By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire

“I am not a member of any organized political party,” Will Rogers quipped. “I am a Democrat.”  The donkey ran true to form in this last election.

Zohran Mamdani won in New York City and his progressive cult already plans to make him their nationwide champion. He is young, he laughs easily, and he hates the state of Israel with a passion that most New Yorkers reserve for the Boston Red Sox or whoever is coaching the Jets. It will be interesting to see if he manages to divest his city’s investment funds of all Israeli and Israeli-entangled stocks, as his followers will be expecting.

Putting aside his signature normalizing of Jew hatred for just one moment, one can take a measure of hope from the numbers. Mamdani won his mayoralty with just over fifty percent of the vote. Kamala Harris, nobody’s idea of a strong candidate, took New York City with nearly seventy percent of the vote. Looked at that way, Mamdani polled low. Even New Yorkers hesitated to trust their future to a self-labeled socialist coasting through life on the bank accounts of his parents and in-laws.

As for how he won his seat: for all his talk about economics, Mamdani also explicitly appealed to identity; so taking him at face value, he blends those engines of change. Donald Trump has been doing the same thing, of course. They simply appeal to different groups. The last time those trends were wedded successfully, however, was more than fifty years ago, and the marriage began to unravel with a very New York-specific crisis: a fight between community organizers who wanted to run their own schools, and a teachers union who fought that development.

It was 1968. One small community dominated by blacks commandeered its local district and fired a number of teachers, who were mainly white and Jewish. Their union fought back; the conflict escalated; the entire city saw strikes and worse. In the end, nobody won. The teachers were reinstated, but the principle of community control took root, the classic black-Jewish political alliance never recovered, and racial justice came to supplant economic justice as the main goal of liberal voters (yes, that’s the exact clock that native New Yorker Bernie Sanders is still trying to turn back).

But the tendency to govern based on ethnic division is an unfortunate corollary to getting elected on it, and in New York City, identities run strong. Taking power from one clan and giving it to another is a dangerous game, and this new mayor won’t even admit he’s playing it. His groupies might not be so canny. They might just make it obvious.  

Perhaps we should even spare a word for Eric Adams, New York’s incumbent mayor, who ran as a proud black man and the heir to a complex tradition of his own. Adams was not much of a mayor. He lacked the managerial chops. This new administration will have its work cut out for it, making sense of a fractured city.

Better news comes from New Jersey and Virginia, anyway, where two moderates running for governor earned significant victories. Their names were Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger. It’s nice to see female names in this context because Democrats have a problem with women. While Republicans simply elect them, nominate them, appoint them, whatever (we liberals are all so silent as Trump fills his administration with females; so uncomfortable with the appearance of these women, so unhappy with the concept that any female can even abide him), Democrats prefer to use them to make a point.

In practice, that led to Hillary Clinton being handed the nomination against Trump in 2016, when she proved to be the most wooden candidate of the modern age; then it led to Kamala Harris being handed the next nomination against Trump, with even worse results. And when both of those women lost, it led to angst about glass ceilings and inveterate sexism. It was neither of those things. Clinton and Harris were two lousy prospects. So congratulations to Governors Sherrill and Spanberger. I hope they succeed and I hope they bring more talented people in their wake.

We will need that talent because the stage is now set for the Democrats to tear themselves apart in another few years: the progressives, who can barely win in New York City, versus everyone else, who have a chance when left alone. My money is on the progressives doing their best to break their party in half. Keep an eye on those New York pension funds to see how low things will go.

Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project,  The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.