June 25, 2026
Come senators, congressmenPlease heed the callDon’t stand in the doorwayDon’t block up the hall
~Bob Dylan
Mayor Zohran Mamdani‘s endorsed candidates had a great Primary night this week. Darializa Avila Chevalier and Brad Lander bested incumbent Reps Adriano Espaillat and Dan Goldman, respectively. Assemblymember Claire Valdez beat Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso in the race to determine who will fill retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez‘ seat. All three of them, and the Mayor, are carrying forward the Democratic Socialist vision for America that Bernie Sanders elevated in his campaigns for President: an economy that works for everyone, not just the billionaires. What’s changed is that the nominal Democratic Party has lost touch with its voters. They reflexively blame those voters for their losses, especially for the second Trump administration. But a political party that refuses to support positions that most of its members hold is a party trying to lose.
Imagine if, twenty or thirty years ago, the Republican Party stubbornly insisted on defying their members by running on abortion rights, gun control and raising taxes. Those are three big ‘single issue’ voter blocks within the GOP. If any one of those blocks stays home on Election Day, they lose. So what did they do? They accommodated them and got those votes. In contrast, the Democratic Party ignored their single issue voting blocks and then blamed them for not ‘voting blue no matter who’ as if they were somehow owed those votes. Thousands of Democrats explicitly informed the Harris campaign that their single issue was ending military support for Israel’s war on Gaza. She calculated that she could win anyway without their votes. She was wrong. While Trump won 2 million more votes in 2024 than in 2020, Harris got 7 million fewer than Biden did 4 years earlier. The moral of the story is clear: listen to the voters or they won’t support your candidate. Pretty basic, no?
Recent polling has only made it clearer that the Democratic Party is wildly out of step with Democrats. Single digit support for Israel’s war on Gaza among Democrats (8%) should have been an easy call for candidates. And yet Goldman and Espaillat wouldn’t commit to end US backing that war. The same math works for single payer healthcare (72%), wealth tax (85%), and expanding the Supreme Court (75%). In electoral politics it doesn’t matter if the issue is sugary soft drinks, fracking bans, or School Prayer. If a supermajority of a Party’s members favor a given position, candidates defy those voters at their own risk.
Already we’re hearing some Democrats still trying to dismiss this fundamental political reality. Hakim Jeffries practically scoffed at NYC voters by saying a handful of primaries “aren’t going to reshape” the Congressional Democratic caucus. If he really believes that, his days in Congress may be numbered. As Bob Dylan said many years ago, “your old road is rapidly agin’. Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand, for the times they are a-changin.'”
