Hyperventilating political prognosticators don’t always get it right. 

“(New York City) Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his Democratic Socialists of America are now the most capable political force in the Democratic Party heading into 2028,” John Ketcham and Christian Browne at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative policy think tank, just wrote in City Journal. “In yesterday’s primaries in New York, his three endorsed candidates beat better-established adversaries, demonstrating how Mamdani and the DSA have become the face of the party’s progressive wing.”

“…the Democratic Party has been taken over by socialists,” says Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, who represents a suburban New York House seat.

Zeteo, a left-leaning digital media company, says “a new politics is brewing. And the epicenter is New York City.”

Wait a minute. Before other pundits and the public accept this assertion, let’s step back and examine what just happened in New York City, focusing on one of the winning socialist candidates, Darializa Avila Chevalier.

32-year-old Chevalier is no shrinking violet. In 2020, she branded Joe Biden a “rapist” and a “war criminal” and called the US a “fucking disgrace”. The day after the horrific October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre of Jews in Israel, she joined a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square organized by leftist groups that appeared to celebrate the event. In posts onTwitter from 2018 through 2022, she maligned interracial relationships. She’s written that Russia invaded Ukraine because the United States had “been bullying Russia”. In a tweet disparaging America, she wrote, “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me”. 

Voter apathy in primary races is the culprit here, as in so many political contests across the country. That, combined with the creation of safe districts across the country, is increasingly causing primaries to be the real elections.

In looking at the New York primary race, it’s important to recognize not only that the race was limited to registered Democrats, of which there are 373,000 in the District NY-13, but that only 67,473 voters participated in the primary, or 18.09 percent. That allowed the Democratic Socialists to wield disproportionate influence. Of those, who bothered to vote, just 32,790 voted for Chevalier, who came out ahead of her main challenger, Adriano Espaillat, by only 2,326 votes.

City Journal acknowledged this in a post on June 27: “Turnout in New York’s closed primary races is typically small—even Mamdani won last year’s Democratic mayoral primary with less than 7 percent of the city’s overall population backing him. Tuesday’s results do not prove, then, that the majority of residents in New York are hard-left socialists. They instead suggest that, since most potential voters remain politically apathetic, a small but well-organized machine like the DSA’s can deliver big results.”

There’s a parallel here with Democratic Socialist Janeese Lewis George’s  victory in Washington, D.C’s mayoral Democratic primary, which has led some to declare her win a mandate. There are approximately 357,000 registered Democrats in Washington, D.C., making up roughly 75% of all registered voters in the District. Only about 38% of registered Democrats voted and Janeese Lewis George won with just 75,000 votes. A mandate? Hardly.

So, calm down folks.

This isn’t to say, however, that the new socialist legislators in the House, largely a result of voter lethargy, won’t muck things up.

As commentator Gerard Baker has observed, “The victory by “democratic socialists” and their allies in New York Democratic primaries last week is a signal moment in the nation’s descent into political dystopia. In it we see a Democratic base, relatively small in number but energized by anti-Trump rage, that has decided that the Black Lives Matter, No Such Thing as a Woman, Mostly Peaceful Rioting that the party nourished under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is too timid for their tastes.

Sure, we can overstate its importance. New York isn’t America. What passes for cool radicalism in Brooklyn’s Park Slope would get you a psychiatric evaluation in most of the country.”

Also, even if the Democrats retake the House in November, their margin is likely to be slim and an enlarged cadre of disruptors will be able to challenge leadership. Republicans are also likely to try to tar the entire Democratic Party for its association with the Democratic Socialists. President Trump has already called the socialist nominees “godless” communists who are threatening the country. At a Faith and Freedom Coalition gathering, he urged religious conservatives to prevent a “communist” victory in the midterms, saying his pro-Christian policies would be reversed if Democrats returned to power. 

And right on cue, Mike Marinella, a spokesperson for National Republican Congressional Committee, said, “Tonight wasn’t just a bad night for so-called ‘Leader’ Hakeem Jeffries. It was the night the Democrat establishment officially surrendered to Zohran Mamdani and the socialist wing of their party. Every House Democrat, in safe and competitive districts alike, will now answer to the radicals calling the shots. And Americans should be terrified by where the Democrat Party is headed.”

Hang on.