Within and without?

The race to elect New York City’s next mayor has devolved, continually, on an almost daily basis. And it started out bad. A year ago, incumbent Democratic mayor Eric Adams appeared to have a lock on reelection, despite a track record of scandal and regressive policies that targeted the most vulnerable—immigrants, the mentally ill, unhoused New Yorkers, library users, people in the justice system, and so on.

Then it got worse. Adams, who has flirted with the disreputable and legally questionable since being elected as a state legislator in 2006, was indicted on federal corruption and bribery charges last September. The weak field of alternatives—the current citywide comptroller, a former comptroller, a handful of past and present state legislators, and a few rich no-names—suddenly gained newfound interest, mostly from the press corps. And a new specter cast an ever-growing shadow: the prospect of former governor Andrew Cuomo—“the creepy tyrant of Albany”—jumping into the race, given the mortally wounded Adams campaign.

Things have only spiraled further since. Trump’s election led to a blossoming bromance between the former Republican Adams and the president-elect. The wooing appeared to pay off, as Trump’s Department of Justice took the unprecedented step of ending its prosecution of Adams. In response, seven government lawyers resigned. As it became clear Adams was now little more than a Trump stooge, his public support collapsed, and at the 11th hour, the looming shade stepped into the light: Andrew Cuomo officially announced he was running for mayor, just before the deadline to do so. He immediately became the frontrunner.

This morass of the villainous, the uninspiring, and the unmemorable has shown how completely broken and unresponsive to the public the Democratic Party has become in New York City (as it has across the country, as last year’s elections painfully showed). It stands as an indictment of the political oppression that has choked off any real challenge to the city’s dominant one-party rule. For those looking for an alternative to the system that produced Eric Adams and numerous other feckless elected Democrats, the prospect of a Cuomo mayoralty feels like a terminal diagnosis.

But this isn’t the whole story. Certain left circles, far from diagnosing doomsday, see within the local political situation a unique and exciting opportunity for a real voice to be heard that articulates a deeply progressive vision for New York City. In many ways, it’s grown not in spite of but because of the crisis within the Democratic Party.

The candidacy of Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani has buoyed hopes that this year could be different. A leader in the Democratic Socialists of America and an avowed democratic socialist, Mamdani has tried to catch lightning in a bottle by running for mayor within the Democratic Party primary.

Despite misdiagnoses, New York City was and has remained overwhelmingly Democratic. It’s true that Trump’s percentage of the vote in the city was significantly better in 2024 than it was in 2016. This was, indeed, a harbinger of the political collapse Democrats faced in November, but not because Trumpism (whatever that is these days) was making major gains among New Yorkers. Rather, it was a reflection of a massive enthusiasm gap that saw nearly 600,000 voters who had supported Biden in 2016 fail to show up for Harris. This pattern appeared to repeat itself across the country.

The lesson learned from what happened in New York and elsewhere has become a dividing line within the Democratic Party. While the party’s leadership has bought into the idea that reorienting itself towards Trump’s brand of nationalistic, xenophobic authoritarianism is the way to win back some imaginary centrist voter, those on the party’s left flank—specifically those with ties to DSA—have been arguing that the failure to adopt working-class politics and policies will continue to lead to underwhelming support and turnout for Democrats.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders have been barnstorming through swing districts and holding rallies, making this case. While mainstream media have labeled them “socialist firebrands” it’s far closer to the truth that Ocasio-Cortez, who is being presented as the future of the Democratic Party, is increasingly being seen as simply a Democrat. And while Sanders remains a kind of left standard bearer, his decision to back Biden’s disastrous reelection effort shows he is more than willing to put party over people.

Mamdani’s bid for mayor predates the Democrats’ shellacking in November, but his campaign represents the ongoing battle and committed political tactics of the DSA’s inside-out approach. This is the playbook that Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani have stuck with: democratic socialists who run as Democrats and, when they win, continue to operate within the Democratic Party, forming a left wing inside of whatever body they happen to join, be it in the United States Congress or New York’s 150-person Assembly.

This tactic aims to support a multi-generational effort to move the Democrats further to the left, despite being repelled again and again by a political party owned outright by the capitalist class. DSA represents an evolution in this quest. Prior to their explosion around Sanders’ 2016 bid to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, the plan followed by groups in New York like the Working Families Party was to back the most progressive candidate in a given race, placing them on their own ballot line, allowed under New York’s somewhat unique “fusion” process. Vote for said candidate on our line in the general election to send a message, the theory went.

Time and again, WFP’s vote totals were dwarfed by votes on the Democratic Party line. Their list of candidates is simply who would have won as Democrats regardless of WFP support, leaving each of those figures without a self-interested reason to cater to whatever policies WFP may have. The ineffectiveness of WFP’s tactic provided, at the very least, an opportunity for left activists committed to working within the Democratic Party to deploy a marginally more aggressive plan: rather than waiting for a candidate to emerge from the Democratic Primary, recruited DSA candidates would run in the primary to become the party’s nominee. This formulation led to Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani, and a good number of other DSA-backed candidates getting elected in New York at every legislative level.

However, this tactic has proven to be only partially successful. First, getting DSA candidates elected as Democrats generally requires a heavily Democratic district as a starting point, which rules out Republican-contested areas outside (or even inside) New York City or other, typically urban, strongholds. Even when elected, DSA members are working within the Democratic Party, and generally have not proven to be impediments to party priorities. For example, Ocasio-Cortez sided with the Biden administration’s decision to force a bad contract down the throats of striking rail workers. 

Working in a legislature with dozens of other members is a much different dynamic than becoming the chief executive of the largest city in the United States. Mamdani’s campaign, then, represents an escalation of the inside-out tactic. On the media front, he and his team have managed to secure plenty of positive press from mainstream media like the New York Times. They’ve also done a remarkable job accruing resources, maxing out the city’s generous 8-to-1 primary public funding threshold, providing them with $8 million ahead of the June election.

These positive points have yet to result in a change in the basic data on the race. Even if Mamdani has been gaining support and is viewed as the second most-favored candidate, the latest polls continue to show Cuomo with a significant advantage over everyone. According to a poll by Data for Progress, which takes into account the city’s rank-choice voting system, Cuomo still ends up winning the primary with 70 percent on the final ballot, more than doubling Mamdani’s projected 30 percent.

Continuing to deploy this inside-out tactic within the corrupt corpse of the Democratic Party means limited victory, and when the likely defeat occurs, what energy and excitement–not to mention an articulation of some set of socialist solutions to the world around us–is snuffed out. Thousands of other voters, who are only eligible to vote in the general election, are left with the fait accompli of whomever the Democratic nominee is being the next mayor.

More than a few political observers, including many of Mamdani’s supporters, will likely argue that there’s no way to win outside the Democratic Party. Rarely is it considered that there’s also no way to win within it, whether in New York City or elsewhere. Mamdani’s distant second position notwithstanding, the coalition that elected Eric Adams, and that is poised to back Cuomo, is the core of the party’s base: largely non-white outer-borough communities that tend to be more religious, older, and home-owning. A winning coalition for any socialist candidate will need a broad base of support from working-class voters in every community. That simply is not an option in the Democratic primary.

More critically, the inside-out tactic cannot survive outside of the Democratic Party, as the party itself is the base from which each candidate must run. That may seem evident, but it means that allegedly socialist candidates are not being grown from the kind of worker-led mass movement conditions that many on the Left see as critical to the future success of any socialist political project. Absent a solidified base of support, the DSA-backed candidates ultimately rely on the same sources of support as any other Democrat—Democratic donors and party leadership. Their jobs, their livelihoods, now depend on capitalists who are willing to keep money flowing into the party and their campaign accounts as long as policies that benefit wealth over workers remain in place. It’s been a constant in Democratic politics, at the very least, since the party fully abandoned labor and embraced Wall Street during the Clinton Era “Third Way” neoliberal push. These environmental conditions cannot help but have a corrosive impact on any candidate who claims to support socialist principles and goals.

By clinging to the partisan primary process, candidates like Mamdani ultimately serve the interests of the Democratic Party—which makes sense, because they’re Democrats. At the end of the day, should he not win, the Assemblymember has to go back to work within his overwhelmingly Democratic conference. To present oneself as an actual challenge to the system, by running against another Democrat in the general election, would initiate a crisis, which would harm those whose paycheck and standing are entirely tied to the Democratic Party. However much an independent socialist candidate in the general election might be needed—and wanted—expecting an elected Democrat to take that risk is unlikely, regardless of how avowed their commitment to socialism.

And what if Mamdani stuns the world and wins the Democratic primary? It will mean he is likely the next Democratic mayor—which is to say, like others in relatively similar situations, that the eroding effects of being hopelessly dependent on the party will mean the hopes of a true socialist in city hall are fleeting, at best. This is the reason why the DSA’s model for change is ultimately built to fail. You don’t change the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party changes you. Like a leopard who can’t change its spots, a political party wholly owned by the capitalist class will work on behalf of that class, no matter how many times well-meaning people try to change it.

The effects of this system are on display all around us, and the view is bleak. Even so, the solution has remained the same through the decades: build independent socialist institutions that can engage with and grow a working-class movement for real change. Political solutions will emerge, and a new vision for how things can be will present itself. But these won’t ever include the Democratic Party.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see About Tempest Collective.

Featured Image credit: Delta News Hub; modified by Tempest.