stating unequivocally that she believed both accusers.

The fallout from this race could have national implications as control of the U.S. Senate hangs in the balance. Serious questions remain about how Democrats found themselves in this situation in the first place. Outsider candidate campaigns are common throughout the country as populist revolts against broken political establishments continue to rise. We will continue to have relatively untested candidates running until this nation reaches a new stasis, assuming it ever does.

As a political strategist, these are the pieces of advice I’d offer to Democratic voters, volunteers and staffers navigating a political landscape filled with untested candidates:

• Take the first scandal seriously. Platner’s bizarre controversy involving a Nazi-affiliated tattoo raised immediate vetting questions. That Platner had either not already realized his tattoo was offensive or deliberately hid this from the public was an immediate sign that Democrats were dealing with a reckless candidate. This was only confirmed as his past Internet history spilled into public view, alongside salacious sexting revelations. By the time the New York Times released a disturbing story outlining abusive behavior towards women, Graham’s protests that nothing more was coming out should’ve been treated as the lie that it was.

• Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire. Every candidate will find a way to explain away controversies and claim foul play by political enemies. Whether or not a candidate’s protestations are true, the persistence of controversy and the inability to effectively parry mean you’re dealing with a low-quality candidate. A good candidate either won’t invite such controversies or will be able to shut them down quickly. Candidates of good character have nothing to hide and the skill to make that clear. Platner turned out to be a dishonest candidate with much to hide.

• Vet candidates for the digital era. As mentioned, Platner left a troubling paper trail that should’ve made him a nonstarter for the U.S. Senate, expressing offensive and violent thoughts on platforms like Reddit. Traditional vetting focuses on personal relationships within a candidate’s communities but undervalues digital life. In an era where much of our lives happens online, sometimes the most troubling parts of a candidate’s existence happen entirely outside the view of their friends and family. Platner’s demonstration of poor character was always available in the digital record.

• Believe survivors immediately. The rate of false allegations, especially with named individuals on the record, is remarkably low. My professional history includes significant time spent interviewing sexual assault survivors. I’ve spoken to survivors across sectors, including the military, entertainment industry and advocacy spaces. Every interview I’ve conducted throughout my career has a throughline: I have never once encountered an allegation of assault I later discovered not to be credible. The initial New York Times reporting should’ve been acknowledged for what it was: a credible story of abuse from survivors. There was no need to wait for a rape allegation to take action.

• Never dismiss allegations due to political affiliation. Much of the swatting away of the original troubling New York Times story had to do with the political affiliation of one of the women interviewed. The reliability of misconduct and assault allegations should never be judged by a source’s political affiliation. If a major publication vets a source and establishes credibility to the point of confidence in publishing an accusation of misconduct, which can create legal exposure, take that source seriously. Remember that sexual assault and domestic abuse are underreported, not overreported. When a person puts their name to an accusation in public, that alone is meaningful.

• Don’t assume consultants (like me) already did proper vetting. Much will be written about the consultants and operatives who packaged a campaign for Platner that did not match his actual background and character. Even his biography was dishonest. Unfortunately, local media and voters must remain on high alert for campaigns thrust upon them by professional political players more concerned with success than sincerity. As someone who works in this field, I can tell you that for each of us who take the ethics of our job seriously, if imperfectly, there are way more who view themselves as hired guns and do not care.

The Democratic Party didn’t have to find itself in this position. Fingers will be pointed for many days to come. But the first place all of us should take a long, hard look is in the mirror. Whether or not we were involved with this race or did anything wrong at all, each of us has a role to play in holding ourselves and our communities accountable to ensure that the names on our ballots reflect the character we wish to see in our leaders. This moment provides sobering lessons for everyone.

As democracy further erodes in the U.S., especially around campaign finance, opportunists will find more and more opportunities to enrich and empower themselves at the expense of the American people. We cannot allow them to succeed.

New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) just had an even better primary season than the shockwave 2025 win of now-Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Out of a ten-candidate legislative slate including U.S. Congress, New York State Senate, and New York State Assembly, only a single candidate lost. Even that loss comes with an asterisk, as Mamdani opted not to endorse in the race to oust Assemblymember Jordan Wright in what everyone I’ve spoken to interprets as an attempt to ensure Manhattan Democratic Party Leader Keith Wright stayed out of the way in NYC-DSA’s successful bid to overthrow Rep. Adriano Espaillat.

The results were as follows:

Wins: 9

• Claire Valdez, NY-7

• Darializa Avila Chevalier, NY-13

• Aber Kawas, SD-12

• Samantha Kattan, AD-37

• David Orkin, AD-38

• Christian Celeste Tate, AD-54

• Eon Huntley, AD-56

• Illapa Sairitupac, AD-65

• Diana Moreno, AD-36 (Note: This candidate also won the special election in February to replace Mamdani in the Assembly.)

Loss: 1

• Conrad Blackburn, AD-70

Judging by the reaction of many Democrats starting the day after the election, voters of their own party have just turned the keys over to a roving band of vicious antisemites hellbent on destroying all that makes New York City great. If that’s the contempt these leaders are demonstrating in public, I can only imagine the discourse in private. The difference in rhetoric between the conservative end of establishment Democrats and the Editorial Board of the New York Post gets harder to identify by the day.

But an intractable problem remains for the Democratic establishment: its machines are dwindling in our city as NYC-DSA takes off like a rocket ship. Traditional Democrats would do well to notice the silver lining. For an ascendent movement looking to seize the apparatus of a party, NYC-DSA is downright friendly compared to the frothing-at-the-mouth MAGA overthrow of the GOP.

Incoming NYC-DSA candidates have often remained measured and collegial, expressing willingness to work on shared goals with their traditional Democratic colleagues and sending out a leading voice of their own organization to make that point. We might be witnessing the least hostile hostile-takeover of a party in the history of political parties.

But that isn’t going to last if dishonest accusations of extremism, antisemitism and other various slanders continue to fly from disgruntled Democrats, especially when a growing majority of such accusations are starting to look more like intentional misinformation designed to weaken political opponents than genuine ignorance.

The rhetoric around NY-13 winner Darializa Avila Chevalier is especially heated, with Pod Save America host Jon Favreau getting in on the accusations of antisemitism after she already faced a barrage of actual bigotry from Team Espaillat. The version of her that exists in the minds of her detractors and the one who exists in real life are almost irreconcilable. This is not to say Avila Chevalier has never made an impolitic remark, something she acknowledges, or deny that she is left-wing on foreign policy in a manner to which many Americans are unaccustomed. Most of us fail to realize the extent of the default-Right position of our foreign policy across party lines. But the caricature of Avila Chevalier that exists in the right-wing and establishment Democrat ecosphere is a combination of tropes that include more than a touch of obvious racism.

There was one alarming antisemite elected this year for a hyper-local volunteer party position. But she was not endorsed by NYC-DSA, despite a misleading headline, and faced universal condemnation from every NYC-DSA leader who was made aware and asked about it. Of course that’s the case, because the democratic socialist organization counts both young Jewish New Yorkers and antiracists of all backgrounds among its core active membership.

Our political reality is that anti-oligarchy politics and opposition to our government’s status quo position on Israel represent the mainstream. This is the supermajority position of our party’s voters across the country and increasingly represents the views of Americans at large.

Even for establishment figures who don’t like our electoral reality, there’s no strategic upside to feuding with a growing sect of leaders and electorally engaged young people who, right now, have their finger on the pulse of voters and demonstrate a willingness to collaborate. Voters aren’t going to reward establishment Democrats who dig in their heels and continue to try to paint entirely mainstream views among young people, not even just on the Left, as somehow extreme.

The best path forward for establishment Democrats, in New York and everywhere else, is the same as it is for all of us: beginning every new relationship from a place of good faith. Our party may be changing, but it doesn’t have to look like the chaos of Republicans.

We can do so much better than our failing status quo and, with growing pains, enter into a new era of successful anti-war and pro-worker Democratic politics. Providing the antidote to President Donald Trump and his party’s dark vision will require bold new voices, even those that challenge deeply held assumptions. The voters have made it crystal clear they’re hungry for change. All that remains is for an intransigent Democratic establishment to soften and begin to heed the will of its own voters.

A reeling Democratic establishment watched as the results rolled in on Tuesday night. One of New York’s strongest machines had collapsed in a seeming instant, bested by the rising power of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) and popular New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

In echoes of the improbable rise of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was visibly shocked upon learning she had defeated Rep. Joe Crowley, the election was called for Mamdani-endorsed activist Darializa Avila Chevalier on the night of the election. She even has a three-letter acronym: DAC. Rep. Adriano Espaillat, pro-Israel chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was defeated.

The Squadriano, City & State editor-in-chief Jeff Coltin’s viral moniker for the allies and machine of soon-to-be former Rep. Adriano Espaillat, couldn’t save him from Avila Chevalier, who has never previously held elected office and faced sustained criticism from opponents for her activism against Israel, including the day after the October 7th attack by Hamas, along with her opposition to former Vice President Kamala Harris. A prominent anti-Avila Chevalier mailer even had her infamous “Fuck Kamala Harris” quote plastered in giant letters. Voters were unmoved. Or perhaps they were moved, just not in the intended direction.

While Avila Chevalier’s was the night’s most notable win, NYC-DSA also picked up NY-7 with the expected success of Assemblymember Claire Valdez against Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. The organization could credibly count the defeat of Rep. Dan Goldman as a success even if it didn’t officially endorse former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander as Mamdani did. (NYC-DSA managed to have its cake and eat it too by not ideologically compromising to endorse Lander while many of its members worked tirelessly to take out the pro-Israel Goldman.)

This wasn’t a successful night for traditional progressives and unions, but specifically NYC-DSA and the pro-Palestine Left.

Assemblymember Alex Bores ran a progressive-except-Palestine campaign backed by a litany of unions and progressive organizations. He was defeated by Assemblymember Micah Lasher, who used a traditional establishment model to succeed. Where did the votes go that Bores needed to prevail? Some of the votes were available to his left, including among voters drawn to Nina Schwalbe, the only candidate to explicitly acknowledge Israel’s genocide, and Jack Schlossberg, who positioned himself to the left of both Bores and Lasher on Israel.

What about a situation where NYC-DSA is pitted against the traditional progressive machine in a race where the candidates run on nearly identical platforms? Reynoso proved to be such a test case: NYC-DSA’s Valdez handily bested Reynoso’s Working Families Party coalition.

Results followed the same pattern at the state level, where NYC-DSA candidates won race after race. The only conceded loss came against an incumbent in a race where Mamdani stayed out, presumably for complicated political reasons that would’ve impacted Avila Chevalier.

Tonight’s results may shock an establishment accustomed to permanent rule, but they aren’t a surprise to those who have watched the trend lines among voters over the past few cycles, both in New York City and around the nation. The Democratic Party is deep in the throes of a Tea Party overthrow I identified last year.

Traditional partisan trust among both parties’ own voters has collapsed into a populist revolt, supercharged by massive wealth disparity and revulsion about both major parties’ support for Israel as it engages in an internationally recognized campaign of genocide.

Both Mamdani and NYC-DSA’s winning candidates used commitment to opposing genocide and fighting oligarchy as electoral motivators. If a single story is to be written about the results in New York City, it should be about the collapse of the pro-Israel consensus and establishment Democratic politics.

As goes New York, so goes the nation?

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UPDATE [June 6, 2026]

Peter Sterne of City & State provided the following quote:

“After speaking with you, I heard from some sources I trust that it really was an explicit agreement. I know, I know – more anonymous sources! Until Espaillat or Mamdani go on the reco…

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Earlier this month, Americans across the political spectrum, including this author, called for the resignation or expulsion of now-former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-California). Swalwell resigned on April 14.

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“AI slop refers to low-quality, mass-produced digital content—text, images, video, or audio—created by artificial intelligence with minimal human oversight.”

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As the Democrats face down a midterm election cycle and the start of the 2028 presidential race, an unlikely name has emerged as a powerbroker (or litmus test): Hasan Piker.

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