Ashland, Virginia
—
Only a party going through the Democrats’ identity and existential crises could, nine months into Donald Trump’s second presidency, have Zohran Mamdani and Abigail Spanberger as its front-runners in two of Tuesday’s biggest races.
Spanberger is a 46-year-old former CIA officer, the daughter of a nurse and a federal agent, who sounded the alarm in Congress and now on the campaign trail about what she sees as her party’s excesses. Mamdani is a 34-year-old democratic socialist, the Uganda-born son of a university professor and filmmaker, who sprung to stardom with a focus on cost of living conveyed in buzzy, multilingual videos pushing for government to pay for more.
This isn’t a sitcom pitch: It reflects a party still deep in figuring out what it’s supposed to be and how it’s supposed to appeal to voters.
Heading into Tuesday’s elections, Democrats are far from resolving the schism between progressives and moderates that undermined them in last year’s presidential race. But many in the party are fearful of being tied to Mamdani’s democratic socialism or anti-Israel views even as they buzz about his breakthrough communications and the passion he has inspired.
Spanberger is clear about her differences with Mamdani. She spoke to CNN on Friday on her campaign bus, leaving an event in Ashland, Virginia, where the woman who introduced her said sometimes she feels she’s the only Democrat in the area.
“Why is it that everybody keeps thinking somebody running in a city, admittedly an enormous city, that that is the deciding race?” she asked.
When asked what she made of Mamdani declaring at an October rally in Manhattan that he had already won the battle over the soul of the Democratic Party, Spanberger’s mouth twitched into a smile.
“Then maybe,” she said, “he should be a Democrat.”
Acknowledging when pressed that Mamdani is in fact the Democratic nominee, Spanberger said that for all the talk — including from within the Democratic Socialists of America itself — about the DSA’s growing power, she doesn’t see democratic socialism on the rise.
She argues there’s a level of dishonesty in some of the big promises Mamdani is making that she worries could hurt Democrats with voters long term, saying the reason she doesn’t have a Mamdani-style proposal for government-run grocery stores is “because I couldn’t ever pass it.”
“People do want us to be aspirational and dream big. They also don’t want us to lie to them,” she told CNN. “When you have a party that makes promise after promise, and then say, ‘Oh, we passed it in the House, it’s not our fault’ — vulnerable people believed you. Maybe he is going to get Albany on board with totally refinancing public transportation. But there’s a lot of people who believe him.”
Mamdani’s campaign did not respond when asked about Spanberger’s comments. But asked at an event on Friday about whether he wants Democrats to have room for more moderate campaigns in Virginia and New Jersey, where US Rep. Mikie Sherrill is running with a similar approach to Spanberger’s, Mamdani was conciliatory.
“Absolutely, I think that this has to be a party that actually allows Americans to see themselves in it and not just be a mirror image of just a few people who are engaged in politics,” he said. “To me, what binds all of us together is who we are fighting to serve, and that is working people.”
Spanberger argued that many polls show her more likely to break 50% in her state than Mamdani is in his city.
She’s facing a Republican who failed to win Trump’s endorsement and who faced GOP criticism over her campaign. He’s in a three-way race, but Mamdani and his close advisers are focused on the 50% mark themselves —for what kind of mandate he’ll be able to claim both for his agenda and the broader direction he wants to set for the party.
Mayoral races in New York don’t usually have national implications. That was before the shocker out of this year’s primary as Mamdani went from 1% in the polls to knocking off former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in his political comeback. Now New York City has the marquee race, with Mamdani trying to consolidate Democrats and defeat Cuomo’s independent run appealing to Trump supporters and moderates.
Rep. Ro Khanna, a Silicon Valley congressman and former Bernie Sanders campaign co-chair, is the only Democrat known to be considering a 2028 run who’s campaigned with Spanberger, Sherrill and Mamdani, as well as supporters of the Democratic-led redistricting effort in California.
“It’s mind-boggling to me that we don’t have more people recognizing” the importance of how much Mamdani has electrified young voters and beyond, Khanna told CNN. He added that he hopes national Democrats also recognize how Spanberger pitched herself to rural counties and Sherrill to the suburbs.
They fit together, Khanna said, in that Democrats are “rejecting the status quo and saying we need a fresh generation of leaders and saying, ‘We’re not going to define our identity around Donald Trump.’”
But the Democratic leaders plotting next year’s campaigns say Mamdani won’t be their blueprint.
“Voters in the Arizonas or the Iowas aren’t thinking about who the mayor of New York might be. They’re thinking about who’s going to understand the issues facing our community and going to fight to make a difference back in Washington, DC,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene, a Washington state congresswoman and chair of the House Democrats’ campaign arm. “It is hard to draw conclusions from a bright blue city versus look at what it’s like in purple districts where you have just that huge diversity, in terms of points of view and different issues.”
Asked whether she’s thought about New York City as she looks at this year’s gubernatorial contests and the 36 races looming next year, Democratic Governors Association Executive Director Meghan Meehan-Draper told CNN, “Not really.”
“I understand why there’s attention on it — but at a moment when our party’s struggling and our brand is struggling, if you want to be a party that wins, gets results and is popular in the eyes of voters, you should look to Democratic governors,” Meehan-Draper said.
Sherrill — a personal friend of Spanberger’s who keeps up with her on the campaign trail via text — tends to respond to questions about Mamdani by pointing out that she won her own primary by a big margin with a field that included candidates closer aligned to Mamdani.
“New Jerseyans want competence — they want someone who is going to attack prices, someone who is listening to their concerns,” she told CNN’s John Berman recently.
And when CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday asked House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries whether he thought Mamdani was the future of the party, the New York Democrat responded, “No.”
Mamdani’s response to Jeffries hours later: “That’s good to know.”
Spanberger’s mode isn’t Mamdani’s big-smile charisma. She knows that her buttons and T-shirts haven’t become a political fashion statement. But she says she’s tired of people saying she’s not exciting. Along with Sherrill, she helped flip the US House to Democratic control during Trump’s first term. She got bills signed by Joe Biden and Donald Trump — “that is not easy to do,” Obama joked while rallying for her Saturday.
A year after some panicked Democrats declared after Kamala Harris’ loss to Trump that women can’t win, operatives beyond New York have joked that maybe the answer is just slightly younger women who are moms and, given Spanberger’s CIA work and Sherrill’s time as a Navy helicopter pilot, were maybe involved with killing some people.
Spanberger laughed at that suggestion, but said what people read into her biography helped her tap into a moment with parallels to when she first won in the post-Trump midterms — but with key differences.
“I wouldn’t even call it the resistance anymore. People have matured in their advocacy,” she said, arguing that while 2017 was defined by protests of a growing base nearly every weekend, now there are clearer, starker stakes and “layers of people who were not anywhere in play in ’17, who are in some cases leading the charges in their communities to make differences.”
Mamdani and his aides say that feeling of people left out of politics for so long is exactly what he’s tapping into.
“Too long we’ve been told that we should wait,” he said Saturday in Queens, but “to wait would be to trust who gave us this moment, who delivered us to it.”
That’s part of why Mamdani and his advisers bristle so much at those who write him off as a great campaigner with a great production team.
“The style is downstream from the substance,” Andrew Epstein, his communications director through the primary and now his digital director, told CNN in an earlier interview. “Unless you have a message and an agenda that is directly relevant to people’s lives, that speaks to the economic conditions in this country, that credibly presents itself as an alternative to this incredibly broken status quo and the alienation that so many people feel from mainstream politics, it’s not going to work.”
Sen. Ruben Gallego, who ran well ahead of Harris last year in his swing state of Arizona to win his seat, said he felt comfortable campaigning just for Spanberger and Sherrill.
“I don’t think Mamdani could win in Arizona, I don’t think I could win New York City, but it doesn’t mean that some of this stuff is also wrong. He cares about the cost of living like many of us; we just take different approaches to it,” Gallego told CNN after finishing speaking at a Mexican restaurant in Alexandria for Spanberger.
Democrats “have always been that way,” Gallego said. “Look at the Republicans, look at those weirdos, man. They have a weird span of things.”
Correction:
This story has been corrected to reflect that while in Congress, Spanberger had bills signed by Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, not Barack Obama.
Source link
