I’m watching the fallout from the Mamdani-backed candidate wins Tuesday night, and I have a couple of short observations first:
No, this isn’t a Democratic “Tea Party”. The tea party movement was stoked the way a lot of things are in the Republican Party — their media amplified the voices of a few, and the “movement” snowballed into a bit of a bigger phenomenon. It was a form of astroturf. What happened in New York on Tuesday was not astroturf.
It hasn’t been widely reported that AOC’s candidates won, too. She and Mamdani endorsed different sets of candidates. She avoided backing primary challengers to sitting Members of Congress. He avoided endorsing some state assembly candidates whose loss would anger Albany. This is how smart politicians operate.
Tuesday’s results weakened Hakeem Jeffries. The way you can tell is that he was butthurt and said that Mamdani needs to smooth things over with Congress. Lander has already said he’ll vote for Jeffries for Speaker, by the way. Jeffries made himself look weaker. He’s a poor politician who took forever to endorse Mamdani, and doesn’t seem to appreciate that Mamdani kept Chi Osse from launching a primary challenge.
Now let’s talk about young candidates who say things that make older Democrats get a little upset. One of the Mamdani-endorsed candidates who won the NY-13 primary, Darializa Avila Chevalier, is a bit of a shit poster, but not a Platner-style one.
Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist running against Rep. Adriano Espaillat in next month’s primary election, called former President Joe Biden “a rapist” and “a war criminal” on social media in 2020.
The online attacks are part of Avila Chevalier’s broader history of railing against establishment elements of her own party in posts from an X account she has since deleted. Playbook obtained a cache of screengrabs of the scrubbed missives.
Besides Biden, Avila Chevalier has targeted former Vice President Kamala Harris and former Mayor Bill de Blasio in her diatribes, slamming the former as “a cop” and the latter as a racist, the screengrabs show.
CNN has collected some more of her remarks. She is 32 or 33, and made those remarks when she was in her 20s. She’s disavowed them, basically: “I have grown considerably since in the years since these tweets, and I am focused on our community and our community’s future.”
Moving on to the race near me, CO-1, Melat Kiros was interviewed by Kyle Clark. Her opponent, Diana DeGette, is hiding from the media, so Clark interviewed Kiros and the other challenger, Wanda James, separately. This is the whole Kiros interview:
She’s smart and Clark is a good interviewer, so you’re better informed after the interview is over, which is something I can rarely say about political journalism. Anyway, Kiros doesn’t have anything like Chevalier’s history of shitposting. One of her campaign staffers accidentally re-posted an item on her social media that said that centrist Democrats suck shit and they also fellate Israel. I saw the piece and it was just a momentary flash of those words, easy to miss. They took it down, and Kiros said she didn’t agree with the views in the post when Clark asked her about it.
The more interesting part of the interview is Clark pushing on Kiros’ anti-war views. He pointed out that Lockheed-Martin has a big presence in Denver, and wondered how Kiros would feel if her quest to cut defense spending would mean a loss of jobs in her district. She said she would hope that Lockheed-Martin would find some other lines of business, but ultimately if we cut defense spending and that costs jobs, so be it. (Paraphrasing here.)
I have a feeling that Kiros’ anti-war views might be more upsetting to some Democrats than Chevalier’s shitposts, but this is what happens when you have a Democratic Party that actually contains people who believe what a lot of liberals believe.
Final note: Chevalier will almost certainly win (though I wouldn’t rule out that her primary opponent does something like what Cuomo did to Mamdani). Kiros might actually win, who knows? In either case, a House term is two years. If they are terrible, then they’ll get challenged in a primary. That’s how it should work in these ultra-blue districts. We should be having regular primaries. Candidates should be showing their faces. As I’ve written here earlier, any candidate who runs in the primary by air-bombing their opponent with TV ads and mailers, while hiding from constituents, should be disqualified.
