Kamala Harris made a phone call last week. On the other end was Zohran Mamdani, the young New York mayor who has become the face of the party’s ascendant left. The talk ran long. It was, by all accounts, the first of many.
The subject was the future of the Democratic Party. That future, increasingly, runs through people like Mamdani, and Harris seems to know it.
The timing tells the story. Days before the call, Democratic socialists backed by the mayor won three New York congressional primaries, unseating two sitting members of Congress. Reps. Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, long fixtures of city politics, are on their way out. Mamdani’s hand is getting stronger, and the people who want to lead the party in 2028 have noticed.
“This is about positioning for the 2028 primary,” Republican consultant Mike Madrid told The California Post. He called it a bet on where the party is heading on Palestinian rights, a lane nobody has fully claimed yet but everybody expects to exist. A risky move, he allowed. But the calculation now favors action over caution.
For Harris, the outreach is a kind of repair work. Her 2024 campaign never found its footing with Arab American and progressive voters, in part because she would not break from President Biden on Gaza. She is trying to fix that now. She has met quietly for months with left-wing organizers, including figures from the pro-Palestinian Uncommitted Movement, along with longtime DNC member James Zogby and Michigan’s Abbas Alawieh.
Alawieh said she asked for the meeting. He said he pressed her to oppose spending American tax dollars on harm to civilians, and shared accounts of constituents who lost relatives in airstrikes backed by U.S. support.
The pattern is not confined to New York. In Los Angeles, Councilmember Nithya Raman is challenging Mayor Karen Bass. In Washington, DSA member Janeese Lewis George won the Democratic mayoral primary. In Colorado, democratic socialist Melat Kiros defeated 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette and is set to become the first Gen Z woman in Congress.
Something is moving in the Democratic electorate. Harris, whose caution once cost her, has decided this time to move with it.
