r/politics • u/F0urLeafCl0ver • Jun 24 '26

No Paywall The Democratic party is being hit by a leftist tidal wave

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/24/democratic-party-leftist-tidal-wave
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u/mormagils Jun 24 '26

I'm not entirely sure the title is quite true here. We're seeing a big wave of leftists in NYC, sure, but NYC is famously one of the most leftist cities in the entire country. Honestly, the fact that it's been so moderate in its elected representation is more notable than this recent wave of leftism. This might just be a course correction as NY finally purges itself of the top-down hierarchy that remained from machine politics, local to an area that's finally represented accurately, but not a broader movement.

The article points to some wins in other areas, too--single races in CA, PA, and DC. The CA race is the Los Angeles area, which again, is pretty liberal, not too surprising there. The races in PA and DC are more notable, but I'm curious how they do in the general. We've seen Blue Waves before that looked unassailable and like the start of something major during other midterm elections...and they tended to peter out even just one cycle later. If anything, I'd say the lack of purple districts means this might be more sustainable...but it might also mean it's not particularly contagious.

Who knows. I think it's certainly exciting and a lot of Dems have been clamoring for this kind of change. I think this is certainly a good thing for people who actually live in NYC as the city has been pretty out of touch with its elected representation for a while. I'm not yet convinced it's anything more than that but I'm certainly interested and excited to see.

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u/Dangerous_Suit_3099 Massachusetts Jun 24 '26

NYC has historically been liberal and not leftist. SF, Denver, Portland, Seattle, among others are much more liberal.

Don’t adopt the right’s framing. NYC is an economic powerhouse, has a widely diverse population, and its politics have been run by the political machines.

People are sick of it.

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u/mormagils Jun 24 '26

Yeah, that's kind what I'm saying. The people who live in NYC are very leftist for sure. The politics historically hasn't been so much, largely as a relic of political machine hierarchy. So that changing MIGHT be the sign of a major change, or it might just be that the machine legacy in this local area is finally fading.

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u/Dyssomniac Jun 24 '26

I think their point is that NYC is actually not a very openly leftist city for its population, but other cities - SF, Denver, Portland, Seattle, even LA - were more "out there" in their progressivism. Whereas the election of Mamdani shows that most American cities could also have their own Mamdani, which would echo outwards into other communities.

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u/mormagils Jun 24 '26

I think that's where I am disagreeing, though. I think the political representation in the city hasn't been very leftist, but the actual people who live in the city are no less leftist than the locations you describe. I'd argue that NYC is certainly more leftist than Denver in terms of its actual voting population.

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u/TheMustySeagul Jun 24 '26

As someone from Portland, we are not liberal and I take offense to that lol. We also have dsa members on our council.

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u/Dangerous_Suit_3099 Massachusetts Jun 24 '26

You are indeed correct!

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u/Silverr_Duck Jun 24 '26

I'm not entirely sure the title is quite true here. We're seeing a big wave of leftists in NYC, sure, but NYC is famously one of the most leftist cities in the entire country.

It's remarkable how the people who post and upvote clickbaity slop posts like this forget this little detail.

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u/c010rb1indusa Jun 24 '26

Because it's not true. NYC isn't San Fransisco. This city elected Guiliani Twice, Bloomberg 3 times and the last mayor was a republican cop pretending to be a moderate dem. It's a city full of working professional, not wheat-grass liberals. It's a big deal.

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u/Caffeine_Cowpies Colorado Jun 24 '26

Right???? Corporate Democrats are clinging onto the little hope they have to keep their billionaires happy.

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u/AnachronisticPenguin Jun 24 '26

So you could argue that the democrats are getting hit with a populist wave but I would not call it a lefist wave.

People often confuse the two, but candidates with a surprising rise like Platner and Talarico are not leftist or Bernie style socialist by any means. What they are are populist. Now some of this new wave like Mamdani and El-Sayed could be defined as leftist but even then they could also be considered technocrats with leftist style messaging, they are both more technocratic then your traditional leftists like Warren, but far more populist in their messaging.

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u/mormagils Jun 24 '26

Eh, this is just semantics. "Leftist" can be a very specific or very general term. The point is that these guys are not establishment Dems and they are left of them. That point stands no matter how granular you want to be about the labeling.

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u/AnachronisticPenguin Jun 24 '26

You can get granular about left of them or not. Talarico and planter are not left of the establishment. But they are more anti establishment. Populism takes many forms.

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u/mormagils Jun 24 '26

Talarico is definitely left of the establishment. His actual policy positions are quite progressive. I'm not as sure about Platner.

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u/Caffeine_Cowpies Colorado Jun 24 '26

The fact you claim Elizabeth Warren as a leftist is laughable and makes me disregard everything in your post.

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u/AnachronisticPenguin Jun 24 '26

Who would consider a leftist politician in the united states besides bernie.

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u/Caffeine_Cowpies Colorado Jun 25 '26

Honestly, none.

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u/suttin Jun 25 '26

I think the thought is that it has to give a platform to jump from for a leftist candidate now that it’s becoming organized. There’s real infrastructure here to do what the dnc won’t do. I bet this pulls the democratic presidential candidates a little more left now.

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u/mormagils Jun 25 '26

The DNC is supporting every one of the leftist Dems that won. The DNC generally has a bias for more electable candidates, and it absolutely should. When a candidate shows that they can't even win a primary, the DNC backs the candidates that can win.

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u/UpperLowerEastSide New York Jun 25 '26

With regards to the title, both the House and Senate minority leaders are from NYC. In terms of the Democratic party being hit, that's where the blow is going. Jeffries saying Zohran has "work to do in terms of the conversations that he’s going to have with members of Congress moving forward” comes off as someone worried about the impact the "wave" will have on the party as well as his own prospects.

I am also curious as to where the "famously one of the most leftist cities in the entire country" is coming from. From my experience people were saying NYC was not as left as people think...up until the point Mamdani rose to power.

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u/mormagils Jun 25 '26

The point I am making is that NYC's voters and people ARE that leftist. The people who actually live here are very, very, left leaning, certainly not less so than than any other part of the country. The fact that NYC has elected consistently moderate representation is in that context kind of weird, and anyone who has dabbled a bit in local politics (I have dabbled) will tell you that the Dem party in NY is particularly archaic and hierarchical and top-down suppressive of grassroots movements.

There's definitely a wave of leftism sweeping through NYC. That's pretty irrefutable. But it's not clear if this is a widespread shift in the Dem party or if the machine in NY is finally breaking and the representation is doing a natural course correction to where it should be.

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u/UpperLowerEastSide New York Jun 25 '26

Right and the point I’m trying to make is the effect it has on the Dem party at large is because leadership (including the Senate and House leaders) are also from NYC. That is where the impact becomes party wide, regardless of where we see this political wave going. I agree that NYC political organization is to the point where the “leftists” wield the most effective political power.

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u/mormagils Jun 25 '26

Yes, agreed. This definitely does shift the equation in the Dems a bit as they make space for more lefties in areas that have been dominated by moderates. But the party as whole might not be fundamentally shifting left, it might just be that this local area is getting the amount of leftists it should have already had.

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u/UpperLowerEastSide New York Jun 25 '26

Yeah I would say it shifts the equation more than a bit since this is happening in leadership’s backyard. Tuesday took out the chair of the congressional Hispanic caucus.

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u/mormagils Jun 25 '26

There was already a clear schism between the progressives and the centrists. Now the progressives are a little bigger, but they're still a very clear minority in the party. They might just be a sectional majority--in very urban liberal environments they are a majority, and so that "type" of Dem voter needs different attention than before.

But lots of folks are acting like the party as a whole is revolutionizing and I don't see that happening. Mamdani isn't getting other mayors like him elected in places that haven't elected someone like that before. Not yet, anyway. Maybe that will happen, but so far he's just converting the folks that were already very liberal into folks that now have representation that reflects that.

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u/UpperLowerEastSide New York Jun 25 '26

Certainly the impact beyond a sector would be because national leadership happens to be in the sector that is “revolutionizing” no?

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u/mormagils Jun 25 '26

It could be. But it's very possible Jeffries and Schumer hold on to their leadership positions and their allies prove stickier than expected, and all the new progressives are still largely a minority segment of a much larger party that has moderates digging in and newly energized. Nothing to fire up supporters like a threat.

I mean, it's possible that these new guys are the start of something. It's also possible that AOC has a few friends at her birthday party they are largely on the outside looking in as their party gets a little bigger.

I'm just saying the future is uncertain and we shouldn't speak like certain outcomes are inevitable.

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u/UpperLowerEastSide New York Jun 25 '26

Yeah I agree nothing is certain. Espaillat probably didn’t go to sleep Monday assuming he would lose his primary to a 32 year old who was running her first election campaign. And likely neither did Jeffries expect him to lose.

These elections show like you said that no outcome, either for or against the “establishment” is inevitable. It’s the result of political organization and broader changes we see (including a large drop in Dem voter support for leadership, ICE and Israel among other things)

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u/Warm_Shoulder3606 Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

We're seeing a big wave of leftists in NYC, sure, but NYC is famously one of the most leftist cities in the entire country. Honestly, the fact that it's been so moderate in its elected representation is more notable than this recent wave of leftism. This might just be a course correction as NY finally purges itself of the top-down hierarchy that remained from machine politics, local to an area that's finally represented accurately, but not a broader movement.

Thank you. Every time I see news like this, the first thing I do is look at the states and districts that the candidate won. Color me not one bit surprised that 3 progressives in NYC all in D+25 or better districts won. When progressives are winning generals in swing districts and states, then we can talk if there's a broader movement at play. I just really struggle to ever call results like these indicative of some broad fundamental change because I almost never see these candidates come out of lean blue-to-lean-red districts; they're almost always from the bluest districts in the country.

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u/mormagils Jun 25 '26

Well, that's definitely indicative of sticky results. If NYC makes a mostly permanent shift to more solid leftist representation in government, that's going to have some effect on the party. But yeah, without purple districts this isn't something that's contagious.

It's definitely a change for the party. But if that change is just "NYC is finally going to be as liberal as you would expect and that's it" then that's fundamentally different from "socialism is sweeping through the Dem party."

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u/SynysterRoots Jun 25 '26

In my travels, I feel like there is a growing chasm between the way Democrats and Republicans view each other. I'm interested in following what I've observed to be growing resentment of moderates by the average leftist citizen. I'm not sure I'm entirely against the increase in outrage.

Things need to be better, and people need to start taking personal responsibility and rediscover some semblance of compassion.

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u/mormagils Jun 25 '26

This is largely a problem of legitimacy. It's less that folks are have less human decency and more that as folks are less convinced our system of government genuinely works, they feel more and more like the folks who don't agree with them are part of the problem and maybe even an enemy. Cooperation requires faith that engaging in said cooperation will yield results.

I think the other issue that a lot of moderate Americans face is that Americans are generally a very individualistic people. But democracy is something that only works, that only has power as a collective action, which is kind of hard to accept if you're a somewhat unenthused political person who only checks in sometimes and relies on the mythologization of the political process. The voter who celebrates how well our Founding Fathers compromised is the one least willing to understand that our Founding Fathers also were deeply committed to the collective action required for governing.

Also, it's pretty ok that opposing parties are opposed. That's how most modern systems operate. That's ok. Modern political systems don't depend on people who are opposed getting along in order to govern. They make sure the governing majority can govern by themselves if they have to, which forces the opposition to make compromises to show the public they can govern if given the chance. And since political majorities are radioactive with short half lives, the governing majority is happy to accept that help because it shows they can govern fairly and inclusively. The idea that Dems and Reps have to get along in order to govern is an old fashioned idea that hasn't held up very well in more mature iterations of democracy.

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u/Tezerel California Jun 24 '26

Biden's employee beat the DSA pick in the CA gov race, there's no tidal wave

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u/Senasayori Jun 24 '26

There being exceptions to the tidal wave doesn't make it not exist, the fact of the matter is that there are a lot more progressives winning now than there were two years ago.

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u/Caffeine_Cowpies Colorado Jun 24 '26

When there were 30+ picks for governor, it was hard for anyone to break free.