Mayor Mamdani Flexes His Power in the Midterms

Last year, I spent three months embedded with a capital defense team.

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On Tuesday, a blowout in the New York primary cemented Mayor Zoran Mamdani as a local kingmaker. "What you all have shown this evening whether for status and belief states that in our Congress, is very year ago, it was not the end of a political movement." "That's one of the beginning!" All of this chosen candidates won, and their victories pointed to a growing movement within the Democratic Party.

Today, political reporter Nick Fandoz explains whether their victories help Democrats in the midterms, or put their chances of winning control of Congress at risk. "It's Thursday, June 25th." Nick Fandoz, welcome to The Daily. "So glad to be here."

Mayor Mamdani is having a very good couple of weeks, it seems.

"Yeah, an incredible couple of weeks. The nicks are NBA championships.

"The world cup, his beloved sporting event, is taking place just across the river in New Jersey, and this week, the mayor made a pretty audacious political gamble in a series of

“important congressional races in New York City, and he won every single one of them."”

"Okay, as much as I want to talk to you about the nicks, you are here to talk about Tuesday's election results, and I want to understand what these results in New York's primary tells us about the strength of Mayor Mamdani, of course, this rising political figure in the Democratic Party, but also what these results mean for the national political picture. So first, let's just talk about what were the results on Tuesday night."

"So on Tuesday night, voters across New York City went to the polls in a series of very competitive congressional primaries. Now, in New York, a very democratic city, the primaries actually are the elections that end up deciding who is going to fill these seats. And Mayor Mamdani did something unusual in these elections." Where his predecessors have tended to try and stay out of local politics of the kind of

bitter inner party fights that could divide their coalition or zap their political capital, he decided he was going to put all of his on the line for a series of candidates, from the left, many of them Democratic Socialists, who share his vision for the city, and he thought could win these seats in Congress for their movement. This is a pretty extraordinary gamble, just six months into his term. If he succeeded, it would give him a foothold in Congress,

where he could inject the economic populist ideas from the left, his views on Israel, and other issues into the national conversation that Democrats are having right now about their identity. But, if he lost, he'd be squandering a lot of his own political capital, he'd be empowering people who are trying to stand in his way. And frankly, I think he'd make even some of his allies think this guy's not as strong as we thought. Maybe we don't need to go

along with what he's talking about. Okay, so you've just explained the gamble of it. Let's talk a little bit about how he decided to take the risks that he did. So to answer this, I want to go back all the way to last year's mayoral campaign. Mymdani was a little known state lawmaker. He was a Democratic Socialist. He was a kind of guy that went and got into the race for mayor. Nobody thought he could win. And a year ago this week, he did in remarkable fashion. He'd be the enderquomo

“this titan of Democratic politics. So from the start, it's important to remember that mymdani”

is an insurgent politician and he's a movement politician. By the time last fall comes around in its clear, he's going to be elected mayor in the general election. He's already looking ahead to this year's race, to figure out how can I expand that movement? New York, we know anything's possible with a great team. I'm Brad Lander and I'll block billionaires from buying our elections.

The first candidate he identifies is Brad Lander. Now, Lander was actually a fellow mayoral candidate

who mymdani had beat, but then they locked arms to take on the Democratic establishment. And mmdani said to him as the election is coming to a close, you know where we could use you most

you're from against Dan Goldman, who was a Democratic incumbent, a former federal prosecutor, but crucially did not endorse mmdani in last year's election. And historically has pretty close ties to Israel, which has become one of the animating issues obviously of the mayor's political movement. Is it kind of bold of mmdani to take on an incumbent politician in this way? Absolutely. But in this case, Lander had a long track record in this district, and I think

both of them knew that he had a very good shot of beating Goldman and flipping this. And

crucially, Lander was willing to do something that Goldman never was. Which was good evening.

Welcome to New York once debate for the attempt congressional district. Both these guys consider themselves liberal Zionists, they're both Jewish. And Goldman has been critical of Benjamin Netanyahu in the Israeli government, but he's drawn a line at calling what's happening Gaza

“at genocide. Israel is not the most important issue in this district. What is the most important?”

And he's not completely denounced groups like APAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, even if he didn't take their money in this election. Lander was willing to do those things he voted for every U.S. military aid package to Israel. He won't recognize it as genocide. He's never used the word occupation to describe. He was willing to be much more vociferous in his criticism of Israel and in separating himself from the kind of pro-Israel political forces

in the United States. And for Maldani, that was crucial.

Well, that really shows you how divisive Israel has become. That's right. But the way that he made this campaign issue, and that he figured it would resonate with the voters in the district that he's known for a very long time, was to basically say that Dan Goldman is beholden to a special interest. He is taking money from the pro-Israel lobby. He is taking money from corporate interests. And that is affecting the way that he represents you in Washington. And that was a pretty powerful

“critique at a moment. I think when a lot of Democrats are thinking about the entrenched interests”

of money and corporate power in the United States. So it took this rather small distinction and made it a bigger one where he could differentiate himself.

And all of what you've just described, of course, drives with Maldani's positions when he first ran

from air. Absolutely. But his intervention here also started to raise another question, which is basically how involved is Maldani this new mayor who's going to be trying to govern an ungovernable city is, people like to call New York, I'm involved to see going to get in politics. And we start to get some answers pretty quickly last fall. In one counter-intuitive move, he actually intervened to shut down a primary challenge by an ally of his in the DSA,

who was looking to challenge Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic Leader. And after his private warnings to this ally didn't get through Maldani actually showed up at a public forum and made a case for why it would hurt his mayoralty in their cause to go after Jeffries in that way to pick such a big fight. Just basically telling the guy to stand down. Exactly. And so that might have been where this all ended. But in late November, one of Maldani's allies in Congress,

Nidia Velasquez, who's been there for 30 years, announces unexpectedly that she's going to retire.

“There's going to be a lot of people interested in the seat. I believe you said there's no air”

apparent. I want to see a strong independent progressive public servant. And the district that she represents is one of the city's farthest left. It's also the place that Maldani ran up the largest margins anywhere in the city. And so when she retires, he sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put one of his allies into that seat and expand his foothold in Congress beyond just lander. It's too good to pass up. As it happens, Maldani had someone very particular in mind.

A young assembly woman named Claire Valdez, who had been his first endorser and the race for mayor and a fellow Democratic Socialist, Velasquez didn't know her at all. It is what it is. I have a lower respect for the mayor. And I guess that we disagree this time. She felt Maldani blindsided her meddling in the race. She ends up backing another candidate, the Brooklynboro president, Antonio Reinozo. Knowing my district, knowing my communities,

I decided to step in an end or something, Antonio. And why did he prefer his candidate Valdez over the handpicks successor from Velasquez? It's a great question. And on paper, there's not a huge amount of difference in these two candidates in terms of policy. They both want to abolish ice. They both have called what happened in Gaza genocide. They both support raising taxes on the rich as the mayor does.

But Valdez comes out of the mayor's political movement. Remember I said he's a movement guy.

Claire was there. If you look at photographs of the New York left over the last eight years,

“a canvas in 2018, you a W picket line. And he felt basically, yeah, that guy's progressive.”

I like him. But Claire is my candidate. And now we need to be able to do everything we can to get her across that country. And what follows is this really fascinating race that drives a kind of geographic line through the district and through Moldani's coalition. Where on one side, you have young, very left, maybe DSA inclined voters who are more often white and college educated than their neighbors who have moved into this district over the last

10 years. And on the other side, you had Renault So and Velaskas who represented and were appealing to kind of the old guard of the neighborhood, the large Puerto Rican and Dominican populations that grew there, the working class black populations, the other immigrant populations in neighborhoods that have not gentrified in quite the same way. Which is so interesting because here's Moldani, a candidate who had attracted both of those groups now driving a wedge between the two of them

with his endorsement of Valdez. Right. And so Moldani is jeopardizing the very coalition that he works so hard to build. And it might have stopped there actually in another year, but he kept going. Because as the spring progressed, he had his eye on another district. This one was in upper men hadn't in parts of the Bronx. It's a heavily Latino district. It's got a big black population. But similarly to the race we were just talking about, a gentrifying white community that's coming in

and changing parts of that district. Now the interesting wrinkle here is that initially Moldani stayed out of this race because he had actually promised the incoming congressman, Adriano Espia,

“that he would be with him. Espia had given Moldani a key endorsement during the mayoral race.”

Brought along Latino support that he needed at the time. And in private, we've reported, they had a handshake deal. The mayor said, "I'll return the favor if you ever need it." And so even though his allies on the left were lining up behind a challenger to Espia, a woman named Daria Lisa of Ulysschevolia. Moldani initially stayed on the sidelines. But as the spring progresses, an aviola chevalier is picking up momentum. Is the DSA endorses her? He starts singing and it was

a "I can't stand the sidelines of this." She's got a real shot of winning. And if she doesn't win, and I stayed out of it, well, that could be on me. There's an opportunity with my popularity and that district, but the resources I can bring to it that I can help push her there. So he decides

to add her to his slate, the third candidate. And this is the decision more than any other that really

makes the Democratic establishment black and Latino Democrats, labor unions go ballistic. Because they say it's one thing to go against an incumbent like Dan Goldman in a district that he's out of step with. It's another to compete for an open seat and upset the outgoing congresswoman. But to go after the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic caucus, the first formally undocumented immigrant in Congress, someone who actually is objectively pretty progressive on every issue

“except for Israel and that's key is a bridge further. I mean, that is much more provocative.”

And somebody that Moldani had given his assurances to that he would support in this very race. Precisely. And so a lot of them look at that and also say, "What good is the mayor's word if he's going to go back on it? Here, how can we trust this guy going forward?" So now, with three districts now in play, this fight just kind of keeps growing outward. So labor unions become very involved. Prominent New York Democrats like Jeffries, who are close with S. Bayot, get involved. They start

campaigning on the ground super PACs, start dropping millions of dollars for and against candidates and both sides of the race. The mayor throws himself aggressively into the slate. And in its worth noting, he has gone way above and beyond what even an endorsing mayor might do in a race. We need clear bell dance. Daddy, Alisa, Avila, Sevalier! And proud lander, fighting for us. He's been raising money. He's been offering strategy advice.

He was out on the campaign trail in the final weeks. Exactly. He held a big rally with Bernie Sanders. Some of it, frankly, gets ugly. Avila Chavallier, who is a PhD student and relatively untested, it turns out that her history as an activist left her with a trove of inflammatory and polarizing tweets. Among the most circulated were tweets that attacked the Democratic Party. In one of them, she said, "F comal Harris." And other ones expressed policy positions that

really far outside of the mainstream. So again, among the most prominent was one where she basically said,

Clearly, very out of step with the majority of Americans. Exactly.

“Okay, I can see why you described all of these risks and mumdonis taking a big gamble in this race,”

because if these candidates end up losing, not only has mumdonis not installed his allies in Congress, he has really alienated people who supported him in his initial race for mayor. He has potentially

damaged his coalition for the next time he might want to run and never mind the fact that he has

made it harder for him to accomplish his agenda. And made some pretty powerful enemies. Sure. And, of course, we know, in the end, gamble pays off. Mamdoni had a huge victory on Tuesday night, because all of his candidates won. All of his candidates won. And I just want to add in convincing fashion. Lander won by almost 30 points. Valdez won by about 20 points. And a viewers should Valdez had a narrower margin, but somewhat comfortable four points over a powerful incumbent.

They were margin so big that even mayor Mamdoni and his allies were surprised. And so big that they sent shockwaves that went not just throughout the five boroughs of New York City, but frankly will be on. And right now, are rattling the foundations of the Democratic Party. Will be right back. I'm Jonathan Knight, and I'm the general manager of New York Times Games.

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Nick, I want to talk about what this clean sweep that we saw from the DSA actually means.

So let's start small and go big. So first, what does it mean from Mom Donnie and his agenda

“here in New York City? I think that for the mayor, one of the most important things that”

this election showed is that he was no fluke. In fact, he may be a political kingmaker. In New York. That his political capital can be transferred to other candidates and give them a real shot at winning races across the city. It's interesting that a guy who essentially ran against the establishment who derided the whole idea of kingmakers has now become one. Yeah, I think he would say I'm not a kingmaker, I'm a movement leader, but I think kingmaker is an

app term. I mean, this is someone now who seems to be among the most popular political figures in New York. As his own team would say, he has a huge amount of political capital and he's not afraid to use it. I think that's the other thing of this is showing us. He is willing to take risks. In this case, the risk paid off and he not only now has new allies, but he also has other Democrats in the system, people in the city council, people in Albany, the governor who are seeing

that his political power is real and they're going to have to respond to it. And so when they get into fights about his agenda, about how to pay for child care, about whether to raise taxes, you can really bet that going forward, he's going to be coming in with a stronger hand. Right. What about on the national level, though, Nick? Because we know in Congress, he came Jeffrey's house minority leader, he has been focused on winning control back

“from the Republicans. So what does he make of all of this?”

First, he came Jeffrey's there very specific implications and much broader ones for his party.

Specifically, two of the candidates in this race, Avila Chivalet, and Valdez have not committed to backing him in a leadership fight next year when he's trying to become speaker. They could become real thorns in his side in Washington. But I think that the bigger implication, both for Jeffrey's politics in New York City and in Washington, is that this is going to give the left a much bigger platform than the Mombani West specifically to advance its ideas at a time when

Democrats are really in this big national argument about what they want to be as a party. And Mombani and his allies have a very specific vision. It's anti-corporate power, it's big government, it's taxed the rich, it's pay for social services to help working people and it's pull the United States away from its alliance with Israel. And on each of those issues, now they're going to be speaking in a louder way in a way that frankly may cause problems for

in lost in deep blue New York City, but in swing districts across the country. But this new wave of progressive Democrats, they obviously represent a lot of frustration that Democrats have with the Democratic Party with the Democratic leadership and that's got to be on the minds of some of the more established Democrats, of course. And I wonder whether it's possible to pull apart how much we saw on Tuesday could be attributed to that frustration

“and how much can be attributed to the pull of Mombani as you have described it?”

I think there is no doubt as we've been watching primaries play out across the country this year. And frankly, ever since Donald Trump was elected, the Democrats are really frustrated with

their leadership. They're frustrated that they lost to Trump in the first place and they're frustrated

that they have not been able to stop him from enacting much of his agenda over the first couple of years. And so in any election like this, I think there is a degree to which voters are coming out to vote against the status quo. They're going to look at any candidate that's backed by leadership and be against them. And that's got to be concerning for Jeffries because if that spreads across the country enough, he could end up with an unruly caucus or nominees

and close contests that can't win against Republicans. But I also think that there is something undeniably particular happening in New York City where Mombani who is in some ways a product of that discontent himself is also able to kind of harness it and put a frame around it and direct

“that energy behind a particular alternative. And so what I think he did in these races that was”

risky but also powerful was by associating himself so much with these other candidates,

he was kind of able to link together races that might otherwise have been sleepy, disparate primaries thought about different things and make them all kind of a referendum on what the democratic party is right now. His version versus the status quo. And so that kind of amplifies both the discontent and it offers a particular alternative and tries to put some force behind it so that it can become more relevant in national politics and New York City of

course isn't some ways an anomaly but in some ways it is often been a leading indicator in politics. I mean this is the place after all where Jeffries is from but so is Chuck Schumer the Senate majority leader and it's the place that in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez won her own surprise

democratic primary against Joe Crowley and launched basically a progressive movement that did

meaningfully push the democratic party left and led to all kinds of incumbents falling across

“the country. So I think anyone who doesn't take this seriously does so with their own peril.”

Okay I understand how all of these dynamics play out in places that are very blue where it's basically Democrat versus Democrat right but just looking forward to the midterms, the very far left politics that these candidates won on. I wonder how that might translate to races that are much tighter in places that are purple for example right or saying something like I don't believe in deportations is really going to turn off voters potentially.

I think this is a question a lot of Democrats are asking today and those who are on the winning side would say well they're going to help us. The democratic party is losing across the country because regular people are not into our ideas they think we're not fighting for them with think we're not committed to the right issues and we're trying to push the party towards a place that we think it can win. Now a lot of those people are not actually living in the kind of

districts you're talking about out in the suburbs of New York or in the middle of the country in the Midwest wherever it may be and the candidates running there I think look at these results and our little worried Republicans have shown they are very adept at taking the extreme comments of lefties in New York City or Chicago or L.A. and broadcasting them all over the country and saying you may think you're voting for this reasonable moderate candidate but you're voting

to empower a party that is so crazy and outside of the mainstream they're going to do X or Y or Z. And that's exactly what we started to hear from Republicans just hours after the election results became clear. The people that they're pushing are communist and this country is not going to have communist president Trump himself. Speaker Mike Johnson in the House. The Democrat party, the socialist the Marxists have nominated some of the most radical candidates to ever run for

office and their running for Congress warned that Marxists and socialists like those in New York City were going to be cropping up all over the country. The insurgent left is on the rise. Right if these DSA members end up working against the Democratic brand nationally in the midterms that could actually feel like a loss for mom Donnie right like he could get blamed for taking a big risk on these candidates that is then seen as backfiring. I think that is certainly a risk

to get blamed and attacked anyway he's already one of the most visible left leading politicians in the country. And so why not take a big swing at trying to push the party to a place where he thinks he might actually help them by advancing ideas that he really believes are not only attractive to many Democrats but also can be attractive and persuasive and activating to people who have either been turned off by the political process altogether or maybe voted for Republicans who feel like

basically the system is not working for them. The people who frankly he was able to bring out

in large numbers in his mayoral action who don't typically vote or in some cases had voted for Donald Trump for president and then came around to support him. Does this Nick feel to you like a potential mirror of what happened on the right which is that populist took over the main stream

“of the Republican Party? I think in many ways there are similarities. I mean whether you look at”

the Tea Party after President Obama was elected or you look at Donald Trump's rise in the 2016 Republican primary. There was a very similar situation on their side after losing a series of elections. There was a faction within the Republican Party who came in and said, "We've got it all wrong. We've got to change drastically if we're going to win across the country." And they went on to start winning races and we find ourselves where we do now. Democrats right now are trying to

figure out how do we can our mojo back and I don't think we're going to have a true answer for a couple of years until we have candidates on the presidential debate stage and vying for the attention of the entire country. It sounds like the big question going into the midterms is

basically whether the far left views of these candidates that might be seen is turning off a

lot of moderate voters, whether that will push more people away than the broadly popular economic and anti-Israel messaging frankly that we have seen that might attract them.

“The midterms will give us one answer to that question and I think that the presidential election”

that's waiting right behind it will give an even bigger one. Because Democrats not just here in New York but in races from Maine to Michigan to other places are testing out their tolerance right now for ideas and labels that previously would have been seen as outside the mainstream that might have been seen as disqualifying. And deciding is that something that we like is that something we're willing to tolerate because of the energy and dynamism and the freshness of what they're

bringing to the table? Or do we want to retreat to something more familiar to try and win over our neighbors who are not already on board? And that's gonna be a rockist multi-stage fight. And so Tuesday night New York might just have been the opening bell. Nick, thanks so much. It was my pleasure. We'll be right back.

“Here's what else we need to know today. On Wednesday President Trump plunged Congress into chaos”

after he abruptly canceled the signing of a bipartisan housing measure. Demanding once again, the Republicans passed highly contentious voting restrictions ahead of the midterms. Even though they say they don't have the votes needed to pass. Republicans had hoped that the sweeping housing bill would project a unified effort to address affordability, one of the top issues for voters before Congress headed home for the fourth

of July break. Instead, as a stage for the signing ceremony was being erected in the capital, the President blindsided his allies, and boldened critics of the bill, and effectively brought Congress to a standstill. And to major earthquake struck central Venezuela on Wednesday, causing buildings to collapse in the capital and to people to swarm into the streets.

The first earthquake of 7.2 magnitude was followed less than a minute later by 7.5 magnitude

earthquake according to the U.S. Monitoring agencies. The stronger earthquake was the largest at the country since 1900. Neither the scale of the damage nor its human toll was immediately clear, but given the earthquake's power and the large number of vulnerable buildings in the Stricon region, fears of a widespread disaster were high. Today's episode was produced by Jack Dacidoro, Stella Tan, and Austa-Chotter-Bady, who was edited by Paige Cowett and Patricia Wilkins,

contains music, by Dan Powell, Pat McCusker, and Rowan Nymisto. Our theme music is by Wanderley. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Oxley.

This week on the Wirecutter Show, we're talking all about frozen summer treats and the best

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which sure is. Do you guys like Jolato? I love Jolato. It's my favorite type of ice cream.

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