Democratic Socialists Aren’t Taking Over America

Candidates endorsed by New York City’s democratic-socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, swept the city’s primary elections Tuesday, provoking alarm in both conservative and centrist circles over the future of the Democratic Party. The right-wing New York Post dubbed the winners, Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier, the “hateful slate.” The Free Press quoted a supporter of one of the defeated candidates warning that it “doesn’t feel safe to be Jewish anymore,” notwithstanding the fact that one of those winners, Lander, is Jewish and a self-described liberal Zionist. New York Attorney General Letitia James told CNN, “All of us are a little frustrated with the Democratic Party. But you don’t blow it up. That’s what MAGA has done.”The leftist trend goes beyond New York. In Seattle, the democratic socialist Katie Wilson is five months into her first term as mayor. Another democratic socialist, Janeese Lewis George, won the Democratic primary last week in Washington, D.C., and will likely be the city's next mayor. In Los Angeles, the democratic socialist Nithya Raman has a good chance of unseating incumbent Mayor Karen Bass.Overinterpreting election results the day after a contest is easy. Less than a year ago, the victories of Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill in Virginia’s and New Jersey’s gubernatorial races were being framed as a rebuke to the Democrats’ left-wing. But the boring reality may be that different places have different politics; all of these candidates are suited to their particular contests. Virginia and New Jersey demanded more moderate challengers, whereas New York, especially New York City, has enough left-of-liberal voters—and organizers and volunteers—to sustain more left-wing candidates. What’s happening in Brooklyn doesn’t necessarily tell us what will happen in Texas. This isn’t blowing up the Democratic Party so much as realigning its leaders with the views of their current constituencies.[Read: The liberal district that coul