Can Progressive Mayors Redeem the Democratic Party?

Back during Michelle Wu’s first run for mayor of Boston, in 2src21, I joined a Zoom call to help boost support for her strong climate policies. During the pandemic years, Zoom calls were politics, but I still often find myself on them, in the process meeting candidates for local offices around the country. It’s a good analgesic for the wearying cynicism that is the hallmark of the moment, since these people are often idealistic, enthusiastic, and smart. But, once in a while, you encounter true political talent—something that is as rare but as obvious as, say, great athletic prowess or a deep musical gift. That was Wu. Even with the awkwardness of Zoom—“Unmute!”—she seemed able to project both intelligence and, for lack of a better word, kindness: not an emotional Bill Clinton I-feel-your-pain response, but a sense that she was concerned with the problems presented and had the wherewithal to take them on.

I know people who insist that when they first heard Barack Obama’s keynote speech at the 2srcsrc4 Democratic National Convention, in Boston, they knew he would one day be President, and I confess that I had the same feeling when I first heard Wu. Bostonians picked her from a crowded field in that first run, and two weeks ago she essentially won a second term eight weeks before the election, beating the Democrat Josh Kraft, the second-place challenger in the city’s nonpartisan primary, seventy-two per cent to twenty-three. Given Boston’s top-two system, Kraft, who is the son of the billionaire owner of the Patriots, could have stayed in the race until November, but he decided on a graceful exit. If there’s an election at all, Wu will be the only name on the ballot.

Much has been made recently of the plight of the congressional Democratic Party, as it struggles to find a response to President Donald Trump’s unprecedented assault on our system of government—a bumbling that has resulted in record-low approval ratings. And much has been made of Zohran Mamdani’s rapid rise in the world’s media center, as he came out of the general vicinity of nowhere to clobber Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary. Both are important stories, but I think they may be caught up in a larger one: it’s possible that the Democrats are assembling a new way of governing, not at the federal level but at the municipal one. Three candidates for election in major cities this fall exemplify that possibility: Wu, in Boston; Mamdani, lucky in his choice of opponents and now far ahead in the polls; and Katie Wilson, in Seattle, who came through her primary nearly ten points in front of the incumbent Democrat, Bruce Harrell, whom she will face again in November. (Seattle’s system is similar to Boston’s.) They’re all relatively young and “progressive,” and they all, crucially, seem to be avoiding many of the well-worn grooves of American political fights by figuring out ways to talk about things that actually matter to the diverse pool of voters who will inevitably make up more and more of the electorate. That is, they don’t just make affordability or crime or livability a “theme” in their campaigns and hit up millionaires to make ads about them; they take it for granted that those are the daily struggles of many of their constituents and make those issues their focus, suggesting new ways to take them on. In the process, they each appear to be short-circuiting the cynicism I described before: voters seem won over not because they’re necessarily convinced that these politicians can solve all their city’s troubles but because these candidates seem likely to at least try.

Wilson, for instance, entered politics by founding Seattle’s Transit Riders Union, which won free bus rides for young people across the city. As an activist, she helped write the JumpStart tax bill, which raises taxes not on employees but on the corporations that pay the heftiest salaries. In February, Mayor Harrell, at the behest of local heavies such as Amazon and Microsoft, led the opposition to a referendum on another tax on those companies which would help pay for public, mixed-income housing in a city that desperately needs it. The law passed in a landslide, which seemed to confirm the idea that he was an old-school Dem, opening the door for Wilson’s challenge.

Wu—the first woman of color elected mayor of a city that has held a reputation for racism—has gained national attention this year for standing up to Trump on immigration. (Wearing an Ash Wednesday smudge on her forehead, she faced down with aplomb a congressional panel investigating her “sanctuary city”; it followed a few weeks after the border czar, Tom Homan, said that he would be “bringing hell” to Boston.) But she won all twenty-two of the city’s wards in this month’s primary because she has paved streets, dealt with subway crises, and turned Boston into an almost unbelievably safe city. Last year, the city saw just twenty-four homicides.

As for Mamdani, the forces of Cuomo, Trump, and Rupert Murdoch have all tried to paint him as a dangerous radical who will fuel antisemitism across the five boroughs, even as, by passing higher taxes on the wealthy, he will drive the city’s billionaires to Florida. In response, Mamdani focussed on such things as the Thirty-fourth Street busway. The manner in which he addressed it, of course, is telling—alongside his former primary opponent the city comptroller Brad Lander (the city’s highest-ranking elected Jewish progressive, whose support has helped undercut the antisemitism angle), Mamdani demonstrated that he could walk across town faster than the bus could move through traffic.

Mamdani clearly knows how to communicate ebullience, a talent that is all the more potent for its scarcity in current political life. (Where Republicans now specialize in rage, Democrats tend toward the anodyne—think Chuck Schumer and his “very strong” letters to Trump.) He also shows a deep knowledge of the city’s history—witness his recent video, about the nineteenth-century investigative reporter Nellie Bly, which he used to introduce his proposals for addressing the issue of mentally ill people on the streets. And, unlike many politicians who play up urban troubles the better to cast themselves as savior, Mamdani seems to truly love the town where he lives. Usually clad in a white shirt and skinny tie, he’s somehow reminiscent of J.F.K., who campaigned with a twinkle in his eye. Fiorello La Guardia, New York’s three-term progressive mayor, also had that gift, and so does A.O.C., who won her House seat on the strength of her bartender and “Congresswomen-dance-too!” spirit as much as on her policy positions. In an Insta age, that kind of joie de vivre is remarkably effective.