The reaction from many to Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary has been hyperbolic to say the least.
Mamdani, a member of Democratic Socialists of America, has promised a 2% tax on the wealthiest 1% of New Yorkers, an immediate freeze on rents for stabilized tenants, increased pressure on landlords to provide safe housing conditions, “Trump-proofing” New York City and ending all cooperation with ICE, raising the city’s minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030, no-cost childcare; and more.
Already, real estate developers are in a “mad scramble” to derail Mamdani’s campaign and support Mayor Eric Adams’ re-election bid, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. The CEO of GAIA Real Estate went so far as to call a Mamdani administration a “death penalty for the city.”
“You’re going to see a ton of money coming into the race from all levels literally against this one person,” said Greg Kraut, chief executive of KPG Funds, in an interview with the WSJ.
Likewise, many are scrambling to make sense of Mamdani’s victory and what it means for the future of the Democratic Party. This includes a June 27 editorial from the Chicago Tribune titled: “Is centrism in the Democratic Party dead? Let’s hope not.”
The authors claim to be grappling with an “interesting question”: Are voters “simply unreceptive to centrist points of view,” or is Andrew Cuomo’s defeat “due more to poor centrist standard-bearers (and enigmatic extremists) rather than the actual political positions themselves?”
To say Cuomo was a “poor centrist” candidate would be to state the obvious. A former governor who resigned in disgrace for sexual misconduct may not have been the best choice to replace a mayor previously indicted on bribery and fraud charges.
But are “poor centrist” candidates the only thing to blame? Is all that’s needed for Democrats to consistently win elections is putting forward centrist candidates with “fresh faces” who are “willing to take chances”? If the Tribune had explored recent polls of Democratic Party voters, perhaps their editors would be better positioned to explore such questions.
Mamdani’s win comes at a time when 62% of Democratic voters say they want the party’s leadership “replaced with new people,” according to a June poll from Reuters/Ipsos. Across all age groups, the poll found more than three-quarters of Democratic voters consider universal healthcare, affordable childcare, and higher taxes on the rich among their top priorities.
As well, 70% of Democratic Party voters say they want Democrats to adopt a more “aggressive stance” towards President Donald Trump’s policies, as opposed to “moderate Democrats” who will “compromise” with him, according to the most recent Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll.
Can Mamdani truly be considered a “radical” or an “extremist” if many of his campaign promises appear to be supported by a significant majority of his party’s voters?
The Tribune editors, however, argue that “far left” politicians like Mamdani are actually seizing on the “centrist” abundance agenda pushed by authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. The abundance agenda has previously been described in People’s World as a call to “slash regulations on housing, energy, and infrastructure” in order to (supposedly) “unleash economic growth and lower costs for working people.”
The Tribune editors described the abundance agenda as a critique of how blue cities and states have made projects that Democrats support (such as high-speed rail and affordable housing) “exorbitantly costly and difficult to complete, due to red tape and environmental bells and whistles.”
“There are vast differences in approach to pursuing the abundance agenda,” the Tribune editors write. “Mamdani and others on the far left place more emphasis on governmental involvement while center-right and center-left voices argue that the private sector should be freed to build more. But the critique itself is a centrist one, and leftists wouldn’t be seeking to offer their own version if they didn’t tacitly agree with Klein’s criticisms.”
What the editors see as a tacit agreement, I’d argue, is more a recognition that capitalists in the private sector can only be counted on to care about profits at the expense of the public good. The abundance agenda is little more than Bill Clinton-era neoliberalism with a “progressive” veneer, as argued by Cameron Harrison and C.J. Atkins in People’s World.
“The abundance agenda is just smoke and mirrors,” Harrison and Atkins write. “Under capitalism, deregulation does not create abundance—it only increases the exploitation of workers and the planet. The real barriers to prosperity are not ‘bureaucratic bottlenecks’ but the capitalist system itself, which hoards wealth, suppresses wages, and resists any policy that threatens its drive for profit maximization.”
A national poll from Demand Progress alleges that among 1,200 registered voters, 43.5% said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who made the “abundance” argument, compared to 55.6% who said they’d support a “populist” candidate.
“A significant majority (81.6%) of respondents responded positively to a populism-aligned argument, ‘get money out of politics, break up corporate monopolies, and fight corruption,’ while only 8.4% said it would make them less likely to vote for such a candidate,” Demand Progress reported.
Among independents, 84.8% responded positively to the “populist-aligned” argument, along with 81.5% of self-described moderates, and 74.3% of self-described conservatives.
What these polls show is not simply that voters want “candidates willing to challenge their party’s orthodoxies,” as the Tribune editors assert. Voters want candidates who will address their material needs and conditions, even if they provide answers that aren’t approved by Wall Street.
The Tribune editors are correct that “centrism and [so-called] pragmatic politics are no means dead in the Democratic Party.” But centrism isn’t being kept alive because of policy proposals like the abundance agenda.
Centrism remains because Democratic Party leaders, at best, are too often on the fence when it comes to working-class issues. At worst, they refuse to listen to (or indeed even acknowledge) their progressive base’s demands and largely fail to respond to the challenges posed by the fascist MAGA movement.
Centrism is kept alive thanks to the efforts of those who pressure young people like David Hogg out of the Democratic National Committee after he previously vowed to unseat “ineffective, asleep-at-the-wheel” Democrats in the primaries.
Centrism is kept alive thanks to people who, like the Chicago Tribune’s editors, advocate for politicians who espouse “common-sense policy positions” like Barack Obama did; people who can’t accept that what was a winning strategy in 2008 and 2012 didn’t work in 2016 and 2024. Campaign strategies that worked against John McCain and Mitt Romney don’t work against Donald Trump.
Centrism is kept alive thanks to those Democrats who seem content to risk future MAGA administrations so long as they can block progressive, “radical” candidates from the ballot.
The Democratic Party has had an entire decade to formulate a reliable, consistent strategy to resist Trump’s MAGA movement. They’ve gone 1 for 3 in running “moderate,” “centrist” candidates against him; and it could be argued that Biden’s 2020 win had more to do with the BLM Movement galvanizing people against Trump than it had to do with Biden’s appeal.
Demanding “centrist,” “moderate” politics is nothing short of a capitulation to fascism at a time when the president seeks to implement Project 2025 and regress this country back to the so-called Gilded Age of the late 19th century.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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