The Mamdani Caucus

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, June 24, 2026

 

Last night, at Darializa Avila Chevalier’s victory party in New York City, former Rep. Jamaal Bowman took the mic and put a question to the crowd. “Is socialism in the motherf—ing house?” he roared exultantly.

 

Socialism was indeed in the motherf—ing house.

 

And not just figuratively. Come January, socialism will be in the motherf—ing House when three candidates backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani in yesterday’s Democratic primaries take their seats in Congress.

 

One is Brad Lander, who knocked off Rep. Dan Goldman in NY-10 by making the race “a referendum on their differences over Israel—hammering the incumbent for not supporting legislation to block arms sales to the U.S. ally and for refusing to call its war in Gaza a genocide,” per Politico. “We cannot keep paying for [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s wars with our tax dollars,” Lander declared on Tuesday night. He won by 32 points.

 

The second is state lawmaker Claire Valdez. Her opponent in NY-7 was endorsed by retiring incumbent Rep. Nydia Velázquez, a member of the House for more than 30 years. No matter: Valdez romped to victory by 20 points after accusing Velázquez’s candidate of taking too long to call Israel’s operations in Gaza a “genocide.” Attendees at her victory party on Tuesday celebrated by chanting “f— AIPAC.”

 

But the star of the evening was the third candidate, Avila Chevalier, due to the sheer degree of difficulty she faced in NY-13. Her opponent, incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, happened to be the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Defeating a sitting member of the House is hard, defeating an influential sitting member of the House is harder.

 

To make matters worse, Avila Chevalier has espoused so much toxic progressive nonsense in her short life that she seems less like a person than a recurring character on Gutfeld! invented to lampoon Squad-style radicalism. She is, or was, a believer in defunding the police and abolishing prisons; she opposes all deportations and reaffirmed that position recently; she attended a pro-Palestinian rally one day after October 7, 2023, when the bodies of Israelis massacred by Hamas were still warm; and she blamed the United States in 2022 for “bullying Russia” into invading Ukraine.

 

She’s so far left culturally that, on certain matters, she hops the gap of the proverbial horseshoe and ends up on the far right. White nationalist chuds disdain interracial relationships—and so does Avila Chevalier, who once complained about nonwhite men fetishizing “ugly colonizer” (i.e., white) women. We’ve lived long enough to see Jim Crow become the bleeding edge of progressivism.

 

She’s a deranged woke muppet, a relic of the 2020 political zeitgeist that helped bring about Trump 2.0. Her views are so hard for normal people to grasp that she walked out of an Election Day radio interview rather than be tortured by having to explain them again.

 

A few hours later, she defeated the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus by 3 points, boosted to an upset victory by her strategy of attacking Espaillat “relentlessly” for accepting donations from the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC.

 

With Mamdani at the controls, Israel-obsessed democratic socialism has captured New York City politics. The president was so alarmed by the development that he interrupted his regular late-night posting about rigged elections and reflecting-pool vandalism to declare that “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!” Okay—but it may yet be a socialist country.

 

A left-wing socialist country, I mean. Right-wing socialism is already here.

 

How did we end up with a Mamdani caucus in Congress? Why have Democrats gone red?

 

The Mamdani factor.

 

One answer to that is: They haven’t. New York Democrats have gone red. (Not this kind of red. That kind of red.)

 

Center-lefties did fine in Democratic primaries elsewhere last night. A pro-Israel candidate won in outgoing Rep. Steny Hoyer’s deep-blue Maryland stronghold. A military veteran prevailed in NY-17 despite attacks that tried to implicate her in Trump’s deportation agenda. A Navy admiral fired last year by Pete Hegseth for God knows what reason advanced to the general election in Nancy Mace’s South Carolina district.

 

Even in newly communist NYC, not every victor belonged to the revolution. Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres, one of the party’s most outspoken supporters of Israel, won his race. Establishmentarian Micah Lasher, who’s Jewish, prevailed in a competitive primary for an open seat in NY-12 despite saying he won’t support legislation banning weapons sales to Tel Aviv. Gov. Kathy Hochul ran unopposed despite being no one’s idea of a diehard progressive.

 

Still, we shouldn’t miss the forest for the trees. Not only did New York Democrats effectively punch a ticket to Congress for a woke muppet last night, they delivered big wins for Mamdani-types in state-level races. There must be a reason that the Democratic Socialists of America are cleaning up in the big city.

 

There are two, I suspect. One is that NYC has lots of overeducated, well-to-do leftists, and DSA-style politics plays especially well with that cohort. They came through for Mamdani in his mayoral campaign against Andrew Cuomo, and they came through again last night for his proteges Valdez and Avila Chevalier. Few expressions of modern populism are as elitist in their appeal as left-wing radicalism. Downscale Democratic jurisdictions are likely to be less receptive to it than rich intellectuals in the Big—very red—Apple.

 

The other factor is Mamdani himself. Republicans of all people should find it easy to grasp how a charismatic leader who’s popular with his own base might galvanize the rank-and-file to follow his lead in party primaries. When he defeated Cuomo last year, Mamdani instantly became the most powerful socialist in the country and a sort of proof of concept that full-bore DSA politics—replete with unapologetic animosity toward Israel—can win even in a city with America’s largest Jewish population.

 

Last night’s primaries were a test of whether his victory was a fluke, fueled by his personal likability (or Cuomo’s unlikability), or whether far-leftism had real electoral legs. Mamdani wanted to prove that the latter was true so he turned on the bat signal for Lander, Valdez, and Avila Chevalier. And NYC’s “dirtbag left” wanted to prove it too, so they showed up.

 

But there’s more to it than that.

 

The Trump factor.

 

Believing that the president had something to do with last night’s results feels like the sort of thing that only a Dispatch-er afflicted with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” could succumb to. Not only was the evidence of a Trump backlash at the polls thin, there was compelling evidence to the contrary.

 

That came in the person of George Conway, a celebrated Never Trumper whose antipathy to the president transformed him from a conservative Federalist Society stalwart circa 2017 to a candidate in last night’s NY-12 Democratic primary. His campaign strategy was straightforward: At a moment when the left is bristling with hatred for Trump and Trumpism, what more perfect vessel for their anguish could there be than a man who shares that hatred enough to have renounced the right over it?

 

Conway was the platonic form of a pure anti-Trump “own the cons” protest candidate. He ended up finishing fifth with 6.1 percent of the vote, well behind even airheaded Kennedy nepo baby Jack Schlossberg.

 

Pretty remarkable, no? For months, rank-and-file Democrats have savaged the White House for losing focus on affordability and their own party’s leaders for not doing more to resist Trumpist autocracy. Last night they got a chance in NYC to express those frustrations at the polls. Somehow, instead of the president or the cost of living, the issue that appears to have galvanized them was … Israel. Now that’s out of touch.

 

I do think there was a “Trump factor” in the socialist surge, though.

 

Obviously, the president’s near-total disinterest in bringing down costs is helpful to left-wing populism. CNN’s Harry Enten reminded viewers as the results streamed in from New York that Democrats view socialism considerably more favorably than they do capitalism, a shift from the ambivalence they expressed between the two 15 years ago. Fallout from the Great Recession and spiking inflation under Joe Biden were hard enough, but Trump’s needless double whammy of tariffs and an oil crisis caused by war with Iran were destined to make voters more willing to hear out the DSA types.

 

For years, partisan conservatives have rationalized their indulgence of fascism by blaming progressives, pointing to the left’s cultural excesses and declaring, “This is how you got Trump!” Progressives can now return the favor by pointing to him palpably not giving a rip about the cost of living as he goes about setting fire to the global economy and responding, “This is how you got Darializa Avila Chevalier!”

 

Trumpism helps explain last night’s results in another way.

 

Ask any partisan conservative why the party they defend to this day chose to nominate a cretin in 2016 and they’ll give you a sob story about Democrats running a campaign of supposedly unparalleled viciousness against Mitt Romney in 2012. Republicans tried nominating a decent, respectable person, they’ll tell you, and all they got for it was left-wing demagoguery and defeat. So in the next cycle they nominated a louse who’d at least fight as dirty as liberals do.

 

Here again, the left ends up being scapegoated for the right’s embrace of fascism. Which is weird, since the actual victim in this self-serving narrative—Mitt Romney himself—wasn’t so aggrieved by his alleged mistreatment that it prevented him from voting to impeach Trump. Twice.

 

If there’s a grain of truth to the “mean to Mitt” myth about 2012, it’s the idea that a party that nominates an uninspiring but “electable” milquetoast establishmentarian to face an opponent it despises and then ends up losing anyway is likely to be more open-minded about radical alternatives going forward. The first black president defeated right-wing statesmen like Romney and John McCain with ease, so what did Republicans have to lose by nominating “the craziest son of a bitch in the race” the next time, to borrow Rep. Thomas Massie’s famous line about Trump?

 

That’s the Trump factor in last night’s results. Democrats supported an electable establishment ticket in 2020 and 2024; their reward was seeing swing voters hand back power to a coup-plotting convicted felon who all but openly promised to abuse presidential authority if given the chance. I’m not sure there’s been a more consequential or demoralizing electoral defeat for the losing side in American history since 1864. If this is where “electability” has brought liberals, of what use was electability?

 

So they’re electing socialists now. What do they have to lose? Republicans ditched the Romney types and started snorting populism when the Romney types stopped winning; Democrats are doing the same after idiotic Americans preferred to play Russian roulette with Trump 2.0 rather than elect Harris. This is how you got Darializa Avila Chevalier.

 

The Israel factor.

 

It’s strange that a foreign policy question would end up as the key issue in congressional primaries, particularly when it doesn’t involve American troops being in harm’s way.

 

There’s no simple explanation for why U.S. support for Israel has become such a salient issue for Democrats. Part of it is surely earnest outrage at the death and destruction in Gaza, which began with the support of a Democratic administration. Part of it is disgust at Netanyahu’s government, which certainly does have its disgusting elements. And part of it is left-wing argle-bargle about Western “settler colonialism” that inflames progressives morally in a way that, say, Islamist regimes mowing down thousands of their own citizens never does.

 

What’s unclear to me is the extent to which socialist Democrats care about Israel on the merits versus as a sort of proxy issue to galvanize grassroots opposition to the party’s establishment.

 

Consider the Tea Party movement, an obvious analog to what’s happening in left-wing primaries right now. In 2009-10 the right ignited in opposition to Barack Obama’s stimulus spending, turning dogmatic fiscal conservatism into a litmus test for Republican candidates. So puritanical was it that, at a 2012 GOP primary debate, the candidates onstage rejected a hypothetical 10-to-1 mix of spending cuts and tax increases aimed at reducing the federal deficit because of the tax component.

 

But Republican voters didn’t give a rip about spending on the merits, as would become clear in 2016. In hindsight, the “small government” rallying cry under Obama was all about unifying the base against a hated president, not about advancing a policy program. Right-wingers found a grievance they could use to flog a political establishment that they despised for all sorts of reasons beyond debt and deficits, and they flogged away.

 

There were issues that the grassroots right really did care about, though. The most shocking upset of the Tea Party era came in 2014 when Dave Brat defeated Eric Cantor, the House majority leader at the time and the presumptive successor to John Boehner as speaker once Boehner retired. Cantor’s Achilles heel in the primary against Brat wasn’t the federal budget. It was immigration.

 

That was an omen. Two years later, the same issue would propel big-spending Donald Trump to a comfortable victory against a field of fiscal conservatives. “Shrink the debt!” was something right-wingers said at rallies; expelling foreigners was what actually mattered to them.

 

My guess is that socialists’ obsession with Israel is more analogous to the Tea Party’s obsession with spending than its more earnest preoccupation with immigration, although it’s surely a bit of both. Without a doubt, the demented muppets of the House’s Mamdani caucus will vote next year to block further aid to Israel (assuming Trump doesn’t cut it first, of course). But the outsized importance of the issue in yesterday’s primary reeks of an “Us” and “Them” litmus test that left-wing populists are using as shorthand for various grievances against the Democratic establishment.

 

Only RINOs support current federal spending. Only DINOs support Israel. The Jacobin playbook never varies.

 

Be careful what you wish for.

 

And so, inevitably, we arrive at the point of the newsletter where I’m obliged to say that the rise of the Mamdani caucus is good for Trump and Republicans.

 

In some ways, it undoubtedly is. If Democrats take back the House and Senate this fall, Republicans will greatly enjoy watching Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer try to navigate the whims of a swelling DSA faction. Both men are from New York, remember; whether they face a serious primary in their next race now depends on retaining the favor of Comrade Mamdani.

 

For extra laughs, imagine a House majority so narrow that the Mamdani-ites end up as the deciding votes on legislation. I’ve spent the last 16 months assuming that the current Republican-controlled chamber is the most dysfunctional we’ll ever see, but stay tuned.

 

It will also be funny watching the postliberals of the Tucker Carlson right wrestle with the fact that they have more in common politically with Darializa Avila Chevalier than with, say, John Thune. They’re not going to defect to the left—tribalist white men could never exist happily in a party dominated by nonwhite women—but they’re destined to feel a very uncomfortable attraction to an Israel-hating Russia apologist who sneers at miscegenation and has been known to say things like “f— Kamala Harris.”

 

It’ll be the political equivalent of questioning one’s sexuality.

 

And of course, Republicans will get loads of political mileage out of Avila Chevalier’s radical antics the same way they got mileage out of Bowman and Cori Bush, former “Squad” members who both ended up being bounced out of the House. The GOP has its work cut out for it in this national environment running the usual “lesser of two evils” campaign, but a new menagerie of gonzo socialists in Congress to gawk at will make that easier.

 

Even so, I’ll leave right-wingers with the same gentle reminder with which I ended my column after Mamdani’s win: Be careful what you wish for. “Every argument that Mamdani-style progressivism is electoral poison at the national level imputes a degree of common sense and decency to American voters that I’m no longer willing to assume,” I wrote at the time. “The shining lesson of the Trump era is that American voters are ignorant, unserious, and unfit to lead the free world. They’re willing to try all manner of dumb things in the name of ‘change.’”

 

New Yorkers proved it again last night. Voters in Maine and Michigan will soon have a chance to prove it with Graham Platner and Abdul El-Sayed, respectively. A country dumb enough to elect a fascist is dumb enough to elect a socialist. Sleep tight.