Something is changing inside the Democrat Party. The establishment is losing its grip, and a new force is taking over, and it’s beginning to flex its muscles. If you want to make it in today’s incarnation of the party, you need the kingmaker’s seal of approval, and it looks like a new kingmaker is being crowned. The question worth asking right now is whether the party even realizes what's happening to it, and whether, at this point, it could stop it even if it wanted to.
On the Republican side, we know who the kingmaker is. Everyone knows that Donald Trump owns the GOP. He's earned it. His endorsed candidates have racked up win after win, and his recent backing of Ken Paxton over sitting Sen. John Cornyn in Texas is almost certainly going to hand Paxton the Republican nomination. That's what kingmaker power looks like: You point, and primaries move. The GOP is Trump's party. There's no serious debate about that anymore. And it makes sense, he is, after all, the sitting president.
As for the Democrats, the kingmaker isn’t even Washington, D.C., nor is he a former president, or part of the establishment.
So who does the Democrat Party belong to? The answer, increasingly, is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Last year, I wrote that Mamdani was "positioning himself as a Democrat kingmaker, which will move the party further to the radical left at an even faster pace." His first real test is playing out right now in New York's 10th Congressional District.
Last year, Mamdani ally and former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander entered the primary race against incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman, and, of course, Mamdani endorsed him. And now, according to a new Emerson College Polling/PIX 11 survey of likely Democratic primary voters, Lander leads Goldman by more than 20 points. The numbers: 56.6% for Lander, 23.1% for Goldman, with 20.3% still undecided. The poll surveyed 450 likely Democratic primary voters May 16-17, with a margin of error of 4.6 percentage points.
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Now, let’s think about this for a minute. Goldman isn't some kind of moderate being punished for being insufficiently leftist or not being anti-Trump enough. He's a hard-left Trump antagonist who holds a safe, deep-blue seat. There's no strategic upside to primarying him from the left. So, why oust Goldman? Because Goldman, who is Jewish, declined to endorse Mamdani for mayor over antisemitism concerns. That was enough. Mamdani decided Goldman had to go, and so Goldman is going.
Lander's campaign isn't even shying away from using his relationship with Mamdani as a selling point, saying in his campaign launch video, “Our mayor can have an ally in Washington instead of an adversary in his own backyard." In a February Mamdani praised Lander as someone who "has spent his career taking on big fights for New York's working families." Lander himself announced his run by boasting about "stopping evictions, building new housing, desegregating our schools, protecting immigrants from ICE." He added, "I recognize this moment, and I'm ready to meet it."
Mamdani is flexing his control over the party in multiple ways, too. He previously forced Gov. Kathy Hochul to cave and deliver a financial bailout for New York City. Now he's in the business of remaking the congressional delegation to stock it with allies. The Democrat Party's power players either bend the knee or find themselves the target of his wrath, and they don’t want to cross him. Clearly, the Democrat Party is transitioning into the Democratic Socialist Party right before our eyes, and Mamdani is leading the way.
