“Kathy Hochul: Why I Am Endorsing Zohran Mamdani.”
When New York City Council member Robert Holden, a lifelong Democrat, saw that headline from The New York Times in his X feed on Monday morning, he gulped.
There she goes, kowtowing to the radical left, he remembered thinking.
Holden, a 73-year-old Queens native, told me that there was a time when it would have been unthinkable for New York’s governor to endorse a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) like Mamdani, who seems all but certain to become New York City’s next mayor.
For months now, prominent Democrats—especially in New York—have been under pressure to line up behind Mamdani. Over the weekend, Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen blasted his party’s leadership for failing to endorse the Democratic nominee.
“Many Democratic members of the Senate and the House representing New York have stayed on the sidelines,” Van Hollen told the crowd at an Iowa fundraiser. “That kind of spineless politics is what people are sick of. They need to get behind him and get behind him now.”
The fact that Hochul was one of the first to fold—ahead of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries—speaks less to her conviction than to her calculation. It is an admission of the real center of power: the DSA, which is threatening to challenge incumbents in primaries who refuse to get with the program.
