The Telegraph – Both radicals and ‘moderates’ now have empirical evidence to prove their approach wins elections. The party is fatally divided.
“We need to not ever use the words socialist or socialism ever again”, said Abigail Spanberger, Virginia’s Democrat governor-elect, on a conference call with her party’s leaders back in 2020. That contentious year saw Joe Biden’s election as president but also a net loss of Democrat-held congressional seats. After a fleeting grasp at fostering national unity, it also ushered in a rising perception that the Democrats are the loony Left, a sentiment that led to Donald Trump’s return to popularity and, ultimately, the presidency while Spanberger and her fellow moderates could only wring their hands as their party’s progressive wing appeared to be in the ascendant.
In Tuesday’s off-year election cycle, Spanberger, a Democrat so moderate that she is a former CIA operative and was a leading member of the House of Representative’s bipartisan “Problem Solvers Caucus”, took her own advice and handily defeated Winsome Earle-Sears, Virginia’s incumbent Republican lieutenant governor, to win the race for the governor’s mansion.
In New York, however, Zohran Mamdani doubled down against her anti-socialist admonition and loudly announced himself as a socialist. He has declared that capitalism is “theft”, that billionaires should not exist, that “whiter” neighbourhoods in New York should be taxed more, that a range of public services should be “free”, and that government-mandated price controls should govern food and housing. He took more than half of New York City’s mayoral vote and utterly humiliated his disgraced chief rival, Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York.
Whither, then, the Democratic Party, if two of its leading candidates this year espoused contradictory ideals while marching under the same banner? Moderates are rushing to celebrate the Spanberger approach, also noting the decisive victory in New Jersey’s gubernatorial election of Mikie Sherrill, a fellow moderate who was at one time Spanberger’s Washington flatmate. Progressives are hailing Mamdani as the new face of the Democratic Party and exuding triumph over their vanquished party establishment. Some shrewder Democrats, notably Gavin Newsom, the California governor, appear to be playing both sides of the fence, cherry picking progressive policies to appeal to the Left while balancing them with moderate stances to shore up the centre.
The dividing line remains nevertheless stark. “I don’t care that much about what happens in the city of New York”, Spanberger candidly told the New Yorker magazine a week before the election. Her apparent disinterest in the other major race of the year suggests that the Democrats may adopt a multi-phased approach, running candidates targeted to local conditions. In an off-year election, where only the New York, New Jersey, and Virginia races were at stake, this succeeded, albeit in places that were already strongly blue and where the Republican candidates were unusually weak.
In the 2026 midterm elections, however, the Democrat divide could spell disaster. Both the moderates and the progressives can now point to empirical evidence that their respective approaches work. As they did in the fateful 2016 presidential election – when moderates clustered around Hillary Clinton while progressives boosted Bernie Sanders – they will almost certainly spend the next year at war with each other over resources, candidate selection, and the national strategy the party will need to make gains in Congress.
Spanberger’s moderate line will probably not change Virginia much, where Glenn Youngkin, the outgoing Republican governor, has long been boxed in by a majority-Democrat state legislature, but it will resonate in party leadership circles, where progressives once seemed unstoppable. On the other hand, Mamdani’s tenure in New York will be daily frontpage news, with each failing socialist policy, every vile reverse-racist comment, all the criminal outrages in its unpoliced streets defining what it is to be a Democrat in 2026.
Ten months of him may well be enough to enlighten the American electorate that any deal with the Democratic Party is a surrender to radical progressivism. From this, the Republicans could readily benefit, and all we would lose is New York City.