Content
Luke Thomas goes over the election results in New York with Zohran Mamdani’s endorsed candidates all winning their races, including against incumbents.
zohranmamdani election lukethomas
Transcript
0:01 · Take a look at this.
0:02 · ALL HAVE SHOWN THIS EVENING WHETHER FOR STATE ASSEMBLY, State Senate, or Congress is THAT A YEAR AGO IT WAS NOT THE END OF A POLITICAL MOVEMENT.
0:14 · [cheering] IT WAS THE BEGINNING.
0:20 · [cheering] And I want to thank you because in this room I see those who believed no matter what tweet they read from Michael Barnett.
0:33 · They believed.
0:36 · THEY PUT THAT ANXIETY into shifts. THEY PUT IT INTO DOOR KNOCKS, INTO PHONE CALLS. RAISE YOUR HAND IF YOU CANVASSED.
0:47 · [cheering] THOSE ARE THE HANDS THAT WON THIS RACE AND EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE INCREDIBLE candidates [cheering] they are going to be the partners in transforming the most expensive city in the United States of America into one that working New Yorkers can afford.
1:04 · [cheering] SO ONE MORE TIME, LET’S HEAR IT FOR TIFFANY CABAN. LET’S HEAR IT FOR DAVID WEPRIN. LET’S HEAR IT FOR SAMY CABAN. LET’S HEAR IT FOR NABILA KHAN. LET’S HEAR IT FOR CLAIRE VALDEZ.
1:22 · [cheering] AND LET’S HEAR IT FOR A POLITICS FOR A POLITICS THAT WILL NEVER FORGET WORKING PEOPLE.
1:33 · [cheering] FOR A POLITICS THAT IS READY TO WRITE A NEW CHAPTER IN OUR PARTY’S HISTORY.
1:40 · [cheering] And for a politics that realizes THE OLD POLITICS THAT GOT US TO THIS CRISIS IS NOT THE politics that’s going to get us out of this crisis.
1:51 · That is New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. He is at Claire Valdez’s victory party last night because of the election that took place in New York. Well, series of elections really. And we’re not going to focus on all of them, and there are many, but we’re going to focus on three and what they mean for our current political environment. Ladies and gentlemen, that is not merely the future, that is our present.
2:14 · The reality is this, for most of the 20th century and for at least some part of the 21st century, the dual party system was pretty good in general for dealing with most of the political questions and most of the political problems that emerged.
2:30 · But if there is anything that we have learned, frankly, in the last few years and now with elections like these, what the future might also look like, that ability for the two parties to basically, more or less, in general, solve political problems has come to a close. And unless something else takes its place, none of our existing political problems will get solved.
2:56 · Ladies and gentlemen, that video, as you know, is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He is at one of the post-election parties for one of the candidates that he endorsed, Claire Valdez, who ended up actually winning.
3:08 · And the reason why this is all important is he mentioned other names on that stage that we’re not even going to get to. But the reason why he’s in the news is because three of the candidates that he did endorse, and the only three in terms of the ones that were for Congress, all three of them won their elections. Two of them Democratic Socialist for America, one of them a regular Democrat in Brad Lander, although formerly a DSA member, they hit a clean sweep last night in what can only be described as a political earthquake. Ladies and gentlemen, the left’s Tea Party moment, it has arrived.
3:40 · Let’s talk about the basic details and then I want to tell you what it means. First up is Brad Lander. You might recall Zohran and Brad Lander co-endorsed one another during the mayoral run. He defeated Dan Goldman, who was an incumbent. We’ll come back to that in a moment. Claire Valdez also defeated Antonio Reynoso.
3:59 · This was an open seat that belonged to someone else previously. We’ll talk more about that in detail. And then the big one. This one was the squeaker of them all. This was the tightest race. This was the most closely contested. This was the one that was the biggest surprise, or at least the hardest one to get. This was the hard yards of campaigning. And Darlie Avila Chevalier defeats Audrey Espada, who was an incumbent and a lot more than that.
4:24 · Zohran Mamdani endorsed all three of these candidates, and all three of them won. He has become, not in my words, but in many others, a kingmaker now inside the Democratic establishment, inside the party. I want to get to what that means, but first you got to understand some of the contexts of these races. First of all, in Brad Lander defeating Dan Goldman, he won by, as I mentioned, a pretty wide margin. Both guys are Jewish. This is actually one of the most Jewish congressional districts in the United States. As I mentioned, Lander is former DSA.
4:55 · He left the party, but he’s still a Democrat, and of course has a strong relationship with Mamdani. He is, Goldman now, the fifth House incumbent to lose a primary this cycle, which kind of indicates this is not exactly just a New York mood, but maybe even a national one. Then it takes us to Claire Valdez, who I mentioned defeated Antonio Reynoso. Claire Valdez, somebody who worked at Taco Bell, somebody who worked at uh Trader Joe’s. You know, in both cases, the candidates wanted to abolish ICE and tax the rich and Medicare for all and whatnot. But Valdez won huge by about 25 points.
5:28 · And the retiring incumbent in this particular case, uh Nydia Velázquez, had split with Mamdani and actually backed her opponent, Reynoso. Mamdani won anyway. And then, as I mentioned, the one that was the most contentious, the one that was the most difficult, and was frankly a squeaker in the end. Darlie Lisa Avila Chevalier defeating Espaillat. This is a monster monster win.
5:56 · Espaillat is certainly no political lightweight. Five terms, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, first Dominican American in Congress. And Mondaire’s endorsement by the way came late but clearly boosted her visibility.
6:11 · She had a ton of baggage heading into this one. She had said this and still found a way to win. She had said bad things about Joe Biden. She had deleted a bunch of tweets about defunding police or being in favor of no deportations and everything. She had a lot of things that were following her and frankly that race was the most contentious of them all. Frankly the most racist. People were accusing her of being a ethnic background that she wasn’t and then having to answer for it. It was a bizarre scene the whole way through.
6:41 · APAC dumped a ton of money into a pro Espaillat group. 650,000 is the last reporting that I saw but then in this in these races more generally putting a ton of money into them. What does all of this mean? I started this video by explaining to you and showing to you that we had a political system with two parties that were in general for the most part halfway decent to maybe in certain cases pretty good at solving those problems. But we now have a very different political climate.
7:14 · The right has radicalized in ways that they have just revealed their base authoritarian preferences that simply cannot be denied. They are a pro-fascist pro-authoritarian party. However wish they want to dress up what they do to the rest of the country. They are not in all cases a lost cause but that radicalization has ended up doing something to the Democratic Party and this is where last night comes into play because it is not just a referendum on the candidates who lost, although in certain cases it very much is that.
7:43 · It is a referendum not merely on the New York Dem party machine, although it is that, too, but it underscores the failure of our current political predicament.
7:58 · The right is gone on a radicalization campaign. It is very, very difficult to know even under what circumstances they can be worked with. And on the left, last night was a referendum on all of the baby killers of Gaza. Last night was a referendum on all the people who have just decided that a policy of permanent incrementalism is good enough for everybody else.
8:21 · Last night was a referendum on taking money from organizations like AIPAC and and more than just them, but certainly as a leading light them as well. Last night was a referendum on the failures of the Democratic establishment to do anything about Trump, to do anything to meaningfully challenge him, to do anything to make health care in this country more affordable, to do anything to rein in the excesses and abuses and the murderous tyrannical campaign of the of the government of Israel.
8:53 · Last night were voters finally sending a message to the establishment, we’ve had enough.
9:03 · We’ve had enough.
9:05 · I need centrist Dems to look at me right now and understand what I’m about to tell you may be uncomfortable, but it is true. Your brand is finished. Your brand is dead. You had an opportunity, not merely for years to do something about Trump, but for decades to to to solve central problems related to the average working Americans needs. And you have failed. That the Democratic Party has failed, and their supporters need to understand it.
9:43 · You had an opportunity to do something about it. You had an opportunity to fix these problems. You had an opportunity to lead on these issues.
9:56 · And you didn’t.
9:58 · We know how far we’re going to get with healthcare in this country with those kinds of people in power. We know. You are looking at it. This is the sum total of their efforts.
10:11 · Drink it in.
10:13 · We know.
10:14 · We know.
10:17 · Without a shadow of a doubt what it means for that side of the political spectrum and that particular group to think what they’re doing is reigning in Israel. They don’t want to. They are in many cases explicitly pro-genocide or at a bare minimum apologists for it.
10:35 · We know that.
10:36 · You have shown that to us. That party and its leadership has had opportunity after opportunity after opportunity to do something about it, and they have not. They have failed consistently to do anything about it.
10:53 · You have failed.
10:55 · You have failed. Crystal Ball made a great point. Last night was a political earthquake. It should be. The punishment for looking the other way on as many children that died in the Uvalde shooting, for that to be happening every single day mathematically for as long as the military campaign by Israel has gone on, we’ve had one of those on the undercount every single day, and they refuse to rein them in. Your time is finished.
11:27 · Your brand is finished.
11:29 · You are finished.
11:31 · We know what it means for you to be in leadership. We know what it means for you to have had an opportunity to do something about it, and you have done nothing. We know what it means to confront the billionaire class and how the corporate side of the Democratic Party simply refuses. We know. We know what it looks like for what your what what their interpretation is of cracking down on big business. Look at it.
12:00 · Resplendent in all of its size, isn’t it?
12:04 · They’ve done nothing. They will do nothing. They’re in favor of it. Oh, we’re very concerned about the dead kids in in Gaza. No, you’re not. You’re in favor of it. All the actions you take indicate you are in favor of it. Oh, we want to rein in big tech. You don’t. You are in favor of it. Oh, we want to get better health care. You have had ample opportunity to do it, and you have failed.
12:30 · We know how close you’re going to get. We can look at it. We can look at the decades and years of what the Democratic establishment, the Democratic corporate party, has been able to do. The grades are in. We have an understanding of what they can do and what they’re willing to do. It is the hell that we see today.
12:56 · And in this is maybe the most consequential part. When it came time to do something to confront the threat, the authoritarian fascist threat of the Trump administration, we watched what you did.
13:10 · We watched.
13:12 · For the most part, it was just laying down. For the most part, it was just accepting it. Look at the fruits of your labor.
13:22 · Look at it.
13:24 · Take a nice long look at what your policies and your leadership has brought us. It is unbelievable to me that in the mainstream media, you can get Susan Collins to go out there and say just a bunch of nonsense while being married to a corporate lobbyist.
13:42 · And people will say, “How can it be that someone who has different ideas than this can get ahead?”
13:48 · And they will say, and the New York Post had a great in a funny way front page cover. They’re going to tell you all kinds of nasty things about these still candidates. Because what they want you to not recognize is the failures of the political class that is that has existed and that does exist now, the political machinery whether state or beyond.
14:12 · They don’t want you to notice the unbelievable failure. Because if you do, then of course it makes sense to be in Maine and say, “Susan Collins is not enough. Goldman is not enough.” Or to look at the mayoral race and say, “Cuomo’s not enough.”
14:31 · It is not a mystery about why voters in New York last night decided that a failure on Medicare or Medicare a failure on health insurance generally, a failure on Gaza, a failure in reigning reigning in the billionaires, a failure in in reigning in Trump. It’s failure after failure after failure after failure.
14:54 · And then they have the temerity to be like, “How can candidates like this be popular?” How could they not?
15:02 · How could they not?
15:06 · We have had enough. I don’t live in New York. Should be noted even here locally, we have a new mayor elect that also is a member of DSA. And again, I want to be clear about this. I actually did not end end voting in that election for a variety of other reasons, but it’s not surprising to me that she won. Her candidate was very pro-corporate in ways that had pissed off a lot of people here.
15:32 · Who are the only ones from the left side of the aisle willing to confront the actual political reality and the actual political problems that we face?
15:46 · It is not It is not It is not the corporate Dem party. They’re better than the right. That is certainly true. But that’s not really saying much.
15:57 · And in fact, they end up being party to them more than they end up liking to be party with the progressive side. We have talked about this. Gavin Newsom only invited people on the right onto his podcast, never people from the left. Any number of leftward voices trying to lead this country in a progressive direction getting slimed and smeared. But we have seen what you will do.
16:19 · We have seen what corporate Dem centrism will lead us to. And we have found it wanting. I do not support every idea of every candidate who got elected last night.
16:34 · And I have tried to make this point to people over and over again. People keep asking me, “Who’s my candidate?” I don’t know. There are some I like more than others. Of all of the people who are leading a progressive charge in the country, I’ve made this point before and I’ll reiterate it. Abdul El-Sayed to me is the closest to the kind of candidate who’s got a sort of comprehensive set of views that I identify with. But I don’t get behind candidates.
16:56 · Yes, to vote individually in cases, but I don’t have a cult of personality behind them. They’re not like people that I have this great degree of adoration for. I’m asking for people who are willing to fight. I am asking for people who are willing to do the work.
17:18 · I am asking for people who are willing to travel the hard yards to deliver on the political frankly needs that we have given our current political reality and it is not not not the corporate dem centrist portion of it. And it never will be. It cannot be. Last night was the canary in the coal mine for all of you. Last night was the beginning of your reckoning. We’re going to primary all of you.
17:54 · All of you.
17:56 · If you’re Chuck Schumer, you have to know your days are numbered. And yes, Ritchie Torres won. That is true in his congressional race although he has heavily toned down some of the pro-Israel rhetoric to get the job done. And it should be noted, it’s kind of funny, right? There is some evidence to show that and this was true by the way here in DC when Janice Lewis
18:14 · George wanted to when she got elected, if you were newer to the city and you were more of a transplant and yes, of course there’s a base of support there a multi, you know, racial coalition that helped get her elected but if you were older and obviously, you know, had more traditional African-American neighborhoods or or areas, they went with with her opponent who ultimately lost. You saw something similar here in some of these races but at the same time, how can it be that it’s transplants and the college educated whites who are putting these people into power and then you have stuff like this from Stephen Miller being like, oh, this is all third world ism. No, no, no. No, no, no.
18:46 · These are all legitimate candidates. These are all legitimate ideas and these are all now mainstream ideas. Don’t let anyone ask you how people like this can win elections in a world where the amount of political failure has been so overwhelming as to be ruinous for the country.
19:07 · More people leaving this country for the first time than entering since the Great Depression. And it’s not just oh, there’s less immigrants coming in. The amount of people exiting is at an all-time high since the Great Depression.
19:21 · Obviously, this speaks to the ground game of the the Dems, the so the the Democratic Socialists of America. And by the way, it should be noted like socialism generally is becoming less and less of a dirty word. People need to realize socialism can mean different things, but if it means a market economy with a significant and robust social safety net, that is just going to naturally be appealing to a lot of people and these scare tactics around this are simply going to go away. But the ground game that they had, Hasan [ __ ] playing a pretty good, you know, contributory role in this regard.
19:53 · Door knocking, getting out there, glad-handing, calling, phone banking. They have done a pretty remarkable job, them and the Working Families Party as well. And obviously, what people are going to say is, well, look, you know, that’s New York City or New York State. What does this really have to do with other parts of the country? Like James Telarico was facing a very difficult situation against Ken Paxton in Texas.
20:14 · Sure, we are not in a place where these kinds of folks in New York could be elected in any congressional race in any part of the country. But it signals to the rest of the political establishment, right or left or whoever simply wants to observe it, they’re coming for you. They’re coming for you. You cannot have this much documented, sustained, unambiguous failure on the critical issues of our time and expect to hold your job.
20:49 · That is what this all comes down to. You had an opportunity, centrist Dems, to fix these problems. You elected to not do it. So now, we’re going to find people who will. It’s really as simple as that.
21:07 · The turnover is coming. The change is coming and it cannot be stopped. Certain Dems might win. In fact, the handpicked successor that for that from Steny Hoyer’s seat in Maryland was an A PAC A PAC backed candidate. He ended up winning. Some of this will linger on and so again as I mentioned in in in certain races it won’t be a uniform takeover. But this caucus and frankly this party generally is going to get more progressive.
21:36 · It’s all going to get more progressive.
21:38 · They’re the only ones who are focused on finding solutions to the existing problems that we have. They are the only ones willing to hold the line on genocide. They are the only ones willing to say people deserve to not die from either not having medical care or going into medical debt just to be able to try and save their lives. They’re the only ones. They’re the only ones. How can people with a straight face ask how something like this can happen?
22:10 · I can tell you exactly how it can happen. You have heaped on years and decades of failure and that time is coming to a close. That political project as it was constructed and pursued is coming to a close. The Dems dying in office is part of it but they’re going to get pushed out the other end. And and even the ones who may have won a seat this time, you’re not going to be safe in two years.
22:37 · This is how the base believes. This is what they believe. This is how they want their leaders to look. Zohran Mamdani is the bellwether. Zohran Mamdani cannot be president and the the right should be delighted about that because he’s arguably the most talented politician in the country irrespective of party and certainly irrespective of age. This process will continue.
23:08 · And so, I just want to say what a great night last night, not merely for these candidates and for the constituents who will eventually be Yeah, you know, because I I don’t imagine any of these races the right is going to win. So, I suspect that this primary kind of ends up serving in fact it’s kind of funny. I just called Jenice Lewis George a a a mayor-elect. She still has to beat the Republican. She hasn’t won it yet. But again, in this city if you win the Democratic primary, you basically win the whole entire thing. This This is This is not merely the future. This is now.
23:41 · The takeover has begun. And this was very very predictable. Not so much these races with these people at this time, but that this kind of force birthed to a degree or at least the tip of the spear in New York. The rest of the country is going to build out the rest of that blade and the rest of that staff. And they are going to prove to be an extremely potent force because we have no choice.
24:10 · We have been left with no possible alternative. There is no way you could elect the right with any kind of rational sense and there are certainly no way you can go back to the same failed centrism, the inauthentic triangulated centrism that has led us to our current hell. It is time to do something about it and New York got that part that process started.
24:35 · DC got that process started and many other places are going to as well. It is good night and goodbye to the centrist Dems. Your time is up and the process of moving you out has begun and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Long live the resistance.