Just in case you thought that Democrats were the big winner on Tuesday night, leave it to New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to break reality to the party: The extremists won, and if the establishment doesn’t kowtow to them, it’s all for naught.
AOC was speaking about New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who beat former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a Democrat-on-Democrat matchup where the conservatives ended up backing Cuomo, if tepidly, because he wasn’t an undisguised radical.
Of all of the major off-year races, Mamdani’s roughly nine-point victory over Cuomo was the least impressive, but arguably the most disturbing. Not that anything good was going to come out of the NYC mayoral race — that train had long since left the station when the GOP declined not to field a candidate with more electability than activist, radio host, and local conservative gadfly Curtis Sliwa — but Mamdani’s six-month charge to the forefront of his party indicated a new leftward, identitarian tilt to a party that didn’t lack for a leftward tilt or a focus on identity politics before the election.
And AOC, appearing on CNN after Mamdani was declared the victor not long after the polls closed in New York, made it clear that her peeps better learn a lesson from this one.
Despite the fact that neither Mamdani nor Cuomo faced any real threat from Sliwa or any other self-declared conservative, Ocasio-Cortez said that the magic of the Mamdani campaign was that “[Mamdani] had to defeat a Republican and the old guard” of the party.
“He was fighting a war on two fronts and not just one,” she said.
“And I do think that this moment — a lot of people who are willing to talk about party unity when it serves everybody, it puts those folks on notice,” AOC added, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
“And I think it also puts folks on notice that we have a future to plan for, we have a future to fight for, and we’re either going to do that together, or you’re going to be left behind.”
BREAKING: Communists have declared VICTORY and say the Old Guard has been DEFEATED.
The Democratic Party is DONE.
AOC: “[Mamdani] had to defeat a Republican and the old guard of the Democratic Party.” pic.twitter.com/uDMDdKxBZH
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) November 5, 2025
If AOC runs against Schumer in 2026, will she win?
One is almost surprised she didn’t announce her 2026 primary campaign against Chuck Schumer and her 2028 presidential exploratory committee right there.
Naturally, hearing this probably should have put a damper on wherever the DNC gerontocracy was holding its election night bash, specifically because this was effectively signing the party onto exactly the kind of wokeness that lost the 2024 election for them, just rebranded for one city with one particular candidate in one particular election year.
Mamdani’s campaign was a mishmash of half-baked ideas that came from the Summer of Floyd, recycled for the kinds of people who kept their blacked-out Facebook profile pics with the Ukrainian flag frame on it well after the virtue signaling was done.
Defund the police? Check. Privilege-checks? Oh, you better believe that’s a check. Knee-jerk LGBT ideology? Check. Tax people who can leave the city to pay for his absurd agenda. Check that box, baby! If there were only still mask and vaccine mandates to impose, rest assured he’d do those, too.
Remember, this is exactly the agenda that caused virtually all goodwill former President Joe Biden’s administration and the Democratic Congress that followed it to evaporate by the end of 2021. By 2024, it was bad enough that Donald Trump not only won the electoral vote but the popular vote, as well.
The reason for the off-year victories is simple: In a slew of races and ballot measures spread mostly across blue states and a very blue city, Democrats treated it like a redo of the presidential election, and Republicans hardly cared. In retrospect, the party probably should have cared more than it did, since the size of the victories will give a party in disarray with serious financial and donor issues an uplift it shouldn’t have been handed, but the momentum — both in terms of fundraising and in terms of agenda — remains on the GOP side.
But here we have AOC saying that “the Democratic Party cannot last much longer by denying the future” — which is to say, her and Zohran Mamdani. Except the reason the “old guard” has hung on is precisely this: They cannot win nationally, and they will lose huge chunks of their base if they embrace anti-Semites, crypto-communists, and other forms of sundry radicals.
Say what you will about the gerontocracy, at least Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Dick Durbin, Jim Clyburn, and their ilk know how to win nationally. AOC and Zohran know how to win locally.
However, the Democrats are also the party of revolutionary social change — and like every party of revolution, a new group of revolutionaries eventually comes for you at some point. The 2025 off-year elections might well be that inflection point. It doesn’t matter how many points you win by in small battles like these if you lose the war in the same stroke.
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