Transcript of Mayor Mamdani Flexes His Power in the Midterms

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From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily.

Good evening, everyone! What a good evening it is.

On Tuesday, a blowout in the New York primary cemented Mayor Zoran Mondani as a local kingmaker.

What you all have shown this evening, whether for State Assembly, State Senate, or Congress, Is that a year ago, it was not the end of a political movement. It was the beginning.

All of his chosen candidates won, and their victories pointed to a growing movement within the Democratic Party.

DSA!

DSA!

Today, political reporter Nick Fandos explains whether their victories help Democrats in the midterms or put their chances of winning control of Congress at risk. It's Thursday, June 25th. Nick Fandos, welcome to The Daily.

So glad to be here.

Mayor Mamdani is having a very good couple of weeks, it seems.

Yeah, an incredible couple of weeks. Uh, the Knicks are NBA championships.

Yep.

The World Cup, his beloved sporting event, is taking place just across the river in New Jersey. And this week, the mayor made a pretty audacious political gamble in a series of important congressional races in New York City, and he won every single one of them.

So, okay, as much as I want to talk to you about the Knicks, you are here to talk about Tuesday's election results. And I want to understand what these results in New York's primary tells us about the strength of Mayor Maldonado, of course, this rising political figure in the Democratic Party, but also what these results mean for the national political picture. So first, let's just talk about what were the results on Tuesday night.

So on Tuesday night, voters across New York City went to the polls in a series of very competitive congressional primaries. Now, in New York, a very Democratic city, the primaries actually are the elections that end up deciding who is going to fill these seats.

Mm-hmm.

And Mayor Mamdani did something unusual in these elections. Where his predecessors have tended to try and stay out of local politics, of the kind of bitter inner-party fights that could divide their coalition or zap their political capital, he decided he was going to put all of his on the line for a series of candidates from the left, many of them Democratic Socialists, who share his vision for the city and he thought could win these seats in Congress for their movement.

Mm-hmm.

This is a pretty extraordinary gamble just 6 months into his term. If he succeeded, it would give him a foothold in Congress where he could inject the economic populist ideas from the left, his views on Israel and other issues into the national conversation that Democrats are having right now about their identity. But If he lost, he'd be squandering a lot of his own political capital. He'd be empowering people who are trying to stand in his way. And frankly, I think he'd make even some of his allies think, this guy's not as strong as we thought. Maybe we don't need to go along with what he's talking about.

Okay, so you've just explained sort of the gamble of it. Let's talk a little bit about how he decided to take the risks that he did.

So to answer this, I want to go back all the way to last year's mayoral campaign.

Right.

Mamdani was a little-known state lawmaker. He was a Democratic socialist. He was the kind of guy that when he got into the race for mayor, nobody thought he could win.

Mm-hmm.

And a year ago this week, he did in remarkable fashion. He beat Andrew Cuomo, this titan of Democratic politics. So from the start, it's important to remember that Mamdani is an insurgent politician and he's a movement politician.

Mm-hmm.

By the time last fall comes around and it's clear he's going to be elected mayor in the general election, he's already looking ahead to this year's races to figure out, how can I expand that movement?

New York, we know anything's possible with a great team.

I'm Brad Lander, and I'll block billionaires from buying our elections.

The first candidate he identifies is Brad Lander. Now, Lander was actually a fellow mayoral candidate who Mamdani had beat, but then they locked arms to take on the Democratic establishment. And Mamdani said to him, as the election is coming to a close, you know where we could use you most would be running for Congress. Why don't you run in the Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan seat where you're from against Dan Goldman? Who was a Democratic incumbent, a former federal prosecutor, but crucially did not endorse Mondani in last year's election and historically has pretty close ties to Israel, which has become one of the animating issues, obviously, of the mayor's political movement.

Isn't it kind of bold of Mondani to take on an incumbent politician in this way?

Absolutely. But in this case, Lander had a long track record in this district, and I think both of them knew that he had a very good shot of beating Goldman and flipping this. And crucially, Lander was willing to do something that Goldman never was.

Which was?

Good evening.

Welcome to New York One's debate for the 10th Congressional District. Both these guys consider themselves liberal Zionists. They're both Jewish. And Goldman has been critical of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government, but he's drawn a line at calling what's happened in Gaza a genocide. Israel is not the most important issue in this district. What is most important— And he's not completely denounced groups like AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, even if he didn't take their money in this election. Lander was willing to do those things.

He voted for every U.S. military aid package to Israel. He won't recognize it as genocide. He's never used the word occupation to describe—

He was willing to be much more vociferous in his criticism of Israel and in separating himself from the kind of pro-Israel political forces in the United States. And for Mamdani, that was crucial.

Wow, that really shows you how divisive Israel has become.

That's right. But the way that he made this a campaign issue, and that he figured it would resonate with the voters in a district that he's known for a very long time, was to basically say that Dan Goldman is beholden to a special interest. He is taking money from the pro-Israel lobby. He is taking money from corporate interests, and that is affecting the way that he represents you in Washington. And that was a pretty powerful critique at a moment, I think, when a lot of Democrats are thinking about the entrenched interests of money and corporate power in the United States. So it took this rather small distinction and made it a bigger one where he could differentiate himself.

And all of what you've just described, of course, jibes with Mamdani's positions when he first ran for mayor.

Absolutely. But his intervention here also started to raise another question. Which is basically how involved is Mamdani, this new mayor who's going to be trying to govern an ungovernable city, as people like to call New York, how involved is he going to get in politics? And we start to get some answers pretty quickly last fall. In one counterintuitive move, he actually intervened to shut down a primary challenge by an ally of his in the DSA who was looking to challenge Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader. And after his private warnings, to this ally didn't get through. Mamdani actually showed up at a public forum and made a case for why it would hurt his mayoralty and their cause to go after Jeffries in that way, to pick such a big fight.

So he's basically telling the guy to stand down.

Exactly. And so that might have been where this all ended. But in late November, one of Mamdani's allies in Congress, Nydia Velázquez, who's been there for 30 years, announces unexpectedly that she's going to retire. There's going to be a lot of people interested in this seat. I believe you've said there's no heir apparent.

I want to see a strong, independent, progressive public servant.

And the district that she represents is one of the city's farthest left. It's also the place that Momdani ran up the largest margins anywhere in the city. And so when she retires, he sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. To put one of his allies into that seat and expand his foothold in Congress beyond just Lander. It's too good to pass up. As it happens, Mamdani had someone very particular in mind, a young assemblywoman named Claire Valdez, who had been his first endorser in the race for mayor and a fellow Democratic Socialist. Velásquez didn't know her at all.

Mm-hmm.

It is what it is. I have a lot of respect for the mayor. And I guess that we disagree this time.

She felt Mamdani blindsided her and was meddling in the race. She ends up backing another candidate, the Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso.

Knowing my district, knowing my communities, I decided to step in and endorse Antonio.

And why did he prefer his candidate Valdez over the handpicked successor from Velázquez?

It's a great question. And on paper, there's not a huge amount of difference in these two candidates in terms of policy. They both want to abolish ICE. They both have called what happened in Gaza a genocide. They both support raising taxes on the rich, as the mayor does. But Valdez comes out of the mayor's political movement. Remember I said he's a movement guy? She was with him on day one when very few people were.

Claire was there. If you look at photographs of the New York left over the last 8 years, the canvas in 2018, UAW picket line— And he felt basically basically, "Yeah, that guy's progressive, I like him, but Claire is my candidate." And now we need to be able to do everything we can to get her across that finish line.

And what follows is this really fascinating race that drives a kind of geographic line through the district and through Mamdani's coalition, where on one side you have young, very left, maybe DSA-inclined voters, who are more often white and college-educated than their neighbors, who have moved into this district over the last 10 years. And on the other side, you had Reynoso and Velásquez, who represented and were appealing to kind of the old guard of the neighborhood, the large Puerto Rican and Dominican populations that grew there, the working-class Black populations, the other immigrant populations in neighborhoods that have not gentrified in quite the same way.

Which is so interesting because here's Mondani, a candidate who had attracted both of those groups, now driving a wedge between the two of them with his endorsement of Valdez.

Right. And so Mondani is jeopardizing the very coalition that he worked so hard to build. And it might have stopped there, actually, in another year, but he kept going. Because as the spring progressed, he had his eye on another district. This one was in Upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx. It's a heavily Latino district. It's got a big Black population. But similarly to the race we were just talking about, a gentrifying white community that's coming in and changing parts of that district. Now, the interesting wrinkle here is that initially Mamdani stayed out of this race because he had actually promised the incumbent congressman, Adriano Espaillat, that he would be with him. Espaillat had given Mamdani a key endorsement during the mayoral race, brought along Latino support that he needed at the time. And in private, we've reported, they had a handshake deal. The mayor said, "I'll return the favor if you ever need it." And so even though his allies on the left were lining up behind a challenger to Espaillat, a woman named Daria-Liza Avila Chevalier, Mamdani initially stayed on the sidelines. But as the spring progresses and Avila Chevalier is picking up momentum, as the DSA endorses her, he starts thinking to himself, "I can't stay on the sidelines of this.

She's got a real shot of winning. And if she doesn't win and I stay out of it, well, that could be on me. There's an opportunity with my popularity in that district, with the resources I can bring to it, that I can help push her there. So he decides to add her to his slate, the third candidate. And this is the decision, more than any other, that really makes the Democratic establishment, Black and Latino Democrats, labor unions, go ballistic. Because they say, It's one thing to go against an incumbent like Dan Goldman in a district that he's out of step with. It's another to compete for an open seat and upset the outgoing congresswoman. But to go after the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the first formerly undocumented immigrant in Congress, someone who actually is objectively pretty progressive on every issue except for Israel, and that's key, is a bridge further. I mean, that is much more provocative.

And somebody that Mamdani had given his assurances to that he would support in this very race.

Precisely. And so a lot of them look at that and also say, "What good is the mayor's word if he's gonna go back on it here? How can we trust this guy going forward?" So now, with 3 districts now in play, this fight just kind of keeps growing outward. So labor unions become very involved. Prominent New York Democrats like Jeffries, who are close with Espaillat, get involved. They start campaigning on the ground. Super PACs start dropping millions of dollars for and against candidates on both sides of the race. The mayor throws himself aggressively into the slate, and it's worth noting he has gone way above and beyond what even an endorsing mayor might do in a race.

We need Claire Valdez, Daria Elisa Ávila Chevalier, and Brad Lander fighting for us.

Raising money, he's been offering strategy advice, he was out on the campaign trail in the final weeks.

He's running back and forth.

Exactly, he held a big rally with Bernie Sanders. Some of it, frankly, gets ugly. Avila Chevalier, who is a PhD student and relatively untested, it turns out that her history as an activist left her with a trove of inflammatory and polarizing tweets. Among the most circulated were tweets that attacked the Democratic Party. In one of them, she said, "Eff Kamala Harris," and other ones expressed policy positions that were really far outside of the mainstream. So again, among the most prominent was one where she basically said all deportations are bad. We shouldn't be removing anybody from this country under any circumstance.

Clearly very out of step with the majority of Americans.

Exactly.

Okay, I can see why you described all of these as risks and Mamdani's taking a big gamble in this race, because if these candidates end up losing, not only has Mamdani not installed his allies in Congress, he has really alienated people who supported him in his initial race for mayor. He has potentially damaged his coalition for the next time he might want to run. And never mind the fact that he has made it harder for him to accomplish his agenda and made some pretty powerful enemies. Sure. And of course, we know in the end, gamble pays off. Mamdani had a huge victory on Tuesday night because All of his candidates won.

All of his candidates won. And I just want to add, in convincing fashion. Lander won by almost 30 points. Valdez won by about 20 points. And Avila-Chevalier had a narrower margin, but somewhat comfortable, 4 points over a powerful incumbent. They were margins so big that even Mayor Mamdani and his allies were surprised, and so big that they sent shockwaves that went not just throughout the five boroughs of New York City, but frankly, well beyond, and right now are rattling the foundations of the Democratic Party.

We'll be right back.

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Nick, I want to talk about what this clean sweep that we saw from the DSA actually means. So let's start small and go big. So first, what does it mean for Momm Donny and his agenda here in New York City?

I think that for the mayor, one of the most important things that this election showed is that he was no fluke. In fact, he may be a political kingmaker in New York, that his political capital can be transferred to other candidates and give them a real shot at winning races across the city.

It's interesting that a guy who essentially ran against the establishment, who derided the whole idea of kingmakers, has now become one.

Yeah, I think he would say, "I'm not a kingmaker, I'm a movement leader." Mm-hmm. But I think kingmaker is an apt term. I mean, this is someone now who seems to be among the most popular political figures in New York. As his own team would say, he has a huge amount of political capital, and he's not afraid to use it. And I think that's the other thing that this has shown us. He is willing to take risks. And in this case, the risk paid off. And he not only now has new allies, but he also has other Democrats in the system, people in the city council, people in Albany, the governor, who are seeing that his political power is real and they're gonna have to respond to it. And so when they get into fights about his agenda, about how to pay for childcare, about whether to raise taxes, you can really bet that going forward, he's gonna be coming in with a stronger hand.

Right.

What about on the national level though, Nick? 'Cause we know in Congress, Hakeem Jeffries, House Minority Leader, he has been focused on winning control back from the Republicans. So what does he make of all of this?

For Hakeem Jeffries, there are very specific implications and much broader ones for his party. Specifically, two of the candidates in this race, Avila Chevalier and Valdez, have not committed to backing him in a leadership fight next year when he's trying to become speaker.

Mm.

They could become real thorns in his side in Washington. But I think that the bigger implication, both for Jeffries' politics in New York City and in Washington, is that this is going to give the left a much bigger platform, the Mamdani left specifically, to advance its ideas at a time when Democrats are really in this big national argument about what they want to be as a party. And Mamdani and his allies have a very specific vision. It's anti-corporate power, it's big government, it's tax the rich, it's pay for social services to help working people, and it's pull the United States away from its alliance with Israel. And on each of those issues, now they're going to be speaking in a louder way and in a way that frankly may cause problems for Jeffries as he looks towards the midterms this fall, where races are not gonna be won and lost in deep blue New York City, but in swing districts across the country.

But this new wave of progressive Democrats, they obviously represent a lot of frustration that Democrats have with the Democratic Party, with Democratic leadership, and that's It's got to be on the minds of some of the more establishment Democrats, of course. And I wonder whether it's possible to pull apart how much we saw on Tuesday could be attributed to that frustration and how much can be attributed to the pull of Mamdani, as you have described it.

I think there is no doubt, as we've been watching primaries play out across the country this year, and frankly, ever since Donald Trump was elected, that Democrats are really frustrated with their leadership. They're frustrated that they lost to Trump in the first place, and they're frustrated that they have not been able to stop him from enacting much of his agenda over the first couple of years. And so in any election like this, I think there is a degree to which voters are coming out to vote against the status quo. They're gonna look at any candidate that's backed by leadership and be against them. And that's gotta be concerning for Jeffries because If that spreads across the country enough, he could end up with an unruly caucus or nominees in close contests that can't win against Republicans. But I also think that there is something undeniably particular happening in New York City, where Mamdani, who is in some ways a product of that discontent himself, is also able to kind of harness it and put a frame around it and direct that energy behind a particular alternative. And so what I think he did in these races that was risky but also powerful was by associating himself so much with these other candidates, he was kind of able to link together races that might otherwise have been sleepy, disparate primaries fought about different things and make them all kind of a referendum on what the Democratic Party is right now.

Mm-hmm.

His version versus the status quo. And so that kind of amplifies both the discontent and it offers a particular alternative and tries to put some force behind it so that it can become, you know, more relevant in national politics. And New York City, of course, is in some ways an anomaly, but in some ways it has often been a leading indicator in politics. I mean, this is the place, after all, where Jeffries is from, but so is Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader. And it's the place that in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her own surprise Democratic primary against Joe Crowley and launched basically a progressive movement that did meaningfully push the Democratic Party left and led to all kinds of incumbents falling across the country. So I think anyone who doesn't take this seriously does so at their own peril.

Okay, I understand how all of these dynamics play out in places that are very blue, where it's basically Democrat versus Democrat, right? But just looking forward to the midterms, the very far-left politics that these candidates won on, I wonder how that might translate to races that are much tighter in places that are purple, for example, right? Or saying something something like, "I don't believe in deportations," is really going to turn off voters potentially?

I think this is a question a lot of Democrats are asking today. And those who are on the winning side would say, "Well, they're going to help us. The Democratic Party is losing across the country because regular people are not into our ideas. They think we're not fighting for them. They think we're not committed to the right issues. And we're trying to push the party towards a place that we think it can win." Now, a lot of those people are not actually living in the kind of districts you're talking about, out in the suburbs of New York or in the middle of the country, in the Midwest, wherever it may be. And the candidates running there, I think, look at these results and are a little worried. Republicans have shown they are very adept at taking the extreme comments of lefties in New York City or Chicago or LA and broadcasting them all over the country and saying, You may think you're voting for this reasonable, moderate candidate, but you're voting to empower a party that is so crazy and outside of the mainstream, they're going to do X or Y or Z.

They want a lot of communists to come in. I'm saying it.

And that's exactly what we started to hear from Republicans just hours after the election results became clear.

The people that they're pushing are communists, and this country is not going to have communists.

President Trump himself. Speaker Mike Johnson in the House.

The Democrat Party, the socialists, the Marxists have nominated some of the most radical candidates to ever run for office, and they're running for Congress.

Warned that Marxists and socialists like those in New York City were going to be cropping up all over the country.

The insurgent left is on the rise.

Right. If these DSA members end up working against the Democratic brand nationally in the midterms, that could actually feel like a loss for Mamdani, right? Like, he could get blamed for taking a big risk on these candidates that is then seen as backfiring?

I think that is certainly a risk for him, but I think to give the mayor his say, what he would allow is that he's probably gonna get blamed and attacked anyway. He's already one of the most visible left-leading politicians in the country. And so why not take a big swing at trying to push the party to a place where he thinks he might actually help them by advancing ideas that he really believes are not only attractive to many Democrats, but also can be attractive and persuasive and activating to people who have either been turned off by the political process altogether or maybe voted for Republicans, who feel like basically the system is not working for them. The people who, frankly, he was able to bring out in large numbers in his mayoral election who don't typically vote, or in some cases had voted for Donald Trump for president and then came around to support him.

Does this, Nick, feel to you like a potential mirror of what happened on the right which is that populists took over the mainstream of the Republican Party.

I think in many ways there are similarities. I mean, whether you look at the Tea Party after President Obama was elected, or you look at Donald Trump's rise in the 2016 Republican primary, there was a very similar situation on their side. After losing a series of elections, there was a faction within the Republican Party who came in and said, We've got it all wrong. We've gotta change drastically if we're gonna win across the country. And they went on to start winning races, and we find ourselves where we do now. Democrats right now are trying to figure out, how do we get our mojo back? And I don't think we're gonna have a true answer for a couple of years until we have candidates on the presidential debate stage and vying for the attention of the entire country.

It sounds like the big question going into the midterms is basically, whether the far-left views of these candidates that might be seen as turning off a lot of moderate voters, whether that will push more people away than the broadly popular economic and anti-Israel messaging, frankly, that we have seen that might attract them.

The midterms will give us one answer to that question, and I think that the presidential election that's waiting right behind it will give an even bigger one. Because Democrats, not just here in New York, but in races from Maine to Michigan to other places, are testing out their tolerance right now for ideas and labels that previously would have been seen as outside the mainstream, that might have been seen as disqualifying, and deciding, is that something that we like? Is that something we're willing to tolerate because of the energy and dynamism and the freshness of what they're bringing to the table? Or do we want to retreat to something more familiar to try and win over our neighbors who are not already on board. And that's going to be a raucous, multi-stage fight. And so Tuesday night in New York might just have been the opening bell.

Nick, thanks so much.

It was my pleasure.

We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, President Trump plunged Congress into chaos after he abruptly canceled the signing of a bipartisan housing measure, demanding once again that Republicans pass highly contentious voting restrictions ahead of the midterms, even though they say they don't have the votes needed to pass. Republicans had hoped that the sweeping housing bill would project a unified effort to address affordability, one of the top issues for voters, before Congress heads home for the Fourth of July break. Instead, even as the stage for the signing ceremony was being erected in the Capitol, the president blindsided his allies, emboldened critics of the bill, and effectively brought Congress to a standstill.

And—

Rescue crews raced early Thursday to find survivors of two powerful earthquakes that toppled dozens of buildings in Venezuela, killing at least 32 people and injuring 700 others. The full scale of the damage was not immediately clear, but one of the quakes that struck on Wednesday was the strongest to hit Venezuela in more than a century. President Delcy Rodriguez, who announced the initial toll of deaths and injuries, declared a state of emergency. Today's episode was produced by Jack DiSodoro, Stella Tan, and Astha Chatterbaidy. It was edited by Paige Cowett and Patricia Willans, and contains music by Dan Powell, Pat McCusker, and Rowan Niemisto. Our theme music is by Wonderly, and this episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for The Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams.

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