We’ve been told loyalty to the Democratic machine is loyalty to the party, that patience is a virtue, and that pushing back on the status quo is naive. I’ve sat in enough rooms to tell you that’s not strategy. That’s self-preservation dressed up as wisdom, and voters are done buying it.
This past week’s primaries across New York told the story plainly. Candidates who owe nothing to the old alliances of big money and corporate donors are winning, not because voters suddenly became radicals, but because people are exhausted by leaders who talk at them instead of with them.
I had a conversation recently with a male Black political consultant, well respected in Harlem, with decades in local politics. We got into Mamdani, and two things stood out. First, a fair ask: that he do more direct, sustained work with the Black community, a critique I take seriously. Second, when I asked why he’d still back Cuomo, a man who left office facing thirteen sexual misconduct allegations, two settled by the state for close to a million dollars combined, plus ethical violations and court costs we footed, more energy went into doubting Mamdani than reckoning with that record.
When I mentioned Mamdani had just closed a twelve billion dollar budget gap, the largest since the Great Recession, without raising property taxes or cutting a single assistance program, by ordering every agency to appoint a Chief Savings Officer to root out waste, he wasn’t aware of it. His response: “Well, I’m curious to see how this plays out.”
That response is the whole problem. We’ve been told government has to be slow and disappointing, and even people who should be paying the closest attention, especially Black and brown communities who’ve borne the brunt of “the way things are done,” have internalized that trying something different is naive. It isn’t. It’s overdue. Did it not matter that these policies would directly benefit communities like his own?
You saw the same dynamic closer to home, in the Greenburgh Town Supervisor primary. Paul Feiner has held that office for more than thirty years, long enough that voters were hungry for change, just not change handed to them by the same leadership that gave us Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo. Barry McGoey ran as the challenger, heavily endorsed by our Westchester County Democratic Committee, of which I am a member, with money, institutional muscle, and slanderous, manipulative tactics behind him. McGoey, a registered Republican from 1997 to 2006, raised more than half his campaign funds from Yonkers-linked unions tied to his prior work there. And still, Feiner won. Greenburgh wasn’t willing to trade a supervisor known for picking up the phone for every constituent for a candidate manufactured by party leadership.
The poster child for this leadership style is Congressman George Latimer, who built his career as a man of the people and now, after taking AIPAC and corporate money, won’t hold town halls, calling the political climate “too toxic.” Check his voting record against his donor list and draw your own conclusions. But technology and social platforms, the very tools the establishment hoped to use to control the narrative, have instead handed voters the receipts.
I’ve sat inside this Democratic committee and watched it happen: the WCDC is shamefully tilted toward conventional, corporate-backed candidates, and punishes anyone who breaks from that mold, especially progressives and anyone critical of Israel’s policies. I’ve watched leadership change voting thresholds on the fly, from two-thirds to a simple majority, whenever it benefited their preferred candidate, as it did for the town clerk position a few years back, regardless of what the bylaws say.
That is not democracy. That is a committee protecting itself instead of the voters it exists to serve. They poured resources into McGoey and gave Feiner nothing simply because he wasn’t their chosen man, and to date still haven’t acknowledged this week’s local Democratic victories.
Mamdani winning, Feiner winning: different races, same thread. Voters are doing their own math now, and aren’t afraid to say when it doesn’t add up. They’re not moved by labels, and they’re not scared into compliance. Leadership built on obedience and donor relationships is watching that model collapse, and the only thing left for them is to decide whether to lead differently, or get out of the way for people who will
Well said! Local party committees and leaders need to do a better job of finding candidates to run that are representative of the community. They tend to either be reactive and support someone who independently decided to run or only select someone in their political circles. I’m sure there are many residents of unincorporated Greenburgh that are well qualified to serve on the Town Board and/or replace Feiner. The Hispanic community deserves representation on the Board for example. The younger generation that are struggling with housing costs deserve representation. And it wouldn’t hurt to have a CPA on the Board or serve as Town Supervisor.