Mamdani’s victory shows how Democrats can win the midterm elections

I do not live in New York City, so I was not eligible to vote for or against Mayor-elect Zahran Mamdani. It doesn’t matter. My home mailbox in Oyster Bay, 15 miles from the New York City border, was filled with anti-Mamdani campaign literature. Suddenly, every Democrat running for office in my suburban community was equated with Mamdani. Moderate local officials are portrayed as Mamdani lieutenants, working side by side to create a kind of dystopian socialist nightmare. It is guilt by association, even when there is little or no association.

The question is whether Republicans will use this strategy in the 2026 midterms. Having led the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for two terms, I am familiar with this playbook. Midterm elections are always a referendum on the president and his party; And with a president at historically low levels of job approval, they need to change the subject. Find the bogeyman.

I campaigned with a version of the strategy in 2010, when I learned from fliers attached to nearly every utility pole in my swing district that I “voted with Nancy Pelosi 95% of the time!” (That’s true, I suppose, if you include legislation to name post offices and declare National Apple Pie Day.) The strategy was to discredit a prominent center-left leader and use his image as a weapon to destroy the unique ideological profiles of downvote candidates.

Now, critics are focusing their attention on how Mayor-elect Mamdani will be similarly weaponized by Republicans – who are certainly eager to portray him as a symbol of a radical Democratic Party that has embraced communism. I have no doubt they will try. But Democrats can learn key lessons from past elections before the midterms.

The debate sweeping the party essentially boils down to this: Is the face of the Democratic Party someone like Mamdani or someone more like centrists Abigail Spanberger and Mickey Sherrill, who were just elected governors of Virginia and New Jersey, respectively? The answer must be: both.

Mamdani has demonstrated a powerful talent for generating energy in the streets, revolutionizing digital campaign strategies, building a ground game, and harnessing the concerns of young voters. By contrast, candidates like Sherrill and Spanberger won competitive races by crafting a message that appealed to voters who feel the pain of rising costs of living and resent President Trump’s partisan excesses. If Democrats can combine these two strategies—campaign operations that can win in Brooklyn and New York with messaging that can win in Brooklyn and Iowa—they will have found the path to victory in the midterms.

Internet-conscious progressives and centrists will continue to argue about X and Bluesky, but the secret is that Democrats need candidates of all ideologies to win seats and check Trump’s power. Candidates who can channel voters’ economic frustrations into messages that feel authentic and responsive – especially on digital platforms – will win. In Virginia, that means a more moderate candidate like Spanberger. In New York, it’s Mamdani. You need both.

Of course, much of this story has not yet been written. How successful the “Mamdani as bogeyman” strategy is for Republicans will be shaped by the performance of his administration. If he governed responsibly, by focusing on the cost-of-living issues that brought him into office — rent, bus fares, grocery prices — Republicans would not succeed in making him seem so scary to voters farther down town. If he takes a more extreme route, focusing more on events in the Middle East than on the downtown tunnel, he will penetrate the headlines in moderate areas across the country and play into the hands of Republicans.

Regardless of whether Mamdani succeeds or fails as mayor, Republicans will try to capitalize on his political image across three concentric districts around New York. First, moderate areas in the city’s suburbs and exurbs — especially on Long Island, where Democrats have been crushingly beaten by Republicans on crime and immigration in recent cycles. Second, the remaining areas outside the New York media market, which extend upstate. Third, competitive battleground areas in the rest of the country, where their electoral numbers will vary greatly. As you move temporally and geographically away from New York City, the impact is very limited.

People in Arizona’s 4th Congressional District in Maricopa County will not be affected by attack ads pairing Democrats with the mayor of New York City. Voters in Florida’s 27th Congressional District — which includes Little Havana — may find the anti-socialist messaging more compelling. But the key to winning these races is for the candidates running in these elections to define themselves, and for the Democratic Party to accept them as they are.

In order to win the midterms, Democrats must be willing to contradict. We are the party of both Mamdani and Spanberger. To win at the national level, we must remember that all politics is local.

Steve IsraelHe represented New York in the House of Representatives for eight terms and was Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2011 to 2015.