“The truth is there’s a quiet civil war going on in the Democratic Party right now,” Andrew Cuomo told Fox News, as he fought for his political life against rival Zohran Mamdani a week out from the New York City mayoral election. “You have an extreme left. Radical left. Bernie Sanders, AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] — Mamdani is just the banner carrier for that movement — versus the mainstream moderate Democrats.”
“And that’s what this election is about,” he said. “It is that civil war. . . . I believe it will destroy the Democratic Party nationwide, if that far left becomes dominant. This is not a socialist country.”
The United States is not a socialist country. But its biggest and wealthiest city — the heart of its powerful financial sector, where the second-most billionaires in the country reside, and where one in twenty-four residents are millionaires — did just enthusiastically elect a socialist as its mayor, giving him a majority of the vote in a three-way race and a 9 point winning margin.
Mamdani ran up wide margins, sometimes double-digit ones, against the disgraced Cuomo in all of the city’s boroughs but one. New York was the only place last night where voters were not largely driven by wanting to vote against something, namely the president, a stark reversal from Democratic politics as usual in the Trump era, where the party’s lack of an affirmative agenda has seen anti-Trump animus serve as its leading motivator.
Mamdani’s win may be the Left’s biggest victory so far in the civil war that Cuomo described — a war that started in earnest ten years ago, when Sanders threw his hat in the ring for the Democratic nomination and found to even his and his supporters’ shock that a surprising amount of the country wanted to buy what he was selling. Since then, that war has been full of stinging defeats for the movement Sanders inspired, not least of which was the Vermont senator’s own 2020 run, which began with the…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
