Democratic Socialism Survives

Reflections on the New York primary season

The big story out of New York is Jamaal Bowman’s defeat. It was a crushing loss for progressives and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Squad. Bowman, at one point, looked like he might have been a future governor or senator, or even someone who could’ve moved to the Bronx and run for mayor. That’s all gone. George Latimer, the Westchester County executive, was a known quantity in the district who vastly outspent Bowman with the help of the Israel hawks, AIPAC and DMFI. He also ran a disciplined campaign, cashing in on the relationships he had forged in elected office over the last thirty years. Even if AIPAC hadn’t spent a cent, Bowman would’ve been in trouble. He courted too much controversy—the House censure for the pulled fire alarm was damning—and seemed to neglect constituent services. Latimer knew the district far better and alienated fewer voters.

In the final weeks of the campaign, Bowman courted the Democratic Socialists of America and won an endorsement from them. It was a curious turn of events, coming less than two years after Bowman broke from DSA over his support for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. For those within DSA, the vote itself was controversial, with some members, rightly, perceiving it as a lose-lose proposition for the organization. While Bowman had pivoted left in the election, coming much closer to DSA’s anti-Zionism, there wasn’t much DSA could do for him. Membership is primarily concentrated in New York City, not Westchester, and DSA doesn’t have much of a presence in the northern Bronx, either. With Bowman getting outspent and trailing badly in the polls long before DSA endorsed, it became clear the socialists couldn’t perform a political miracle and would be tagged as failures by local and national media, even if saving Bowman was impossible.

DSA, overall, had less to brag about this year. Several insurgents came up short in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Only one, Claire Valdez, managed to beat an incumbent, a scandal-scarred assemblyman named Juan Ardilla. There was no clean sweep like 2020, when every DSA candidate for the state legislature won. DSA endorses sparingly and tends to take on tougher fights. In one central Brooklyn race, their candidate got 47% against an incumbent assemblywoman supported by Hakeem Jeffries, who might end up speaker of the House, and Letitia James, the popular attorney general. Moderate Democrats will never sleepwalk into a race against DSA again and that’s why their gains are more incremental now. And there’s the sticky truth that they still haven’t quite figured out how to win over a large chunk of working-class Black and Latino voters in the five boroughs. Asians, meanwhile, drift rightward. (One exception, the non-DSA leftist Ron Kim in Flushing, keeps on winning.)

But here’s the rub: the democratic socialists are still expanding. For all their defeats Tuesday, they’ll add one member, Valdez, to their state legislative caucus. All of their incumbents won, and won comfortably, in a night that was very good for incumbents everywhere. In the end, DSA will send three socialist state senators and six assembly members to Albany. Eight years ago, that would have been a pipe dream.

All the predictions that Oct. 7 and the DSA’s pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel activism would be their downfall—that it would obliterate their politicians in New York City—were very wrong. Why were they wrong?