El-Sayed, a former public-health official, managed it, clinching (as of this writing) 48.5% of ballots, against 47.5% for his centrist opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens. The narrow margin might prompt Democratic-establishment crowing about El-Sayed’s chances in the general. But consider that AIPAC and other outside groups poured some $60 million into Stevens’s campaign, with more than half of that amount coming from the political action committee of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby — making this the most expensive Democratic primary ever. Outside groups backing El-Sayed, by contrast, only managed fewer than $5 million. 

Sixty million bucks couldn’t buy a Democratic primary. We have, in every sense, entered a new era.

Stevens was the sort of candidate who, not long ago, breezed to the nomination in a statewide contest. When Mallory McMorrow, the third Democrat in the running, dropped out, it was assumed Stevens could consolidate the anti-El-Sayed vote. This was how centrists almost always beat the Left, after all. In 2020, Bernie Sanders was doomed when Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Beto O’Rourke dropped out of the primary, endorsing Joe Biden. Even when Leftists were strong, they were factional candidates, doomed to electoral ceilings. Sanders couldn’t get more votes than Biden or Hillary Clinton. The Left had to content itself with small-scale victories, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knocking off Joe Crowley in a single New York House district.

But now we have a Left surge of a kind not seen since the late 1960s and early ’70s. Back then, Left-leaning Democrats won primaries on the strength of their full-throated opposition to the Vietnam War. Just so, today it’s Israel-critical Democrats who are being rewarded for aligning the party with popular sentiment. And popular sentiment is clear: the Jewish state is now viewed unfavorably by nearly all major demographic groups (save for Republicans over age 50).

El-Sayed, like Mamdani, is a fierce critic of Israel. Both shattered taboos around what could be said about the Jewish state. AIPAC knew what was at stake, hence its unprecedented spending. The state’s Democratic establishment, led by outgoing Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and outgoing Sen. Gary Peters, likewise lent its backing to Stevens. Before the mid-2020s, that sort of endorsement power alone would have just about ended any statewide primary.

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Progressives, of course, can’t claim total victory. The margin was uncomfortably tight, and El-Sayed must survive the general election come November. But here, too, the deck is stacked. Moderates get to lose elections all the time, but if the Left blows a race to a Republican, the alarm bells are heard ringing all across the country. It’s the same way with governance: a centrist like Eric Adams, the former Gotham mayor, can depart City Hall in utter disgrace. But Mamdani, the democratic socialist, must run the city without a whiff of scandal; the slightest failure on his part (supposedly) indicts the entire American Left. 

What makes El-Sayed’s victory over Stevens most intriguing, though, is that progressives will finally be able to test a thesis they’ve long entertained: namely, that their brand of politics — populist on economics but still socially liberal — can win in a battleground state. Progressives, typically, haven’t won primaries where a strong Republican is waiting in the wings. If El-Sayed can win Michigan, one of the most pivotal states in the country, he will be a true national star.

For now, at least, the progressive Left has been able to leave its cultural baggage behind. El-Sayed can’t be credibly called anti-woke, but he might be, like Mamdani, post-woke. Mamdani abandoned his earlier calls to defund the police. He does not, like the Democratic Socialists of America and 2010s progressives, support an open border. 

El-Sayed has trod a similar path. With his bulging muscles and willingness to mix it up on the podcast circuit and alternative online channels, he codes as the sort of pol who might be able to solve the Democrats’ problem with woke-weary young men. He possesses a certain machismo that, for Leftists, is a more recent phenomenon. And he speaks forthrightly to the cultural crises of young men, telling UnHerd’s Sohrab Ahmari that Leftists should address the structural causes behind male malaise — issues like online gambling and porn addiction — rather than write off men as “toxic.” Whether this is enough to convince young men to vote Democratic again nationally remains to be seen.

The bigger story, though, is the pro-Palestine current running through the party, and the generational shift well under way that will eventually tug top Democrats away from Israel. Like all small-d democratic groups, they eventually respond to their voters, and this is clearly what their voters want. Social media were rife with videos mocking Stevens for her over-the-top devotion to the Jewish state — “Israel comes to me in my dreams” — and the AIPAC largesse floating her campaign. 

There was her voice, too, almost a peculiar parody of the Michigander accent — I’ve spent a great amount of time in the state and never heard anyone speak that way — that had many online critics pulling up old clips of Chris Farley. Were these attacks sexist? Maybe. But they came from as many young women as young men. Swaggering El-Sayed was the one they wanted.

The pundit class contends that El-Sayed is a terrible bet in the general election against the Republican nominee, Mike Rogers. Whether they have a point or not, we will find out soon enough. What the Michigan primary proved was that Democratic voters are no longer compelled by that pitch. They once were; the entire premise of Biden’s 2020 campaign was his contention that only he could defeat Trump. Now the electorate is restless. They saw the Democratic failures of 2016 and 2024. They are weary and angry about living, again, under the yoke of Trump. When a Democratic politician or star operative lectures them about electability, they tune out. Wasn’t the failed reality-TV star supposed to be unelectable? Then he won — and won again. Stevens could talk all day and night about how she flipped a Republican seat. Very few people cared.

The harsh reality for the Democratic establishment is that they have, like Republicans in 2016, lost their grip on the party. They have no one but themselves to blame. In 2024, Michigan was the home of the Uncommitted movement: progressives who refused to fall behind Biden and Kamala Harris over the horrors unfolding in Gaza. Why would Stevens, AIPAC’s foot soldier, be the right candidate for 2026 in Michigan of all places, with its sizable Arab and Muslim population? 

Now that it has been proved that AIPAC cannot buy a Democratic primary, the group’s influence on Democratic politics, already waning, will collapse sharply. Even if El-Sayed loses in November, there won’t be a lane for Israel hawks in future Democratic primaries, and they will migrate fully to the GOP (where, it must be noted, a warm embrace isn’t certain to greet them). 

Organic support for Israel is vanishing, and the vast reserves of cash can’t bring it back. Stevens herself once won a House primary bludgeoning a progressive Jewish Democrat, Andy Levin, whom Israel hawks believed was insufficiently supportive of the Jewish state. Now she is finished. At best, she will be a footnote: one of the very last pure AIPAC Democrats. Like the Rockefeller Republicans of old, she and her cause will fade into history.

Yet the woman who introduced modern democratic socialism to America, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, may find this outcome more discomfiting than thrilling — at first blush, at least. Though AOC entered Congress as a disruptor railing against the party’s leadership, she has become, quietly, far more accommodating in Washington. Will the incoming socialists follow the same pattern — or adopt a more radical line, forcing her to choose between fidelity to the Left and her mainstream aspirations?

AOC is friendly with top Democrats, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who might well end up the next House speaker. She has climbed the ranks of key committees. She has been, when needed, a good soldier. In 2024, at the Democratic National Convention, she delivered a forceful speech in favor of Kamala Harris, hailing the then-vice president for working “tirelessly” for a ceasefire in Gaza. Meanwhile, members of the so-called Uncommitted National Movement — progressives who refused to commit to the Harris-Walz ticket over Palestine — were all but barred from the convention. This irked Leftists to no end, leading them to question AOC’s progressive credentials and to wonder out loud whether she was a sell-out.

Yet beyond the hard-Left rank-and-file, AOC is unlikely to face an immediate battle with the new socialist electeds. She didn’t endorse all the primary challengers who won — in deference to her House colleagues, she stayed away from those challenging incumbents or the preferred candidates of incumbents. Even so, she has made overtures to the victors, praising Valdez and Avila Chevalier in New York. The winners all express a fondness for her — publicly, at least. In short, comity will likely reign within The Squad.

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There’s a larger question, though, over how these relationships might fare if some of the new Leftists decide to behave in a more confrontational manner. Ocasio-Cortez may run for president and wants to make a bid for a broader national audience. A lawmaker like Avila Chevalier won’t have the same incentives. Within the DSA itself, there are also going to be fresh tensions. It isn’t hard to find online gripes from Leftists wondering if AOC is too soft on Israel, too willing to accept the Democratic status quo.

How things change.

It was in 2018 when AOC won her shock primary over Joe Crowley, the boss of the Queens Democratic Party, seen as a potential successor to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The organization that supported her, the DSA, was mostly a fringe curiosity, a legacy project of the famed political theorist and activist Michael Harrington, who died in 1989. As recently as a decade ago, the DSA boasted only a few thousand members nationally and had little impact on conventional electoral politics. When AOC won, she benefited from the first DSA boom, which followed Sen. Bernie Sanders’s unsuccessful but surprisingly robust battle against Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Fast forward to today, and there are around 120,000 DSA members across the country, per the organization’s own tally. 

At first, it looked like AOC would fulfill the expectations of her greatest fans and detractors alike. Before she was even sworn in, she stormed Pelosi’s office with 200 youth activists to demand Congress do more to combat climate change. Her nascent Squad seemed poised to disrupt the Democratic majority, with AOC leading the way. 

Some of their number, such as Omar and Michigan’s Rep. Rashida Tlaib, would prove to be lightning rods. Yet as the years wore on, Ocasio-Cortez gradually evolved into an institutionalist, a proud progressive who would nevertheless partner with Pelosi and try to climb the ranks of the body. She is one of the top Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and while she still supports policies like the Green New Deal — a massive stimulus program to fight climate change while putting millions to work on the scale of the original New Deal — she rarely talks about it anymore. In light of her rising stature in the Democratic caucus and her alliance with Jeffries, AOC didn’t endorse Avila Chevalier or Valdez in their primaries, though both are fellow Latina DSA members from New York City. 

Among a faction of the left, AOC skepticism persists. Bhaskar Sunkara, the Jacobin founder (and a contributor to these pages), recently declared that Ocasio-Cortez is “more progressive than socialist.” Some in the DSA have grumbled that by upholding corporate-friendly Democrats like Jeffries, AOC has undercut her own seriousness about rebuilding the welfare state and union power. There’s a schism, too, between how New York City socialists view Ocasio-Cortez — they adore her — and a smaller slice of the national leadership that has always seen her as too moderate: AOC never forced a vote on Medicare for All, voted to support Iron Dome funding for the Jewish state, and seemed, at times, more concerned with placating colleagues in seniority than catering to the base. 

How will these factional tensions contour her future and that of the wider DSA-aligned Left in Congress?

Power, generally, tends to change those who obtain it. For the next wave of DSA members entering the House, the question is whether they’ll follow the current AOC example — or venture down a more radical path. The latter, given Ocasio-Cortez’s own entanglements with the Left, may be more likely. Neither Avila Chevalier nor Valdez have said they would support Jeffries for speaker. Kiros and Rabb haven’t committed, either. (Brad Lander, who is not a DSA member but would be one of the most progressive Democrats in Congress next year, has said he will back Jeffries.) 

This doesn’t mean, ultimately, that Jeffries won’t have the votes to win the speaker’s gavel. Nor does it imply that all of these DSAers won’t fall in line with the mainstream of the party. But it does offer a preview of what’s to come. 

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What was true was that Ocasio-Cortez never employed the tactics of hard-Right Republicans in Congress, many of them members of the House Freedom Caucus, who were able to take down one speaker (Kevin McCarthy) and hold another hostage (Mike Johnson). If these conservatives took relatively little interest in governing — the nihilist anti-spending approach dated back to the Tea Party years — it was inarguable this faction could, at times, impose its will on the rest of the Republican Party.

The hard Left has never been able to do the same to the Democrats, whose party leadership disciplined members far more effectively and could, more often than not, tamp down insurgencies. Donald Trump thrice clinched the GOP nomination, while Sanders couldn’t do it even once. In 2026, though, the Democrats are running out of cards to play. A democratic socialist governs New York City, and Leftists are running roughshod over establishment Democrats in congressional primaries. Jeffries, for all his skill, lacks Pelosi’s stature and naked political talent. AOC and her allies couldn’t defenestrate Pelosi because she was, unlike McCarthy, one of the great backroom tacticians of the modern era, a legislative leader with few peers anywhere. And she was a historical figure, too, the first and so far only female speaker of the House. By the time AOC entered Congress, Pelosi had already completed a four-year stretch as speaker and spent many decades in politics; she was the preeminent power in San Francisco and Washington, DC.

What is Jeffries compared to that? Suddenly, the radicalism that the new DSA members might pursue almost reads like realpolitik. Why should Valdez or Avila Chevalier or Rabb fear Jeffries? What can he really do to them? Why not try to replicate the House Freedom Caucus model on the Democratic side? Jeffries’s staunch support for Israel is outmoded, and even ordinary Democratic voters alienated from the DSA don’t have an especially high opinion of him. They’re tired of their leaders and don’t feel they’re fighting Trump hard enough. 

This is where the DSA Leftists can appeal, to some degree, to the “normie” Democratic voter — both despise Trump and want to engage in political combat at his level. AOC, ultimately, will have to shift with them — she’ll need to be more pro-Palestine and anti-Israel, and more willing to spar with Jeffries. For her, this all might be liberating, anyway. The AOC of 2018 would probably be protesting the AOC of 2026. If she really wants to run for president, she’ll need every last activist in her corner. That primary will be a real war.

But the Democratic establishment should only take so much heart in this. A quirk of history has kept the mayor of New York from seeking the presidency. However, the Democratic establishment is every bit as frail as the GOP establishment was a decade ago, and Mamdani-backed candidates won a string of remarkable victories in New York’s congressional and state primaries in late June. 

Today, the Democratic establishment is finding the bottom the Republican old guard reached in the 2010s, just before a fading reality TV star romped through the primaries and proceeded to remake the party in his own image. Chuck Schumer and his ilk are almost as limp as Jeb Bush was in 2016, when he promised a shock-and-awe campaign but was humiliated on debate stage after debate stage. The odds are better, right now, of Schumer becoming the Senate Majority Leader in 2027 than of him surviving a primary in his own state in 2028. 

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Trump and Mamdani are chummy because Trump understands, intuitively, that the Democratic Socialist, immigrant Muslim represents the Left version of himself. The two men may agree on nothing politically, but they know what it is like to confront the full wrath of their respective parties’ establishments. They carry battle scars from slaying scions of political dynasties that were once very popular (Bush, Cuomo), and they know the feeling of winning nominations while party elites withhold endorsements. Trump, of course, is the Republican Party elite now, while Mamdani, only six months in office, is a generational star who still can’t get more than a grudging acknowledgment from Schumer, or Hakeem Jeffries, who is probably going to be the House Speaker next year.

But Jeffries and Schumer, for different reasons, represent a political approach that is fast falling out of vogue. Schumer is 75, and his kitschy, cable TV hucksterism and Israel-cheerleading is alienating to a vast majority of voters under the age of 40. Jeffries is much younger and may well have a future leading the Democrats, yet his own style has failed to resonate with the party’s base. He is not revered like Nancy Pelosi. Very few Democrats beyond the members of his caucus are excited for him to lead the House. His own Israel boosterism has made him the target of young progressives, and rank-and-file voters still feel that he hasn’t aggressively confronted Trump enough. 

It is easy to forget that the base of the Democratic Party was once much more comfortable with its establishment wing. Bernie Sanders could not win the Democratic nomination because, for all the ways party apparatchiks and the DNC might have foiled him, he never won over enough voters to overcome Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. Ten years ago, many Democrats liked the former First Lady and Secretary of State. She was not a great political talent, but enough voters in the primaries didn’t want to take a chance on a socialist senator from Vermont.

That era is gone. No true frontrunner exists for the 2028 Democratic nomination. No Clinton or Obama can tip the scales. If Kamala Harris wants to run, she’ll have to get in the muck with everyone else and hope she can survive a grueling primary season. The establishment was desperate to coronate Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama helped engineer Biden’s 2020 victory, convincing the center-Left candidates in the field to drop out and consolidate against Sanders. The establishment won’t have that power, in this election cycle. 

Socialist candidates can win today because there are no more effective Red Scares and fewer and fewer voters remember the Soviet Union. Democratic Socialists are economic populists, and there is a growing share of the Democratic electorate that responds to this messaging. Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists of America undertakes actual political organizing — the sort Obama abandoned once he became president — and its candidates benefit from an establishment that decided it wasn’t worth the effort to knock on doors or pass out leaflets in the streets. DSA is filling a void. The party elites are only now understanding how threatened they are.

This doesn’t mean DSA is taking over the Democratic Party tomorrow. Members of its ranks still espouse fringe views around defunding the police and abolishing prisons. So far, there is little evidence DSA can win in districts with large numbers of independent or Republican voters. That was Trump’s original magic — to cross over, to create a coalition. But maybe, someday, the socialists can. After Mamdani, who can say what’s not possible? 

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At the minimum, the far-Left is going to rack up more victories in Democratic primaries. Jaime Harrison, the former chair of the DNC, proclaimed recently that Leftists and socialists who “hate the Democratic Party” should not “run for our nomination.” “Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers,” Harrison posted on X. “Don’t use our infrastructure. Don’t ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your campaign.” It was a laughable statement — not only because Harrison was the DNC chair who hoped to deceive the American people over Biden’s fitness to seek another term, but because it revealed a belief in a politics that effectively no longer exists. There are no Democratic Party “volunteers,” nor truly any “infrastructure.” Candidates are responsible for recruiting their own volunteers and building out their own get-out-the-vote operations. The DNC can, on certain national campaigns and the presidential race, assist, but the Democratic Party in America — like the Republican Party — is effectively a shell organization, a ballot line that anyone, with enough effort, can occupy. 

That’s how Mamdani became the Democratic mayor of New York City and Trump became the Republican president of the United States. This is not a parliamentary democracy. Parties do not select candidates, control lists, or charge membership fees. Party lifers like Harrison sometimes like to pretend they do this, or that they have a right to say what a “Democrat” is. At some point, a Trump-like contender will subvert the Democratic Party at mass scale. There isn’t much to head off this possibility; it isn’t like there’s an all-powerful shadow establishment that can rally behind one candidate and squelch the powerful insurgent. Mamdani proved, at the local level, that overcoming this opposition is possible with enough charisma and organization. And his victory shouldn’t be undersold because it was in one city: if New York City were a standalone state, it would be one of the 15 largest, close in size to Virginia. Sanders, were he running in New York City, might have even won were he ten years younger or a bit more palatable. 

Either way, men like Harrison, Schumer, and Jeffries will have to adjust to the new order. They will not control the destiny of the Democrats much longer. The clock is ticking.

Ultimately, Biden settled on his vice president, Kamala Harris, following through on his post-George Floyd aim to add a nonwhite politician to his ticket. Harris had flamed out as a presidential contender and ended up an ineffectual VP; her struggles in the White House incentivized Biden, despite his senility, to attempt another presidential run. If the physicists are correct, surely there is an alternate universe in which Vice President Big Gretch eased out Biden in early 2024, seized the nomination, and stopped Trump in his tracks.

But we don’t live in that universe. In ours, Whitmer has remained governor of Michigan, where she’s waffled on whether she will run for president come 2028. On paper, she would be viable: a two-term governor from a swing state with a real track record of beating Republicans. If she did take the plunge, she would receive plenty of media attention and wouldn’t struggle to fundraise. Unlike California’s Gavin Newsom, she doesn’t govern a state that produces many unflattering headlines. Opponents couldn’t point to any great homelessness crisis, natural disaster, or affordability crunch occurring on her watch.

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A Whitmer presidential campaign would, however, be a test case for a kind of politics that is growing more alienating by the day: relentless and unapologetic support for artificial intelligence. If Whitmer ran for president, she’d be the pro-AI candidate in whatever pro-AI lane exists. Few governors have catered more to the industry than Whitmer, whether it is championing tax breaks or ramming through massive data-center projects that have drawn local backlash — the kind that, shockingly, hasn’t seemed to rattle Whitmer at all. In 2026, developers have scoped out at least 16 data-center sites in 10 Michigan counties, according to an MLive tally. A massive $16 billion data center in Saline Township, which just broke ground, has been a signature Whitmer project, generating intense grassroots opposition.

Across America, Democratic and Republican politicians are growing more skeptical of AI. Red states like Florida, Utah, and Oklahoma have enacted regulations on energy use for data centers, as have deep-blue ones like California and Washington. New York passed a one-year moratorium on data-center buildouts. Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, Oregon, and Washington now regulate what chatbots can communicate to human users. The polling points the way toward more aggressive regulation: half of all American adults say the increased use of AI in daily life makes them feel more concerned than excited, according to a Pew survey from last year. Merely 10% say they are more excited than concerned.

Yet the term-limited Whitmer has been a tireless AI champion, as has the Democratic frontrunner to replace her in the governor’s mansion, Jocelyn Benson. Read any release from Whitmer’s office, and it is obvious that she views the AI expansion as a job-creating opportunity that can’t be passed up. The Saline Township data center being built by Oracle and Related Digital, she promises, will yield 2,500 union construction jobs, more than 450 ongoing jobs on the site, and 1,500 more across the county. “This investment from Oracle and Related Digital sends a simple message to anyone who wants to build the future — you can build it in Michigan,” she enthused.

Yet there are several intractable problems with data centers that Whitmer has mostly waved away or vaguely promised to address in the future. Electricity bills can surge. The water supply can be endangered. There is the noise and pollution generated from the diesel-powered backup generators. And there is a great risk, too, if AI amounts to a bubble. Hundreds of billions have been spent on a technology that remains unprofitable, and if a reckoning ever comes, towns and rural areas across the country will be left holding the bag: half-built centers, farmland wrecked for no purpose.

Hence, why prominent politicians of the Left and the Right have grown more skeptical of AI.  The likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Josh Hawley — representing the socialist Left and the populist Right, respectively — have positioned themselves as fierce industry opponents. Candidates for office have seen their fortunes rise just on the strength of their willingness to regulate AI. But Whitmer is cut from a different cloth. In some sense, this might be because she represents an older wing of the Democratic Party, one that remains deferential to corporate power. As both Harper’s and the nonprofit news site Bridge Michigan have pointed out, Whitmer has, since taking office in 2019, spent nearly $1 billion in taxpayer cash on corporate incentives that have delivered on only a fifth of the promised jobs. In 2024, she backed legislation to grant total exemptions on sales and use taxes for large-scale data centers, overcoming opposition in the state legislature.

In Michigan, AI companies have forged a close relationship with the dominant utility, DTE Electricity, which is eager to do big business powering the data centers. While Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat like Whitmer, has lambasted DTE for its frequent demands for rate hikes, Whitmer hasn’t been nearly as outspoken. DTE is a prolific donor in the state; Whitmer has been, naturally, a beneficiary of its largesse, bagging at least $550,000, according to Detroit News. Jocelyn Benson — the secretary of state and Whitmer’s likely successor — is married to Ryan Friedrichs, a vice president for Related Companies, not only the firm behind the Saline Township data center, but a major donor to Benson’s campaigns.

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Top Michigan Democrats are compromised enough by the data-center and utility lobbies that it fell to Tom Leonard, a former leading contender for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, to speak out against AI’s conquest of the state. Leonard called for an end to tax breaks for data centers, as well as a one-year moratorium on building new facilities. He has since dropped out, and if Michigan experiences a blue wave akin to the 2018 midterm that swept Whitmer to the governor’s mansion, Benson will probably end up the next governor.

And while the next US senator from Michigan will have far less say over the future of data centers than the governor, the fight over AI has divided the Senate primary, too. Abdul El-Sayed, the Sanders-backed progressive candidate, has called for AI companies to be regulated as public utilities and criticized his rival, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, for supporting Whitmer-endorsed data-center tax breaks in the legislature. Meanwhile, Haley Stevens, the congresswoman who is the most conservative of the three Democratic contenders, has generally defended the AI industry in the context of national security and competing with China.

For Democrats nationally, especially those who over the years have fawned over Whitmer and the political operation she’s built in Michigan, there will be the question of what kind of party they want to form. If Whitmer plunges into the presidential race, she will be the Democratic warrior for AI. If she doesn’t, others might take up the cause in the name of innovation. But they would be wise not to ignore actual voters. An AI revolt is brewing in Michigan, and it is headed anywhere else where data centers are proliferating. The AI Democrat, like the AI Republican, may only be able to survive for so long.

The former New York City comptroller and Zohran Mamdani ally is running to replace Rep. Dan Goldman in the state’s 10th Congressional District, spanning Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. By every “normal” measure, Goldman’s should be a safe seat: the two-term lawmaker faces no scandal, takes conventionally center-Left stances on every issue, and is, of course, furiously anti-Trump; indeed, he rose to fame in the 2010s as the lead counsel in President Trump’s first impeachment trial.

Yet Goldman is trailing Lander by 34 points, according to a recent Emerson College/PIX 11 poll. 

Goldman, then, is effectively doomed. Why is that? If, on issues like health care and housing and the economy, there aren’t great differences between Lander and Goldman, they do diverge significantly on Israel and the fate of the Palestinians. And it’s here where Lander, who is proudly Jewish like Goldman, points to the future of the Democratic Party.

He might, in time, come to embody it fully.

To be sure, the lopsided nature of the polls isn’t just about “revulsion” at Israel, which is overwhelming among Democrats and Independents and growing among Republicans under age 50. Lander just ran for mayor, served as Gotham’s chief financial officer, and represented significant chunks of the district for 12 years as a member of the city council. Lander, in other words, is no ordinary insurgent. Goldman has much shallower roots in the district.

Then, too, Lander sits to Goldman’s Left, and the district is among the most liberal in the country. While Goldman notably refused to endorse Mamdani for mayor in the general election, Lander proudly co-endorsed and campaigned with the democratic socialist. The mayor, in turn, has endorsed Lander in his congressional race.

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Lander holds several positions on Israel that, several years ago, would have been considered taboo. He opposes all military aid to Israel until the Jewish state complies with international law, particularly in regards to the occupation of the West Bank. He backs the Block the Bombs Act, which would curtail weapon sales to Israel. And he’s labeled the war in Gaza a “genocide,” defying a still-powerful Israel lobby that insists the mass-casualty horrors of the operation were a necessary response to the Oct. 7 attacks. 

“With young people,” Lander says, “it really is a disconnect between what they can see with their eyes and what received political wisdom is trying to tell them.”

Lander, however, is willing to break from the furthest-Left flank of his party, which has become explicitly anti-Zionist. He believes in two states for two peoples, with one that is explicitly Jewish. Unlike his friend and ally Mamdani, Lander doesn’t back the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, though he doesn’t censure it, either.

Goldman, by contrast, represents the Democratic Party’s past. On Sunday, he participated in the Big Apple’s Israel Day Parade, marching steps away from Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-line finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who has vowed to “bury” Palestinian statehood and recently threatened to evict a Bedouin village in response to an International Criminal Court indictment; Lander gave the parade a miss. 

The awkward proximity to the likes of Smotrich cast into sharp relief the unenviable position of pro-Israel Democrats, like Goldman, forced to defend a very different Israel than the one their parents championed. 

An heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, Goldman has grown critical of Netanyahu but is unwilling to back the blanket suspension of military aid that Lander is calling for. He is not voting for the Block the Bombs Act. He is, at least, supportive of restrictions on offensive weapons but still backs funding for the Iron Dome missile-defense system.

In 2023, Goldman voted to censure his Democratic colleague Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) for using the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” A year later, Goldman backed a GOP-led effort to undercut a lawsuit lodged by South Africa against Israel on charges of genocide. Goldman rejects the term. 

“Goldman has made it clear he is always going to vote for US military aid to Israel,” Lander tells UnHerd, “regardless of how much it violates international law or Palestinian human rights.”

Maddy Rosen, a spokeswoman for Goldman, defended the congressman’s record.

“Brad’s hypocrisy famously knows no bounds, which is why he’s blatantly lying about Dan’s record to deflect from the fact that he invested New Yorkers’ taxpayer dollars in Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer as comptroller,” she said. “The military aid that the US provides to Israel already requires Israel to follow human-rights law. When Israel has not, as with the West Bank, Dan has supported withholding weapons from that region and is a co-sponsor of Rep. Nadler’s West Bank Violence Prevention Act.”

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Still, there are going to be more Lander-style Democrats in the House. American democracy often works on a lag, with politicians trailing public opinion. They do, though, eventually catch up. A Pew survey taken last month found that a stunning 80% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents take an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 69% in 2025 and 53% in 2022. These are generational numbers: the youth have an even dimmer view, and their opinions will likely only harden with age. This is why more and more 2028 Democratic presidential candidates are swearing off AIPAC cash altogether. Netanyahu’s decision to drag Washington into a war in Iran seemed to be the final straw.

“Americans don’t want to keep providing unconditional military aid to Israel after watching the genocide in Gaza … and yet Democrats and Republicans in Congress keep voting for it,” Lander tells UnHerd. “The numbers are increasing of Democrats who are saying no. We should not vote for additional US military aid to Israel.” And there will be “Republicans,” he predicts, “who will be voting that way, as well.”

That remains to be seen, especially with AIPAC and Republican Jewish groups’ successful demolition of Thomas Massie. What Lander may be right about, though, is that Republican voters are becoming less reflexively pro-Israel, if evolving at a slower clip than Democrats. What’s disappearing from the electorate, broadly, is any particular affection for the Jewish state. Gen-Z conservatives, especially those who take MAGA’s America First credo to heart, are far less likely to back Israel than older generations, and there probably will come a point when Republican members of Congress begin to reflect those views. How long that actually takes is anyone’s guess.

What’s clear is that, for the Democratic Party, there is no going back to the status quo ante on Israel. The next Democratic president won’t indulge Israeli leadership the way Joe Biden did. A Democratic House or Democratic Senate won’t speedily authorize billions in unconditional military aid. House Democrats, at least, will be sounding a lot more like Lander. 

“There was sympathy for Israel on Oct. 7 that might have been built upon in such a different way, if Israel had a different leader and different political coalition,” says Lander. “It wasn’t, and here we are.”

Trump’s personalist rule over the MAGA GOP, meanwhile, is increasingly bound up with the pro-Israel cause. And indeed, it was just these two forces — MAGA and pro-Israel hard-liners — that came for Massie, a principled libertarian in the Ron and Rand Paul mold, who opposes the war with Iran and has called for cutting all foreign aid, including to the Jewish state.

The GOP under Trump has ideological underpinnings, but fealty to Trump comes first. That is the only tangible reality. As Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) put it on X, “This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party. The rest of us get the privilege of living in it.” Fine — who combines such utter servility to Trump with grossly anti-Muslim rhetoric (“the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one”) — fits in much better with the second Trump term than the independent-minded Massie ever could.

And Massie realized what he was up against. It wasn’t only that Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL, was personally recruited by Trump to run against him. It was the money: more than $34 million poured into the primary, much of it funding anti-Massie attack ads by pro-Israel groups, making this the most expensive House primary in US history. Combined with Trump’s frothing opposition, and anti-Massie messaging from the likes of Pete Hegseth, it was enough to easily sink him.

Rarely has a House primary been about one person (rather than an opposition between two of them). Several months ago, Trump said publicly that he just wanted a “warm body to beat Massie.” Gallrein made it clear he would happily serve in that role, promising to back Trump 100% of the time. That was all there was to it. He granted almost no interviews, and declined numerous debate invitations from Massie. Here was a foot soldier for Trump, going against a Republican who was willing, time after time, to go his own way.

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The Zohran Mamdani I know

By ross barkan

Trump reviled the Kentucky libertarian for holding up a Covid relief bill in 2020; for voting against the “Big, Beautiful Bill” tax-and-spending package; and for leading the bipartisan fight to force the Justice Department to release the Epstein Files. For Trump, that last was the point of no return. Massie would have to suffer for linking up with Democrats like Rep. Ro Khanna of California in a bid to seek the truth about the late convicted sex offender.

If, for the president, Epstein was the breaking point, Massie’s greatest political challenge was defying the traditional American foreign-policy consensus. Unlike most Republican politicians, Massie was willing to be a principled isolationist. His conservatism on domestic matters translated to a deep skepticism of foreign entanglements, and he was the rare Republican to criticize Benjamin Netanyahu. He voted against a House resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel and also opposed Iron Dome funding. Hence why AIPAC and Republican Jewish groups made it their priority to wipe out Massie. AIPAC gloated over his defeat: “Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics!”

Why, exactly, were they so motivated? For Israel hawks, the Republican Party is their true last stand. The Democratic Party isn’t totally lost to them, but they can read enough polling data: in five or 10 years, there may not be any politicians like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer left: powerful Democrats who offer unstinting support for the Jewish state. Not very long ago, almost every top Democrat attended the AIPAC conference and delighted in landing a speaking slot. In 2016, when Bernie Sanders refused, his decision was considered mildly scandalous. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, had been a proud attendee.

Those days are over. Several potential presidential candidates have said already that they’d refuse AIPAC donations. Democrats have turned on the organization for its backing of Republicans and its willingness to bludgeon Democrats who deviate from the Netanyahu orthodoxy in any fashion and even to the mildest degree. Even more centrist-minded Democrats, like former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, have called for limiting military aid; California Gov. Gavin Newsom described Israel as an apartheid state before walking it back (sort of).

Many Democrats, too, see the triumph of Zohran Mamdani, a pro-Palestine mayor who supports BDS, as a watershed moment, and evidence that it’s possible to win elections while defying the Israel lobby. Mamdani won in New York, the most Jewish city in America.

With Republicans under age 50 turning against the Jewish state, the possible proliferation of Massie-esque Republicans is an existential threat to the Israel hawks, and they will continue to pummel politicians to ensure the GOP will keep sounding like Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, and Ted Cruz. The defeat of Massie promises, at the minimum, that Republicans will think twice before breaking with Israel in any fashion. It’s not that regular voters care all that much — it’s the money, so much of it, ready to deployed at a moment’s notice to annihilate any Republican who steps out of line.

How long that lasts is the real question. For now, Israel hawks unquestionably dominate the Republican Party. What about 2036? 2046?

The hawks have proved, in Kentucky, that they can overwhelm a House primary with unprecedented amounts of cash. But they haven’t yet shifted the attitudes of young conservatives, many of whom are either isolationist — they take the slogan “America First” seriously — or veer into anti-Semitism, like the Groypers who follow Nick Fuentes. Anti-Israel or Israel-skeptical conservative commentators including Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, and Tucker Carlson are undoubtedly on the ascent, while traditional hawks like Ben Shapiro are seeing their enterprises shrink. The conservative grassroots, whether animated by old-fashioned hatred of Jews or straightforward opposition to foreign-policy entanglements, is not supporting the Shapiro-style Republican. If they still, largely, back Trump, they’re weary of the Iran war and don’t understand how America benefits.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s purity trap

By Sohrab Ahmari

It’s not obvious, yet, what the post-Trump Republican Party looks like. Neoconservatives and hawks have had a resurgence in Trump’s second term. Led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, they’ve emerged as true power brokers, while JD Vance, who used to represent the party’s isolationist wing, has been forced to accept a war in Iran he might not have backed were he president. Massie has, for the most part, been the outlier, playing the gadfly role occupied by the likes of Ron Paul in past decades.

But it’s Massie’s vision, as marginal as it is, that may point to the future of the Republican Party — or a future, at least. Not all GOP voters are as strongly libertarian as he is, but as the current cohort of Gen-Z ages, more will probably be receptive to his message in the coming years. A recent New York Times/Siena poll found that while a vast majority of Republicans still back Trump, 37% want to see the party’s next nominee “move in a different direction.” Notably, 45% of Republicans believe “it is best for the United States to be active in world affairs to maintain security and prosperity,” while half say that “they want the country to pay less attention to problems overseas.”

When Trump exits the scene, those viewpoints will remain. Trump won his first election, after all, excoriating the Republicans who’d championed the Iraq War. If he broke his campaign promises, he still retained control of the base thanks to his magnetism. But future Republicans won’t have the same power. One day, a vacuum will open up. Unfortunately for Massie, that day isn’t here yet. It’s Trump’s Republican Party. MAGA apostates don’t have a place in it. For now.

Start with the first trend. Democratic politicians have come to understand that the base of the party is deserting the Jewish state. The atrocities in Gaza during the war that followed the Oct. 7 attacks resulted in a civilian death toll that has been too much to stomach for anyone on the Left — and for an many on the Right, as well, not least Tucker Carlson. 

Now the Israel consensus in the United States, once unified across the two major political parties, has been shattered by Trump’s war in Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu relentlessly promoted war; Trump was all too happy to oblige; and as a result, America is mired in a global catastrophe that has been, at least in part, Israel’s making. The poll numbers are disastrous: almost 60% of Democrats and half of independents view Israel negatively, according to an NBC News poll released last week. This is a sharp increase from a few years ago, and it’s highly unlikely that the Jewish state will win back many of these voters, since the young hate the Zionist mission with the greatest intensity. This under-40 cohort will age and carry its views with it, while the more sympathetic middle-aged and elderly will die off. 

For many decades, criticism of Israel was the third rail in American politics, but leading Democrats are now unafraid to break with precedent. California Gov. Gavin Newsom calls Israel an “apartheid” state. Ruben Gallego, the Arizona senator, has sworn off donations from the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the largest pro-Israel lobby, as has Ro Khanna, a progressive lawmaker from California. Last year, JB Pritzker, the billionaire Illinois governor who once sat on the AIPAC board, voiced support for a Senate resolution that would have blocked American arms sales to Israel. Even Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish and may end up the most prominent hawk of the 2028 race, has been sharply critical of Netanyahu.

The second Leftward surging through the Democratic Party, popular opposition to the Iran war, presents the party with a clear opening: Trump ran on opposition to Mideast regime-change wars, but he has now launched a large operation that may soon entail the deployment of ground troops — of which only 7% of voters approve, according to a Reuters poll last week. But it is yet to be determined if the Democrats will capitalize on this opportunity. Opposition to the war has been clear enough, but certain Democrats, especially the older legislative leaders like New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, run the risk of merely stating their opposition on procedural grounds.

When Trump launched the bombing campaign in Iran, Democrats in Congress fumed that they weren’t consulted first. Israel hawks like Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, weren’t necessarily upset that a war with Iran was happening — it was more that it wasn’t sanctioned, that Congress didn’t get its say, as it did when George W. Bush declared war on Iraq. These leaders suggested that if Congress could have signed off on the bombings, perhaps the chaos would have been more palatable.

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Gavin Newsom is having fun

By Ross Barkan

For Democrats to find a way forward, the party will have to be unequivocally antiwar, in the same way it is moving toward the position, soon to be entirely mainstream, that conditions must be placed on military aid to Israel, if it is to receive any aid at all. The Left will have to move on from lamenting the lack of congressional hearings to a clear and forceful denunciation of the war. Yes, accountability to Congress matters. But as Trump, like the two Republican presidents before him, immolates the Middle East, it’s hardly the main point.

Most crucially, Democrats will have to be the party that is, without question, against all war. MAGA must not outflank the Left on the isolationist front again. The always dubious proposition of a Republican “peace” president has lost credibility, and Democrats must take advantage of it.

The war in Iran is a reminder of just how badly Democrats, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden in particular, failed in 2024. Biden, of course, was senile, and never should have run again; Harris was put in the unenviable position of replacing him without having competed for a single primary vote. But then Harris ran one of the worst campaigns in living memory, ducking the media and struggling to articulate any serious domestic policy vision.

When it came to foreign affairs, however, she equivocated less — and the hawkish posture she landed on gave Trump the opening he needed to best her in every swing state. “Make no mistake, as president, I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend American forces and interests from Iran and Iran-backed terrorists, and I will never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon,” Harris said in October 2024, in a call with Jewish voters. “Diplomacy is my preferred path to that end, but all options are on the table.”

All options are on the table sounds an awful lot like what’s happening now. Granted, Harris is not unstable like Trump, and the odds are far lower that as president, she would have launched such a controversial military operation. Yet it was rhetoric like this that allowed Trump and his followers to hustle to Harris’s Left and promise voters that MAGA, with its vow to put America first and end foreign entanglements, would be the less risky option. When Stephen Miller, in November 2024, posted that “Trump said warmongering neocons love sending your kids to die for wars they would never fight themselves,” and that “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace,” plenty of Americans believed him. It was a lie, but one the Democrats allowed to pass unchallenged, especially as Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney, an unreconstructed neoconservative who celebrated her father’s legacy.

The new generation of Democratic politicians is wiser than Harris. Despite an onslaught of scandal related to an alleged Nazi tattoo (since removed), Graham Platner, a proudly Left-wing oyster farmer, has been a fundraising juggernaut who could very well knock out Schumer’s preferred candidate, Gov. Janet Mills, in a primary race for Republican Sen. Susan Collins’s Maine seat. Platner is an Iraq War veteran who is unapologetically against the war in Iran. He has a fierce, compelling antiwar message that may well launch him to victory. Speaking with a CNN reporter recently, Platner likened Trump’s Iran bombing and troop deployments to Iraq. “We find ourselves here with another war that should not be happening, that is resulting in destruction and horror — all frankly on the taxpayers’ dime,” he said. “That is money that should be spent here in the United States on schools, on hospitals, on infrastructure.”

“Won’t that leave troops in harm’s way, if you vote to defund this operation?” the reporter asked. “No,” Platner said, “because the troops should just not be in harm’s way. End the war. Bring people home. Stop bombing. We can end it.” 

That’s all that needs to be said. Stop bombing, bring home the troops. If Democrats can distill this message plainly — if the party can equivocate less, and avoid the traps Harris laid for it in 2024 — it can quickly outflank a GOP defined by Donald Trump. Few wars in modern American history have been more unpopular at the outset than the bombing of Iran, and voters will only sour further on the conflict as energy prices remain high and the economy stagnates. Unlike in the aughts, today Democrats will take little political risk in being antiwar. During the Iraq War, politicians had to contend with the long shadow of 9/11. They had to beat back accusations of hating America or not sufficiently supporting the troops. They had to, like past generations of liberals, worry about red-baiting, and fend off implications that a belief in civil liberties or pacifism meant they wanted to comfort the enemy within.

Now all they have to do is speak like Platner. Stop killing — and stop wasting money. If Democrats truly want to be the party of peace, their future is plenty bright. 

The California governor is all but openly campaigning for the Democratic nomination, with his aggressive press operation and willingness to engage with Right-wing podcasters. Conventional wisdom suggests his bid will flame out. He presides over a state drowning in social and economic woes. California is expensive, its streets are filled with the homeless, and the state’s population is no longer growing.

The knock on Newsom is that he’s a coastal liberal who has never run in an election where he’s had to take Republicans all that seriously. Vice President JD Vance, who seems poised to be the Republican nominee two and a half years from now, is likely enthused about the possibility of facing down Newsom on the debate stage. 

Newsom is slick, too slick, and he oozes California privilege. He was the guy who imposed Covid lockdowns and then went dining at the tony French Laundry restaurant. He is a creature of San Francisco’s Democratic elite, a relentless ladder-climber who owes his early career success to billionaire heir Gordon Getty, a family friend, and to Willie Brown, the Democratic power broker and former mayor who also elevated Kamala Harris..

There is nothing terribly inspirational about Newsom’s backstory. He played the inside game well, got himself elected mayor, then lieutenant governor, then governor. Now, he thrills the Democratic base as he apes Donald Trump on X. (“SEND IN THE ADULTS!!! GRANDPA IS TIRED” Newsom’s press office replied recently to a Trump video.) In a few years, he’ll be left in the dust by some other Democrat, perhaps a more “serious” standard-bearer like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro or Pete Buttgieg, Joe Biden’s former transportation secretary and a 2020 contender. 

All of this isn’t wrong, and could come to pass. But there is a certain kind of pundit who underrates Newsom’s appeal and can’t quite comprehend that this California liberal could be poised to seize the Democratic nomination and become the next president of the United States.

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Can Democrats save free speech?

By Ross Barkan

Isn’t Newsom just Hillary Clinton with hair gel and a smarmy grin? Maybe. What he also is, however, is a budding media star, equally comfortable on television and podcasts, and he relishes a political brawl. He has no trouble with Fox News, and he hosted the late Charlie Kirk on his own podcast, which has become strikingly popular. In 2023, he staged a Fox debate with Ron DeSantis, who looked like, for a brief moment, he could be the next Republican nominee. Pundits derided the Newsom-DeSantis debate as a publicity stunt, but it was, for the California governor, a chance to flex real media muscle. 

What became clear was that DeSantis, for all his braying about the “free state” of Florida and California’s ills, could not dominate Newsom. Republicans, until then, had imagined Newsom to be another liberal patsy. They didn’t think he could hit back. One conservative who did notice Newsom’s potential, Matthew J. Peterson, then editor-in-chief of The Blaze, put it best: “he’s comfortable in his own skin like Trump, and doesn’t just want to be there, but is comfortable and assured and loves being there.”

Indeed, Newsom has more in common with Trump than many Democratic or Republican pundits might believe, and this will be a strength for him in 2028, not a weakness. He is savvy at holding the spotlight, identifying and bludgeoning enemies, and adapting to shifting political moods. 

In the old Fox formulation, bullies versus nerds, alphas versus betas, it was increasingly obvious that Newsom, the oily former jock, was a man fit for the quasi-demented and deeply influential arena of cable TV. Unlike DeSantis, who was also an outstanding amateur baseball player — he participated in the Little League World Series and captained his Yale squad — Newsom retained his ex-jock aura, or at least the sensibility of a guy who was comfortable with athletes and celebrities.

He swaggered and slithered like Jerry Maguire. This, too, would be Vance’s problem if he ended up on a debate stage with Newsom. For all Vance’s tough talk, he still sounds like the doughy, overachieving Yale Law grad who is secretly pleased with himself for rustling up a pair of blue jeans in his bedroom closet. Newsom, meanwhile, is a bit like the guy who cut class all the time and bedded the homecoming queen. 

If his Trump resistance is shtick, it’s effective shtick. He has read the national electorate well. He executed on a successful push to get a gerrymandering referendum passed in California, countering the Texan push to add more GOP House seats. A Democratic-base voter is desperate for a politician who will mock and belittle Trump on Trump’s own terms. And even the happy warriors like Zohran Mamdani, who don’t sound like Trump, understand that you’ve got to be able to mix it up with the president and his supporters. Mamdani’s chummy White House visit didn’t hurt him because he didn’t offer Trump any concessions or even smile for photos. 

Newsom has never had much of a fixed ideology — he occupies the Left flank these days, but was a centrist, business-friendly mayor of San Francisco — and he’ll be able to conform himself, come 2028, to whatever mood the voters might feel. This, again, is like Trump — or maybe another famous politician born in 1946, Bill Clinton. Newsom knows conservatives expect little from him. In that way, they are no better than the Democrats, coddled in their bubbles, and they are used to punching at what never punches back. The older Republicans can still remember Sean Hannity’s nightly thrashing of Alan Colmes. In Newsom, they see only the latest woke lib, when they would be better off conceiving of Newsom as a West Coast Clinton: debonair, chameleonic, and cutthroat when needed. Clinton exuded alpha charm. He commanded a press conference room and a TV screen. Newsom isn’t so different.

The other knock against Newsom is electability. If he does beat the field in 2028, including Kamala Harris, how can he possibly triumph in the purple states? Didn’t a Californian just go zero-for-7 in the key 2024 battlegrounds of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia? Newsom could certainly struggle in the rural towns and swing suburbs. It’s not like he has any experience winning these people over.

But don’t be too certain of the electability arguments. Recent history has shown that there’s no way to really tell which kind of candidate can triumph. A black man with a foreign-sounding middle name and less than one term in the Senate wasn’t supposed to win two presidential elections. A fading reality television star who boasted about his sexual conquests and demonized war heroes wasn’t supposed to win two presidential elections. And in New York City, a 34-year-old Muslim socialist wasn’t supposed to beat back (twice) a former three-term governor. American politics is getting stranger all the time. And President Gavin Newsom, if still unlikely, is not at all beyond the realm of possibility. One challenge Newsom will have is convincing an electorate weary of political elites and eager for outsiders that he is one of them — or close enough, anyway. In such an anti-establishment country, can the chosen son of Democratic San Francisco actually get himself elected president? Soon enough, we’ll know.

Now, with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Republicans have a new pretext for blatantly violating the First Amendment. Attorney General Pam Bondi has promised to “come after those who engage in hate speech,” distinguishing between “free speech” and “hate speech.” As she said in a recent interview: “There’s no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society. … We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” Vice President JD Vance is no better: “Call them out, and hell, call their employer,” he said as he guest-hosted an episode of Kirk’s podcast. “We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.” Sen.Ted Cruz, who at least insisted that the First Amendment safeguards hate speech, told a Politico panel that he endorsed “naming and shaming” as a means of supporting a “functioning and vibrant democracy.”

It is almost amusing to hear Republicans talk this way after spending the last decade decrying the illiberal, woke Left. Now, instead of defending their own professed values, they have lustily adopted every last woke pathology. Those progressive pathologies were all too real. “Naming and shaming” is indeed what many liberal activists advocated for in the 2010s, waging Twitter-fueled cancellation attempts against anyone who violated their orthodoxies. In the wake of Trump’s first presidential victory, the Left, along with organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, took what they considered to be reasonable measures for desperate times: abandoning discourse among friends, standards in journalism, and defenses of free speech. Just ask anyone who wanted, in 2020, to say that the police should not be defunded or Covid vaccine mandates for employment were an infringement on labor rights and personal liberty. 

The Left’s forms of censorship were more subtle than Trump’s heavy-handed approach, but they existed at a nexus of government, corporate, and institutional power, and came to define the movement in the public eye. Tech platforms, in collaboration with the government, forcefully suppressed information, whether it was the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop or discussion of the Wuhan lab-leak theory. Twitter and Facebook shadow-banned offending accounts, and many institutions, not least colleges, unduly muzzled students and faculty who vented dissident views. As the Left veered into illiberalism, the Right became, for a period, the champion of speech rights.

But those days are long over — and that could be good for the Left. 

The MAGA regime is plainly disdainful of free speech. It is abusing the powers of the federal government because it has yet to fully control the private institutions where liberals still hold significant sway. There is absolutely no difference between the Left’s dedication to cancel culture and Cruz’s call for “naming and shaming.” Or, for that matter, Vance effectively demanding that anyone who says something he doesn’t like about his slain friend get fired from their job. Or the X account Libs of TikTok boasting of making calls to dozens of ordinary people’s employers to get them fired for anti-Kirk messages.

Most ominous is Bondi, who appears ready to wield the full machinery of the Justice Department against the American Left because there are political views in the country she finds distasteful. There are no legal grounds for arresting or even harassing an individual who espouses so-called hate speech. Indeed, the Constitution protects hate speech, as the Supreme Court has affirmed. Bondi knows this. What she is hoping to do, though, is to intimidate the Left and break it on the cultural terrain. Success is doubtful, but she has the power to disrupt the lives of many activists, politicians, and intellectuals, the way the 20th-century FBI and CIA menaced, surveilled, and infiltrated the Left.

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By Ross Barkan

The last time conservatives were so openly hostile to speech rights, George W. Bush was president, but that administration, at the minimum, had the excuse of the worst terrorist attack in American history. The 9/11 attack was the pretext for setting up a mass surveillance state, spying on American citizens, and intimidating opponents of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars into silence. It was vile, but it had some logic to it.  

Kirk is another matter entirely. His assassination is a tragedy and should not have happened. Yet it does not represent a grave new threat to national security or the American people more broadly. Thousands of civilians were not killed in cold blood. Conservatives can insist it’s the American Left that killed Kirk — the radicals. There may be a radical and radicalizing online discourse that destabilizes such people, and Tyler Robinson seems to have succumbed to the Left-wing variety. But there’s no formal organization or movement behind Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old alleged shooter. He is, in the tradition of American assassins, an alienated, angry, and very young gunman. This is true of most assassins and mass shooters; they have confused and disordered inner lives. Post-hoc justifications are crafted to elucidate what is, ultimately, a form of deep mental illness, and one that occurs on both sides. It is true that the Left has been guilty of blaming mass shootings on an infectious Right-wing ideology but, in almost every instance, the violence had no clear cause that could neatly fit a political binary. Now conservatives are guilty of the same fallacy. 

A good question is what Kirk, a man who defended free discourse, would ask for now. Would he want his death to be used as a pretext for shutting down debate? We’ll never know. One of the great failings of Kirk — yes, it’s acceptable to criticize the recently deceased — was that he was usually willing to jettison certain principles in the service of Trump and MAGA. He did this repeatedly, from dropping his pursuit of the Epstein files once Trump wanted the matter dropped, to flip-flopping from isolationist to supportive of Trump’s bombing of Iran. 

With the Right wing apparently finished with free speech, it will be up to the Left to defend and champion it anew. This is possible, still. At the very minimum, the many activists, pundits, and politicians who dismissed the First Amendment’s value in the last decade are discovering, again, why it’s so vital. We can only hope they’ve learned their lesson and are ready to embrace principle over political expediency — only that will bring back the votes.

What might this look like? In the 20th century and into the Aughts, there was rarely any conflict between progressive values and free speech. Leftists understood that an unstinting defense of the First Amendment was vital, and to support the speech rights of so-called enemies was necessary if a climate of free discourse was to survive. The American Civil Liberties Union defended the right of the Ku Klux Klan to hold a march, and drew a clear distinction between that and an endorsement of the organization’s racist ideology. In the 2020s, Democratic politicians and Left-leaning organizations like the ACLU must become speech champions again. Americans believe in the First Amendment, and they don’t want their rights trampled on. Can liberals and progressives earnestly safeguard these rights once more? It’s not impossible. MAGA, certainly, has handed them an opportunity. 

 It was always hard to tell how serious Musk was about this venture. Once a Democratic-friendly billionaire, he fell into Donald Trump’s orbit after buying Twitter (renamed X) and became, by 2024, a prolific donor to the GOP and the Trump campaign. As a reward, Trump put him in charge of the ludicrously named DOGE on a Musk pledge to cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget, or about a third of annual outlays. DOGE made a mess of the federal bureaucracy (while only delivering a relative pittance in cuts) and proved unpopular. 

The relationship between Musk and Trump, with their titanic egos, was never built to last — the budget cuts were never all that compelling to Trump — and they broke up when it became clear that the Tesla boss was a political drag on the administration. For all the chatter about how they clashed over tax credits, the death blow for Musk was probably a hotly contested election for a state Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin. Musk spent heavily to boost the Republican nominee and even campaigned for him personally; the Democratic nominee handily won anyway. For Trump, this was an embarrassment.

 The third-party bid, then, was probably Musk’s lame attempt to console himself. Yet the brief life of the America Party — notwithstanding its founder’s willingness to invest huge sums in the project — sheds light on why third-party politics are such a challenge in the United States. 

The Democrats and Republicans maintain the longest-lasting party duopoly in the world. Of the two, the Democrats are the older party, founded in the 1820s by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren to represent Southern and Western farmers, the emerging proletariat in the North, and grasping entrepreneurs everywhere who felt shut out by the Eastern establishment. The Republicans, meanwhile, were founded in the 1850s as a vehicle for Northern Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats and Free Soilers, and everyone else opposed to slavery. Since then, no sustainable third party has taken root. Many tried, to be sure, but they either dissipated or were absorbed into one of the two major parties.

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It’s springtime for progressives — again

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Much of this is structural. In a first-past-the-post presidential system that rewards, in every way, zero-sum politics, there will always be two dominant factions. The Electoral College renders third-party efforts mostly futile. In the 1992 presidential election, billionaire Ross Perot garnered nearly 20% of the national vote, a significant sum, against Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. In a proportional parliamentary system, he’d have been entitled to that share of the vote in parliament; instead, he won zilch, because he couldn’t carry a single state and was therefore awarded no electoral votes.

Due to ballot-access laws that vary from state to state, it can be very hard for third parties to maintain a long-term presence in either local or national elections. Take the Green Party, a small Leftist party best remembered as a vehicle for Ralph Nader’s presidential runs (and blamed for spoiling Al Gore’s chances in the 2000 election). In New York today, the Green Party no longer has a ballot line. Indeed, in 2024, no third-party candidates for president appeared on the ballot in New York — a first in the modern era. Voters could only choose between Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

 The two major parties in America are remarkably malleable and adaptable, able to survive even when they serve, within their own ranks, diametrically opposed regional and class interests. In Britain, the Conservative Party — the world’s oldest, if not the oldest continuous, party — is now threatened with extinction by Nigel Farage’s Reform movement, which is cutting deeply into the Tories’ base. 

If Britain’s intra-Right contest took place under US rules and conditions, the Tories would almost certainly swallow or co-opt Reform. That’s in essence what happened with Trump: he ran a populist, outsider campaign against the GOP establishment in 2016 and, instead of destroying the party, he simply remade it in his own image. The keepers of the older GOP consensus — foreign-policy hawkism, pro-business austerity — simply learned to push their agenda using Trumpian rhetoric (and often succeeded because Trump’s populism was skin-deep).

On the Left, a similar dynamic played out with Bernie Sanders, except Sanders could never beat the Democratic establishment in the same fashion. Rather than campaign as a Green or a socialist, Sanders — who doesn’t identify as a Democrat but caucuses with the party in the Senate — ran in the 2016 Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton. He won many states and millions of votes, and was able to emerge as a significant political leader after the election. 

In the wake of this, the Democratic Socialists of America saw a huge boost in membership and became a budding political force in American politics. Unlike the Socialist Party of the 20th century, DSA doesn’t field candidates on its own ballot line. Instead, the DSA simply endorses Democrats who call themselves socialists and are willing to fight for their policies. In New York, this is how Zohran Mamdani won. He ran as a Democrat and beat back the Democratic establishment. Like Trump, perhaps, he’ll be able to reshape the party — at the local level, at least (full disclosure: Mamdani managed my own unsuccessful bid for the New York state Senate in 2018).

 What Musk, as deranged as he often is, did get right is that Americans are hungry for other options. Both parties are resented (centrist Democrats especially), and the nation isn’t so much polarized as negatively polarized, with voters defining themselves as much by the party they revile as the one they support. It’s rarer and rarer to hear an American declare they’re proudly a Democrat or Republican. The old political machines have withered. Americans have a weaker relationship with the Democratic and GOP apparatuses than they ever did before.

 To build a viable alternative, millions of dollars would be needed to secure ballot access and advertise the virtues of the new party to voters who are still used to only voting Republican or Democratic. And the party, in some sense, would have to be distinct enough to avoid charges that it’s simply siphoning ballots from the Democrats or the GOP in America’s zero-sum system. This was Musk’s fear — that he would end up a spoiler, abetting Democrats.

What Musk would probably have never gotten right is the policy platform of the America Party. Musk doesn’t understand the American electorate very well. DOGE, his great obsession, backfired, as even rank-and-file Republican voters rebelled against the idea of government programs they rely on facing devastating cuts. At heart, he is a globalist capitalist, and even his nativism is limited by his desire for high-skilled foreign workers to join his companies.

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A viable third-party movement in America would have to unite voters who feel underserved by the Democrats and Republicans. What kind of voter isn’t truly seen or served by either party? The answer is a socially moderate or conservative economic populist, a voter with a Bernie Sanders view of the economy who is more traditionalist on cultural issues and skeptical of immigration.

Trump’s GOP, on immigration, has plainly overreached. Americans wanted him to get control of the border, and on that count, he succeeded. But terrorizing ordinary migrants, dispatching hairdressers to a Salvadoran gulag for life, and removing student green cards over pro-Palestine op-eds was heinous. Trump’s approval rating is falling, including on immigration, and Americans now take a warmer view of immigration.

A third party, in this scenario, would advocate for a stricter border but a reasonable path to legal status for law-abiding migrants — the compromise once supported by Republicans like Marco Rubio. The dynamism of the United States derives from its inherent multiculturalism, its ability, again and again, to assimilate newcomers. If there’s a single politician who might embody what this theoretical third party movement would look like, it’s Dan Osborn, the former labor organizer running for the Senate again in Nebraska. Osborn is campaigning as an independent against the Republican incumbent, shunning both parties. He’s deeply critical of corporate power, like Sanders, and sympathetic to rural gun owners, like a Republican. He advocates for a “secure” border. And he’s got a shot at winning.

Osborn, though, isn’t helming any political party. There might be a universe in which a saner version of Musk attempts to use his cash to seed more Osborn-like candidates across America, building a movement around the America Party. That universe, though, hasn’t yet arrived, and maybe never will. Team Red and Team Blue are here to stay.

Both the Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, and House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, could end up victims. Or at least, they may have to sweat very hard through their re-election campaigns. Some of this might be because both men are based in New York City, ground zero for Left-wing activism. But the threat is baked into their jobs at a time when Democratic voters, nationally, are taking a dim view of their party overlords.

This great suspicion of the Democratic Party is what distinguishes the first Primary Spring from the second. In 2017, President Trump had just been elected for the first time, and liberal activism was reaching its apogee. This was the #Resistance era, when every conceivable cause — immigration, policing, loathing Russia — was amplified to a stunning degree, and public protest was seemingly inexhaustible. Though anti-Trump marches still take place today, they are nothing like they were in 2017 and 2018, when resistance to Trump was culturally dominant and “woke” politics were just beginning to peak. Put it this way: the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad campaign could not have appeared during the first spring.

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In addition to being more woke, Democrats liked their party back then. There was genuine excitement for their upstart candidate, and party elders like Schumer and Nancy Pelosi were not yet considered too old, too disconnected. They were cheered as heroes of the anti-Trump war. In 2017, these two ideas — liking the national party leaders enough, while also demanding change — could exist in harmony. Pelosi resented Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, and followers of the young upstart could be fiercely critical of the party mainstream. But once the fireworks died down, there was some sense of unity: everyone agreed that beating Trump was critical, and there were plenty of ordinary Democrats who could have warm feelings about both Pelosi and AOC. Unlike now, the Democratic Party itself largely polled well.

The true beginning of the first Primary Spring was AOC’s shock victory over Joe Crowley in a district straddling The Bronx and Queens. Crowley was one of the highest-ranking Democrats in the House, but he wasn’t a well-known national figure. Rather, he was a political boss in Gotham, where he was regarded as a power broker poised to one day ascend to the speakership. Beyond a few local Leftists, no one saw AOC’s triumph coming. Overnight, she was transformed into a national star feted on talk shows, and she embodied a new Millennial generation that was, with great fanfare, asserting itself politically. Moderate Democrats may have been rankled by AOC, but her star power was undeniable.

In the first Primary Spring, progressive challenges to sitting members of Congress and state legislators were prized most. Bernie Sanders’s second presidential campaign, in 2020, was seen as the expected culmination of several years of intense activism. If very few believed Ocasio-Cortez could defeat Crowley, Sanders, following his aggressive challenge to Hillary Clinton in 2016, was far less of a dark horse. Leftists, around the fall and winter of 2019, truly believed that the Vermont socialist could seize the nomination and bring his “old Left” vision to the White House.

Sanders’s obvious defeat in 2020 — the Democratic National Committee or scheming Clintonites couldn’t be blamed this time around — sapped much of the energy out of the first Primary Spring. But there were more progressive victories that came that year, after Sanders conceded to Biden. One of them was Jamaal Bowman, the Squad congressman who unseated a long-serving pro-Israel hawk, Eliot Engel, in a Democratic primary as the pandemic raged. On the same day Bowman won his primary, a young socialist organiser from Queens named Zohran Mamdani triumphed, as well, beating a local assemblyman to enter the Albany legislature.

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When Biden became president, progressives had more power, but the sizzle was gone, and Democratic incumbents were much better-positioned. AOC’s Squad plateaued. The Democratic Socialists of America began to see a net decrease in membership. And the wind-down of the pandemic meant certain causes that were once dominant, like Black Lives Matter, were going to matter less. Corporations, which enthusiastically backed Black Lives Matter and other progressive causes during the pandemic, would return to business as usual by the time the next presidential election rolled around.

And here we are now, facing a second spring. In one sense, there is nothing surprising about a Trump presidential victory triggering a new Primary Spring. Squint hard enough, and you’ll spot the parallels between 2017 and 2025. Special elections are breaking the Democratic Party’s way, and GOP town halls — if congressional Republicans even bother to hold them — are filling up with constituents alienated by Trump’s Medicaid cuts. What’s different now is the internal sourness: Democrats hate Trump but aren’t feeling much better about their own leaders, Schumer in particular. The remarkably durable leader — he’s been in politics for half a century, and the leader of the Senate Democrats for a decade — seems in danger of losing.

The good news for Schumer is that he has time to recover his standing: he won’t face voters again until 2028. The bad news is that the primary date could fall on the same day as the presidential primary, leading to a turnout boom that sinks him. In the New York City Democratic mayoral primary in June, Mamdani benefited from a turnout surge, especially from 20-something voters who don’t typically participate in local elections. Like Trump, Mamdani performed very well with the casual voter. These kinds of Democrats — anti-establishment, less reverent of party leadership — would not be friendly to Schumer, who will turn 78 in the fall 2028. Mamdani proved, too, that pro-Palestine politics are a winner in a primary, and Schumer’s tireless defense of Israel won’t be viewed fondly.

The challenge for Schumer isn’t just age. Sanders, at 83, is still popular with the youth and revered by the Left. It’s that Schumer’s political strengths no longer play well in the current environment, especially as Democrats hunger for compelling national figures to lead them out of the wilderness. They want another Barack Obama, or at least someone who possesses that sort of verve — a natural storyteller, above anything else.

Democrats lack a narrative. Schumer has always been a small-bore legislator, relishing constituent work and passing somewhat notable but inoffensive bills. He is not a Harry Reid or Lyndon Johnson; he has never had much of a vision for where Democrats or the nation should go. Rather, he’s always been stronger at wrangling votes and cajoling colleagues. Under Biden, this was beneficial, as Democrats passed sweeping infrastructure and green energy legislation with the narrowest of majorities.

Under Trump, however, Schumer has little to offer.

Who primaries Schumer remains to be seen, but AOC already looks like a strong contender. She has played more of the inside game since coming to Congress, and she still retains a strong fan base among the young. She’d raise gobs of money. If she doesn’t run for president, a campaign against Schumer seems inevitable. And if, for whatever reason, she decides against it, New York has no shortage of younger legislators and high-profile politicians who could knock out Schumer; Letitia James, the state attorney general known for tussling with Trump, would be formidable.

Less vulnerable, but no longer completely safe, is Jeffries, the House minority leader. Jeffries, like Schumer, is based in Brooklyn. He’s much younger, still in his 50s, and he’s a stronger public speaker. He has deep roots in the black community, which has traditionally been important for primaries. Unlike Crowley, he won’t be a sleepy campaigner. His district also has enough moderate and conservative chunks to save him from a Left-wing challenger.

But Jeffries must look over his shoulder now because Mamdani was a serious contender in his district. In the northern sections, younger, Left-leaning voters are eager for change. It doesn’t matter to them that Jeffries, in 2027, appears likely to become speaker of the House, with Democrats favored to flip the chamber. They aren’t moved by the power that’s potentially in reach.

Jeffries will, at the minimum, be motivated to offer a message for the Democrats that transcends reviling Trump. Eight years ago, Trump hate went a long way. Now, voters are demanding more. They are, if anything else, less naïve than they once were. If Schumer is challenged in 2028 — or if the rumblings of internal dissent get louder — Senate Democrats will have to rethink how they organize themselves, especially as they struggle to get out of the minority. Is Schumer really the man to lead them back? Or do they hunt for another leader, someone with a sharper vision and more of a fighting spirit? These questions, for the Democrats, will only become more urgent as the Trump era drags on.

Mamdani was a rising organizer whom I wanted to hire for my bid for the state Senate. In the New York City neighborhoods where I was campaigning, Mamdani had been the canvassing director on the City Council bid of a Palestinian pastor who nearly pulled off a stunning upset. The pastor, known as Father K, had thrilled the local youth, and canvassers constantly swarmed my apartment building. Many belonged to the Democratic Socialists of America. The concept of an openly socialist campaign winning office had always seemed far-fetched. But here was Father K, storming the ramparts. I wanted to know immediately who was working for him.

When I met Mamdani, he was intrigued by my campaign. I was a progressive Democrat unafraid of calling myself a socialist or criticizing Israel, even though I was Jewish. We immediately bonded over a shared political vision, as well as a wicked sense of humor. But hiring Mamdani couldn’t happen automatically — not because I was waffling, but because he wanted to know whether I was serious.

He needed to know if I was going to raise a decent amount of money and make my run viable. He wasn’t interested in vanity campaigns or lost causes. I respected that. I was motivated to go out and raise money, proving my mettle to my supporters and to Mamdani. In early 2018, he signed on as my field director, and he rapidly rose to become my full-fledged campaign manager.

These days, Mamdani faces a far tougher challenge than helming a state legislative campaign. He’s got to win a general election against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (again), incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, and the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa. Then he has to decide how to govern Gotham’s vast bureaucracies. Winning in November, by contrast, will be relatively easy. Some of his campaign promises, like freezing the rent on rent-stabilized apartments, are quite doable. Others, like raising corporate taxes or funding a $5 billion childcare expansion, will need the cooperation of a state government that may not be hospitable to a young socialist mayor. Business leaders are threatening to leave the city.

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Mamdani will also have to decide how he would govern America’s largest police force — as a Leftist who once backed defunding the police but no longer advocates for this goal. Will he retain the current NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a well-regarded, Harvard-educated technocrat who is also critical of many of the criminal-justice reforms that he backs? And what would he do if President Trump keeps flooding New York streets with ICE agents?

There is a cliché, which is mostly true, that being mayor of New York is America’s toughest job after the presidency. City Hall has a way of wearing down the titans who swagger inside. Every local ill is laid at the mayor’s feet. A DC lawmaker doesn’t have to rush to the site of a gas explosion or a train derailment, but a mayor is expected to — immediately. If a police officer is killed, he must comfort the family.

Is Mamdani up for all of this? If he beats back Adams and Cuomo, as expected — neither man is very popular — we are going to find out. He would have less experience than any incoming mayor in modern times. There’s great promise there. And peril, too.

I can think back to my own campaign, when I saw how Mamdani moved through rooms and thrilled our volunteers. He was supremely good with people, in the way you still hear folk tales told about a young Bill Clinton. His charm and gravitas, for someone of his age, was striking even then. Though Mamdani worked for me — my campaign funds paid his salary — I very much worked for Mamdani and felt driven to give every ounce of myself to the cause. This was his superpower. I would stand at a subway station in the middle of summer to pass out campaign materials at six in the morning. I would knock on doors to talk to voters seven days a week, often until nine at night. The volunteers and paid canvassers were no less driven. Everyone wanted to give themselves — to him.

A surreal moment for me came just a short while ago when Mamdani appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on the eve of the Democratic primary. Colbert pressed Mamdani on Israel and concerns about antisemitism. Mamdani is an unabashed critic of the Jewish state, a backer of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, and someone who, until not very long ago, could be called an anti-Zionist. I’m sympathetic to much of what Mamdani believes and, as an American Jew, I am weary of a nation many thousands of miles away defining how I should worship or how I am viewed by the world. When Colbert asked Mamdani how he could bring together Jews and Muslims, Mamdani, who is Muslim, replied, “Many years ago, I was the campaign manager of a Jewish candidate for state Senate, and I took him to a mosque in Bay Ridge, and after he gave his speech at Friday prayers, an older Palestinian man came over to him, and he looked at him, and he said, ‘cousins’.”

That candidate, of course, was me. Indeed, Mamdani and I went to many mosques — too many to count. I was, in many instances, one of the very first candidates for office who had ever spoken with these Muslim men. (Since the prayers were segregated by gender, I also spoke with Muslim women’s groups.) At one Eid prayer, I took the microphone and spoke to thousands of Muslims arrayed on a vast field. I went to churches and synagogues, too, of course, because the district, in all its New York diversity, demanded it. Mamdani believed, urgently, that a candidate should go everywhere possible. Unlike many other Leftists, he relished the art of persuasion: knocking on the door, finding a Donald Trump sympathizer, and convincing him to take another look at a Left-wing candidate like me.

I didn’t win. We ran competitively — an uphill, underdog campaign — and came up short. I was momentarily crushed but glad, in the end, to return to my writing career, which I valued more. I knew Mamdani would get his own chance to run soon. It was merely a question of where and when. He had learned several vital lessons from our defeat. One was that building a large field operation was incredibly important. We had an army of volunteers and paid canvassers, many of them in their twenties. But other traditional tactics, like sending campaign mail, mattered, too. Since we were running out of money by the end of the race, we didn’t have the budget to dispatch those glossy mailers, which are never terribly creative but do alert voters to your presence.

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I invoked Clinton before, but there are uncanny parallels between Mamdani and Barack Obama: two young men with foreign-sounding names and African roots who upended the political establishment and won in such a fashion that few actually believed was possible. America had never had a black president, or even one who had spent less than one term in the US Senate before successfully vaulting to the White House. Obama was assailed relentlessly for his relative youth and inexperience in 2007 and 2008, especially in his bitter primary against Hillary Clinton.

Ironically, Mamdani embodies much of what Obama’s feverish Right-wing critics accused him, falsely, of being: a Muslim socialist born in Africa. Mamdani, born to a Ugandan-Indian father in Kampala, can never legally serve as president. In some form, this inoculates him from attacks from the Right, since he is hiding nothing and is rarely on the defensive. The same is true of his parentage: his mother a renowned filmmaker, his father a celebrated scholar of the Middle East. Other Leftists might run from such a background, but Mamdani never fails to acknowledge his own privilege. He is always quite direct.

One political strength and saving grace for Mamdani, ultimately, may be his fan base. No local politician has captured so many imaginations. Mayoral races don’t normally attract tens of thousands of volunteers; in the case of Mamdani, the internet became real life, with his Instagram and TikTok virality morphing into a flesh-and-blood campaign apparatus that blew away the competition. As with Trump, Mamdani’s fans are bound to stick with him, and they’ll battle for him as he slogs onward as mayor. If he does win in November, it will herald a new political era for New York and perhaps the United States. All of it, at the very least, will be fascinating to watch.

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He had also consolidated full control of the Republican Party, imposing his own brand of nationalism and isolationism on the rank-and-file — or at least changing how they talk about policy. His long-running obsession with tariffs and protectionism was, over time, embraced by enough Republican elites, regardless of his subsequent rolling back of economy-destabilizing global tariffs. And his promise to end foreign conflicts — both in Ukraine and the Middle East — resonated with broad swathes of the public, showing, at least temporarily, that the old neoconservative wing of the Republican Party was in retreat.

But Trump’s decision to enlist the United States in Israel’s war with Iran has exposed genuine fault lines within the MAGA movement. It has shown too that, within the Republican establishment, hunger for war has not abated. Neoconservatives aren’t quite beat.

True America First— the isolationism that shares some characteristics with the American anti-war Left — can be hard to find in Congress. The vast majority of Republicans backed the recent Iran strikes and only one, a libertarian in the House of Representatives, joined Democrats in trying to constrain Trump’s war powers.

Even if younger Republicans, as well as a number of MAGA politicians and pundits such as Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Tucker Carlson, do not want war with Iran, the older senators and congressmen do. Caught in the middle are those like Vice President J.D. Vance who maintain close ties to war skeptical MAGA leaders but are also resolutely pro-Israel. Vance has stood behind Trump and offered no criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu. A devout Catholic, he has often framed his support of Israel in religious terms, appealing to the Republican Party’s evangelical wing.

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If Trump is able to be swayed by traditional foreign policy voices within the Republican Party, like Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, then what is MAGA? The same can be asked on domestic policy, with Republicans in Congress struggling to pass omnibus legislation that would accomplish prototypical GOP goals, like slashing Medicaid (the healthcare program for poor Americans) and cutting taxes on the rich.

This is not to say Trump or MAGA didn’t alter the Republican Party — it’s more that most revolutions aren’t total, and there’s a great deal of traditional Republican muscle memory that won’t be neatly eradicated. With Iran, one can see the Trumpists twisting themselves into knots to justify a bombing campaign within an America First, pro-peace framework.  “We’re not at war with Iran,” Vance said on Sunday to NBC’s “Meet the Press”. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth mirrored him at a news conference in the bombing’s aftermath: “We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program… this mission was not, has not been about regime change.”

Rhetorically, at least, this is still not the 2003 Republican Party. The George W. Bush administration gladly talked up regime change. They believed it would be easy. These days, there is more caution, relatively speaking, from the Trump White House. But it’s important to remember there is a reason that media celebrities like Carlson are so anti-Iran War now: they know the pulse of the Republican base. They know, generally, where voters are. They hear from viewers and commenters.

Of course, Trump himself is truly a wild card. On 22 June, he posted on social media that “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”

If the average Republican politician is gleeful that Trump bombed Iran, the average Republican voter is not. This is the problem for MAGA: a promise really was broken. This is a new war. Foreign policy conflicts have a way of damaging presidencies quickly. Joe Biden has ever really recovered from the well-intentioned but chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Any protracted conflict with Iran will not help Trump, who has already seen his approval ratings slide from January. Politically, there is virtually no upside. A segment of foreign policy hawks, Orthodox Jews, and evangelical Christians might be heartened, but collectively they represent a very small slice of America.

This is the challenge for MAGA. Trump, as long as he is President, can maintain order, but infighting is inevitable and the course to be charted after Trump is not obvious. It’s hard to know, even, where someone like Carlson will land. How genuine are his commitments to the anti-war position? Easy enough to flay someone like Cruz in a clip that goes viral — Cruz could not say, with any certainty, how many people live in Iran — but far harder to challenge Trump directly. All factions of the Republican Party, from neoconservative to isolationist, are kept in line. Even vocal anti-war voices like Greene are resolutely pro-Trump.

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The greater question is what comes next, especially in the later years of the Trump presidency. Trump will be a lame duck, barred from running for a third term. He has flirted openly with defying the US Constitution and that threat should not be taken lightly. But the logistics of a president who would turn 82 in 2028 successfully seizing the nomination and beating a standard Democrat— unlike 2024, Democrats will conduct an open primary, and the best candidate will win it — are far more difficult than they may seem right now. Or, if Trump doesn’t win and claims the election was stolen (again), he’d have to illegally seize power while subduing the armed forces, FBI, and CIA and forcibly lock out the new Democratic president duly sworn in on January 20th, 2029. The reality of Trump is that, given his age and lack of competency, he probably doesn’t have such a coup in him.

MAGA, then, will have to fight it out with Trump fading from view. They will have to decide what they are really about. It’s still a movement that’s more wrapped up in Trump’s whims than anything else, with some intellectualism and high politics grafted on to it. Think tanks have sprung up to try to lend MAGA a more cerebral sheen, but the reality of it all is that Trump has no obvious heir. Yes, Vance is the anointed one as Vice President, but he lacks the raw talent and native charisma to corral such an unruly movement. He is not a star. He is an underperforming one-term senator who got the chance of a lifetime to run on Trump’s ticket. His luck, great so far, could easily run out.

What this all means, ultimately, is that life for the chest-thumping MAGA devotee will only get less peachy from here. Storm clouds are building. The war with Iran is going to go over poorly with the American public, even as Republicans are in lockstep behind it.

It should be remembered that the aforementioned Bush, the President who launched two Middle Eastern wars, was once enormously popular. He won a re-election with a popular vote victory and seemed poised for four years of dominance. Democrats appeared moribund. Instead, he struggled mightily through his second term, voters soured on his wars, and Barack Obama shot to the presidency as a direct rebuke of all that came before. Patience with MAGA is wearing thin. Housing and food still costs too much, the economy isn’t roaring, and now American lives might be at risk overseas. America certainly isn’t being made great again.

If I underrated the degree of damage Trump would do in those first 100 days — the severity of DOGE was remarkable, and the attacks on free speech have been chilling — my thesis holds: Trump is steadily growing unpopular, and political gravity, over time, will keep tugging him down. He would undoubtedly relish becoming a genuine American fascist, but he simply isn’t. Not yet, anyway. Elections haven’t been canceled, public institutions, if cowed, are not blindly worshipping Trump, and the media still publish freely.

Trump has abused his executive authority in disturbing ways, but so did George W. Bush and FDR when it came to locking up American citizens. Trump is eroding American democracy, but the nation is greater than him. Some of the damage he’s doing might be permanent — reputationally, in terms of Washington’s relationship with the world — but much of it, with another Democratic president, could be reversible. What is ruined by executive fiat can be rebuilt by fiat.

MAGA doesn’t have to consider life after Trump right now, but that life will come. Time is undefeated. Trump will be 82 years old when he ends his second term. He could try for a third, but it’s hard to see him winning. And even if he pretends like he won an election he lost, he will struggle to subdue the military and the security apparatus in time to cling to power indefinitely as an unpopular monarch. On 21 January, 2029, would the American military really obey Trump and not the newly sworn-in president? Would ambitious Republicans who want to be president themselves want Trump lording over them into his 80s and beyond?

Anything is possible. But anything doesn’t have to be likely. Trump will leave the Oval Office, one way or the other, and there will be an American republic after him, however flawed. It will be here, though. Erosion isn’t destruction. If the Roman Empire dragged on for five centuries or so, the United States can at least range beyond 225 years.

In the short-term, Republicans will lose seats in the midterms next year. The operative question is how many. Given Trump’s unpopularity and the possibility that the GOP budget will impose draconian health-care and welfare cuts, Democrats will have much to campaign on in 2026. A repeat of the 2018 blue wave is plausible. I don’t gamble much, but I like the odds of current Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries as House speaker at the start of 2027.

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The Senate is a different story, with the Democratic slippage in rural states making the formation of a new majority quite difficult. If Democrats can’t become competitive in states like Iowa, Ohio, and Nebraska again, they will have a hard time forming a Senate majority. At best, it seems, they can claw to a narrow 50-50 split or 51-49 advantage, and even that will not be straightforward next year. They’ll have to play defense in Michigan, New Hampshire, and Georgia (all winnable) and try to flip Maine, where Susan Collins has been quite durable, and North Carolina, where dream recruit Roy Cooper would have a chance to knock out Thom Thillis.

There is no reason to believe Trumpism, as a style and even policy preference, won’t outlast the man. Tariffs will probably lose their appeal because no other Republican is so protectionist and the stock-market slump after Liberation Day actually rattled the political class. Still, on economics, the GOP seems to prefer the new populist flavoring to the decades of neoliberalism that peaked under Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Robert F. Kennedy’s attacks on Big Pharma have fit seamlessly into the new Republican Party’s conception of itself.

At the same time, it’s worth wondering how seriously one should take this new populist GOP. If they’re for the common man, why are they trying to gut Medicaid? What about DOGE? That’s all conventionally Republican, even libertarian. Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator, has come out against the attempted Medicaid cuts, but most of the other Republicans have defaulted to their old median. We’ll see how it all shakes out. Beyond 2025 — and even beyond the Trump White House — it cannot be known how long MAGA will persist.

What is it, after all? It’s less political machine than loose movement built around one man. Trump will leave a legacy behind, and he will have, without a doubt, wrenched the GOP in a direction that was unimaginable a decade ago. Will that wrenching continue when he’s out of office? I’m not sure.

MAGA has another three full years in power. In one sense, that’s a very long time. It’s enough of a window for an unhinged executive to continue wrongly deporting people, attacking academic freedom, and eviscerating federal agencies. It’s enough time to blatantly ignore court orders. It’s enough time to behave like an authoritarian and indulge in McCarthyite tactics. It’s enough time to be grossly corrupt. These will be rough years. Even if Democrats have the House, there will be little they can do to combat executive orders beyond filing lawsuits and protesting. That is frightening. It’s important, though, to not give in to either nihilism or catastrophism. As dark as the moment might be, the United States has seen worse.

The first Red Scare in 1919 and 1920 led to the rapid arrest of 6,000 people across 36 cities, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants with ties to Left-wing causes. The second Red Scare extended throughout much of the Forties and Fifties, obliterating countless careers across academia, media, and the arts, and outlasting Joe McCarthy himself. House Un-American Activities Committee hearings roved from city to city, terrorizing Americans who held liberal political views. The CIA and FBI, through programs like COINTELPRO and Operation CHAOS, spied on American citizens and infiltrated numerous civil-rights, labor, feminist, and student organizations.

They harassed and intimidated almost anyone who dared to associate with a cause deemed too progressive. And, of course, there was the Bush administration, which erected a vast surveillance state and illegally detained hundreds of individuals at Guantanamo Bay without any due process. Much of what Trump is doing now he learned from Bush the Younger, whose pointless wars brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people across the Middle East and thousands of US service members. It’s important not to forget this.

In short: America is drenched in sin, and America persists. America is not irredeemable; even now, I am proud to be a citizen, and believe in the promise of our Constitution.

To return to the humdrum of electoral politics: What comes next? As someone who is not too enamored with JD Vance, I predict that he is both the probable 2028 GOP nominee and someone who may preside over the crumbling of MAGA. Trump lost an election but pushed onward because he was Trump: he is in possession of an inarguable magnetism, that black magic, which holds the project together. One cannot look away from Trump. But many can look away from Vance, who underperformed in his Senate race and lucked onto the 2024 ticket.

Vance is smart person, even a serious one, but he does not possess Trump’s charisma. It is difficult to imagine him presiding over a rally of tens of thousands unless Trump is there to first lure the MAGA faithful into the tent. Hard, too, to conceive of how Vance will persuade so many millions of casual, disaffected voters to head to the polls for him like they did for Trump. One can’t quite be a fan of Vance, right? He’s not a WWE Hall of Famer.

To be sure, it wouldn’t be fair to count Vance out now, not when we don’t even know who the Democratic nominee in 2028 will be. The advantage Democrats will have, though, is that they won’t be the party of incumbency and Republicans will have little to run on unless there’s a great economic miracle in the next few years. In 2024, Trump benefited from pre-Covid nostalgia, and that playbook can’t be run again. The post-Trump GOP — or one held completely captive by the president — will have to find a new path to victory.

Suggested reading

Trump’s new world disorder

By Helen Thompson

No single political figure in modern times has dominated a political party like Trump has. If the Reagan and Nixon eras may still be more significantly historically, the Trump era, which began the moment he descended the golden escalator at his tower 10 years ago next month, rivals both for import. Assuming Trump remains healthy, he will have been president or running for president for more than 13 years. He loomed over Biden’s presidency, and for younger Republicans, he has supplanted Reagan in their pantheon of political heroes.

He is sanctified for all time. What this means for the movement he leads is another matter. It is difficult to see how he becomes more popular, as president, from this day forward. Second-term presidencies are a slog, and Trump’s has already proved alienating to a wide swath of people, including those who decided, without great passion, to give him another shot in 2024. Biden’s popularity never recovered from the Afghanistan withdrawal. Trump’s fall into the abyss might have begun with DOGE or the tariffs that wiped out all the stock market gains of the last year (mounting a cumbersome recovery since then). When he was running for president, Trump could always claim he presided over a booming 2010s economy with low inflation and nonexistent interest rates. Even though he was in the White House in 2020, most Americans thought of him as the last pre-pandemic president, and he exploited this to maximum effect.

The power of Trump’s personality permitted MAGA, to some extent, to not keep every promise to the voters who elected him. Trump winning and punishing his enemies was a form of deliverance. It feels, finally, that will no longer be enough. The US economy is still robust, as world economies go, but Trump can’t readily tame inflation, fix the housing market, and kickstart a new national industrial policy to make his tariff proposals workable. He doesn’t think that deeply. There are feints in the direction of bona-fide populism, like his executive order on drug prices, though it’s unclear how it will hold up in court.

Trump, unfortunately, is not terribly interested in dragging the GOP-run Congress towards legislation that might make permanent reforms to the health system. Biden, through the Inflation Reduction Act, allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices for the first time. Trump is not leaning on Mike Johnson or John Thune to expand Medicaid, introduce a public option, or tackle monopolization in the health sector.

In fact, Republicans seem intent on undercutting the health care on offer for working-class and poor Americans. Assuming they follow through — and Trump is a willing accomplice — MAGA will lose ground. They will have accelerated the inevitable: the occlusion of one era, and a slow march into an unknowable future.

This essay was adapted from Substack.

The United States needs a health secretary who will, at the minimum, cast a skeptical eye on the pharmaceutical industry, which turns enormous profits and helps ensure American health care will always be commodified. Before the pandemic, most Democrats had little problem railing against Big Pharma. They were the villains, deservedly so, of the opioid epidemic, and it was not an exaggeration to say several of the pharmaceutical behemoths, most notably Purdue Pharma, had blood on their hands.

When Covid arrived, however, the politics shifted. Republicans resisted the vaccines once President Joe Biden was in office, even though Operation Warp Speed had been a Team Trump accomplishment. Democrats defended the Covid vaccines and their manufacturers — Pfizer and Moderna, in particular — at all costs, even though the jabs did cause injuries in relatively rare instances and couldn’t stop the spread of the novel coronavirus as originally promised.

Suggested reading

Robert Kennedy Jr: America needs a revolution

By Freddie Sayers

Naturally, RFK Jr. was a Covid-vaccine skeptic. Hence he became, in the 2020s, a public enemy for many liberals.

Yet he should be listened to when it comes to one of his most cherished causes: banning pharmaceutical advertising from television. In a sane world, this would be a bipartisan cause. Few countries on Earth allow pharmaceutical companies to relentlessly market their drugs to unsuspecting consumers. Non-Americans are always shocked by what is permitted on the airwaves. Turn on the television, especially the news, for any length of time, and you will be barraged by ads for every type of malady under the Sun. Since the Nineties, drug companies have spent tens of billions on these ads.

Drug advertisements began appearing with regularity in newspapers and magazines in the Eighties, but they were mostly kept off TV by a requirement that ads naming a specific illness include the long list of side effects. In the late Nineties, the Food and Drug Administration relaxed its rules, permitting advertisers to briefly summarize the drug’s risks. The TV floodgates were thrown wide open. These days, the most aggressive campaigns are for newer medications that haven’t yet gone generic; competing brands duke it out in a packed field of similar drugs to reach patients with widespread conditions like arthritis and diabetes.

Suggested reading

How MAGA got hooked on supplements

By Frederick Kaufman

The average American drug ad is easily parodied but plainly effective. Typically, some older adults are shown in a cheery setting with friends and family. The color palette is bright. A narrator with a warm voice speaks about health challenges that might arise. The older adults are never shown to be in pain or distress; they might be taking a jog, playing with their dog, or firing up the grill. They’re bright-eyed, maybe laughing. Towards the end of the ad, the narrator will briefly summarize the drug’s side effects. Anyone with a morbid sense of humor can enjoy the contrast, just a bit: the scene remains focused on life’s joys as the narrator informs you the drug might cause rashes, bleeding, blackouts, or suicidal thoughts (in “rare cases”, rest assured).

But we know the big business of Big Pharma is no laughing matter. The drug companies are prepared to furiously fight any sort of ban that Kennedy might attempt. They will call up their expensive lobbyists on retainer in Washington to bend rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats to their will. They will probably get to Trump, who doesn’t feel passionately about the issue.

The courts have snagged reforms in the past. Efforts to minimally restrict drug ads have repeatedly been defeated, often on First Amendment grounds. The first Trump administration tried to require that commercials mention the drug’s price, but a judge blocked the policy, saying that it lacked authority from Congress.

Suggested reading

Why RFK Jr is so seductive

By Lee Seigel

Will Congress act? In theory, if Trump prioritized the ban, lawmakers could push it forward. The current Republican Party will obey Trump’s commands. The narrow majority the GOP holds in the House could be bolstered by a slew of progressive and populist Democrats who might view a fight with Big Pharma as a winning issue. Several centrist Democrats in swing districts, including Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in Washington state, campaigned on a platform that was critical of pharmaceutical companies.

There’s a coalition to be built if the Trump administration takes the issue seriously. If a critical mass of Senate Republicans back legislation, it’s not hard to imagine the most Left-wing members of the Democratic conference, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, supporting a ban on TV ads. Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut who may run for president and has swerved in a more populist direction, could be a convert, too.

But that’s the rub: Trump has never demonstrated that he is all that interested in the granular work of getting policy priorities through Congress. In the first term, he was content to let Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan hash out a corporate tax cut and attempt — unsuccessfully — to repeal ObamaCare.

For now, Congress is focused on classic GOP priorities like tax cuts for the wealthy and gutting Medicaid, the health-care program that covers more than 70 million Americans. In addition to being cruel to the poor, a budget reconciliation package with tax and health-care cuts is likely to prove inflationary, especially when paired with tariffs. Beyond the tariffs, there’s no grander project here. The populism Trump promised isn’t being delivered — DOGE, and its wanton budget cuts, certainly aren’t it.

What conservatives don’t quite understand is that the truest owning of the libs will come through triangulation. Trump can begin to subdue Democrats by pursuing policies like a ban on TV pharmaceutical ads, forcing the Left to stand with him for something popular or oppose him and appear extremely out of touch. Trump doesn’t seem to have that kind of savvy. He’s fine to let his party scheme over Medicaid cuts.

That will not end well for the GOP. Democrats know how to campaign on health care, and taking it away from working-class people will make the 2026 midterms rather easy for the party out of power. Those political ads write themselves. They’ll be sandwiched between the 30-second spots for heart disease pills that may cause internal bleeding and murderous thoughts. In rare cases.