On the menu: Epstein scandal not going quietly; Cornyn gets a boost; Hogg-tied; Ernst headed for the exits?; "TacticalGramma"
There's something familiar about the way a lot of Democrats are talking these days about their party's nominee for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
A standard line from Democrats skeptical of socialistic policies and anxious about anti-Israel energy is to say something about how mainstream candidates can learn a lot from his style: social media-savvy, high-energy, and focused on kitchen-table issues. They say it was "a brilliant campaign" and duck the substance.
The echo you're hearing there hearkens back a decade to what Republicans were saying about Donald Trump's early successes. It was the same shtick: Mainstream candidates, it was said, could learn a lot from Trump's grasp of Twitter, blunt talk, media savviness, use of humor and pugnacity.
Imitation soon followed, and to predictably disastrous results. Like, really disastrous. Really, really disastrous.
Certainly for a general election, style tends to matter more than substance. Lower-propensity voters without strong attachments to either major party are bound to be less concerned about the fine points of policy than the super-high-frequency voters who populate a primary electorate.
Vibes matter with those voters, but big ideological questions tend to be front and center. If Trump had been a celebrity squish with an appetite for comprehensive immigration reform, it wouldn't have mattered if he was famous or funny or good at Twitter. So it goes with Mamdani and the adventures in economic planning and the thrill of denouncing Zionism.
When it comes to the lesson for the blue team, the The New York Times's Nate Cohn said it best: The Democratic Party has shifted dramatically to the left in the past decade. "Today, liberal Democrats outnumber moderate and conservative ones by 12 percentage points, according to Gallup, 55 percent to 43 percent. In 2016 and 2020, liberals were essentially even with moderate and conservative Democrats."
That's not to say that Mamdani didn't run a terrific campaign. In fact, he still is.
Faced with a challenge from the right by independents Andrew Cuomo and incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, Mamdani isn't playing it safe. Safe would be to count on those two to divide the anti-socialist vote and smash through to victory by keeping his progressive base fired up and freaked out. That would certainly be the Trump-y move.
Instead, Mamdani is trying to grow his coalition by visiting with business leaders and calling on tDemocratic members of Congress. Sure, Mamdani didn't win many converts from the Upper West Side, and, sure, many of the big-name Washington pols who met with him were already on his side. But the big part is showing up, and doing it with a smile.
You could say that Adams is reaching out to his right, too. Only he's skipping the center and going for the fringe, as he rakes in big bucks from Trump-aligned donors and spends his media moments on Fox News. Good for keeping busy and maybe even for beating Republican Curtis Sliwa in Staten Island, but not exactly a mainstream choice. And with Sliwa bangers like "slapping fannies and killing grannies," maybe not even Staten Island.
But if Adams has plenty of money rolling in and gets to keep busy doing media, that's a serious problem for Cuomo, who is trying very hard to get into a one-on-one race with Mamdani, going so far as to say he would drop out if he's trailing Adams in the homestretch, and wants Adams to do the same.
Mamdani is no dummy and knows that it would be a mistake to underestimate the threat Cuomo poses. The general electorate looks very little like the primary, and Mamdani's critics will now have months to hammer his weaknesses, not just on the substance of socialism and anti-Zionism but also on the style.
What can delight the true believers may come off as slick or phony when presented to a broader audience. Certainly, Cuomo is in no danger of coming off as too slick, and can summon what seems to be a kind of enthusiasm when talking about things like mass transit and sewer improvements.
Given the crowded field, is that enough to deny Mamdani a win? Probably not, but it won't be a cakewalk, even if Adams just hangs around to audition for a cable news contributorship.
The lesson for Democrats in all this is the same one that Republicans failed to grasp about Trump in 2016. Mamdani's success is certainly about his prodigious gifts as a politician, but those aren't easily replicated.
What is replicable is a platform, and with the right one, a radical minority movement within a larger party can stage a hostile takeover. It happened to Republicans around immigration, and one of these days, it may happen to Democrats around socialism.
Establishment Democrats managed to keep an avowed socialist from winning their party's nomination in 2020 and 2024 and even managed the controlled demolition of an incumbent president's reelection campaign in favor of another normie. And the old guard's ability to deliver solid, electable moderates for races this year in New Jersey and Virginia similarly speaks well of the health of the normies.
The spectacular failure of aspiring enfant terrible David Hogg this week in the first test of his youth movement in an Arizona House primary would seem to point in the same direction, but look closer. The Hogg-backed candidate, Deja Foxx, a "25-year-old political content creator" isn't substantially more radical than the winner, Adelita Grijalva. Indeed, what Hogg mostly seems to be focused on is youth for youth's sake and social media virality. He's trying to do the same thing that old-head Democrats are talking about learning from Mamdani.
That, again, misses the point. Mamdani has many specific attributes and won in a very unusual kind of primary where an incumbent mayor had left the party and the front-runner was dragging heavy baggage. Those are not things that can be replicated in other Democratic primaries, but his socialism can be.
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