Democratic Strategist

1 day ago | thedemocraticstrategist.org | Ed Kilgore

One of the reasons Zohran Mamdani’s smashing victory yesterday created such a sensation is that public polls (overall) did a poor job of predicting the size and shape of both his and Andrew Cuomo’s coalitions in the Democratic mayoral primary. An average of these polls prepared by Race to the WH showed Cuomo with 36.4 percent of first-choice ballots and Mamdani with 28.6 percent.

2 days ago | thedemocraticstrategist.org | Ed Kilgore

At New York, I wrote a post about Andrew Cuomo and the sort of faux-centrism I believe he represents–the week before the former governor went down to a shocking defeat in the New York Democratic mayoral primary. Maybe I was on to something….

1 week ago | thedemocraticstrategist.org | Ed Kilgore

Keeping up with the norms being violated by the second Trump administration is tough, but I did write about an important one this week at New York:Donald Trump and Stephen Miller have an arithmetic problem with their mass-deportation initiative. They appear frantic to ramp up deportations. Miller reportedly chewed out ICE brass (“Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?”) on the numbers not long before the agency launched its fateful raids in Los Angeles.

2 weeks ago | thedemocraticstrategist.org | Ed Kilgore

Vivek Ramaswamy is too young to remember George Wallace. I remember him well, which is why Ramaswamy’s snarky effort to compare Gavin Newsom to him drove me to a refutation at New York:The last time tech bro turned politician Vivek Ramaswamy waded into American political history, he was touting Richard Nixon as the inspiration for his own foreign-policy thinking, so to speak.

2 weeks ago | thedemocraticstrategist.org | Ed Kilgore

In the second Trump administration, Democrats have had trouble finding a focal point for their opposition to the 47th president’s riotous agenda. It’s significant that the most galvanizing moments for congressional Democrats have been the scattered and uncoordinated signage they displayed during Trump’s address to Congress in March and a 26-hour filibuster by Senator Cory Booker in April. Neither provided much in the way of clear and sustainable leadership.