Establishment Democrats have already lost

This newsletter was supposed to come out shortly after Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral election in New York City last Tuesday, alongside Democrats winning midterms around the country. But then I got sick. That might have had something to do with the election night watch parties.

Luckily, I tested negative for Covid and flu (and I’m still wearing a mask on the train). But I had to take a trip to urgent care on Sunday when my asthma flared up and I couldn’t fully breathe. A hefty dose of albuterol fixed me right up—and thankfully, I have health insurance right now. Getting laid off in January thrust me into the precarious situation that many Americans are navigating where we don’t know if or where affordable healthcare will be coming from. And as I recuperated last evening, that situation became even more dire, when eight Democrat senators caved on the party’s fight to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies, which could lead to insurance premiums skyrocketing well past what everyday Americans can afford.

This vote, which will decide whether people live or die, has been kicked down the road for another month, and only if Republican senators keep their promise. Meanwhile, I’m thinking about testimonies I’ve seen on social media from people who are afraid of dying if they can’t afford insulin anymore, who have lost loved ones because they couldn’t afford their medicine, and who will soon lose access to healthcare if something doesn’t change. This forfeit was negotiated in part to restore SNAP benefits to starving Americans, while the president tried to take back the meager funds that were belatedly issued to some recipients by court order (shortly after midnight, his request was denied). The Republican Party is on a murderous rampage, and a group led by elder Democrats are capitulating again, just days after their voters pulled off what seemed impossible at the ballot box.

It’s devastating to think that lives will be lost unnecessarily because of the cowardice, ineptness, and banality of evil within the chambers of American government. But if the Democrats who played a role think business will continue on as usual after this, they’re wrong. Last week’s election already proved it.

Some incumbent Democrats have taken the hint that their voters are demanding a change to the status quo. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul comes to mind. Before Mamdani won his mayoral primary, she spoke out against his plans to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers. But a few months later, she endorsed him over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and she only became more vocally supportive since then. Hochul also condemned the way Senate Democrats attempted to negotiate the end of the shutdown last night. Her shift is notably different from other major New York politicians, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who begrudgingly endorsed Mamdani at the last minute before disagreeing that he was the future of the Democratic Party, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who ultimately refused to endorse Mamdani. Schumer has also been the target of much ire over the past 24 hours for failing to protect the ACA.

Hochul understands what Jeffries and Schumer either do not or refuse to: their voters have swung to their left, a tide change that has been a long time coming but especially under Trump 2.0. The time for #Resistance is over. Americans want restitution. We are begging for the freedom to exist without facing crushing debt. And we are tired of seeing atrocities play out every day while democratic institutions cower in fear. Mamdani didn’t just win because of viral TikToks. He won because he used popular mediums to share a politically resonant message. That message is focused around local affordability and accountability, but it’s also proudly pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide, and in service of vulnerable people everywhere. There’s a huge but often discounted demographic that authentically believes in these things and will no longer accept anything else. Democrats can either meet their changing base where it is or fail.

If this sounds dramatic, that’s because it’s reflective of the nonstop, constantly changing pace of politics today. In mid-January, Mamdani was polling at 6 percent and Cuomo was the favorite before he even announced his campaign. 11 months later, according to YouGov, Mamdani is one of the top 20 most popular politicians in the country. Over a million people voted for him last Tuesday.

Conventional elite wisdom holds that Americans won’t accept democratic socialism or vote for certain minorities or turn their back on Israel. Mamdani’s decisive rise should have shattered those illusions. But some pundits are hanging onto the idea that Mamdani only represents the Bushwick, Brooklyn population: a pocket of unusually radical leftists who could carry him over the finish line in New York City and nowhere else. That’s not necessarily true.

For example, Mamdani’s opponents attacked him relentlessly on the issue of Israel, smearing him as antisemitic and targeting his unabashed support for Palestine as his ultimate weak point. It was an ugly and often racist strategy that completely failed, and not just because international foreign policy is largely unrelated to the day-to-day expectations for the New York City mayor. Pew Research polling from the start of Trump’s second term found that a slight majority of all Americans now have an unfavorable view of Israel, with almost three out of four Democrats between the ages of 18 and 49 feeling that way. And from what I’ve gathered, most of these people don’t just have a slightly negative take on Israel. These are people who have been bombarded with images of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians for more than two years. Opposing Israel has understandably become a core moral principle for many people, and not just left-leaning voters, but especially left-leaning voters.

And these aren’t just people in New York City. Recently, a Spitfire News subscriber reached out from Corvallis, Oregon, a city of 61,000 that houses Oregon State University. I ended up chatting with several leftist activists in the community who have been dealing with their own targeted campaign after they supported a City Council resolution to divest from genocide, apartheid, illegal occupation, mass deportation, and mass incarceration—and were labeled antisemitic in response.

“This is something everybody is seeing and sees that it’s wrong. We’re seeing at the national level that being in support of this genocide or even being passive about it is becoming a political cost to politicians,” said Matt Aberle, a 33-year-old government worker from nearby Albany, Oregon, who was inspired to get more active in political organizing after seeing what Israel was doing. “There’s lots of work around Palestine, but we’re also tying that back to domestic things, like ICE and American imperialism.”

Aberle and four other local group members I spoke to said that the left-leaning Corvallis City Council was initially receptive to their resolution, until they faced opponents and even a local media outlet that characterized it as antisemitic, despite some of the resolution’s supporters being Jewish.

“I think I’ve become kind of cynical to a lot of government response, even at the local level, and even from so-called liberals who want to apparently support human rights and apparently be there for their community, but it’s kind of contingent,” said Kylie Griggs, a 25-year-old who moved to Corvallis from Portland. “I think human compassion and justice will eventually prevail, I think there’s no way around that because we just can’t continue down this path. It’s not going to be sustainable. Even if just for their own political careers, I hope people realize that.”

My conversations with the Oregon activists were partially inspired by my previous stories about DARVO, a concept developed by Dr. Jennifer Freyd in the late 90s to understand the psychology of sexual violence that has broadened over time to describe other kinds of individual, institutional, and societal harm. In political rhetoric, DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) has been successfully leveraged to smother progress by smearing proponents of democracy and morality as violent and incapable. Leftists are branded as terrorist sympathizers for opposing genocide. Progressives are called radical and dangerous for wanting everyone to have food, healthcare, and education. People to the left of establishment Democrats are blamed for losing elections and diminished when they win them. There’s no doubt that Mamdani will be up against enormous barriers and offensive forces while he tries to enact his agenda of affordability for New Yorkers. There will be outrage and setbacks.

But this doesn’t change the fact that Mamdani’s platform resonated well beyond the five boroughs. The Oregonians I spoke to celebrated his win and so did many of the people who are scared of losing their healthcare soon. He’s emblematic of a party that has already shifted left to confront the devastation head-on, whether its leaders are willing to help or not.

Thanks so much for reading this far, and if you appreciated my reporting, consider upgrading to support my independent journalism. You’ll also get access to all my paywalled stories.

And finally, here are a few other things I wrote this week:

• For The Verge, I wrote a massive feature on the influencers covering the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni lawsuits, following the trajectory of Lively’s subpoena for Perez Hilton’s “reporting” on her case this summer. It’s also about the rapidly thinning barrier between journalism and influencing.

• I’m devastated that Teen Vogue laid off most of its team and is folding into Vogue. They just published a piece from me about YouTube beauty gurus and alt-right pipelines.

• My latest story for WIRED unpacks a Christian movie studio that is increasingly using AI in its Amazon Prime biblical epic about Israel. Yes, that’s right.

Finally, the Supreme Court declined to hear Kim Davis’ challenge to same-sex marriage. Amazing news for my upcoming gay wedding! And on that note, until next time.