Tuesday's Primaries: Mamdani’s Clean Sweep, Everything Else

While only being in office for less than a year, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is already demonstrating his political muscle, as all three candidates he endorsed in New York’s primaries won their elections on Tuesday. 

According to AP, Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and former city comptroller Brad Lander all won their primary races for House seats. Making the victories even more notable is that Lander and Chevalier’s opponents were both incumbents. Chevalier and Valdez are both Democratic Socialists, and with the two expected to win in the general election, it will double the number of Democratic Socialists in Congress. While Lander considers himself a traditional Democrat, he did run further to the left than his opponent, U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.). 

Mamdani’s clean sweep of endorsements has further added to the naval gazing by officials in the Democratic Party who, somehow, are still trying to figure out the party’s identity two years after President Donald Trump’s reelection. There are concerns that having far-left candidates will give Republicans more ammo to demonize the Democratic Party. 

“Republicans will very quickly seek to elevate, as they always do, the most radical voices in the Democratic Party,” Howard Wolfson, a former head of the House Democrats’ campaign arm, told the New York Times. “And after tonight, they will have more radical Democrats to choose from.” 

It’s wild that this dude was a campaign head and hasn’t clocked that it doesn’t matter how far left you are, Republicans are going to make a boogieman out of anyone who runs as a Democrat. They tried to frame former President Joe Biden, the definition of a centrist Democrat, as a radical leftist. What works in New York won’t work in every state, but it’s honestly kind of upsetting that Democrats keep pissing and moaning every time unapologetically left-leaning candidates win. 

If the traditional way of doing things still worked, Democrats wouldn’t have lost the 2024 election and wouldn’t have had historically low approval ratings despite a historically unpopular Republican president being in office. If Republicans can gleefully make white supremacy part of their platform, it shouldn’t be an issue to have candidates who believe that housing is a right, genocide is bad, and that working 40 hours a week should allow you to pay rent. 

Elsewhere in New York, Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of former President John F. Kennedy, came in third. New York Assemblymember Micah Lasher beat out Schlossberg and fellow Assemblyman Alex Bores. While Schlossberg led early on, it seems that was due to name recognition alone, as the race evolved into a battle between Lasher and Bores. 

Bores, a former Plantir employee, campaigned on bringing more stringent AI regulation to Congress. This resulted in a PAC, financed by OpenAI investors, spending $7 million on attack ads against Bores, with a group connected to the AI company Anthropic spending another $10 million to support Bores. Lasher acknowledged the AI proxy war in his victory speech on Tuesday night. 

“I have some news for the two big AI companies who’ve taken such an unusual interest in who won this congressional seat,” Lasher told his supporters. “I won’t be taking my cues from either of you when it comes to protecting our kids, our jobs, our environment.” 

South Carolina held runoff elections on Tuesday, where Trump made the interesting move of endorsing both Republican candidates for governor. He gave a last-minute endorsement of South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, after it was clear his initial candidate, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, was unlikely to win in the runoff. 

Wilson won the runoff on Tuesday, and most of the media have said this continues Trump’s nearly perfect endorsement record, but does it really? I feel like endorsing both candidates basically cancels out the weight of the endorsement. Someone had to win, and now it’s unclear what, if any, impact Trump’s endorsement had on the race. Especially since the candidate he initially endorsed lost. 

South Carolina’s runoff election also saw Nancy Lacore, a former Navy admiral who was abruptly fired by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as part of his anti-woke crusade, win the Democratic nomination in the House race to replace Nancy Mace (excuse the Dr. Seuss nature of that sentence). While Lacore is running in a district that was redrawn in 2021 to favor Republicans, Democrats believe Lacore’s military background will make her competitive in the midterms. 

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