A year ago, Zohran Mamdani and the army of left-wing organizers he inspired stunned the Democratic establishment by beating back a bevy of better-known and better-connected rivals to win the primary for mayor in New York City.<\/p>\n
The party\u2019s leaders wishfully treated the result as a one-off and looked ahead to the midterms. Mr. Mamdani was a unicorn, they said, a master of social media with a great ground game and a better smile.<\/p>\n
Then it happened again.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, Democrats backed by large labor unions, their House leader and the party\u2019s longstanding (and more moderate) Black and Latino old guard were drubbed up and down the ballot<\/a> by left-leaning insurgents whom the mayor threw his weight behind.<\/p>\n This time, the losses were so deep that New York\u2019s long-vaunted political power elite was forced into a painful reckoning, as prominent Democrats from Brooklyn to Washington tried to account for how their candidates had lost the pulse of voters preoccupied with rising costs and Israel\u2019s wars, while being outmaneuvered by the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization with about 14,000 members.<\/p>\n \u201cThey out-organized us,\u201d said Letitia James, the state\u2019s attorney general, who called the results a \u201cwake-up call.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cClearly we didn\u2019t get out traditional Democrats,\u201d she added. \u201cThey just didn\u2019t come out. We didn\u2019t provide them a reason to.\u201d<\/p>\n Democrats across the country have shown for months that they are furious at their party leadership for failing to stop President Trump, and they have been willing to use their votes to show it by embracing populists and leftists.<\/p>\n But for New York, there were also particularly uncomfortable questions. Why were cash-rich unions seemingly unable to turn out voters at rates they once did? Why did the city\u2019s youngest residents veer toward democratic socialism over more traditional progressive politics? And why didn\u2019t Democratic leadership better respond to the engine of gentrification transforming swaths of the city that were once Black and Latino political strongholds?<\/p>\n The pressure to find a course correction is mounting. D.S.A. members began speculating on Wednesday about even more ambitious targets, like challenges to Representative Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Chuck Schumer, the moderate Brooklyn Democrats who lead House and Senate Democrats, in 2028.<\/p>\n The left had reason to be feeling emboldened.<\/p>\n Mr. Mamdani\u2019s candidates toppled two incumbents, Representatives Daniel Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, Jewish and Dominican Democrats who had the support of major labor unions, popular local politicians and Mr. Jeffries.<\/p>\n Claire Valdez, a little-known D.S.A. assemblywoman, easily defeated Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, in a race for a soon-to-be vacant seat, despite his support from the left-leaning Working Families Party, Ms. James and Representative Nydia Vel\u00e1zquez, who is stepping down at the end of the year. (It was not long ago that Mr. Reynoso himself was the progressive insurgent taking on an earlier iteration of the Democratic establishment.)<\/p>\n Down the ballot, Mr. Mamdani and the D.S.A. were also on track to pick up six new seats in the State Legislature, increasing its presence in Albany to 15 lawmakers from nine. In Brooklyn, the most Democratic borough, voters even appeared to be rejecting the low-level party officials aligned with the old guard.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a bad night \u2014 I\u2019m not going to deny that,\u201d said Representative Gregory W. Meeks, the leader of the Queens Democratic machine and a close ally of Mr. Jeffries and Mr. Espaillat.<\/p>\n