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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Maurice Shema, the host of a new podcast from Serial Productions, The Marshall Project, and The New York Times. Last year, I spent three months embedded with a Capitol defense team. Their client had been on death row for more than 30 years, and now his execution date had been set.
I followed along as the lawyers tried to prove something nobody had successfully done in three decades, that one of Texas' most notorious serial killers was actually innocent. The last 12 weeks. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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 Mamdani 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.
All of his chosen candidates won, and their victories pointed to a growing movement within the Democratic Party. 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.
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Chapter 2: What were the results of the New York primary elections?
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 Mamdani 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. 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.
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Chapter 3: How did Mayor Mamdani become a political kingmaker?
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.
Right. 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.
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Chapter 4: What risks did Mamdani take in supporting progressive candidates?
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 eight years, a canvas in 2018, UAW picket line.
And he felt 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 Velazquez, who represented and were appealing to kind of the old guard of the neighborhood, the 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 Mamdani, 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 Mamdani 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 in 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.
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Chapter 5: Who are the key candidates backed by Mamdani?
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 going to look at any candidate that's backed by leadership and be against them. And that's got to 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
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, 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.
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