Mailbag: How Democrats Should (And Shouldn't) Run Against Their Toxic Brand

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And have a happy Independence Day weekend contemplating rebellion against tyranny.

Nancy: Hi Brian, I’m so tired of Dem politicians being asked to disavow something or someone, condemn, reject—however you want to describe it. For me, the insistence that Zohran Mamdani or others disavow a slogan like « from the river to the sea » or « globalize the intifada » belongs in this category. Is that a purity test? As a lifelong New Yorker and progressive activist, I see the absurdity of our local candidates regularly being asked to demonstrate /pledge fealty to any Israeli government. But that’s still the case.

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It is almost definitionally a purity test! And you’re right to pick up on a certain hypocrisy, insofar as the liberals insisting Mamdani disavow other people’s slogans overlap heavily with the ones who insist progressives are shrinking the Democratic tent with all their purity tests.

Forgive me if yesterday’s newsletter already addressed this question at sufficient length, but I think there’s more to say.

Two arguments in that piece can run into tension: The first is that the Democrats who rushed to renounce Mamdani aren’t maximizing the tent. They’re poisoning a large population of Mamdani supporters against the rest of the party to appease a different population of Mamdani haters (some subset of which might be willing to vote for mainline Dems, but not for someone as far left as Mamdani).

The second is that growing the tent shouldn’t and really can’t mean making no judgments about who’s welcome, particularly in high echelons of power and influence. Making the tent too big, in a careless way, can create more than just internal cohesion problems, it can trigger a flight to the exits. It’s trivial to imagine, for instance, an unusual primary electorate nominating someone completely toxic, who creates more problems than upsides for the rest of the party.

This actually happens from time to time, more often to Republicans than Democrats. In the Trump era, Republicans have become militant vice-signalers, such that when their voters nominate vile candidates, the party rallies around them anyhow. Sometimes, as in the case of Donald Trump himself, the bet pays off. More often, as in the case of Roy Moore and too many other failed Senate candidates to name, it backfires.

But before Trump, Republican voters would nominate moral cretins like, e.g., David Duke, and the leadership would renounce the nominees for the sake of the rest of the party.

One could imagine Democrats, in some race that fell off most people’s radar, nominating (say) a 9/11 apologist to some local office, compelling Democratic officials to withdraw all party support.

It should go without saying that this kind of thing is much, much likelier to happen in random, tiny backwaters than in New York, where city-wide primary elections can draw hundreds of thousands of voters or more. When you see Democrats treating Mamdani as if he were the progressive equivalent of Duke, your strong presumption should be that they’re panicking like chickenshits and running Mamdani down for bad, selfish reasons.

So I think New York Dems should make their peace with Mayor Mamdani, steady on their front foot, and learn to say something like “I have disagreements with Zohran, but he’s right about [XYZ] and unlike the other candidates in the race, he isn’t in Donald Trump’s pocket.”

As it happens, I listened to Mamdani’s answer to the “globalize the intifada” question, then read the transcript of it for good measure, and there’s honestly not much to take issue with. I assume Democrats like Kirsten Gillibrand, who raced to condemn him after his victory, were bandwagonning with knee-jerk Zionists and bad-faith actors and hadn’t grappled with Mamdani’s actual words.

Few unscripted answers to unscripted questions are perfect. Mamdani probably could have hit a sweeter spot if he’d been more willing to parse distinctions: If you say “globalize the intifada,” because you believe Israeli civilians and diaspora Jews are fair targets for violence, of course I condemn you; if you say “globalize the intifada,” because you think it’s an edgy way to make Palestinian human rights a larger international cause, I share your objective—but I don’t use that language because I understand how threatening it can sound to Jews. Particularly because the phrase has ambiguous meaning.

tl;dr, I don’t think the Democratic Party needs to do away with all litmus tests, but they shouldn’t impose litmus tests cavalierly or opportunistically, and the people who applied a litmus test in this case seem to have done zero work understanding the meaning of the question or the content of the answer.

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Michael: Derek Thompson made an interesting comment while talking with Tim Miller on the Bulwark podcast. He argued that Democrats are having success when they run *against* the Democratic party. In the NYC mayoral race, Mamdani ran as a critic of the Democratic Party as an institution while Cuomo ran as the card-carrying institutional Democrat. A lot of the other Democrats who have had electoral success have done the same. Tom Suozzi, who is out there criticizing Mamdani as too liberal, was very critical of the Democratic brand in winning his own race to flip a frontline district.

How far can Democrats go behind candidates who basically run against the party brand?...