How will Democrats handle the Mamdani effect?

Hello Swampians, it’s Jonathan Derbyshire here, the FT’s US opinion editor, standing in for Ed.

Today is a big day for New York City’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who is due to meet President Donald Trump in the White House. Trump announced the meeting, with his preferred mis-characterisation of Mamdani’s democratic socialist views, in a post on Truth Social: “Communist mayor of New York City, Zohran ‘Kwame’ Mamdani, has asked for a meeting,” he wrote.

As momentous as that encounter will be — particularly given the president’s previous threats to withdraw federal funds from New York and the warning made on Tuesday by Trump’s border tsar Tom Homan that operations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the city would soon increase in scale and frequency — Mamdani could be forgiven for having other things on his mind.

On Wednesday evening, the mayor-elect attended a meeting of the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, the group that endorsed his mayoral bid and, as I wrote in a piece for the FT Weekend Magazine last month, provided much of the organisational muscle for his successful campaign.

I concluded that piece by noting that in the final stretch of the mayoral race, Mamdani had begun to put some distance between his platform and certain policies promoted by DSA. “The relationship between the organisation and an insurgent candidate is one thing,” I wrote, “Holding a mayor Mamdani accountable will be quite another.” The meeting on Wednesday seemed to bear this out.

Mamdani urged DSA members not to back city councilman Chi Ossé’s decision to run for Congress against House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, whose eventual endorsement of the mayor-elect had been both late and lukewarm. “The choice is not whether to vote for Chi or Hakeem at the ballot box,” Mamdani told the meeting. “The choice is how to spend the next year. Do we want to spend it defending caricatures of our movement, or do we want to spend it fulfilling the agenda at the heart of that very same movement?”

There is in fact a significant caucus inside NYC-DSA that supports Mamdani’s position, dismissing Ossé as an “opportunist” or adventurer, and arguing that the organisation’s energies would be better spent on building a “larger socialist bloc” in the New York state assembly in Albany. DSA members will vote on whether to endorse Ossé’s run on Saturday. The outcome will be a sign of how far Mamdani’s writ runs inside the group.

But Ossé’s gambit not only draws attention to the potentially fraught relationship with DSA that Mamdani will have to navigate once he assumes office on January 1. It also has wider national significance for the Democratic party, where centrist incumbents across the country face potential challenges from insurgent candidates running to their left.

As Axios’s Andrew Solender reported this week, “House Democrats are facing a surge of progressive primary challenges” inspired by Mamdani. The scale of the “anti-establishment” wave is impressive. In New York alone, House members Grace Meng and Ritchie Torres are facing challenges. Solender also points to the national role in backing insurgent candidates played by Justice Democrats, a group that aims to “elect a mission-driven caucus that will fight for bold, progressive solutions to match the scope and scale of our current crises”.

Now, Mamdani is a politician of unusual gifts, who also benefited from a pre-existing campaigning infrastructure built by DSA over several years that simply doesn’t exist elsewhere in the country. It may be premature, therefore, to suppose that the “Mamdani effect” will benefit leftwing or progressive challengers to the Democratic establishment nationwide. Yet it is undeniable that the ideological wind in the party seems to be blowing decisively in one direction.

I’m pleased to be able to call on my colleague Lauren Fedor, the FT’s deputy Washington bureau chief, to respond this week. Lauren, what do you make of this wave of progressive challenges to Democratic incumbents? You talk regularly to lawmakers in Washington DC. How is the party establishment responding to the Mamdani effect?

Recommended reading

• News broke on Wednesday of a new peace plan for Ukraine drawn up by the Trump administration and Russian officials that envisages major concessions by Kyiv. Former US National Security Council official Philip Gordon’s column for the FT, in which he explains why fawning over the US president by foreign leaders is not only humiliating but doesn’t work, is therefore particularly well-timed. The Ukraine plan, Phil argues, “must leave European leaders wondering whether their sycophantic attempt to curry favour with Trump was worth it”.

• Marc Fisher’s New Yorker profile of Trump’s accidental FBI director Kash Patel is essential reading. How did a self-described “Indian American hockey fanatic” from Queens end up running the US’s principal federal law enforcement agency?

• And for something completely different, do read Terry Eagleton’s highly entertaining piece in the New Statesman about some long-lost poems by Iris Murdoch, which he concludes were probably better left in the attic.

Lauren Fedor replies

Jonathan, Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City has undeniably inspired the next generation of progressive politicians, and breathed new energy into the left at a critical moment for the Democratic party. In that sense, it is no surprise that a host of left-leaning candidates are seeking to follow in his footsteps, and ride the wave of his victory into next year’s midterms.

But this is a playbook we have seen before, and while there are some notable examples of progressive challengers who have ousted incumbent Democratic lawmakers in recent years, many more have fallen short.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is of course the best known example of a progressive political novice who unseated a long-serving member of the Democratic party establishment. Back in the spring of 2018, she shocked just about everyone in Washington when she defeated Joseph Crowley, a 10-term incumbent who was then the Democratic caucus chair.

Alongside Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Massachusetts’s Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, AOC became a founding member of the “Squad,” an informal group whose numbers expanded to six in the 2020 elections. At the time, many argued the Squad represented the future of the Democratic party — and their numbers were set to multiply. 

But that did not happen. To be sure, a couple more members have joined the Squad’s ranks in recent election cycles. Yet many more insurgent candidates have learned the hard way that it is almost impossibly tough to beat an incumbent.

As you say, Mamdani is a politician of unusual gifts. His unique combination of charisma, clear message and campaign discipline propelled him to victory. Ocasio-Cortez has similarly been described as a once-in-a-generation political talent. It remains to be seen whether there are more undiscovered political stars in our midst.