New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made one of his sharpest calls yet for change in the Democratic Party on Thursday night as he rallied with his slate of progressive congressional candidates in Tuesday’s Democratic primaries.
“For far too long, our party has seen its job as managing decline instead of delivering material change for working people,” Mamdani said at a rally headlined by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. “It has seen its job as explaining why we cannot instead of showing how we can, and that old way of thinking will lose on Tuesday. And frankly, it will lose in South Carolina and New Hampshire. It will fall short of 270 electoral votes, because the party of the past will not be what leads us into the future.”
“When does the race for 2028 begin?” he added. “It starts now. It starts on Tuesday.”
Mamdani’s insistence that the Democratic Party as it currently exists will be unable to win a presidential election again marks a new line of critique for the 34-year-old democratic socialist, whose anti-establishment campaign last year broke new ground for the progressive movement.
“People often ask me what I think of the state of the Democratic Party. This slate here today is our answer,” Mamdani said while speaking at Kings Theatre in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Now six months into office, Mamdani is testing his political influence, endorsing three progressives in New York’s Democratic primaries: Assemblymember Claire Valdez, who currently represents Queens; Brad Lander, the former city comptroller; and Darializa Avila Chevalier, an educator and immigrant rights’ activist.
Valdez is running for retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez’s seat. The other two are challenging incumbents: Lander is trying to unseat Rep. Dan Goldman and Chevalier is targeting Rep. Adriano Espaillat while also facing scrutiny over deleted social media posts disparaging Democratic leaders and her attendance at a pro-Palestinian rally the day after Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.
In picking his slate of challengers, Mamdani is also taking on House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the Brooklyn-based Democrat who has endorsed both Goldman and Espaillat. Asked recently about Mamdani supporting Chevalier over Espaillat, Jeffries told CNN’s Erin Burnett: “The mayor and I have agreed to strongly disagree as it relates to this particular race.”
During his remarks Thursday night, Mamdani tore into what he called “monsters” that he said include “those who fund television ads that blanket the airwaves with misleading and bad faith attacks” against his three endorsed candidates.
An outspoken critic of Israel’s government, Mamdani then ripped the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has spent millions to boost pro-Israel candidates in congressional primaries this year, often by running ads that reference domestic issues rather than foreign policy.
“They move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal, to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another, instead of our leaders turning towards the moral change we all know to be necessary,” Mamdani said.
CNN has contacted AIPAC for comment.
