Mamdani's progressive slate sends a message to AIPAC and Cold War Democrats

AIPAC-backed Rep. Dan Goldman, who rose to Democratic stardom in the Russiagate era but faced a backlash over his support for Israel post-Oct. 7th, loses in a progressive sweep led by Zohran Mamdani.

(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

A sweeping victory by a progressive slate in New York’s Democratic primary – Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier – adds significant momentum to the political movement of their chief endorser, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, and his populist, pro-Palestine message.

Bernie Sanders’ crushing 2020 primary loss to Joe Biden, which many progressives (myself included) believed he would take handily, offered a sobering warning about extrapolating national political lessons from coastal leftist enclaves. But the Biden administration then went on to endorse Israel’s mass murder campaign in Gaza, and paid a political price for it in the 2024 election. Last night’s results continue that trend.

Lander’s victory over Daniel Goldman, a Levi Strauss heir and cable news mainstay, would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Goldman rose to prominence in late 2019, when he served as the Democrats’ lead attorney in their first impeachment of President Trump. Right after the collapse of Russiagate, Democrats doubled down on their Cold War playbook by targeting Trump for freezing a weapons shipment to Ukraine while he pressured it to assist with his political vendettas. In a series of columns for the Nation magazine, I warned that Democrats were hurting their election chances by centering Cold War dogma over pocketbook issues. “It is difficult to recall a time in recent memory when liberal US politics has been centered on issues so divorced from reality and from issues that matter to people’s lives,” I wrote.

That is no longer the case. The ascent of neoconservative Democrats like Goldman during the Russiagate/Ukrainegate era pushed the party further to the right. That shift became politically untenable after October 7^th, when voters saw party leaders from Biden on down defend the indefensible in Gaza. In recent years, Goldman has tried to offset his hawkish foreign policy by embracing popular domestic positions like Medicare For All. But his support for Israel sealed his political fate.

During the primary campaign, Goldman invoked his role in Trump’s first impeachment. Once an issue that riveted MSNBC audiences, it failed to land in a time of economic stagnation and a live-streamed genocide. Tellingly, the cable news voice most visibly alarmed at Goldman’s defeat last night was none other than Fox News’ chief Trump cheerleader Sean Hannity, who choked up while reporting the news of what he called “a pretty scary transformation... in the Democratic Party.”

The transformation is not exclusive to Democrats. Two longtime Trump allies, former Fox news host Tucker Carlson and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have both said in recent days that they can no longer support the Republican Party. Both have broken with Trump over his support for Israel and his failed regime change war on Iran.

Back in 2016, Trump appealed to a winning margin of swing state voters by criticizing costly regime change wars. He disingenuously repeated that message in 2024, capitalizing on Biden’s proxy war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza. Trump has long abandoned any claim to the pro-peace mantle. By contrast, along with their support for Palestinian freedom, two of the winning Mamdani-backed candidates, Chevalier and Valdez, have criticized the US role in the Ukraine-Russia conflict and advocated diplomacy to end it. If one primary night in deep-blue New York City is any guide, an authentic version of anti-war populism now has a political home.