Newspaper Reader offers the New York Times, as the counter evidemce to the assertion of ‘Why the Center Left Is Losing’?
Jun 27, 2026
Matthew Yglesias, Claire Ainsley, and Yascha Mounk debate whether progressives have abandoned the working-class voters they once claimed to represent.
Jun 27
The Biggest Winner: Zohran Mamdani
All the candidates the mayor backed won their primary races on Tuesday, enhancing his political clout in the city and the state.
The big winner in the Democratic primary was Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and he wasn’t on the ballot.
He had backed Brad Lander, a former New York City comptroller, who won a closely watched race against Representative Dan Goldman in a district in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. Lander ran to the left of Goldman. Mamdani and his allies, in an aggressive push to expand the power of progressives, had taken issue with Goldman’s support for Israel.
Mamdani’s influence also paid off in the race for the House seat in Brooklyn and Queens that is being vacated by Representative Nydia Velázquez. There, the candidate he had backed — Claire Valdez, a Texas-born democratic socialist serving her first term in the State Assembly — defeated the Brooklyn borough president, Antonio Reynoso, who had been a Mamdani ally.
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Mamdani’s push to capitalize on his popularity and put more progressives on the ballot strained relationships with the left-leaning Working Families Party and labor unions. It also led to tensions with Representative Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, who is in line to become speaker if the Democrats win control of the House in November. Grace Mausser, a co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America chapter, said on NY1 on Tuesday that she hoped that Jeffries had learned this from the results: “Americans are tired of status quo politics.”
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Editor: The Cult of Francis Fukuyama will never die! Matthew Yglesias, Claire Ainsley, and Yascha Mounk are the last of the just?
Will you be in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday July 15? I will be interviewing Francis Fukuyama about how liberalism should respond to the postliberal threat. Find out more and get your free ticket here! —Yascha
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