Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, October 30, 2025 Real World News
With the coronation of Zohran Mamdani, the soon-to-be socialist mayor of New York City, as a Democrat Party power player, the party has essentially allowed the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to take the reins, analysts say.
High-profile socialists in the party such as New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had already thrown in for Mamdani, but party leaders mostly stayed at arm's distance.
That is, until House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries endorsed the NYC socialist candidate.
"Hakeem Jeffries just endorsed the socialist takeover of his own party," said Will Kiley, the NRCC communications director.
"The Democratic Socialists of America are the driving force within the Democratic Party, despite not being Democrats," David Strom noted in an Oct. 27 analysis for HotAir. "Their candidates, especially AOC and Mamdani, are defining the political landscape in more than rhetoric. The Schumer Shutdown is, mostly, the AOC shutdown. Schumer is terrified that AOC could displace him as the next Senator from New York."
Strom continued: "Jeffries couldn't easily keep his mouth shut--he's from Brooklyn, after all, and will presumably be voting in the election himself. But as the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, he is also presumed to be speaking for more than himself. That's doubly true, as the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has positioned Mamdani as a model for where the party should go."
In ceding power to the socialist wing of the party, Democrats have badly weakened their party, growing only with self-described “white liberals” while losing ground with other voters, according to a new center-left group’s report, Semafor reported on Oct. 27.
The group, called Welcome, consulted hundreds of thousands of voters over six months. It found that 70% of voters think the Democra Party is “out of touch.”
Most voters, the group found, believe the party over-prioritizes issues like “protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans,” and “fighting climate change” while not caring about “securing the border” or “lowering the rate of crime.” (Welcome began as a PAC in 2022, then founded a nonprofit with the same name for political research.)
Along with the Mamdanis and the AOCs, the Democrats also have elevated political newcomers like Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas to party power status.
While being interviewed on a recent podcast, Crockett decided to opine on crime, saying: “Just because someone has committed a crime, it doesn’t make them a criminal.”
New York Post columnist Miranda Devine noted: "Of course, it’s nonsense. A criminal is defined precisely as a person who has committed a crime. But when Crockett chooses her own definitions, she is simply echoing a progressive shibboleth that has turned blue cities across the country into lawless hellholes. It holds that people who commit crimes have no agency—that they are helpless victims of circumstance. Therefore, any attempt to hold them accountable by arresting them or putting them in jail is unjust—it further victimizes them.
"The obvious result of this logic is that criminals are emboldened and their real victims become helpless hostages to lawlessness."
As for Mamdani's place in the party's pecking order, Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, made that clear, stating:
“Mamdani’s politics have a Rooseveltian quality to them. He really wants to rebuild an FDR coalition that is fundamentally committed to the success of the working and middle classes in his city.”
Outside deep Blue areas of the country, however, Mamdani "is political poison," Strom noted. "And the Republicans know it."
An Axios analysis noted:
"Move over, Rep. Nancy Pelosi: Republicans have found their bogeyman for 2026.
Why it matters: They are convinced that Mamdani's high name ID will make it easier to link a democratic socialist in New York to Democratic congressional candidates in battleground districts across the country.
Republicans have been preparing for Jeffries to endorse Mamdani for months.
In late July, they conducted a battleground poll of 1,000 respondents in 46 congressional districts to get a baseline reading on Mamdani's popularity. Their survey showed that Mamdani had an 81% name ID with a 25% favorability rating and 41% unfavorable."
Strom added that the Democrats "can't escape the rising power of their progressive wing. It's not that Jeffries or most Democrats fundamentally disagree with Mamdani or AOC, but they do understand that the keys to their victories have been sounding moderate while governing left. If they drop the former, the latter will kill them."
Greg Schultz, who managed Joe Biden’s 2020 primary campaign but was replaced for the general election, worked with Welcome to shape its report.
“For the last 20 years, Democrats have just misunderstood how you actually win elections,” Schultz told Semafor. “I thought Biden had proven in the 2020 primary that the base of the Democratic Party is a 58-year old woman without a college degree. But when you hear people in DC say ‘the base,’ they mean white intellectuals that live in a few coastal cities.”
Democrats are anticipating a decent off-year election for the party, eyeing gubernatorial wins in Virginia and New Jersey while getting California voters to wipe out five Republican-held congressional seats via referendum.
That would build on the Democrat optimism created by their special election wins and strong margins this year.
Citing the report by Welcome, Semafor warned: "Don’t get cocky. Democrats’ newer coalition is wealthier, more educated, and turns out far more easily than MAGA’s — but in the meantime, it keeps losing ground with less affluent voters and with unions. Those unions’ rank and file, increasingly, see Democrats as cultural elitists who look down on them and want to replace their jobs.
"The progressive response to that drift has been economic populism, promising new jobs and telling voters that Republicans use cultural wedge issues to distract them from tax cuts for the rich. Welcome’s report sees that remedy as ineffective, and the collapse in split-ticket voting in recent elections suggests the group may be right."
