Democratic Socialist Wins Signal Return of Working Class Focus
When New York City Democrats voted for three democratic socialists backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, it was likened to a political earthquake. And in a sense it surely was.
“I believe that the country is in the midst of a tremendous upheaval and we can’t talk about the victories of the democratic socialists without talking about the mood of the country,” said labor lawyer/philanthropist Diane Middleton. Polls show Trump is uniquely unpopular. “The majority of people in this country are disgusted with the Trump administration. They do not agree with anything the Trump administration is doing,” she said. “Polls show that over 70% of the people want universal medical care, they want Medicare for All, they are fed up with corruption and particularly income inequality.”
In a way, “This is nothing new,” she said. “Bernie Sanders in Our Revolution has been talking about these issues for years.” But it’s more sharply focused. “People are seeing what’s happening, particularly the news that Trump made $2 billion first year in office. People are not happy about it.” On top of that we have “an unauthorized war with Iran and genocide of the Palestinian people.”
But the polls show something else, she noted. “The majority of people in this country have a worse opinion of the Democrats than they do of the Republicans. Plainly, the American people are ready for change.”
While the New York elections grabbed headlines, long-time grassroots activist leader Patti Crane sees things a bit differently.
“Colorado to me is a purer test case,” she said, referring to 29-year-old lawyer Melat Kiros’s victory over 15-term incumbent Diana DeGette, which happened a week later on June 30. “I believe that the Colorado results are actually more significant, because the Colorado situation lacks the complications that seem so prevalent in New York,” she said. The national media was largely oblivious to some of this — such as “disappointment with [New York Gov.] Kathy Hochul” over broken promises, but there was also intense involvement and backlash against the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), as well as the well-recognized influence of Mamdani.
In Colorado, in contrast, “This was a very productive, healthy, decent congresswoman, Diana DeGette, who had served 15 terms and was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and really had a lot of good positions,” Crane said. “And essentially, the people in a very, very blue Denver district said, ‘yeah we had a good gal, we put her in there 15 terms at the time, and we’re still going to replace her with someone more progressive.’”
That sort of upset was “almost unheard of,” said Middleton. DeGette “first took office before Melat Kiros was born, and the fact that Kiros had never run for office before, had no political experience, I mean is just astonishing in terms of the victory,” she said. “So I think we’re going to see this all over the country and I think it’s not just the posts. It’s not just New York and California.”
Still, it’s worth reflecting on what happened in New York.
Former city comptroller Brad Ladner defeated Congressman Dan Golden — a wealthy incumbent who rose to public prominence as a prosecutor in Trump’s first impeachment trial — by more than 30 points. Those facts alone underscore a dramatic shift: being prominently anti-Trump is not enough for Democratic voters — they want something to vote for, not just against. Nor is having a lot of money and establishment support enough to survive politically.
Ladner’s victory was the least shocking of all, given his long history in city politics — 16 years as a nonprofit leader and 12 years on the city council before being elected comptroller. Much more surprising was 32-year-old community organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier’s defeat of five-term incumbent Adriano Espaillat, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Her margin was only 3%, but it was a genuine David-vs-Goliath struggle. Similarly, first-term New York Assemblywoman Claire Valdez, a former union organizer, defeated Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso — the anointed successor to 17-term incumbent Nydia Velázquez — by a hefty 20%.
Added to that, Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates won nine out of 10 state legislature races as well. “The Mamdani endorsed candidates that won are a harbinger of things to come. They are emblematic of the mood of the American people, and all you have to do is look at the Colorado primary,” Middleton said.
The establishment backlash was swift, led by Donald Trump ludicrously insisting they were “communists” who “want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life.”
But DSA Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has heard it all before.
“The one thing that we know is that the Republican party’s brand is fear,” she said on MS NOW. “They have to constantly churn out what they want people to be afraid of — to be afraid of socialists, to be afraid of immigrants, to be afraid of women. … They constantly want Americans in fear of somebody. Because if you are not afraid of someone who is your neighbor, you’re going to realize who’s actually pick-pocketing you. And that is the large corporations that are engaged in profiteering and jacking up your prices for no good reason. It’s going to be this administration that is engaged in record levels of swindling, thefts, tariffs.”
If that sounds like something any Democrat could say, that’s very much the point.
But a group of 10 “centrist” House Democrats and five house candidates quickly formed in opposition, echoing Trump’s rhetoric. One member anonymously told Axios, “there’s going to be a war” between factions, and by smearing democratic socialists as “bomb-throwers, not problem solvers.”
But those accusations are as false as Trump’s. The most prominent member of the centrist group, Josh Gottheimer, played a key role in derailing Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, which Biden had developed in partnership with Bernie Sanders after the 2020 primaries. Gottheimer himself was the bomb-thrower, blowing up the problem-solving partnership that democratic socialists had forged with Biden.
And long-time Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein called the centrist-threatened war “A Non-Fight Not Worth Fighting,” noting that “taken together, expenditures on Social Security and Medicare amount to about 9% of GDP. When it comes to such ‘socialism,’ we’re more than a little bit pregnant.”
“We know who the enemy is,” Bernstein went on to say. “It is the status quo. The polling, both electoral and consumer sentiment, couldn’t be clearer on this. And to shout ‘commie!’ or ‘socialist!’ at someone with potentially credible ideas on how to wield public policy to help solve real problems is to defend the status quo.”
Crane had a similar view. “Those of us over a certain age remember all the propaganda about socialism that the neoliberals and the corporatists, you know, poured on American citizens, beginning with the postwar era. … We were all educated to abhor socialism and it was because what we were abhorring was communism, not socialism. And there was never any good teaching about the difference,” Crane said. “We have a whole generation of people who say, ‘Well, what we got now does not work, period. It does not work for the regular citizens. So we gotta get something.”
Here in LA, the question is whether New York or Colorado better describes how the mayoral contest shapes up. With Spencer Pratt out of the picture, “I am so thrilled that instead we’re going to have in LA what I would consider a pretty good referendum on more progressive policies versus pretty progressive policies,” Crane said. Similar to Colorado, “We can possibly have a true policy-focused election debate,” especially if “instead of the sort of harsh adversarial debate context … we could have more of a roundtable conversation, where the conversation is more thoughtful and more policy-oriented and less about gotchas and more about actually delineating the differences.” The townhall format is one way of doing that the media is familiar with.
On the other hand, LA, like New York, has a lot of complications, as Crane put it. Nothing illustrates that better than the recent decimation of the Charter Reform Commission’s recommendations at the hands of the city council. Not only was the commission’s coherent logic chopped to pieces, none of the most popular and urgent reforms survived, except for doubling park funding with a much longer phase-in. There was no movement at all on the commission’s strengthening democracy agenda, and little more on rebuilding trust through accountability.
City councilwoman and mayoral candidate Nithya Raman has been a leading advocate for charter reform, while Mayor Karen Bass delayed the process for almost a year, dragging her heels on appointing commission members — as Raman pointed out in a recent video. That delay was a prime reason that the council felt rushed, and unable to deal with the details of some reforms that otherwise might have passed. This underscores how locally, as well as nationally, there’s a yawning gap between voters’ desires and politicians’ responses — a gap that democratic socialists are working to close.
“Plainly, the American people are ready for change. And what is so amazing about the time period we’re in is that the American people are no longer afraid of labels like ‘socialist,’” said Middleton. “They are saying — because I think people like AOC, Bernie, and particularly Zohran Mamdani have made it so clear — that this is what they stand for. When AOC says, ‘I stand for Medicare for all. I stand for ending Citizens United. I stand for ending the corruption and bribery in Washington,’ people say, ‘Yeah that’s what I want. I don’t care what you call it.’”
In the end, Bernstein said, “If Mamdani and the other new-wave democratic socialists can deliver on the affordability and social justice agenda where status-quo purveyors — in both parties — have come up short, then they should and will win.”