After his 2021 primary win, Mayor Eric Adams was championed by democratic leadership nearly immediately. In 2025, Queens assemblyman Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic nomination for mayor with a grassroots coalition of disillusioned progressives and working-class New Yorkers, with larger victory margins than Adams in 2021. Mamdani dominated among young people — including young men who drifted to President Donald Trump in 2024 — whom Democrats appear desperate to win back. Despite his decisive victory in the party’s primary election, many of the Democratic establishment’s powerful figures from New York, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, have refused to endorse him.
“Vote Blue No Matter Who,” is a phrase that has practically been beaten into the minds of every progressive voter for nearly a decade. Why is Mamdani all of a sudden an exception to this well-touted call? Now, how could anyone credibly expect progressives and their supporters to rally behind one of the centrist Democrats in the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential election when the party leaders insist on ignoring popular progressive candidates like Mamdani?
For years, centrists have accused progressives of disloyalty, especially in 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump. The myth of “Bernie or Bust” holds that Sanders’ supporters refused to back Clinton and cost Democrats the presidency. In reality, a higher percentage of Sanders voters supported Clinton in 2016 than Clinton voters supported Obama in 2008. In 2020, many progressives backed former President Joe Biden despite serious policy differences. Again, in 2024, Democrats blamed the party’s left wing for sinking Kamala Harris’ candidacy by voting for third-party candidates. But these claims don’t hold water; even if every third-party vote were added to Harris’ total, she still wouldn’t have surpassed Trump. Even Mamdani himself ended up voting for Harris in the 2024 election despite voting with the Uncommitted Movement in the Democratic primary.
If anyone is breaking the Democratic party line, it’s the centrists. In New York, Adams not only dropped out of the mayor’s race but abandoned his Democratic Party affiliation completely. Former Governor Andrew Cuomo, after losing badly to Mamdani in the Democratic primary, is now mounting a third-party campaign to split the vote. National and state Democrats alike, including Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries and much of New York’s congressional delegation, have withheld endorsements despite Mamdani’s decisive victory in the primary. Kirsten Gillibrand went so far as to smear Mamdani as supporting “global jihad” before eventually apologizing, while Minnesota’s failed 2024 presidential candidate Dean Phillips declared there was “no room” in the party for socialists.
The hypocrisy from prominent Democrats is all the more glaring when you consider just how far the Democratic establishment has drifted from its voters on key issues. For example, a Quinnipiac poll this summer found that just 12% of Democrats sympathize more with the state of Israel, while 60% sympathize with Palestinians. A Brookings survey found that 84% of Americans favor an immediate ceasefire and nearly half believe Israel is committing genocide. Still, party leaders continue to embrace Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite an active arrest warrant against him from the International Criminal Court. And when Mamdani speaks out against Israel’s war crimes, reflecting the mainstream views of not just his party, but New Yorkers broadly, he’s maligned as “too extreme.”
The same goes for healthcare. Mamdani is a co-sponsor of the New York Health Act, a bill that would create a single-payer healthcare program, guaranteeing healthcare for all New Yorkers, and the latest Economist/YouGov poll shows that 85% of Democrats support a “Medicare for All” healthcare model. Meanwhile, Congress’s Medicare for All Caucus continues to shrink, year by year.
Biden even said he would veto a Medicare for All bill if it reached his desk, defending the private insurance system over a universal guarantee. Nancy Pelosi, while Speaker of the House, refused to allow a floor vote on the legislation, claiming she didn’t want to put moderates in a difficult spot. On these matters and more, the distance between Democratic voters and Democratic leaders is a chasm. Again and again, when progressives demand change in the party that ought to reflect them, they are told to wait, compromise and swallow their principles for some vague and failed “electability.”
New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein has recently argued that Democrats must embrace “big tent politics” to stay competitive in an ideologically diverse country. In theory, this is right. But in practice, “big tent” is invoked almost exclusively to excuse center-right Democrats while disciplining the left. Mamdani and others are told their critiques are too divisive, but when figures like California Governor Gavin Newsom or Harris shift to the right on human rights like transgender rights, they are “praised for pragmatism.” Ironically, Andy Beshear, governing as a Democrat in Kentucky, is often more forceful in defending transgender rights and cultural issues than safer-seat Democrats in deep-blue states. The problem isn’t the idea of a big tent; it’s that too often that the “tent” seems to expand only in one direction.
The slogan “Vote Blue No Matter Who” was always a blunt instrument. The Democratic Party asks voters to silence their own values for the sake of “beating Republicans,” while failing to deliver on the issues that matter to them. It also gives the Democratic Party license to abandon progressive priorities without consequence by painting themselves as a happy medium between “extreme” progressives and Republicans, even if that means abandoning their base. When progressives are told their loyalty is non-negotiable by the very same centrists who abandon Mamdani and what their voters are for without hesitation, the result is increased cynicism, not any sort of unity. And cynicism breeds disengagement, which leads to electoral losses, the very outcome Democrats claim to be so afraid of.
If the Democratic establishment wants to keep invoking “Vote Blue No Matter Who,” they should live by it. That means rallying behind and endorsing Mamdani, the actual Democratic nominee, even if he makes Wall Street uncomfortable or has the extremely popular democratic position of criticizing Israel. It means respecting the fact that progressive voters are the base and have been more disciplined and loyal than the centrists give them credit for. And it means confronting the reality that the party is out of step with popular sentiment on the issues that matter most to their constituents. Because the question now is not why progressives should vote blue no matter who. It is why anyone would, if this all continues.
Andrew McDonald, FCRH ’26, is a history and political science major from Sacramento, California.
