The Nation

09/04/2025

Yet, even though Politico packages its report as a cascade of GOP schadenfreude, the body of it is taken up with lamentations from Democrats. Indeed, the wording of the headline comes not from any Republican operative but from a concern-trolling Democrat—former Nassau County executive Laura Curran, who absurdly opines that the GOP opposition is “more excited about this than Mamdani’s followers or supporters.” Not to be outdone, Hank Scheinkopf, a longtime Democratic operative in New York who is working with an anti-Mamdani PAC, delivers this whopper: “Mamdani is the greatest threat to Democrats probably since Ronald Reagan because he’s everything Democrats have been accused of being and in fact is—to the extreme. Republican ad makers will know what to do with this.”

The Democrats’ addiction to left-marginalization strategies is especially unwarranted in Mamdani’s case, since the substance of his platform does what this same cohort of centrist party leaders tirelessly claim they want to do: He focuses on “kitchen-table issues,” with plans to secure affordable housing, provide free transportation, and mitigate the rise of daily living expenses in the country’s most costly city. In a never-ending regress of subject-changing rhetoric, Democratic officials can be heard claiming that virtually every authoritarian power grab from the Trump White House is a desperate ploy to distract voters from kitchen-table issues. They said it about the illegal mobilization of federal troops in Los Angeles; they said it about the mobilization of the broader immigration police state; they said it about the Epstein files; and they keep saying it about the battle to restore the foundations of American democracy.

Now the party has a charismatic, well-spoken advocate to actually solve kitchen-table issues, and its leaders have rallied to declare him anathema. (They are also keen to repudiate Mamdani for his principled stand against the Gaza genocide, to the point of militantly ignoring the extensive polling showing his strong support among Jewish voters in New York, but that’s another column entirely.) It’s long past time to recognize that the true distraction here are the members of a Democratic consulting class dogmatically opposed to revising their stratagems in the face of system-wide failure. Alas, it’s far from certain that they will get out of the party’s way before another midterm debacle.