Democrat mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and his wife, Rama Duwaji, vote in Queens, New York. Photo / Getty Images
The United States election this week results kicked off a year-long fight over who best personifies the Democratic Party as it heads toward crucial Midterm elections.
Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who will run New York City, or moderates like Abigail Spanberger, the centrist with a CIA background who was elected governor of Virginia.
Republicans have already begun seizing on Mamdani as the embodiment of today’s Democratic Party, saying his elevation confirms that the party is in thrall to left-wing extremists.
Democratic leaders - eager to shed the “woke” label that dogged their party in 2024 - say the heart of their party is people like Spanberger and New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill, a Navy veteran who also won on Wednesday.
Both Spanberger and Sherrill are centrists whose national security credentials helped them win longtime Republican seats when they first came to Congress.
And they prevailed in states that, while generally Democratic, have strong pockets of conservatism.
“If you are trying to win national campaigns that bring in a whole slew of swing voters, is the test Park Slope, Brooklyn - or what happens in New Jersey and Virginia?” said former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, a potential 2028 presidential candidate.
“I am less interested in the Upper West Side and more interested in the Upper Peninsula. That is how you win.”
Emanuel was referring to a politically contested region of Michigan that went for Trump in 2024.
Republicans say Democrats will be unable to distance themselves from Mamdani and his leftist identity, given his charisma and the automatically high profile of the New York mayor.
“It’s not like the Miss USA pageant, where judges get to decide who represents the party,” said GOP strategist Matt Gorman.
“Mamdani is where the energy of the party is. He won for a reason. He will be governing in the media capital of the world, so the media doesn’t have to look too far.”
Republicans immediately seized on Mamdani as a foil, saying they plan to use him in ads across the country in their effort to maintain control of the House, where they currently hold a narrow 219-213 advantage.
The National Republican Congressional Committee, which co-ordinates the GOP House campaigns, launched an ad yesterday in 49 battleground districts warning that Mamdani’s victory revealed the extremism of the Democratic Party.
“A radical left earthquake just hit America. The epicentre: New York,” a narrator warns in the Republican ad.
“Now the socialists are celebrating. They call it progress. We call it chaos … This is the future House Democrats want, and your city could be next.”
Mamdani calls himself a democratic socialist, which adherents describe as a commitment to both democracy and greater economic equality, and he favours such policies as rent control, free buses and universal childcare. Republicans, however, have made it clear they will portray him as a Soviet-style communist.
In a memo released last week, the NRCC framed House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries’s endorsement of Mamdani as evidence that the Democratic Party has been “hijacked” by leftist radicals.
“Mamdani is a socialist hostile to America, supports an agenda ripped directly from the pages of the Communist Manifesto, is openly anti-police, and is funded by groups with ties to terrorist organisations,” the memo said.
Some progressives, however, say they welcome efforts to make Mamdani the face of the Democratic Party, noting his ability to electrify an array of voters with an unapologetically liberal message.
While New York is famously liberal, it has also elected centrist or even conservative mayors in the past, from Rudy Giuliani to Mike Bloomberg.
“New York is obviously different than Boise, Idaho, but I kind of think that with proper leadership and courage, what’s happening in New York, in fact, can happen all over the country,” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) said in an interview.
“And I suspect I’m not the only one who thinks that. I think Donald Trump understands that. I think the Democratic establishment understands that. I think that’s what they’re afraid of.”
Other Democrats said they are sceptical that Republicans can connect candidates in swing districts with the policies of the mayor of an unrelated city.
It is one thing to link candidates with a president of their own party like Donald Trump or Joe Biden, they said, but Mamdani will not be serving in Congress, let alone the White House.
Former congressman Steve Israel (D-New York), who ran the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2010 to 2014, said the Midterms are going to revolve almost exclusively around voters’ feelings about Trump.
“Midterm elections are always referendums on a sitting president,” Israel said. “Democrats like Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill will be premier surrogates for House and Senate candidates, not because they counter the portrayal of Zohran Mamdani, but because they are common-sense contrasts to Donald Trump.”
Democrats are under pressure to retake at least one chamber of Congress in 2026 and establish a rival power centre to Trump in Washington.
The Republican-led Congress has almost uniformly backed the President, so that even some of his most unorthodox moves - imposing global tariffs, infringing on Congress’s spending authority, abruptly tearing down the East Wing - have gone mostly unchallenged.
Control of the House would let Democrats hold hearings, issue subpoenas and even pursue impeachment of Trump officials if they chose, actions that are currently beyond their power.
Parties that suffer devastating election losses, as the Democrats did in 2024, always face a lack of leadership and a struggle to define their identity.
But the dynamic also creates challenges for the winners, who get the blame for the nation’s problems and struggle to convincingly point the finger at the other side.
Trump’s solution since taking office has largely been to attack cities and the Democrats who run them, decrying urban centres as dystopian, crime-ridden cesspools. As a proudly left-leaning mayor of an iconic American city, Mamdani is likely to become an even bigger target.
During the campaign, Virginia governor candidate Winsome Earle-Sears (R) told a rally that New York had nominated “a socialist”, prompting an outpouring of boos. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R), campaigning against Spanberger, said she “reminds me very much of our mayoral candidate for the Democrats in New York”.
Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican candidate for New Jersey governor, told Fox News before the election that his state would “roll out the welcome mat” for New Yorkers seeking to escape New York if Mamdani became mayor.
Many Democrats see a not-so-subtle element of Islamophobia and racism at play in the Republican demonisation of the mayor-elect, since Mamdani is a Muslim of Indian descent who was born and raised in Uganda until age 7. GOP leaders say they are focused solely on what they call his extreme policy agenda.
Wednesday’s results could suggest the attacks on Mamdani will have a limited effect, given that both Spanberger and Sherrill also won.
Many of the Midterm races will unfold on territory less friendly to Democrats, and some party leaders are clearly skittish about getting too close to Mamdani.
Jeffries (D-New York), asked recently on CNN whether Mamdani is the future of the Democratic Party, said “no”, pointing instead to House Democrats. Jeffries did not endorse Mamdani until last week, despite Mamdani’s clear win in June’s mayoral primary.
When Jeffries did give the candidate his official backing, Republicans immediately pounced. “He is the head of their party now,” Representative Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) told reporters last week. “When he gets elected mayor of New York, he’s giving the marching orders to the rest of the Democrats. And they want to raise taxes on everybody.”
In contrast, Spanberger and Sherrill have backgrounds that seem almost tailor-made to rebut the Republican caricature of Democrats as unpatriotic and soft.
Spanberger, whose father served in the Army, became a CIA case officer, working undercover on terrorism and other threats. She flipped a longtime Republican House seat in 2018, where she presented herself as a centrist and once warned Democrats never to use the word “socialism.”
Sherrill attended the US Naval Academy and spent nearly 10 years on active duty before becoming a prosecutor. Then, like Spanberger, she captured a longtime Republican House seat.
One challenge for Democrats is that while Mamdani’s national name recognition is limited, Spanberger and Sherrill’s is even more so. Still, Democratic strategists say that they can become examples for other Democrats to follow, particularly political newcomers in battleground districts.
“These are the type of people we’re trying to recruit … to train people who have never done politics before to look up to and mimic styles of what it means to be a common-sense Democrat and how to win in super competitive races,” said one Democratic operative.
Some Democratic strategists contended that, for all the obvious contrasts, the similarities between Mamdani and Spanberger in particular are as notable as their differences.
Both are skilled campaigners who understood their constituencies and ran accordingly, they said. Both focused relentlessly on the affordability of basic items like food and housing and both found effective ways to convey their criticisms of Trump’s signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill.
Israel said that while Mamdani’s policies are unlikely to sway Midterm voters in faraway places, the exception could be if he over-reaches as mayor of New York.
“If he governs too far to the left and there are daily headlines about his going too far, then yes, the narrative continues and could affect certain districts in the Midterm election,” Israel said.
“If he governs more reasonably, with less controversy over his views, it becomes a big zero in the Midterm elections.”
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