Establishment elected Democrats have been having a real weird one in the aftermath of Zohran Mamdani’s commanding primary victory over outside-stander Andrew Cuomo. While right-wing billionaires give up the entire game on how they view the election, plenty of normal-ass Dems are getting on board with Zohran, even if they don’t like it, because they’re not suicidal. But notable exception Hakeem Jeffries seems to think that none of this will touch him.

“I don’t know him.” “I wasn’t involved,” etc. The ostensible leader of House Democrats, who is flush with AIPAC cash, seems to not understand what even similarly-AIPAC-funded Ritchie Torres does: that the Democratic Party in New York City is rapidly changing, and he is not immune.

What he fails to recognize is that it has been changing. NY WFP and DSA candidates and other progressive candidates have been slowly but surely changing the way NYC views itself for more than a few years, now. Since the election of Eric Adams, there has been a greater insistence on unity with the left, to prevent another Wiley/Garcia split, while also building upon the city’s increasing thirst for actual leftist or otherwise progressive polices.

This has been happening across the city in smaller elections that non-sicko people outside of NYC haven’t been paying attention to. Mamdani didn’t come out of nowhere; a lot of work was put into laying the foundations for this run — not necessarily for him specifically, but for a legitimate leftist to do so. What New York WFP/DSA folks understand — in a way that, perhaps, some of their counterparts in other parts of the nation do not — is that you do not create an Overton window shift from the top-down.

This has been an ongoing irritation elsewhere for quite some time, and continues with Mamdani’s nomination victory. The conversation once was “we need to find a Bernie,” to no success. Now it’s “we need to find a Zohran.”

The reality is that a) Bernie Sanders is literally from a different era of American politics and the way he came up is not the way any new leftist will, and b) constantly swinging for a home run results in higher strikeouts.

But NYC has, so far, figured it out. AOC’s endorsement of Mamdani was key to circling the wagons around him, and it was built off the insistence that the left avoids another 2021 outcome. Ultimately, it was Brad Lander who fell on his sword for the greater good, and frankly, it was one of the best things he’s ever done for himself. Now a progressive darling, there is no race he can run in the future that won’t have a solid core of organizers helping him out.

That’s what a progressive-leftist coalition looks like. Sometimes, the leftist has to be the one to win. Or otherwise, it is entirely a one-way street. That Mamdani fully had the upper hand in the election by the time these conversations were clearly had probably also finalized the decision. But hey, Senator or Congressmember Lander has a quality to it that I can really get behind, and there will be a lot of appetite to support him when he’s done as Comptroller.

And as a result of this work, and one really hard decision that Lander rightly made and committed fully to, that coalition is both strong and confident. There hasn’t been any successful attempts at creating division within the coalition, most likely because it is clear that establishment support is dwindling and the existing Democratic power structure in the city is already being reshaped, much as it does nationally when a nominee for president is selected. A supermajority of Democrats want new leaders. While we can discuss what specifically voters want in a candidate, what we know is one thing: they’re tired of fucking losers.

The point of triage is to stabilize damage. You sacrifice pieces to protect the whole. The problem with national Democratic leadership is that they do not know, or at least cannot agree, on what the “whole” even is. They’ve become lazy and rich and resistant to any sort of change, paragons of the Ratchet Effect, obliquely talking about money in politics while taking millions from poisoners and genocidaires, as their stock portfolios magically go up and up and up.

Progressive organizers have, even during the waning years of the Obama presidency, been building an understanding with voters that the enemy of their enemy is not necessarily their friend, and that it is not only okay to want things, in fact, you should want things. While random liberal posters online loudly demand that we continue triage, at the end of the day, they’re not the ones putting on their worn-out shoes, knocking the doors, and talking to their neighbors en masse on a consistent basis.

There are entire neighborhoods, thousands and tens of thousands of people in Los Angeles that have never once had someone knock on their door to talk about a candidate. In a Democratic stronghold, I find that unforgivable. And that mentality is changing with each subsequent progressive or leftist addition to the City Council. But we’ll talk about that another time.

Hakeem Jeffries is emblematic of this perpetual triage. In many ways it’s supporting austerity measures by being vaguely mad at the irresponsible and deadly cuts by the federal government, while clearly having no real plan to restore services, because in many ways his machine wants them cut. It is painfully obvious that he is an empty suit, heavily incentivized to speak on behalf of his donor base, and ultimately cannot make himself appear as anything but an HR rep trying to keep you from escalating a harassment complaint against your supervisor.

But much like his counterpart in the Senate, Jeffries has no real ability to enact any sort of authority over his caucus. The Democratic Party does not exist today as a cohesive organization. It is without central authority in either national chamber, governors are straight up doing their own thing (they generally do anyway, but it’s much more pronounced now), and local parties in major cities are feeling the heat.

One good thing about “we need a Mamdani” is that, *knocks on wood*, winning the general and becoming Mayor of NYC will supercharge that desire. While it cannot be undersold just how influential Bernie Sanders was (and is, though that influence is waning), the entire point of the leftist project is to build a culture through which more and more people can succeed. And with Lander, it also very cleanly illustrates that setting your ego aside and doing what is best for the people is an extremely popular decision that will pay dividends down the line.

The reason why the right wing is falling over themselves about Mamdani — aside from the fact that they’re hypercapitalist, racist, bigoted freaks who are afraid of every subway known to humanity — is that Zohran himself is emblematic of Democratic voter sentiment, and that change in Democratic politics means that actual, tangible, legitimate pushback to their straight up evil desires is growing and organizing. It means that their capture of Democratic leadership is, at minimum, about to take a major hit.

How they are acting right now regarding Mamdani’s campaign is their actual, true position. They will be throwing enough money at Adams that could’ve been better spent on so many other things. They’re screeching about communism. They’re threatening to leave a city they will never, ever leave.

In the event of a Mamdani general election victory — *knocks harder on wood* — there will be a quick pivot to “well, it’s just a mayoral, he can’t do XYZ” and putter on to the next thing. That will be the mask they wear to hide the anger and embarrassment of losing to a socialist in the city of Wall Street.

Jeffries, for his part, never takes the mask off. He will look dead-eyed into the camera, with a plastic smile, saying nothing bothers him at all, until New York turns out the lights in his office.