Mike the Mad Biologist

While there has been wailing and gnashing of teeth over how Mamdani-backed candidates seized all three branches of governmentwon three Democratic primaries, what these elections show is how bad Democratic moderates are at turning out their supporters. In the most publicized Democratic primary race, the Chevalier-Espaillat race in NY-13, the DSA-backed candidate Chevalier received ~9.7% of eligible Democratic primary votes, while the moderate Democrat, Espillat, received around nine percent of eligible Democratic primary votes (the Democratic primaries are the de facto election).

Regardless of what one thinks about Chevalier (I have some serious doubts), all Espaillat needed to do was to convince one percent of eligible Democratic primary voters to vote for him. It’s not like there was high turnout or a huge margin of defeat, which would have forced him to ‘convert’ over Chevalier voters, he should have been able to do that. Considering eighty percent of eligible voters didn’t vote at all, getting one out of eighty stay-at-home voters to show up and vote should be easy for someone who has held the seat for a decade. Yet he couldn’t do that.

That’s not even the worst case: in a NY state assembly race in New York City, the DSA candidate won with seven percent of the eligible vote (to the non-DSA candidate’s five percent). When the overwhelming majority of voters stay home, it should not be hard to find votes.

Higher primary turnout would be preferable for democracy as a whole–and D.C.’s Democratic primaries had 38.7% turnout (good job everyone, but let’s do even better next time!). By the way, in D.C., the democratic socialist still won the mayor’s race, even with that level of turnout. But when moderates with the advantages of incumbency lose low turnout primaries, that’s not a problem of party takeovers or voter foolishness, that’s a failure by establishment candidates to turnout their own voters.