The Democratic Party Gets Its Populist Takeover

All three congressional candidates that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamadani endorsed won their primaries on Tuesday. The races were widely viewed as a test of just how much influence the left would have in charting the next chapter for the Democratic Party — and a referendum on Mamdani’s power.

“Mamdani is the one variable that truly matters,” Michael Lange, political writer and elections analyst of The Narrative Wars Substack, tells The Intercept Briefing as he breaks down the wins of Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier by district. “You pair that type of broad cultural political figure with the block-by-block organizing of New York City DSA — it’s a very powerful thing.” 

“You had a candidate who said ‘Fuck Kamala Harris’ win the historic capital of Black America,” says Lange, of Avila Chevalier’s win over five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat. “If that is not a distillation of the ‘Democratic tea party,’ I don’t quite know what is.”

This week on the podcast, host Akela Lacy speaks to Lange and Intercept managing editor Maia Hibbett about the strategic mistakes of the traditionally progressive Working Families Party, the growing influence of the Democratic Socialists of America on the Democratic Party, and how the DSA is upending electoral politics from the left.

“Here in New York, a lot of the momentum is being driven by the DSA, of course, but there are these progressive and insurgent candidates across the country who are trying to change the course of the Democratic Party,” says Hibbett, “and excite voters who might not have been into the Democratic establishment in past cycles.”

Lange notes how demographic changes and pressures on the Democratic Party base are impacting voters’ priorities. “The party’s becoming younger, more educated, and increasingly squeezed financially,” says Lange. “There’s just this broad alienation of people who have not really been able to get ahead, not for their own fault, and I think it’s like downstream of our economy, and that’s why the affordability zeitgeist is so potent.” He adds, “You spin the wheels up in two years, what could this look like in a Democratic presidential primary?”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

Maia Hibbett: And I’m Maia Hibbett, managing editor of The Intercept.

AL: Maia, did you see what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had delivered to his house office on Wednesday morning?

MH: Yes, they were beautiful.

AL: The Republicans’ House campaign arm delivered flowers and a card offering their condolences to Jeffries after candidates that he endorsed lost to socialists on Tuesday night in primaries in New York.

This is what the card said, “Three losses in one night is tough. We wanted socalled ‘leader,” — in quotes —”Jeffries to know our thoughts are with him, his candidates, and whatever remains of his influence in the Democratic Party.” Maia, let’s get your thoughts on this.

MH: On one hand, Jeffries probably felt a little bit of relief that no one did end up challenging him, so he wasn’t one of the people facing that challenge. But it was a really bad night for establishment Democrats. Ally of Jeffries and lots of other Democratic old guard, Representative Greg Meeks in Queens, was also mad, and he was giving comments on Wednesday morning implying that New York City was  going to suffer.

It wasn’t  going to get as much resources from the federal government because it was losing one of its really powerful incumbents. You’ve covered the race that toppled Espaillat pretty closely. It represents a different kind of power coming into play in New York and in Democratic politics.

AL: One of the candidates most considered a long shot prior to Tuesday is Darializa Avila Chevalier, who ousted the powerful chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Rep. Adriano Espaillat. Avila Chevalier was notably an organizer of the Columbia pro-Palestine protest alongside Mahmoud Khalil. She cited Espaillat’s refusal to help Khalil in the aftermath of his arrest as one of the main reasons that she even decided to challenge him in the first place, and she came on the national stage after writing an op-ed in support of him and being recruited by Justice Democrats.

MH: That result was really striking, especially because if you think back to a little over a year ago, before Zohran Mamdani won the primary for New York City mayor, you were covering the arrests of these student protesters in solidarity with Palestine, and that storyline has changed so dramatically.

It seemed at the time like their power was going to fade or that these protests were getting crushed, and now one of them is going to become a member of Congress.

AL: This was definitely not on Democrats’ bingo card, particularly Espaillat, who was a large recipient of money from the pro-Israel lobby and faced a lot of criticism for how little he did to support those students at the time.

While Avila Chevalier’s win on Tuesday was one of the biggest surprises, both liberal and conservative critics of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which she is a member, framed her success as part of this narrative that we’re seeing come out from some reactions that Ivy League transplants are taking over the Democratic Party and don’t actually reflect the working class interests they’re claiming to represent.

MH: That was a huge criticism in another race on Tuesday night in New York, which was the competition between Claire Valdez and Antonio Reynoso for Nydia Velázquez’s seat. Velázquez was retiring, and she had chosen Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso as her successor. Velázquez was considered a progressive.

She was early to support Zohran Mamdani’s campaign and in some ways, the DSA’s choice to run someone against her chosen successor was being presented as this betrayal and this attempt to usurp the progressive power base that had begun to grow in New York City.

AL: And then, of course, in the middle of all this, there’s Brad Lander, who many of our listeners may recall ran against Mamdani for mayor and then formed a coalition with him.

He ousted incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn less than 10 minutes after the polls closed. That was less of a shock, as Goldman had lagged behind in the polls for some months, but I think with the quickness that they called the results was another twist of the knife for Democrats in the establishment who had stood by Goldman.

MH: Yeah, and it’s funny because not that long ago, I think Goldman was considered a pretty powerful and a pretty popular politician. People talked before the 2025 mayoral race about the possibility that he could run for mayor of New York City. Maybe now he will because he’s free to do stuff. 

Here in New York, a lot of the momentum is being driven by the DSA, of course, but there are these progressive and insurgent candidates across the country who are trying to change the course of the Democratic Party and excite voters who might not have been into the Democratic establishment in past cycles.

Next week in Colorado, there’s a race that you’ve been covering really since it started, which is an insurgent candidate named Melat Kiros, who is endorsed by Justice Democrats and is also a DSA member backed by the national DSA. She’s running to take out longtime incumbent Representative Diana DeGette in Denver.

There’s also Graham Platner in Maine. There’s Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, both candidates we’ve covered a lot running for Senate. Another DSA candidate is Francesca Hong, who’s running for governor of Wisconsin. In some of these races, the DSA is a huge driving force behind these insurgent candidates, and in other cases, they’re not actually DSA candidates, but they’re adopting this similar populist working-class-focused politics that has been elevating politicians in these races across the country.

It does seem like the story of the Trump era is that people want change. There’s the pearlclutching version of this that’s “Oh, God, there’s populism. There will be a Trump of the left.” But perhaps there needs to be, and populism is just governance by the people.

AL: Next, we’re going to go deeper on all of this and more with political writer and analyst Michael Lange. He writes about politics in New York City on his Substack “The Narrative Wars” and is the author of a recent piece called “The (Not So) Civil War for the Commie Corridor.” We’ll discuss the growing influence of DSA and how the group is upending electoral politics from the left. 

Michael, welcome to the Intercept Briefing.

Michael Lange: Oh, it’s so great to be here. Thank you for having me.

AL: Michael, we are speaking on Wednesday afternoon. I know you’ve had a busy day talking about the results from Tuesday night’s primaries in New York. Leftists are ecstatic right now. The primaries on Tuesday night were widely viewed as a test of just how much influence the left would have on charting the next chapter of the Democratic Party and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s abilities as kingmaker.

I want to go through some of these results with you, some of which were absolutely stunning. We have former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who beat Rep. Dan Goldman, which was somewhat expected. But two socialists came out on top in Congressional races that were far less predictable.

You called, ahead of Tuesday, a closer race for Claire Valdez. Were you surprised by the results?

ML: Certainly the scale of it, yes. There was always a world in which, let’s start with New York 7, where Antonio Reynoso, the candidate that Claire Valdez was facing, he’s more of an institutional progressive supported by the Working Families Party, Brooklyn Borough president, was in the city council.

There was a scenario in which his support fell off to a certain degree with younger voters and younger voters Claire Valdez friendly, came to the polls en masse and broke the outcome for that way. But I was still surprised because there is a part of this district, in addition to a lot of the institutional and labor support that someone like Antonio Reynoso has, and he does also have a genuinely progressive record, and he was running on a very left-wing policy plank. 

AL: Virtually indistinguishable from Valdez’s.

ML: 100 percent right. The contrast between the candidates was very coalitional and institutional and also cultural to a certain degree. So he kinda had these bona fides and I thought that in some places, he can at least dent her margins.

And then the big kind of wild card is that this district is also home to a very large Orthodox Jewish community, the Satmar of South Williamsburg. Interestingly, even though they’re Orthodox Jews, they’re religious anti-Zionists, but they’ve known Reynoso for a very long time, and those folks were turning out in quite large numbers. They block vote in accordance with the whims of the rabbinical leaders there. 

So Reynoso had 10 percent of the electorate that was basically giving him close to 100 percent of the vote. So he started off with 10, and she started off with zero. And I was like well, to claw back from that, it won’t be entirely easy. And there were public and private polls that showed this race within two or three points. So maybe, I paid a little bit too much attention to that. 

But Claire Valdez had a very strong close and was able to engineer a lot of young voter turnout, especially proportionally to the amount of people turning out in this lower turnout congressional primary.

And she really ran away with it. Voters under 50 of all races, I think supported her pretty substantially. There were some neighborhoods in this district where she was getting the same margins that Zohran Mamdani was getting versus Andrew Cuomo. Although instead of Cuomo being this fossil of the Democratic establishment, she was getting them against someone who’s lived his entire life in the district and does have other progressive and institutional validators.

I’m a little less surprised actually by Darializa’s win because I’ve been covering that race pretty closely and I had talked at length about how this was a prime opportunity district and Adriano Espaillat was, to some degree, in my estimation, a paper tiger and also that he was someone who was operating with a pretty hard ceiling. However they seemed to — and by they, I mean the political establishment, Hakeem Jeffries, a lot of labor unions, a lot of outside spending — seemed to really realize that there was quite a lot of vulnerability to him with one month left. Then of course, Mayor Mamdani endorsed Darializa, and that really raised the salience of the race, and then all of a sudden she’s getting attacked a lot.

There was a deleted Twitter account where they found her tweets. She said a bunch of different things, ranging from like F Kamala Harris to she attended an October 8 rally in New York. I thought to a certain extent that might hurt her with older voters who, white and Black who may not have much love for Adriano Espaillat, but I thought when you project that amount of money and negative spending onto a relatively unknown candidate, it can, in certain instances, have very drastic implications.

But she was able to really weather that, and also he was someone who had spent much of his career appealing to building Dominican American political power in Upper Manhattan. That was a stronger strategy 10 years ago when the Dominican electorate was half or even a little more than half of what this district is.

But it has been redrawn. It has experienced demographic change to a certain extent, and now it’s basically one-third Hispanic, one-third white, one-third Black. And so he was very focused on a third of the electorate, and it left him very vulnerable. Darializa was able to [go] — for someone who had not held office before — against a 10-year Democratic incumbent, she did quite well with Black voters, and she did very well with white voters as well, of all ages and also religions.

This district has a lot of, I would say, progressive, older Jewish voters. A lot of this spending was geared at getting them to flip towards Adriano Espaillat or at least sit the race out. But they didn’t, and they backed her by considerable margins, and she paired that with real inroads with the white, Black, and Hispanic renter-class and that was enough for her to win by three points.

So it’s an incredible accomplishment.

AL: Yeah, I’m really glad you brought up the money piece because this was one of the most expensive congressional cycles in the history of New York, with more than $50 million spent. And obviously, not every seat, every congressional seat in New York was up for election. We’re talking about the handful that were up. 

Also down the ballot, super PACs spent almost five times what they spent on state legislative races in 2024, according to a report on Wednesday from New York Focus. A total of $9.6 million, including more than $2.5 million spent against DSA candidates alone, almost every single one of whom won their races.

What is the upshot here? We also saw some of the biggest national investments ever from pro-Palestine groups spending to support progressives in these races. How has all of that money changed how elections work in New York, both for the establishment and for this insurgent class?

ML: The value that this spending has is clearly diminishing. But I also think it’s worth highlighting American Priorities and Justice Democrats and some of the money that they used to support Darializa. Darializa was spent, I think, three or four to one. Which is not great, but it’s not a margin that I guess can truly make or break a campaign.

She was not getting out-spent 10 to one, 20 to one, things like that. So I think, again, stabilized some of the potential bleeding that could have come with a really hefty independent expenditure advantage one way or the other. There was, as you mentioned, tremendous super PAC spending in these downballot races. But those largely flopped. 

One of the things that New York City DSA and also Mayor Mamdani did quite well this cycle is there was a lot of emphasis — and, some of this was happenstance in the way that incumbents retired and things like that, and what kind of came available — but for Claire Valdez running in the 7th Congressional District, there was one DSA-endorsed state senate candidate farther down the ballot, and then there were, I believe, three competitive or open incumbent challenges — assembly races that overlapped with the 7th District. Then basically, Claire’s race really helped raise spend, engagement, turnout in a lot of these crucial districts down the ballot. And then Claire, of course, blows it out of the water. I don’t want to say that she carried all these other folks to victory, but the dynamics of her race, campaign, and blowout certainly helped folks at the bottom of the ballot get turnout.

AL: I find it interesting that the national discourse around getting out of money in politics, which is still very strong and a big part of these candidates’ campaigns, but they’re also recognizing and being very candid about the fact that they do need money to combat some of the spending.

And obviously it’s not going to be equivalent, but you had Valdez and Reynoso, trading barbs about dark money or super PAC money in the race. And she said something to the effect of, and you hear this argument all the time, “We’re not going to fight this fight with one hand tied behind our back.” I think that’s an interesting tension that’s come out in the aftermath of this. 

[Break]

AL: Another big discourse talking point, if you will, is about whether this marks the end of the relevance of traditional progressives, many of whom voters see as beholden to the Democratic establishment.

We see this nationally with the declining relevance of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, despite the election of more and more progressives to Congress. Most people might think of the left flank of the national Democratic Party as strictly progressive. Think Kamala Harris versus Bernie Sanders. But it’s a little bit more nuanced than that, especially in New York.

You wrote recently, “It is The Socialists vs. The Progressives: NYC-DSA, the volunteer army that went from study hall to City Hall in a decade; versus the Working Families Party [WFP], the progressive third party that dominated the anti-establishment lane of New York politics for twenty years before the socialists arrived on the scene”

For our listeners who might not be as familiar with the nuances of how this works in New York, can you break down those lanes on the left? Who is in each camp, where do they diverge, and how are they pushing Democrats to the left?

ML: I think some of the biggest differences between DSA and WFP is ideological. It is an outgrowth of that Sanders versus Warren 2020 presidential primary, but I think it’s also in structure of the organization. 

I don’t think it’s unfair to say that DSA is just a more democratic, member-driven organization. The way the Working Families Party does their endorsements and things like that, it is a little more top-down. As a rank and file member of DSA, you have a lot more input on the direction of the organization. Some of that manifests in terms of the number of people who actively participate, the number of people who are dues-paying members, who volunteer, things like that.

DSA, they push a very class-focused politics. Not that the Working Families Party does not. Also DSA has led quite significantly on Palestine and those issues, especially after October 7. Not to say that the Working Families Party doesn’t talk about class. It’s literally in their name, but there is a bit more of an identitarian bent to that. Even today, the leader of the Working Families Party, Jasmine Gripper, was talking about well, Antonio built a multiracial coalition. She was saying things like that, whereas if DSA just lost a race of that magnitude, they wouldn’t say we built a multiracial coalition. That type of thing. Never mind that Claire Valdez won Hispanic voters by a very large amount. Anyhoo. 

So I do think that it was a very difficult evening for the more traditional progressive wing of the party and we saw this in the mayoral race last year with the rise of Zohran Mamdani and the stagnation of Brad Lander, who of course was just elected to Congress. And then especially in this Trump 2.0 world, people are hungry for a different type of politics. I foregrounded this race, the 7th District, a battle to see who leads to left in New York. It’s very clear that after last night, DSA is the one leading the left. And I think that will have wider repercussions as well.

AL: This is a great segue because I do  want to ask you about this piece that you wrote on the 7th District, where I am a resident.

ML: Oh, there you go.

AL: And in talking about that, talk a little bit about how progressives whose candidates lost last night are reacting to the results. You already mentioned Jasmine Gripper, state director for the New York Working Families Party. But you dubbed this race a “civil war in the commie corridor.”

The “commie corridor” branding has really taken off in the past couple of months. I just wanted to tip my hat to you. 

ML: It has, for sure. Thank you. 

AL: But what’s going on here, and how did this race in particular become such a referendum on Mamdani’s power?

ML: Very early on, Mamdani and a lot of New York City DSA leadership and rank and file wanted to support Claire Valdez. 

I’m a DSA member. I’ve known Claire Valdez for years before anyone cared that I said the “commie corridor” or I wrote books or anything like that. She has a lot of goodwill in the organization with just normal members. She’s a union organizer. People really just like her.

So when Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez — who, I should also say I used to work for her when I first graduated college — when she retired, there were a lot of people who went to Claire, a reluctant candidate, and said, “Oh, I think you would be really great.” And clearly the mayor shared that sentiment. A lot of people close to the mayor did as well. 

But of course, Congresswoman Velázquez, I think there was some appetite on her part to support another DSA candidate, one that she was more familiar with. But then she did not want to support Claire, so then she really went all in on Antonio Reynoso. Those two are very close. Antonio was born and raised in the South Side of Williamsburg, which is a historically Puerto Rican area. And credit to Nydia and Antonio, they were waging fights against the machines of old in that part of town prior to 2016, prior to 2018, before DSA really asserted themselves politically.

But then she was upset that the mayor wanted to go a different route than her. She made some comments to The New York Times. It got bitter. It felt like both sides were waging a lot of capital on this outcome. There was a lot of media sparring and things like that. Obviously with hindsight, potentially the Working Families Party and the Reynoso camp, they might have raised the stakes of this race too much. Now, they probably didn’t know what was going to happen but I think probably they’re sitting here on Wednesday regretting it. 

But I think that the most important thing is that Mamdani is the one variable that truly matters. And New York City DSA, for all of the local nonprofits and relationships that Antonio Reynoso had, New York City DSA out organized them.

They knocked over 300,000 doors. They knocked the entire district, and you really felt those results on Tuesday night. To pick that district to have a very high stakes proxy war was a strategic mistake on the part of the Reynoso–Working Families Party world because this was not like a fight in Park Slope or Carroll Gardens.

Not that it would’ve gone differently, but those are a little more progressive, granola, Brad Lander coded areas. They were really having this fight, on some of these blocks where 93 percent of voters are under the age of 50, and where Mamdani is not just a political giant, but a cultural figure.

You walk around Green Point or Bushwick with him, and there are women just tumbling over themselves, running out of the bar to get a picture with him. He did a selfie line at McCarren Park. And ironically, someone I went to college with who also reports on this stuff, he was saying that everyone he spoke to who said they were voting for Clara Valdez was like, “I’m doing it because of Mamdani.” You pair that type of broad cultural political figure with the block-by-block organizing of New York City DSA — it’s a very powerful thing. It’s how they were able to basically create a very favorable electorate even without the big highly salient mayoral race, the wall-to-wall media coverage, things like that.

I won’t get the voting data for probably a couple days or a week or so, but I have a hunch that the voting base this year in the 7th District was even younger than it was last year. Were the same amount of young voters, like raw, going to turn out? Not necessarily, but proportion-wise, it was pretty robust and it really cascaded on election day.

AL: You mentioned DSA sort of outorganizing the Working Families. I also want to mention that DSA, New New York DSA cochair Gustavo Gordillo told Hasan Piker at a watch party last night that his phone bank for Darializa Avila Chevalier could have identified 2,000 voters, which was the margin by which she won. A pretty spectacular effect. 

ML: Yeah, it’s funny, I thought they were going to make fun of me because I was like, “Oh, I think Adriano might eke it out.” But they were like, “Actually, we saw that you said that and we were like, all right, we gotta go into overdrive.”

AL: There you go, data-driven. 

ML: I obviously wanted Darializa to win. I quite literally voted for her. I owe it to the people who read and trust what I say to share that. 

And I do think that there was a broad sentiment like,”Oh, she’s probably like pretty close, but will she get across the finish line?” That type of push that they were able to engineer, it’s just no other mass member organization that I can really think of could do that. They called through every Democrat who had voted in Upper Manhattan in the last six years. I think the first list they did, they burned through it in 12 minutes. Really remarkable organizing that it’s exactly the type of thing that decides a race at the margins like this.

AL: The other big question coming out of last night is and really, this is in response to the way that both Democratic Party leaders and Republicans are spinning this, which is that Hakeem Jeffries has lost control of the party and that there’s a communist takeover of the Democratic Party that is out of step with the vast majority of voters outside of the coasts.

But is this something that can work outside of New York City? There are several races with progressives and socialists on the ballot coming up. Midterms are not over. I’m sorry to our listeners. Next week in Denver, Melat Kiros is challenging Rep. Diana DeGette. Kiros is a DSA member endorsed by the Denver DSA chapter and the national DSA.

Later this summer assembly member Francesca Hong is running for Wisconsin Governor. She’s a member of the Assembly Socialist Caucus and a DSA member. On the nonsocialist but progressive populist side, there’s also Graham Platner’s Senate race against Republican Susan Collins in Maine.

Is this a coastal formula? Why or why not?

ML: It’s funny. This is the question that’s at the heart of my forthcoming Mamdani book.

AL: Oh, wonderful. 

ML: But it won’t be out for a bit because we’re living through his effect on the Democratic Party. I do think the party’s becoming younger, more educated, and increasingly squeezed financially. 

There’s this growing precarious middle class that’s really not getting ahead, really disillusioned with—it’s funny talking about this, it’s like I sound like Morris Katz because he says similar stuff.

AL: Morris Katz is a Mamdani adviser who’s also working with other progressive candidates, including Graham Platner. But Michael, continue.

ML: But yeah, you have this youngerish, but also middle-aged, we’ve even seen races where progressives and leftists have won Gen X suburbanites because even these mortgaged homeowners are really feeling squeezed by affordability. But it’s also a broader cultural alienation. It’s downstream from the loss of community, the rise of oligarchy. I think technology as well, like the tech oligarchs, it’s all intertwined. Two years from now, artificial intelligence and that type of stuff could be the number one, the number two, or the number three issue.

But I think there’s just this broad alienation of people who have not really been able to get ahead, not for their own fault, and I think it’s like downstream of our economy, and that’s why the affordability zeitgeist is so potent. And so yes, does the “commie corridor” like literally travel to Michigan? Not exactly. But also the Democratic Party is pretty urbanized. It’s getting even more urbanized, especially in a primary setting. 

What you’re asking is what a lot of us are asking right now? Is like, OK, you spin the wheels up in two years, what could this look like in a Democratic presidential primary?

What was very interesting about New York 7 and New York 13 is that ironically, the rest of the Democratic Party is copying Mamdani’s message with respect to affordability, almost verbatim. But in 7 and 13, Claire Valdez and Darializa, and I was thinking like, oh, if maybe they underperform or maybe one of them doesn’t win, this is a tweak to make in the future cycles. They weren’t going super hard on affordability. There was a lot of talk about Palestine and AIPAC, things of that sort. Darializa also leaned into Adriano’s voting for omnibus bills that increase ICE funding, things like that. 

So my thesis was like undoubtedly those were motivating issues to Mamdani doing so well in those areas, but particularly in Upper Manhattan, that’s the heart of the multiracial working class. And I was like, a huge part of it was affordability. But what was really fascinating is that, it’s one thing to win in Ridgewood with that, but in Upper Manhattan, more tenants than any other district in the country. Darializa won by talking a lot about Palestine and a lot about ICE. If she didn’t win, it would’ve been maybe we should’ve talked more about affordability. But she did win in spite of all the spending. I don’t want to say a narrative buster, but it’s a very interesting, data point

AL: It flies in the face of the claims by centrist strategists that those things are not popular with the base that they need, particularly that working class base where they’re saying that those issues are not the bread and butter issues that working people come home and think about at night.

But I do think you’re touching on a key point here, which is that those issues tie into the broader frustration with not even just the positions that they’re taking, but the shutting down of discourse or the lack of teeth, particularly on the ICE thing, the lack of a response to really differentiate themselves from Republicans in the longer term.

You did mention a socialist presidential candidate. 

ML: Oh, boy. 

AL: That is the perfect segue to my final question for you which is, again, echoing a big question that came out of last night, which was where was Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

ML: To her credit, she did support four state—

AL: Assembly members, yes.

ML: Who were all challenging incumbents, and they all did win.

AL: Yes. And so this is the strategy. So the criticism here for our listeners was that Mamdani did the work in the congressional races, and AOC did the work in the state legislature races. Both of them supported all DSA candidates in the respective races that they did endorse in.

But many people were taking shots at AOC saying that she should regret that she didn’t endorse Valdez or Avila Chevalier. 

I find the argument that they were splitting their clout in a race where the left had limited resources to be a compelling one. I also find the argument that AOC is looking at building bridges with the people who will help her potentially run either for the Senate or for the presidency one day, and that it wasn’t worth her while to step into these races where Mamdani was already clearly carrying a lot of the weight.

What did you make of that strategy?

ML: Yeah. I think it’s just downstream of the nature of the relationships and the institutions that both of them have. Mayor Mamdani not endorsing any insurgent challengers in the state legislature in an effort to, not piss off, for lack of a better word, Carl Heastie, who’s the Assembly speaker.

The inverse, though, pushing a lot of chips in with respect to Congress. I mean, Claire — it’s an open seat. Everyone needs to be adults about it. But the Darializa’s thing — that was big to take on the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

With the congresswoman it’s probably just the inverse of that. There’s also a special Nydia Velázquez connection there. 

But plenty of people running had either the mayor or they had AOC. And then I think a lot of them also had Bernie Sanders as well, and New York City DSA. So it was like, you had almost everybody with one or two or three really famous folks on their lit, and the institutional heft.

Regrettably Conrad Blackburn was running for an Assembly seat in Harlem. He was the only candidate to lose last night.

AL: The only DSA candidate to lose.

ML: It was partially because he was the only one who did not have a Mamdani or an AOC endorsement.

It was a tricky race. I think just to zoom in and out, there was a lot of money spent against him at the beginning. When he was in Florida and a law student, he had that two-month internship in the Florida attorney general’s office, but the Florida attorney general was Pam Bondi. That, I think, hurt him considerably. But after months, I think he was able to claw back. 

I think also Darializa being on the top of the ballot was able to help him. But the Darializa versus Conrad thing is a very interesting dynamic in how their spending was treated. Whereas with Darializa, they opened the floodgates late with all these attacks, and with Conrad, they started earlier. I’m sure if they could do it over again with Darializa, they would’ve taken her much more seriously, because now, of course, Adriano Espaillat, someone who is, I don’t want to contribute to a myth here, but he is someone who built a Dominican political machine, while I don’t really agree with the politics of it, over the course of 30 years. It was a 30-year-old machine being defeated by a 32-year-old, Columbia graduate student, who had never run for office before. 

AL: Who said, “Fuck Kamala Harris.” 

ML: Well, yeah, if I can curse. You had a candidate who said “Fuck Kamala Harris,” win the historic capital of Black America. If that is not a distillation of the “Democratic Tea Party,” I don’t quite know what is. For as much anti-incumbent sentiment as there just is broadly now, there has been that with Adriano Espaillat, particularly in the southern parts of his district for a while, which was another reason that he was vulnerable and he played it poorly, and I think she ran a gutsy race.

AL: Michael, we’re going to leave it there. Thank you so much for helping us make sense of the wild ride that was Tuesday night. I look forward to reading your book when it comes out and looking forward to more of your— I don’t know if you’ll beat “commie corridor,” but we’re excited for whatever comes next.

ML: I appreciate that a lot. It was great to be here. Thanks for having me.

AL: We want to know what issues you are following in this exciting midterm cycle, send us an email at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

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Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.