Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, has received an icy reception from both key members of the Democratic Party and its boosters, leading some progressives to wonder whatever happened to the mantra, “vote blue no matter who?”.
Since winning the Democratic mayoral primary in June, many Democratic leaders in New York and nationwide have kept their party’s nominee at arm’s length. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., has declined to endorse Mamdani, as has Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
Other members of New York’s House delegation, like Democratic Reps. Dan Goldman and Ritchie Torres, have followed Jeffries and Schumer’s lead, congratulating Mamdani on his “energized campaign,” in the words of Goldman, but stopping short of endorsing the Democratic nominee for mayor.
Still others, like Rep. Laura Gillen, who represents some of New York City’s Long Island suburbs, said after the primary results that “Socialist Zohran Mamdani is too extreme to lead New York City.”
While there are a number of Mamdani critics in the party, there are also many exceptions, like Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., who had endorsed Scott Stringer, a former city comptroller, but has since endorsed Mamdani, comparing his victory to former President Barack Obama’s. Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., who had backed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the primary, also endorsed Mamdani.
Still, the reception of Mamdani by establishment Democrats has inflamed a feeling among progressives that has been growing for years: the party’s liberal base is expected to vote for any Democratic candidate, no matter how conservative, while conservative and moderate Democrats get to pick and choose when they support their party’s nominee.
Faiz Shakir, a former senior advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, told Salon that when it comes time for the party to rally around their nominee, it’s not a two-way street.
“It’s not only not a two-way street,” Shakir said. “More problematically, it’s telling the new voters that have come into the Democratic primary process that ‘We don’t like your views, we don’t like you voting in the Democratic primary.’”
Shakir, who founded the non-profit news organization A More Perfect Union in 2021, added that the rejection of Mamdani speaks to a bigger issue in the party, which is that leadership cares more about maintaining the rules and power structure in the party than they do about expanding the party’s base of support.
“It’s even less about Mamdani, less about Bernie. It’s that you guys have attracted people to vote in this process and upended the notions that we all, in this club, have agreed upon as the rules of the Democratic Party,” Shakir said.
Shakir noted that Mamdani was able to connect with people disengaged from politics and young voters, something that Democrats nationally have been attempting to do following their defeat in 2024.
Mamdani was also specifically able to bring voters who either didn’t vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 or didn’t vote at all back into the fold. Shakir said that the party made the same mistake in how it handled Sanders’s candidacies in 2016 and 2020, the latter of which Shakir managed. Unlike in Mamdani’s case, Sanders’s primary candidacy ran aground after establishment Democrats united around a single candidate in response to the senator’s early successes in the presidential primary process.
“They came into this primary process, they got enthusiastic about the candidate, they expressed their preferences, and if you’re going to try to overturn, it has less to do with Mamdani than telling a bunch of these voters, ‘I don’t like your preferences,’” Shakir said. “If you go back to 2016, that is what a lot of sentiment of the ‘Bernie bros’ was right? That is what turned them off to the party, and we’ve been living with that legacy ever since.”
The refusal to endorse Mamdani by his fellow Democrats has taken on extra gravity because of the situation that Mamdani finds himself in in the general election, facing off against two other Democrats running as independents, the incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, and Cuomo.
It’s not the first time Democrats have failed to rally around their nominee in a high-profile race. The situation echoes the 2006 Connecticut Senate election, when Ned Lamont, the now governor of Connecticut, defeated Joe Lieberman, the former Senator, in the Democratic primary.
Lieberman, in response, decided to run as an independent, eventually defeating Lamont in the general election that year. In post-mortems of the race, critics blamed Democratic leadership for insufficiently supporting Lamont over Lieberman.
Matt Bennett, a vice president for public affairs at the centrist group Third Way, contested that shutting Mamdani out of the party was justified because of his connection to the Democratic Socialists of America.
“What moderates are worried about is not just the ideas that he has run on like free busses and, you know, grocery stores, that kind of thing,” Bennett said. “It is his pretty deep connection to the Democratic Socialists of America, a connection that’s in some ways much deeper than than what we saw from Bernie or [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] means he put out a fundraising email for them, like a few weeks ago, like he’s and he has marched with their banner, and he has said that he’s very He’s a proud member, and at least I’m not speaking for all moderates.”
Bennet specifically said that the concern for the pro-business people at Third Way is that parts of the DSA platform could be “very easily weaponized” against other Democrats. He specifically mentioned the DSA’s support for the “abolition of the carceral state.”
“Those ideas would strike basically anyone in mainstream politics as loony, like seriously. Go look at the platform, it says, shut down all prisons and free all incarcerated persons, like that’s insane and we just shouldn’t have people connected to insane ideas,” Bennett said. “We just shouldn’t have people connected to insane ideas in high-profile places in our party.”
Start your day with essential news from Salon.Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.
Bennett said that other progressives, like Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago, have not received the same reception because they are not as closely affiliated with the DSA. It’s worth noting that both Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez were DSA members endorsed by their local DSA chapters in 2024. Tlaib is currently slated as the keynote speaker for the DSA’s 2025 National Convention.
“The thing with Mamdani is he’s actually not really a Democrat,” Bennett argued “He is a member of a different party, and so I do think that in some ways, he’s unique.”
Centrist groups like Third Way and the Welcome Party, which hosted a gathering of centrist Democrats in 2025, have also often praised politicians like former Sen. Joe Manchin, I-W.V., who finished off his career in the Senate by officially leaving the Democratic Party after years of standing in the way of the Democratic Party’s agenda.
Welcome Party strategist Liam Kerr specifically said we need five more Joe Manchins, despite Manchin having officially left the Democratic Party.
To those who work in coalition with Democrats, like Ana María Archila, the state co-director of the Working Families Party in New York, top Democrats and their allies fretting about hypothetical anti-Mamdani backlash in the midterms are getting over their skis.
“Most elected officials in the Democratic Party in New York City have endorsed Zohran. That’s just the fact. And there is, I think, a kind of thinking that is overly shaped by risk aversion and they are sort of thinking about how this will play out in 2026? How will this impact congressional races? How will this impact other elections?” Archila said. “Most people are not thinking that way. Most people think, ‘How does this leader present to me? Does that he or she seem like they understand my life and they care and they want to fight for me?’”
Archila added that Mamdani’s reception by the leaders of the Democratic Party might not matter in the end because he was able to inspire “historic numbers” of voters to participate in the Democratic primary.
“We are convinced that he will lay the groundwork to build the largest, most powerful, most diverse, and most energized coalition that the city has seen, and that coalition will include many of the leaders of the Democratic Party that, by now, are taking it sort of slowly,” Archila said.
Read more
about Zohran Mamdani
