Democrats Are Done With Caution

 

Opinion

Michelle Goldberg

Democrats Are Done With Caution

 

June 24, 2026

Michelle Goldberg

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/opinion/nyc-election-primary-avila-chevalier-lander-valdez.html

 

Of the three New York City congressional candidates endorsed by Zohran Mamdani in Tuesday’s primary, Darializa Avila Chevalier was the weakest.

 

A sociology Ph.D. student and doctrinaire leftist who has never held elected office, she was running against Adriano Espaillat, head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. He’d built an uptown political machine known as the “squadriano” in New York’s 13th District, which includes Washington Heights, Harlem and parts of the Bronx. Many of the area’s neighborhoods are reliably progressive but not known for their radicalism. After all, in the last presidential election, Donald Trump improved his margin in the Bronx by double digits, one of the largest swings in the country, in part because of voter angst about crime and migration.

 

Last week, in an interview with the New York Editorial Board, a group of veteran journalists who question local political and civic leaders, Avila Chevalier said she opposed all deportations, even those of violent criminals. A prison abolitionist, she either couldn’t or wouldn’t answer repeated questions about whether murderers should be incarcerated. Both she and Espaillat are Dominican, and on the morning of the election, she walked off a popular Spanish-language radio show after she was asked about old tweets, including some that seemed to disdain Dominican nationalism. (In other since-deleted tweets, Avila Chevalier cursed at Kamala Harris, called Joe Biden a “rapist,” and derided his support for Ukraine as “bullying Russia.”) Her name was notably absent from a get-out-the-vote message that Bernie Sanders posted for other progressives on Tuesday.

 

But in the end, Avila Chevalier won, carried to a narrow victory by the left-wing tsunami that created landslides for the other congressional candidates Mamdani endorsed, Brad Lander and Claire Valdez. She will almost certainly become the most left-wing member of Congress, and Republicans are sure to try to make her the face of the Democratic Party.

 

Many Democratic primary voters, however, are in no mood for defensiveness. As they see it, they’ve been failed by a cautious, compromising establishment, and they’re going to overthrow it. The Democratic version of the Tea Party is here, with dramatic implications for the midterms and possibly the next presidential election. As Mamdani said at a rally at Brooklyn’s Kings Theater last week, people are asking when the race for 2028 begins. “It starts now,” he said.

 

New York’s primary demonstrated the astonishing political power of the mayor and of the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization that he, Avila Chevalier and Valdez are all members of. It suggests that Democratic voters have been radicalized by the horrors of Donald Trump’s second presidency and infuriated by their leaders’ failure to contain him. And it’s a sign that after the savagery of the war on Gaza, support for Israel has become toxic among large parts of the party’s base. Avila Chevalier was an organizer of the anti-Israel protest encampments at Columbia, whereas the American Israel Public Affairs Committee poured money into a super PAC supporting Espaillat.

 

The city, of course, is not particularly representative of the rest of the country. New York’s electorate is more progressive, and Mamdani, who has brought a joyful, dynamic energy to the city’s governance, has a unique clout. The same night that his slate dominated in New York, AIPAC’s preferred candidate, Adrian Boafo, won a congressional primary in Maryland.

 

Still, progressive outsider candidates are surging in many parts of America. There’s now a democratic socialist mayor in Seattle, and a democratic socialist just won the primary to become mayor of Washington. In Maine, Graham Platner — who, like Avila Chevalier, had a vituperative social media history — easily defeated the state’s governor, Janet Mills, for the Senate nomination. Voters in Maine’s rural Second District, which Trump won by nine points, chose a progressive, Matt Dunlap, to run for the House seat of an outgoing moderate Democrat, Jared Golden, defeating Joe Baldacci, the candidate endorsed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

 

This leftist momentum is a bullish sign for progressives in other Democratic primaries, like Abdul El-Sayed, running for Senate in Michigan, and Francesca Hong, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, running for governor in Wisconsin. Both are either ahead or competitive in recent polls.

 

That means the 2026 midterms could end up being a giant national experiment that tests the populist left’s theory of victory. For years, it has argued that Democrats have failed because, in thrall to corporate interests, they let themselves become the party of the status quo. Unable or unwilling to galvanize voters with an economically progressive alternative to the right, they’ve offered only timid, business-friendly incrementalism. Usamah Andrabi, a spokesman for Justice Democrats, the organization that recruited Avila Chevalier to run for Congress, told me that too often, the Democratic Party “tries to stymie big and bold ideas” in favor of technocratic pragmatism. “I think what voters have really made clear, particularly this past year, is that they are desperate for bold, visionary leadership,” he said.

 

This spring, I met Hong, a member of the Wisconsin Assembly from Madison, when she was visiting New York. She argued that winning the general election would require motivating voters who feel “disenfranchised or angry at the Democratic Party” with an anti-establishment, working-class campaign. Electability, said Hong, is subjective. “We have to take a step back and look at the current political moment and where voters are at and what they care about,” she said. “Who is the candidate that actually responds with a solution that they believe? Who is the candidate that presents a vision that they will see themselves in?”

 

Hong is right that many voters can’t be mapped onto a neat left-right spectrum. They judge candidates on a whole range of axes — whether they seem like normal people or career politicians, insiders or outsiders, populists or elitists. That’s why there are voters who went from Sanders to Trump, or Trump to Mamdani.

 

Still, as someone who desperately wants to see Republicans beaten, I’ll admit I’m anxious watching Democrats stake so much on a strategy of left-wing audacity. After all, progressive overreach has backfired in the past.

 

The D.S.A., remember, also surged during Trump’s first presidency. In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a D.S.A. member recruited by Justice Democrats, stunned the political world with her upset victory over the longtime Democratic congressman Joseph Crowley, and was joined in the House by a fellow D.S.A. member, Rashida Tlaib, and the like-minded progressive Ilhan Omar. Other D.S.A. members won local offices nationwide.

 

Mainstream Democrats rushed to ally themselves with the left’s insurgent energy. Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker signed onto Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill. When the Black Lives Matter protests exploded in the summer of 2020, Harris sent out a fund-raising appeal to bail out people who were arrested protesting in Minnesota. Though Joe Biden beat out Sanders for the presidential nomination, once elected, he worked closely with progressives, adopting ambitious climate policies, expanding the safety net and welcoming migrants. Before the war in Gaza made him a villain to many on the left, he was hailed as the most progressive president in a generation.

 

Then came collapse. During the Biden administration, the D.S.A. hemorrhaged members amid sectarian infighting, especially over Palestine. In 2021, some factions tried to expel the recently elected representative Jamaal Bowman for being insufficiently anti-Israel, and the national D.S.A. unendorsed Ocasio-Cortez.

 

At the same time, centrists swung against a left that had indulged its purist tendencies. Bowman would go on to lose a primary fight to a more moderate challenger, as would Representative Cori Bush, the former Black Lives Matter activist who’d been endorsed by the D.S.A. In the 2024 election, the vast majority of American counties shifted right.

 

Andrabi attributes Democratic failure to Harris’s uninspiring centrism, and there were certainly people who declined to vote for her out of disgust with Biden’s unstinting support for Israel. But as Blueprint Research has found, swing voters who backed Trump overwhelmingly saw Harris as soft on crime and the border, and “too focused on identity politics.” She was weighed down in part by positions she took amid the frothy left-wing ascendence of 2020.

 

Maybe this time will be different. The electorate is furious, and now it’s the right that represents a hated status quo. Much of the Democratic establishment has proved itself feckless; a candidate as flawed as Avila Chevalier could win only against a complacent political machine that’s lost touch with the people it’s supposed to represent. Calls to abolish ICE were once seen as fringe, but since Trump has turned the agency into something akin to a personal militia, in most recent surveys, a plurality of voters want to scrap it.

 

All that gives the left a renewed opportunity to wield power. The question is what lessons leftists have learned from the past dismal decade. As both candidate and mayor, Mamdani has usually embodied a practical, optimistic sort of left politics — a sewer socialism — laser focused on New Yorkers’ material concerns. Avila Chevalier represents something different, an academic leftism rigid in its refusal to accept trade-offs or make concessions to ordinary people’s moral intuitions. One approach is a recipe for building, the other for backlash. The danger is that a movement flush with success may think it doesn’t have to choose.