Front Burner - A big Mamdani win, a big Dem identity crisis

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

In a huge win for the Democrats, Zohran Mamdani has been elected mayor of New York City. He ran on an explicitly leftist platform, focused on affordability and the working class — but many of his own party's top leaders have been reluctant to endorse him. Some still haven't.A rift is growing between the party's centrist establishment, keen on partisan opposition to Trump and appeasing wealthy donors, and the progressive wing of the party newly energized by Mamdani, who promises to tax the rich and fight what he sees as a growing oligarchy.Joshua A. Cohen is the author of the American politics newsletter Ettingermentum. He breaks down the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party.

This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over-delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing.

Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo. This is a CBC podcast. Hey, everybody. I'm Jamie Plessom. A mandate for a new kind of politics. That is Zora Mamdani speaking yesterday in New York City, having just been elected mayor. It's been a meteoric rise for the 34-year-old. He's gone from relative obscurity to mayor of the biggest city in the United States, all due to a grassroots campaign based on democratic socialism.

But it's a victory that his party, the Democrats, kind of had to be dragged into kicking and screaming. Endorsements from the party elite came late or in some cases not at all. I have not refused to endorse. I have refused to articulate my position and I will momentarily at some point in advance of early voting. Did you vote for Mondani or come up? Look, I voted and I look forward to working with the next mayor to help New York City. One year since the second election of Donald Trump and one year out from the midterms, the Democrats find themselves having an identity crisis.

The more centrist party establishment seems focused on returning to a pre-Trump era of quote-unquote normalcy. But Zora Mamdani speaks to a much more explicitly progressive wing of the party, hungry for change. With me today is Joshua A. Cohen. He writes a newsletter on substack called Ettingermenum. He covers American politics focusing on the left in particular. We're going to take a deeper dive into the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. Josh, hey, thank you so much for coming on to Frontburner. Thanks for having me on. I'm really excited.

Me too. Me too. I'm a fan of your work. So let's talk about Zora Mamdani off the top, an incredible victory for a guy who, I would bet even a lot of New Yorkers might not have known his name this time last year. How are you guys doing? Do you guys want to talk about the election for a minute? He ran it? How's it going, sir? You have a minute? Excuse you, ma'am. How are you doing, boss? Why is it that you don't feel as much? He ran, as I mentioned, this explicitly leftist campaign.

We are an existential threat to billionaires who think their money can buy our democracy. We are an existential threat to a broken status quo that buries the voices of working people beneath corporations. And has become kind of emblematic of a new way of progressive politics within the party. What we're finding today, remember exactly where we were? There are far more people excited about the possibility of politics in the city on the same street where last year there were very few who were looking to have that conversation. In that context, how significant do you think his win was last night? It's an incredible, just to put it like the American left, the Bernie left has never done anything remotely like this before.

especially in the way that he did it. You have Bernie Sanders two runs where he has this very impressive run in 2016, but he doesn't win. In 2020, he has a strong start, but is unable to kind of speak to the way that people are feeling during light while Trump is president, and he doesn't really do very well, and so rates consolidates.

And you have a number of House primaries that take place in these deep blue districts with very low turnout. The low turnout really is key here. I think in AOC's first race in 2018, like, I don't know if they were more than a few 10,000 people, if that, who voted in her primary. So it's kind of this, like, embarrassing,

like, dirty little secret for the left in this country that you kind of... And in a lot of cases, like making that especially embarrassing, is that in these races where they have one, it's been off of the support of like younger or like transplants and white voters who are particularly engaged in politics and turnout for every election as opposed to like the working class non-white parts of their districts. So there was this kind of disconnect between the self, like the image that the wing presented of itself and the reality of its kind of

relatively limited wins. Right. And what makes a Mamdani's campaign so accessible. is that he, for the first time, in a way that AOC did it, in a way that Bernie Sanders did it, is able to actually put together and speak to and win an authentic working class constituency. And he added on to that with a lot of the city's non-white working class in a way that no other left-wing candidate in the history of this modern movement has been able to do. Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city who may not. this movement their own i speak of yemeni bodega owners and mexican abuelas senegalese taxi drivers and uzbek nurses trinidadian line cooks and ethiopian aunties and that was what really was striking to me when he first won his primary i was stunned by his success with the

These voters that the left had not been able to reach out to in any of their recent elections. And he did it again last night. Well, tell me more about how you think he did that, right? I mean, because he is undoubtedly, you know, a generational talent when it comes to communication. The message is about transforming the most expensive city in the United States of America into one that's affordable for each and every New Yorker. And what New Yorkers across the five boroughs gave us last night was a mandate to pursue the most. ambitious affordability agenda the city has seen since the days of Fiorella LaGuardia. He is a charming guy.

He has an incredible visit by a mayor of New York is always considered significant. Where would you go first? Mr. Cuomo? Given the hostility and the anti-Semitism that has been. shown in New York, I would go to Israel. Mr. Mamdani. I would stay in New York City.

My plans are to address New Yorkers across the five boroughs and focus on that. Do you think it was the issue set? Or do you think it was also largely him? I think it's, and this is kind of understated

and you probably won't see his team or anybody involved in the left like say this, but I mean, I guess I will. I think a lot of the efforts by the left in the previous between like 2018 and up to really him in 2025 there was kind of this lack of cohesiveness and coherence and focus there's kind of this like very kind of broad-based strategy of just talking about every single issue as like kind of the basic progressive messaging thing and that makes the question of like running a progressive campaign a question of do you support

radicalism as a concept or not. And that's something that a lot of the candidates around this time, I think four years ago, the very ill-fated campaign of Diane Morales, and if you look at her website, she focuses on just, there's no kind of like specific issue focus. There's not a specific focus on economic issues. She talks about her lived experience and like highlights how she wants to have a radical reimagining of the social contract. My lived experience, is closer to the average New Yorkers than anyone else's in this race as a first generation

college graduate, black boricua, single mom. My lived experiences are more connected to the average New Yorkers than anyone else. Her campaign imploded because of these staff level controversies and she never even gets

more than a couple percent of the vote. Mamdani focused, from the very beginning of his campaign, has this very, very disciplined focus on the cost of living, which I think is an important thing in the context of like the Democratic Party's internal debates because there's a lot of discussion over how like they can fix their branding. And a lot of it revolves around existing polling and people arguing that you need to move the party's positions to match what polling like says or what polling says

that voters want. And Mamdani, when he runs his campaign, he pushes for with cost of living against what the polling is saying. At the very start of the campaign, the polling says that the top issues in the race are crime and immigration and the traditional issues that have powered like the right wing of city politics in New York for like decades at that point. It's what had got an Eric Adams elected. And what Mamdani does with his focus on the campaign is that he changes the fundamental question of the race. If you look in polling during his in the primary, you see concurrent with his increase in support, there is an increase in what New Yorkers considered to be the most important issue of that election. It goes from immigration

and crime and these social issues that favor the conservative wing or someone like Cuomo, and it shifts towards cost of living and housing, which are both issues that he talked about. So by the end of the campaign, you have this political environment that is totally transformed compared to what it was at the beginning, and it's one that very much benefited him, and it's something that he could not have succeeded in if he didn't have that focus on that one specific issue, as opposed to trying to play within the existing setup and just arguing for left-wing radicalism as such in the context of every single issue. This ascent isn't for everyone.

You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always overdelivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. as an insurance broker your customers count on you from the simple turnkey business quote to the highly complicated unique risks that require tenured experience and knowledge to hash out

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coalition, but I actually want to ask you about this one group in particular that came out for him yesterday in big numbers. This is a group that played a big role in Trump's 2024 when I'm talking about young men. Yes. And an NBC exit poll on Tuesday had him up 40 points with men, 18 to 29. I was floored when I saw that number last night. It's so huge. And this is a group that the Democrats would love to make inroads with, right?

Yes. How do you explain that number, in particular, who are? are these guys, you think, who came out from him, Downey. Are they the same guys who came out for Trump? Are they guys who weren't voting before? I think they'd have to be some of the same people voted for Trump because there was such a shift. I don't know what the exact numbers were in New York, but if he's winning the race by 10 points and he's winning young men by 40, assuming that those exit polls are correct, he's undoubtedly like doing far better than most Democrats do relative to his overall numbers with young men. I think in the Virginia and New Jersey race,

is the both of the Democratic candidates there who both did like very well. It was they did shockingly well. And the Democrats in other races in the country also did well. It was a very big across the board like kind of smackdown of Republicans to an extent that I never even really priced in beforehand. In the race for governor of Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger defeated Republican Winsome Earl Sears flipping the office from red to blue. Democrat Jay Jones also won there in the race for Virginia's attorney general.

And in New Jersey, Democratic Congressman Mikey Sherrill has won the governor's race, defeating Republican and Trump-backed candidate Jack Chittarelli. Well, I took a lot of satisfaction in this because I was kind of a lonely voice in the aftermath of the 2024 election, like both on this issue and kind of broadly, where I didn't see it as, or I kind of rejected the idea that it was a cultural kind of thing. Everybody after the 2024 election cannot stop talking about right-wing youth culture, online tradition. Catholic people, Joe Rogan, Grypers, like the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, all of this online just stuff that is seen as this is just some permanent cultural thing that, like, is always, it's going to change politics forever and like we can't even conceptualize how bad it is.

What I actually did, and I wrote about this in an article for the nation, was that I looked at the actual history of the youth vote. And if you look at that, you do find that after 2008, there is a consistent and very strong democratic edge with young voters. Between, like during the Vietnam era, like 1968, but in between you have a youth vote that shifts, like, a lot over the years. Often, like, in many cases, it was just as Republican of the country, as the country, if not even more so. You had young voters, like, for Reagan, who voted for Reagan by 20 points

in both of George H.W. Bush's election, and he was hardly some magnetic generational figure. Young voters voted around the same way that the country did. The huge shift where you have with millennials where they become very much more left-wing than the rest of the country only really happens under Bush in 2004. And that's understood as a cultural thing in its own right. People assume that it's about gay marriage or Iraq,

and to an extent it is. But when I looked at the actual data from 2004, it overwhelmingly said that young voters shifted to the left in 2004 over the economy. And that happens to an even greater extent in 2008 when, like, millennials just become very, very left-wing across the board. So for the next 12 years after that, you have this very kind of left-wing, young voting-like constituency. It's always assumed that young voters are good for Democrats. Everybody works for that presumption.

Under Obama, Democrats had a president who was broadly popular and especially popular with younger people. It just makes Democrats, I think, for people my age, like, it was just common sense. like this they were the republicans were the party of bush and trump they were the stupid people who couldn't like run the country and were bigoted and only like stupid old people voted for them while democrats like they weren't like amazing or perfect but like they could run an administration but then under biden you have the entire cost of living crisis happen but more importantly i think and this is the thing i think that people really kind of understate joe biden was the first Democratic president to leave office with a negative approval rating or resoundingly

negative approval rating since Jimmy Carter in 1980. The fact, like, we had probably multiple generations of people in this country who had never experienced a Democratic administration that was widely seen as inept, incompetent, where things had gotten discernibly worse under their time and power than when things had begun. So the answer, like in my mind, mind wasn't that like this was some ideological verdict. And when you run a, when you have a current administration like you do right now that has seen to be completely an utterly failing on cost of living, like minus 30 approval rating is just their credibility is completely shot. They're broadly disliked. They don't even have positive approval on immigration, which is supposed to be their

calling card issue. And then in New York, especially, you have someone directly speaking to the issues that made people see Democrats is so inept. So I think that's why the shift and, and zone Orhan Mondani himself is obviously, like, somebody from, like, our age group, he's himself, he's 34, he himself would be classified in voting as a young man, like this, like, demographic. Totally, especially beside Andrew Cuomo, right? Yeah. But just, so look, like, here you have this guy who is speaking directly to the issues that have made the Democratic Party seem inept in your estimation.

He's doing stuff that AOC and Bernie haven't even been able to accomplish. And yet, the Democratic establishment has been so hesitant to embrace him. You know, are talking Wednesday afternoon. And I'm pretty sure Chuck Schumer still has refused to say whether or not he actually voted for a Democratic nominee, whether or not he voted for Mom Dami, or whether he voted for Cuomo. And so why do you think that they were so hesitant? to embrace this guy? Well, it's for the same reason they were so hesitant to get Biden out of the race in 2020.

It's just this lack of confidence in themselves, this lack of willingness to make any major, like, changes. They don't want to have to make any hard decisions. Because when you're just benefiting from backlash to Trump that's not connected to anything that you actually do, you can keep everybody happy. And this is especially the case. Under Trump, one, they were able to kind of get,

like, they were able to have their cake and eat it too in like a very profound way they were able to have this activated and motivated and angry and like very importantly like base that would give them a lot of money that also wasn't making any hard ideological demands that was the environment in which these people have come up as leaders schumer especially and they want to not have to make any compromises between that they want to have the base that has tea party level like rage and mobilization but is also willing to get behind whatever candidates they want and not make any demand is or will upset any of the larger donors. And it's just, this kind of shift forces the leaders to actually do something that I would say,

like, Republican leaders have, like, been forced to kind of reckon with, and I wouldn't say so very successfully, but they've at least had to make these kind of decisions where you decide, like, how do we negotiate between the anger of our base and the need to kind of, or what they imagine is a need to appeal to a larger electorate, but I think more importantly, especially in Mamdadi's case, like appealed to wealthy donors and big cities, and they've just gotten into a kind of decision paralysis because they aren't used to make these kinds of decisions, and they don't want to because it's hard, or they're not used to doing hard things. So they've just sat there. They've kind of, like, not responded in hopes that it'll go away. I don't think they've really

reckon with the fact that they've lost. And when you lose, like things change and they that's just not something that they seem even really capable of acknowledging i'm not impressed by them at all talk to me a little bit more about that they think that they're walking right because yeah uh you know i think the argument is that they think that Mom Dhani's policies will alienate moderate suburban voters, members of the business community, you know, stuff like subsidized transit, rent freezes. Yeah, rent freezes. Universal childcare.

Yeah, yeah, that this will, like, people will balk at this stuff. They'll think that he's going to, like, the policies like this will, like, bankrupt the nation that they just won't fly, you know. if you tried to scale this out. And then so talk to me about that. And then also the rule the donors are actually playing here. Yeah. Well, the donors, I think, are a significant part of this because, so, I mean, I wrote about this, like, lately, like, this kind of history of, like, centrist liberalism.

And my big message was that these people, like, there's this kind of idea that centristism is only this, like, pragmatic thing. It's only focused on winning and that it will move whatever direction does need to win. And I think a better accounting for it, especially, like, in the earlier years, is that it was something that had its own, like, very concrete view of, like, society and government. And from the very beginning, the modern version of democratic centrism has been very positive about wealthy people, especially in tech. There is this entire ideology they built around the idea that if we're in this conservative era and the Reagan revolution has

happened and we can't create, like, the shining tomorrow through the government, then we can do do so out of the private sector with these new technologies. One of my major goals to connect all the schools, the libraries, and community centers in this country to the Information Super Highway by the year 2000. Infrastructure has to be thought of in a different way. We still need highways and water lines, but we also need communications lines that can allow us to take advantage of the high-performance computers like the ones that you So up to the Obama era, this is a major part of the party identity.

You have Obama talking about how he's going to build Iron Man. Today I am joined by researchers who invent some of the most advanced metals on the planet, designers who are modeling prototypes in the digital cloud, folks from the Pentagon who helped to support their work. Basically, I'm here to announce that we're building Iron Man. He's meeting with Elon Musk. Well, congratulations. This is terrific.

Thank you very much. How's the car doing? It's doing great, actually. Yeah, how can you split your time between car and rocket? Well, it's usually about 50-50. We should have the sedan on the road. They're giving huge Defense Department contracts to these companies. I think that's, like, it's the Obama era when Peter Thiel and Elon Musk become

billionaires for the first time. So this is, it's not even like it would be better to just get these guys money. And it's like for like somebody like Chuck Schumer, like these donors are the core of your party identity. They're the core of how you see yourself. They're like the way that you get things done. They're like the vision of the future you have for America. And in 2024, there's this big shift in Silicon Valley where they all become very right wing

and very pro-Trump, just kind of out of nowhere. And there's a lot of talk among centrist pundits about like how we did too much antitrust, we alienated these poor souls in Silicon. Valley. They got so upset with us. We shouldn't have been so mean to them. We need to be nice to them. And then the middle of this kind of like attempted reproachement. I don't know how to say it. Your French speaking English would probably laugh at me. I think you did great. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Like you have this guy coming in explicitly running against the rich and saying he's going to tax them in the biggest city in the country. These people like completely freak out

at him. Like he just makes, he's defining the party in a way that makes that kind of bringing, like, bridging of divides at Silicon Valley impossible for the center. It's making this kind of shift that they hope would be temporary permanent. So in terms of like identity, if they're not with Silicon Valley, they don't really know what they are. So I don't think that like

it's even like a purely like we just need to get the money from these people. We need to be able to outraise Republicans and run functional campaigns. They have a conception of themselves that's so tied up in big business that like the idea of just explicitly alienating for electoral purposes is

just counter to everything they believe in. The establishment, you can kind of see who they want, though, right? Like one of those people seems to be Gavin Newsom, the governor of California. This is a guy who's made a lot of hay out of responding directly to the excesses of MAGA and the second Trump administration. This guy has abandoned the corporate. of this great democracy. He's threatening to, but go after judges he disagrees with, cut off funding to institutions of higher learning. He's on a cultural binge. He's rewriting history, censoring historical facts. I mean, he's like started to troll Trump on Twitter. Yes. He's like setting himself in direct opposition, sort of like the anti-Trump, right? And so why do they think someone, someone like Newsom is the answer here.

Well, he's just kind of seen as the next man up, like from like a sports perspective. He's like the governor in this very large state. He like did his round. He served as lieutenant governor. He served as mayor. Like it kind of keeps a traditional system of party hierarchy intact. I don't know if they're thinking this way, but there might be kind of a sophisticated kind of idea that they're working from.

A lot of the rage, a lot of the anger and the desire for change that, um, powers. of Mamdani, at least with some voters, isn't, like, particularly ideological. I wrote something earlier this spring, but I think something that people have really missed is that among a lot of liberals online, they talk about how, like, Bernie and, like, AOC are doing these big rallies and standing up for them, and they really, like, are huge fans of them. But they're also at the same time fans of any politician who were just loudly, like, yell at or oppose Republicans, even if it doesn't really mean anything or have a larger ideological purpose to it. They love, I don't know if your listeners about Jasmine Crockett,

they might have seen her on Facebook or somewhere, but she's a representative from Texas who's only served two terms, and like, but she's become famous just for just yelling at it, just personally insulting Republicans on live TV. I know he's unintelligent. That part is clear. But, like, I'm wondering also, like, is it dementia don that we're getting, is it just dumbed on that we're getting, like, I don't know. And they see her as this face of like, like, I've seen like people say, like, we need to run AOC for president, Bernie for Senate leader, and Jasmine Crockett to run the house. Like, they consider those three, even though they're not connected at all, Crockett considers herself to be part of

the party establishment and doesn't have particularly like outside of the box of views just because of her aggressive positioning. So this energy that went into Mom Donnie, win this kind of anti-establishment, like desire for fighters or desire for change in any way, doesn't necessarily need to be harnessed by someone who is a democratic socialist or has this cohesive issue-focused view of the world and this idea of what they want to change and this larger kind of project that keeps election winning. It can also be channeled by anybody who just goes on TV and says the right things. And I think with Newsom, he kind of fits in that kind of Jasmine Cracklett, Bernie Zoran just category, even though he himself is like a very

kind of centrist. I think like one of the most like kind of centrist Democrats in California, he's someone who has gotten that same exact energy among liberals because he has taken this active stand against Trump and has done meaningful things to oppose him and has feud with him publicly and has like stood up against him. And I think if you're the establishment. And Newsom is very appealing to you as somebody who can kind of put on that mask of opposition to Trumpism and get that kind of energy behind him without really doing much meaningful to, like, actually stand for something new. Right.

So before we go today, I just wanted to put one more argument to you because I take your point that the Democratic Party can get behind someone like Gavin Newsom and give this kind of. of illusion that that they're changing right yeah but as recline the columnist at the new york time the podcaster he he kind of made this argument recently which boiled down to the democrats don't need to choose between progressivism and centrism they actually need to do both things yeah he says that the way that they win is by expanding through whatever means necessary to build a party that can incorporate both a guy like Zora Mamdani and a guy like Joe Manchin, who is a centrist, too conservative, really, Democrat.

And so can they, is that even something that you could feasibly do? That was really what I was thinking when I read Ezra. Well, the thing that kind of annoys me about, this is somebody who has always been very interested in these centrist Democrats like Manchin and has followed and studied their careers just out of personal interest,

what Ezra Klein is asking for, he's not asking for anything the party hasn't already done. The center of this party does not have an actual ask that would actually change things because there has never been a point where someone like Joe Manchin has not been welcomed with open arms into the party. All the centrist politicians, these guys drool over. Nobody has done anything to them. Nobody has ever tried to primary them. Nobody has tried to kick them out of the party. They're disliked by progressive advocacy groups because they're not progressive, and that's about what you'd expect. But nobody has ever tried to get rid of Joe Manchin. They desperately try to get Joe Manchin to run for

re-election in 2024. They got John Tester, who was like a centrist Democrat. They moved heaven and earth to get him to run for re-election in Montana. There has never been this crusade against getting these people out of the party, and there never will be. But these people, Like, these politicians have either retired or they've lost. They've lost in these districts that they're supposed to be uniquely capable of winning. And it's a bizarre claim to make because, like, especially given that he cites in that piece, this whole study that I think, I mean, I have a lot of issues with it. But, like, I think largely accurately says in this era of polarization, like, the elections

across the whole country are going to be determined by the presidential nominee and how well they do. And there can only be one presidential candidate. You can't like have like a whole constellation of people running for president at the same time. You have to choose one person who will define the party. And that person is necessarily going to come from one faction. And I think with the centrist people, they've bitten off a bit more than they can chew in a lot of ways. They didn't expect someone like Mom Donnie who would like really be focused on winning like a majority and working, like, to actually create a sustainable kind of politics. And now they realize that, like, this kind of conception of, like, this anti-left-wing politics

that they've been working to create might not have been totally well-founded. And with all of the energy among these groups that they're trying to desperately to get back into the fold, particularly with the young men, the energy all goes in Mamdani's direction. So that's, I mean, I agree that it's a critical part of the coalition, but it's not simply a matter of just keeping them co-signed in New York and then, by the way. like saying a couple good words about them and then trying to, like, run your preferred candidate nationally. Like, you have to make a choice somewhere down the line. And I think he's kind of opposite.

He knows the way polarization works in this country. He wrote a book about it. Like, so I think he's trying to be a bit, he's not really showing all of his cards here, in my opinion. Okay. Josh, this is great. Thank you so much for coming by. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Go Canada.

Thank you. All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.