The world’s attention may have wandered elsewhere, but Russia continues its brutal bombardment on civilians in Ukraine. Its strikes on the city of Dnipro yesterday, which included a strike on a passenger train from Odesa, were some of its deadliest yet, as journalist Caolan Robertson discussed with Tim in a Bulwark video yesterday. Happy Wednesday.

The Democrats’ Crisis—and Opportunity

by William Kristol

Silly me. I was kind of looking forward to November 4, 2025.

There’ll be two elections for governor that day, in Virginia and New Jersey, and in both cases the Democratic nominees—Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill—are impressive individuals whom I admire, centrist liberals with whom I agree, and skilled candidates who are likely to win.

Their victories would signify a Democratic party on the road back, a party at once embracing and updating the humane and tough-minded legacies of Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey—and yes, for us ex-Republicans, of John McCain.

And they do seem likely to win. But as my Yiddish-speaking forebears would have told me: Mann tracht, un Gott lacht. Man plans, and God laughs.

And so, we get another type of Democratic nominee who now seems poised to become a face of the party: New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a vocal proponent of government-run grocery stores and a person unwilling to repudiate the phrase “globalize the intifada.”

Now to be fair, the good Lord didn’t nominate Mamdani last night. New York’s Democratic primary voters did. They did so partly because Mamdani really ran a heck of a race. He is a 33-year old state assemblyman who was at 1 percent in the polls in February and ended up scoring a comfortable victory over a three-term New York governor. His imaginative campaign, his skills as a communicator, and his abilities as a candidate are things everyone from every faction of the party in every part of the country should study.

It’s also the case that Mamdani was hugely helped by the fact that his main opponent was Andrew Cuomo, the aforementioned 67-year old former governor who’d resigned in disgrace after sex scandals, as well as after having mismanaged the pandemic and lied about it. The Emily Litella–like Democratic establishment looked at Cuomo’s baggage and decided: Never Mind. But the voters did mind.

As high as Mamdani is riding this morning, both he and his backers should recognize that New Yorkers are perfectly capable of rejecting the Democratic nominee in the general election. The Democratic nominee, after all, has lost seven of the last fifteen New York City mayoral races. But the alternatives this time don’t seem as formidable as John Lindsay or Rudy Giuliani or Michael Bloomberg.

Mamdani’s challengers in the general include Cuomo, who does have another ballot line—but after the drubbing he just took, it seems unlikely now that he’ll ask voters for another look in November. But who knows? Otherwise, the November ballot will feature the incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, running as an independent, who’s a bit . . . problematic. There’s the wacky Republican, Curtis Sliwa, who lost to Adams in 2021. And there’s another independent who’s qualified for the ballot, a former assistant U.S. attorney named Jim Walden. He seems like a perfectly normal and reasonable alternative, so, given the world we live in, he presumably has little chance of gaining momentum.

In any case, beginning today and for the next five and a half months, Democrats in office and running for office all around the country are going to be asked whether or not they support Mamdani. If they say, ‘Yes,’ then the natural follow up will be: Well, do you endorse this or that statement or position of his? If they say ‘No,’ it will be: Aren’t you disrespecting the Democratic voters of New York?

Some will welcome the chance to speak up and get some attention. Others will desperately try to duck and weave. Either way, fun times for the media and for the Republicans. Democrats in disarray!

And I doubt that the natural dodge—“Hey, it’s just a mayoral race”—is going to work. The population of New York City is almost as large as that of Virginia or New Jersey. New York City has a larger budget and a larger GDP. It’ll be kind of hard to pretend what happens there doesn’t really matter.

Still, all may be well. In 1960, when John F. Kennedy ran for president, there were plenty of Democratic office holders at all levels who were segregationists and in some cases racists. He wasn’t. He managed to coexist with them, held the party more or less together, and won the presidency. In 1948, by contrast, the segregationists led by Sen. Strom Thurmond and the leftist fellow travelers led by former vice president Henry Wallace defected from the party, and the Democratic nominee Harry Truman won a four-way race.

So Mamdani’s victory needn’t be some kind of death knell for a winning Democratic party coalition in 2026 or 2028. It needn’t be a death knell for a centrist party in the tradition—now that you mention it!—of Truman and Kennedy. It should be a death knell for an ossified Democratic establishment that needs to be put out of its misery. And it should be a wake up call for non-socialist Democrats to show some of the audacity and the ability of Mamdani.

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The Great Truth Social Tongue Bath

by Andrew Egger