Moderate Democrats seem possessed by the fear that Americans will abandon them—not for their lassitude in the face of a far-right takeover of the country, but because they might be poisoned by the contagion of a handful of socialists who won Democratic primaries in New York in June. This panic was eloquently expressed by James Carville, an architect of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and still a strategist with clout in the party. The object of his ire was Darializa Avila Chevalier, the winner of the primary in New York’s thirteenth congressional district, which covers Upper Manhattan and a swath of the Bronx. Carville had read in The New York Times that between 2018 and 2022 Avila Chevalier, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at CUNY, posted tweets disparaging Kamala Harris and the American flag. Like Mamdani, who endorsed her in the primary, she has argued that Israel cannot be both a Jewish state and a state with equal rights.

“Lady,” said Carville on his podcast, Politics War Room,

I ain’t in the same party as you. I’m sorry, I’m just not…. It’s time for Democrats to talk the S-word: Schism…. The idea that we must neglect…all the huge, phenomenal successes [centrist Democrats] have had and declare that the party is now under the control of the democratic socialists of New York City is insane…. I’m done. I’m not in that fucking political party.

In some respects Carville’s comments seem absurd: the number of House representatives endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will probably, as of this writing, jump from two to six in January—2.6 percent of the roughly 230 Democrats projected to win in the chamber. Yet a herd of moderate Democrats appear to share his panic, as if they sense the precarity of their electability, and they do have plenty of reason to worry. A Fox News poll in March showed that 49 percent of registered voters, including 72 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of independents, view capitalism as not working very well or not working at all. A recent Marquette University Law School poll, meanwhile, found that Democratic voters favor the DSA over their party’s sitting representatives in Congress. Digesting the poll, Harry Enten, a data analyst for CNN, said, “Simply put, they’re more popular than the Democrats currently in charge.”

Some of Avila Chevalier’s offending (and now deleted) tweets suggest thin historical knowledge, especially about the Soviet Union; many read like harmless expressions of the sophomoric idealist she was at the time. (One retweet: “A world without borders—just like a world without prisons or police—is necessary, and the only moral way forward.”) In any event, Republicans’ daily barrage of incendiary lies has weakened the impact of online ideological indiscretions. Avila Chevalier has said that she regrets the comments, and she should be taken at her word.

During the campaign her rhetoric was universalist, like that of every DSA candidate. She called, for instance, for free day care and health care—a crucial distinction from Great Society liberalism, in which some government assistance was reserved exclusively for the poor. We now know that such policies stigmatized the most vulnerable recipients as “welfare people.” Universalism aims to remove that shame. The DSA has also expanded the definition of the working class to include certain white-collar workers, some of whom earn six-figure salaries. For this they’ve been lambasted as a movement of well-off white people. But their approach, in a time of soaring unaffordability, has widened their base of support to the middle class, at the expense of mainstream Democrats.

Some Democratic stalwarts have publicly fretted that the self-professed socialism of these candidates will hand Republicans a truncheon with which to run wild. They fear that the entire party will be tarred as “anti-American.” This sort of hand-wringing smacks of cowardice and exposes just how badly Democrats have lost their ethical bearings. Moderates are necessary, of course; they still speak for large numbers of Americans. But crouching in a defensive posture is no way to win elections, especially in the blood war of American politics in 2026. Republicans are an openly insurrectionist party. Their actions at home and abroad have begun to fit the definition of state terror, as I understood the term while living in the South American dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s.

In the first year and a half of Trump’s second term, the strategy of high-ranking Democrats has been to let Trump destroy himself, watch his poll numbers sink, and stay out of the way. The rationale has been not to repeat the fiasco of the impeachments and investigations during Trump’s first term, which served ultimately to strengthen his status as the standard-bearer for the electorate’s amorphous grievances. Trump’s popularity has indeed cratered. But the strategy has come as a betrayal to Americans who have had to bear a blitz of crushing executive orders and Supreme Court rulings, endless displays of billionaire cronyism in the White House, aimless war crimes, spectacular corruption, open racism, and paramilitary invasions of our cities by ICE. New Yorkers’ rejection of this reality has put the city at the center of national politics.

The results of the June 23 primaries seem to confirm that democratic socialists have become, in Harold Meyerson’s apt phrase, the “urban wing” of the Democratic Party. Mamdani’s immense popularity has solidified his position as a kingmaker like no one since the heyday of Carmine DeSapio’s Tammany Hall. Mamdani is not corrupt like Tammany Hall was, of course, but he keeps a sharpened political dagger at hand. He reportedly promised the incumbent congressmember in the thirteenth district, Adriano Espaillat, that he would endorse him for reelection. Espaillat was blindsided when Mamdani instead backed his challenger, Avila Chevalier, a month before the June primary.

Mamdani’s support was important: Avila Chevalier won the nomination by 3.5 percent. But Espaillat’s turf war with established black politicians in Harlem may have been what cost him the election. Prior to Espaillat, Harlem had been the fiefdom of Charles Rangel, a black congressman for forty-six years with national influence and close ties to the Clintons. Some of his protégés continue to hold sway. Avila Chevalier—who, like Espaillat, is Dominican—lost Hispanic voters by 8 percent. But she won black voters by 3.8 percent, almost exactly her margin of victory overall. (White voters favored her by seventeen points.)¹ In the end, her victory over a seventy-one-year-old five-term incumbent who pays a great deal of attention to his business enterprises in the district wasn’t entirely surprising.

More divisive in New York was Mamdani’s recruitment of Claire Valdez for the open seat in the seventh congressional district, which runs from Downtown Brooklyn to Woodhaven in Queens. Here, too, his political dagger glinted. For thirty-three years the seat has been held by the hard-fighting progressive Nydia Velázquez, who was close with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and had been the first member of Congress to endorse Mamdani for mayor. Shortly after Mamdani won last November, Velázquez, seventy-three, announced her retirement, saying that his election bolstered her confidence in the city’s new young political leaders. “I feel at ease,” she told the Times.

Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, was her hand-picked successor. Ignoring the usual courtesies of succession, Mamdani shut Reynoso out in favor of Valdez, a union organizer of steely commitment who had moved to New York from Texas in 2015 to pursue a career in the arts. Reynoso grew up in Los Sures, a Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhood in Williamsburg within the congressional district. Their political positions were virtually identical: abolish ICE, raise taxes on the rich, oppose US support for Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, and Medicare for All. But their styles are different. Valdez dresses informally, like a union rep on the job, and projects a sense of fire and devotion. Her smile is charismatic and broad. Reynoso is polite, with a mild delivery. He wears the subdued off-the-rack suits of the politician’s trade.

Reynoso had the endorsements of two of New York’s most visible black elected officials, Attorney General Letitia James and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, as well as that of Velázquez and others. Valdez had the backing and ground game of the DSA. The candidates are essentially of the same generation—Valdez is thirty-six, Reynoso forty-three—but during the campaign Valdez’s camp attacked Reynoso for having taken donations from real estate developers, and the image of Reynoso as a compromised, business-as-usual relic of Brooklyn’s old black political guard stuck. Valdez beat him by twenty points. Apparently Mamdani wants his fellow socialists in power, not just progressives.

Velázquez and James angrily warned the mayor that he could tear apart the progressive coalition that elected him. This remains to be seen. Black political clubs, advocacy groups, and churches have been entrenched in neighborhoods of color in New York City since at least the 1970s. A good example is the Vanguard Independent Democratic Association (VIDA), founded in 1972 and led by the late Al Vann, a black power activist from Bed-Stuy. For decades VIDA wielded a great deal of influence over Central Brooklyn’s political and social life, thanks to its core support from black homeowners. It was entities like VIDA that, five years ago, were critical in helping Eric Adams win the final round of the 2021 mayoral primary by a single point. By ignoring Manhattan below Harlem and predominately white precincts in the boroughs, Adams appeared to carve out a new path to city hall. But in 2026 his coalition seems irrelevant and, in some cases, sclerotic, thanks in part to his administration’s staggering corruption, his self-abasement before Trump to keep himself out of jail, and his administration’s failure to deliver policies of value to New Yorkers.

Mark Winston Griffith, a community organizer in Brooklyn and the former head of the Brooklyn Movement Center in Bed-Stuy, has written incisively about the cultural and psychological tension between neighborhood newcomers and third- or fourth-generation denizens—many of them homeowners—that came to a head on June 23.² The increasing whitefication of black and Latino strongholds over the past twenty-five years has had an immeasurable effect. Bed-Stuy’s black population dropped from 75 percent in 2000 to 38 percent in 2024. Its white population jumped from 2.4 percent to 33.4 percent in the same period, and that number is rising. Many of VIDA’s black homeowner constituents have sold their appreciated properties and left New York, but the percentage of homeowners in Bed-Stuy has stayed the same at around 20 percent; 78 percent are renters, many of them now white.

As Griffith points out, today we have “Black or brown candidates, most with little to no electoral experience, running against Black or brown Democratic establishment candidates in rapidly changing districts.” All but one of the DSA-endorsed incumbents or insurgent candidates in this cycle were younger than forty. Most of their voters, Griffith suggests, neither know nor care much about their neighborhoods’ black history. What they do know is that they are financially squeezed by suspiciously high gentrified rents and resentful of the status quo. A day or two after the June 23 primary, the writer Molly Crabapple nailed the irony in a tweet:

The politicians whining that DSA voters are “transplants” are the same ones that took real estate cash to greenlight the gentrification of their own communities. These politicians helped displace their own base, then have the gall to complain when new people vote them out.

Political consciousness in New York and elsewhere is spinning away from establishment Democrats. So far, they have offered no answers other than angry denouncements of their rivals (like Carville’s) or lame assurances that they are working against the Trump administration at every turn. They can easily outspend their left-wing challengers: apart from New York City’s staggeringly expensive congressional races, anti-DSA super PACs spent $2.9 million on this year’s state legislative primaries, dwarfing the less than half a million dollars proffered in support of socialist candidates. As Mamdani’s landslide victory over Andrew Cuomo in last year’s mayoral race suggests, however, money doesn’t win elections. Often it hurts candidates who spend it on a mercenary deluge of attacks and robo-ads that turn voters off. At the state level in New York, the DSA will likely pick up at least six new seats in November, giving them fifteen lawmakers between the Assembly and Senate in 2027. That remains a small figure in relative terms: the Senate has sixty-three seats, the Assembly 150. But the organization’s electoral success in NYC is rapidly growing.

The appeal of democratic socialism in other parts of the country is harder to gauge. Highly competitive DSA-endorsed candidates will be running in November for House seats in Denver and Philadelphia, mayor in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and a seat in the Kentucky state House in Louisville. The socialist Francesca Hong is polling unexpectedly well in the Democratic primary for governor of Wisconsin, which will take place on August 11. A Republican super PAC is spending $2.2 million on ads to boost Hong’s chances, on the theory that she is too far left to win the general election. Democratic officials in Wisconsin nervously oppose her.

In the Democratic primary for Michigan’s open Senate seat on August 4, Abdul El-Sayed has been polling consistently ahead of his moderate opponent, Haley Stevens. El-Sayed is not a member of the DSA, but his politics align with theirs, especially regarding Israel, which he has called “a rogue state.” AOC has endorsed him, and Politico has reported that DSA officials have “already shifted organizers, volunteers and resources” to Michigan to help him get elected. If either of these candidates wins their primaries, we’ll witness a major test of whether socialists can carry Rust Belt swing states.

These midterms remain volatile. Democrats are flailing for a coherent message that will resonate with voters, while Republicans seem set to pay for their spectacular dystopian failures. Aware of the danger and with an eye on his own presidential prospects in 2028, J.D. Vance told the podcaster Joe Rogan recently that, “crazy” as socialism is, it’s a natural response to the “extreme wealth inequality” in the US economy. Unless young Americans “own something [like their homes], socialism is the inevitable outcome.” Vance, the promotional product of tech billionaires with Übermensch delusions, meant this as a cautionary statement, not a proposal that Republicans back a universal platform.

Jaime Harrison, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, recently sent a warning to socialists:

If you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination. Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure. Focus on building the party you actually support.

Never mind that the DSA supplies its own volunteers—if Harrison were to be heeded, Democrats would run the risk of shrinking into permanent irrelevance. They would do better to welcome socialists into the party and to adopt some of their ideas, which are no more radical than Social Security was during the New Deal. Our two major parties have moved so far to the right since 1980 that common-sense proposals to rebalance the economy are met with terror, as if they will turn the US into a twenty-first-century version of the Soviet Union. But Democrats currently have no path to becoming the majority party without making room for an outspoken and unambiguous left flank.

Two years ago, during the 2024 Democratic primary for the assembly seat in my Crown Heights district, a neighbor wanted to know more about the incumbent, Stefani Zinerman, before casting her ballot. Did she count real estate developers among her donors? Zinerman’s office wouldn’t answer the question. My neighbor cast her ballot for Eon Huntley, the DSA-sponsored candidate, who was an active parent in the local public schools.

Like all DSA candidates, Huntley accepts no money from large corporations, real estate developers, or special interests. That year he lost by 516 votes. In June, when he ran against Zinerman again, he won by more than twenty points. Voters like my neighbor long for representatives who haven’t been bought, and the DSA has provoked them to scrutinize those who have been. The rubber stamp that political machines have counted on has been withdrawn.

—July 23, 2026