On Election Day, I awoke to no fewer than seven press releases from the National Republican Senatorial Committee tying Democratic Senate candidates to New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.
It stands to reason. President Donald Trump’s job approval ratings are tumbling. Republicans control Congress. The economy is shaky. What better political squirrel to have voters chase than an avowed socialist who wants to raise taxes; has, in the past, appeared hostile to the police and has declined to support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state?
This is how Republicans plan to overcome the historic midterm curse of an unpopular president. “Zohran Mamdani isn’t just another fringe Democrat. He’s the future of their party,” Mike Marinella, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP’s campaign arm, told me. “His socialist agenda, anti-police rhetoric and radical economic views are now the blueprint House Democrats are stuck defending in the midterms.”
But the fight over Mamdani, 34, between left and right could pale in comparison to the brewing battle between center-left and far-left. And that’s what really matters here, given the national media spotlight that follows every Big Apple mayor.
Progressives who favor a bold, liberal populism are pointing to Mamdani, the little-known New York state assemblyman, as an example of the kind of politics they should embrace to build a movement capable of winning national elections. Mamdani, says Adam Green, cofounder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, “has the traits that Democrats should try to replicate, which is having fresh, forward-looking ideas, a shake-up the system vibe and ideas that connect with local voters on pocketbook issues while challenging billionaire power.”
Pragmatists warn that overreading Mamdani’s success in an overwhelmingly blue city would lead to ruin in the battleground states and swing districts the party needs to recapture the House in 2026 and the presidency in 2028. “You can’t win swing districts by playing politics that work in New York City. It’s that simple. Democrats have to decide: Do we want to win?” said Al From, the Democratic operative who led the charge to make the party more competitive after President Ronald Reagan was reelected in a landslide in 1984. From’s group, the now-defunct Democratic Leadership Council, propelled President Bill Clinton to the White House in 1992.
Democrat Abigail Spanberger’s victory in the Virginia governor’s race will only sharpen the debate over the party’s direction. Spanberger is a former congresswoman who, in 2018, flipped a Republican-held suburban swing district anchored in Richmond by positioning herself as a centrist. The former Central Intelligence Agency officer sought the same middle ground in her campaign for governor and won big. “This is the way,” many pragmatic Democrats are going to say, to borrow the tagline from The Mandalorian.
But progressives are nonetheless unimpressed, pointing to Spanberger’s weak Republican opponent, Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, and the benefit of running in a state with a significant federal workforce under constant threat from the Trump administration.
The left has been even less impressed with U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill, another Democrat who flipped a Republican-held suburban district in 2018 and is now New Jersey’s governor-elect. Progressives are as likely to have as much confidence that her type of consensus-oriented politics can excite voters in 2026 and 2028 as centrists have in Mamdani’s appeal. Which is to say: not much.
“Zohran Mamdani and Mikie Sherrill are a study in contrasts that the entire Democratic Party should look to when choosing candidates that have certain traits in 2026 and 2028,” Green told me before Election Day. “She has no vision and was outflanked by the Republican candidate on working people’s issues while campaigning solely as an anti-Trump candidate.”
The Democratic Party’s problems are less about policy and more about finding candidates who are charismatic and fresh-faced. At some point, however, Democrats collectively are going to have to come together on at least some critical policy choices. Within the party, there are real disagreements on cultural issues like transgender rights; public safety issues like border security; foreign policy issues like the U.S.-Israel alliance and fiscal issues like whether to raise taxes, and if so, on whom.
Style matters. But so does substance.
