Kamala Harris Shows How Easy it Is For Real Democrats to Endorse Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s Next Mayor

If you still think the left is the only intransigent force in the Democratic Party, you’re either not paying attention or you are and you’re pretending to not see what Kamala Harris sees when she shut down all this nonsense with a very good and straightforward answer to Rachel Maddow’s good and straightforward question about this budding kerfuffle with Democratic leadership.

Kamala Harris on Mamdani: Look, as far as I’m concerned, he’s the democratic nominee and he should be supported.

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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) September 22, 2025 at 7:42 PM

Is that so hard Schumer? Why won’t Jeffries say the same thing? Is it because Kamala Harris is smarter and braver than both of them combined? Obviously (this is not a compliment to Kamala, just a statement of fact about her basic competence), but there is another obvious link here worth digging into: Democratic donors. New York Democratic donors have been very clear and consistent all year long that they would rather join with Trump donors behind Andrew Cuomo than support the Democrat who got more votes than any New York City primary candidate ever. Jeffries’ and Schumer’s resistance to joining New York Governor Kathy Hochul, speaker of the New York State Assembly Carl Heastie, chairwoman of the New York Congressional Black Caucus Yvette D. Clarke, and New York State comptroller Thomas DiNapoli as well as many other powerful New York Democrats in endorsing the presumptive next mayor of New York City just proves how much they let donors dictate their actions. Also, how much they apparently love losing.

Mamdani’s race has really been illuminating, in that it has helped Kathy Hochul find her backbone and lead her to a huge recovery in the polls, and she is an example of how it has separated actual Democrats who have some kind of principle to respond to small-d democratic accountability (or at least see the political upside in genuflecting to it), and the authoritarians in the donor wing of the party who have no problem overruling popular will for Andrew fucking Cuomo because they would rather burn the entire world to ash than admit that it’s not 1996 anymore.

So yesterday Trump designated Antifa terrorists alongside a White House fact sheet on the “radical left” threat. Democratic Leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer haven’t said a word about it.

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein.bsky.social) September 23, 2025 at 8:53 AM

These people should be shunned out of the party. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and their donors are the avatars for, and the authors of this historic collapse in support for the Democratic Party. They have overseen an era where every poll shows how Trump is dramatically underwater even with non-MAGA Republican voters on core parts of his policy platform, but those same polls still show the Democratic Party as more unpopular than Donald Trump. Do you know how incompetent you have to be to be more unpopular than a guy polling in the 30s? That’s the current New York Congressional Democratic delegation’s legacy.

If you are in a position of leadership in the Democratic Party, and you cannot bring yourself to endorse the Democratic nominee to be mayor of America’s largest city, you should not be in leadership. Period. You shouldn’t even be in the Democratic Party honestly. We on the left have long been lectured by this wing of the party that Democrats not supporting Democrats in elections is a cardinal sin, which means that Schumer and Jeffries are clearly in the pro-Trump and Cuomo wing of the party. If you think that’s harsh, welcome to what being a Bernie Sanders supporter has been like the last nine years. Neville Chamberlain is off the hook, history has a new set of shockingly spineless capitulators to authoritarianism, and they are the two most powerful Democrats in the country who also happen to be the most cowardly and feckless.