On Tuesday, a slate of progressive candidates backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept several prominent congressional primaries across the city, toppling establishment rivals and incumbents in a display of the American left’s renewed strength.
Of the night’s several progressive triumphs, the most impressive came in New York’s 13th Congressional District , where Mamdani-backed candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated the powerful incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat. Chevalier’s victory — which drew comparisons to to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ’s defeat of Joseph Crowley in 2018 — has sent shock waves through the Democratic Party establishment. In other races, progressives not only won but dominated. Former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander trounced incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in the city’s 10th Congressional District, while New York State Assemblymember Claire Valdez easily defeated her establishment-backed opponent, Antonio Reynoso, in Brooklyn’s 7th District. These victories extend a progressive winning streak that has been building all year. Earlier this month, Graham Platner, a 41-year-old oyster farmer running as a fiery populist. won a resounding victory in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary despite repeated establishment efforts to sink his campaign . Railing against the billionaire class and vowing to confront both Donald Trump and a feckless Democratic leadership in Washington, Platner became the most high-profile symbol of a broader leftward surge. From deep-blue districts in New York and New Jersey to swing seats in battleground states like Pennsylvania and Ohio , left-populists have scored numerous victories against their establishment-backed opponents throughout the primary season. Progressives not only won but dominated. This progressive winning streak reflects the average Democratic voter’s declining trust in the party’s traditional leadership. Since the 2024 election , much of the Democratic base has concluded that the party establishment that backed Hilary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 cannot be trusted to take on Trump or defeat Republicans in 2026. As Perry Bacon recently observed in the New Republic, the Democratic establishment has broadly “discredited itself with the party base, with massive electoral (2024) and policy (the Gaza war) mistakes.” A poll taken shortly before the New York primaries by Democratic pollster Honan Strategy Group found that nearly 8 in 10 Democratic voters in the city said that their party was doing a “fair” or “poor” job fighting for working people. Almost as many respondents said that the party was failing to stand up to the Trump administration. This distrust in the party’s old guard has directly fueled the surge of leftist populists like Platner and Mamdani. Endorsements from establishment figures like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — once coveted signals of viability — now appear to hurt the candidates who receive them. This remarkable inversion reflects just how thoroughly the 2024 election discredited the party’s leadership class. Ten years after the initial rise of Trump, the Democratic establishment appears every bit as clueless as it was back then and even less capable of standing up to the lawless president. But the left’s recent electoral success is about more than Trump. It reflects a broader and more durable demand among Democratic voters for leaders who are willing to confront a plutocratic class that has done so much to erode American democracy. In many ways, today’s resurgent left can be traced back directly to Bernie Sanders ’ 2016 presidential campaign, which famously took aim at the billionaire class. A decade ago, Beltway insiders widely viewed Sanders as a political eccentric who seemed to have wandered in from a bygone era when figures like Eugene Debs and William Jennings Bryan were household names. To the pundits and consultants, Sanders’ intense focus on economic inequality and the billionaires seemed obsessive and borderline conspiratorial. Sanders, proclaimed one critic on Politico, was the “most prominent conspiracy theorist in America” due to his claims of a “rigged” economy favoring the ultra-rich. While political and economic elites mocked Sanders’ brash populism and labeled him a demagogue, the senator’s overwhelming popularity with young voters refuted the notion that he was a relic of the past. The Sanders campaign clicked with millennial and working-class voters by tapping into the disillusionment with the post-2008 economy and the growing alarm over inequality and concentrated wealth. Younger people flocked to the then-74-year-old democratic socialist because he spoke to their own financial struggles and presented an alternative vision to the neoliberal politics that had dominated both parties for years. The intervening decade has vindicated Sanders and affirmed his warnings about the country’s slide into oligarchy. The revolt that Sanders set in motion has since grown into a full-fledged movement. Consider the growth of the billionaire class. In 2015, the world’s richest man was Bill Gates, who then had a net worth of $76 billion. In those days there was no such thing as a “centi-billionaire” and the Forbes 400 were collectively worth $2.34 trillion, with an average of $5.8 billion each. This was already a remarkable increase from three decades earlier, when the financial magazine began tracking America’s wealthiest. In Forbes’ debut list in 1982 the “400 richest” were worth a combined $92 billion (about $300 billion in today’s dollars), while the richest man in the country, Daniel Ludwig, had an estimated fortune of $2 billion. In constant dollars, Gates was worth about 15 times more in 2015 than Ludwig was in 1982. This once-dramatic explosion of wealth at the top looks modest today. In just a decade, the United States has gone from having no centi‑billionaires to more than a dozen. Last year, Gates was worth about the same (in real dollars) as he was in 2015, but failed to even crack the top 10 richest list. The 400 richest in 2025 had a collective wealth of $6.6 trillion , with an average net worth of $16.5 billion, representing 2,000%-plus growth since 1982. But nothing illustrates today’s extreme concentration of wealth more starkly than the arrival of the world’s first trillionaire. As of this writing, Elon Musk is worth more than 10 times what Gates was a decade ago in real terms. The world’s second-richest man, Larry Page, also blows Gates out of the water, with roughly three times the Microsoft founder’s net worth. This unprecedented concentration of wealth, combined with the growing hubris of right-wing oligarchs like Musk , helps account for the widening appeal of democratic socialists and left-wing populists. Ten years after Sanders disrupted the Democratic Party ’s planned coronation of Hillary Clinton, his call for a “political revolution” resonates more loudly than ever with voters. The revolt that Sanders set in motion has since grown into a full-fledged movement with victories to back it up. If Tuesday’s results in New York are any indication, there are more and bigger ones on the way.
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