Party Control Is Dead

From Mamdani to Trump’s Epstein fiasco, Americans are turning on their leaders

Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City and the MAGA revolt against Donald Trump over the Epstein files have one thing in common: people do not want to be managed by the two major political parties, nor the wonk brigade of supposed experts defending them.

It’s as if the voters are saying: ‘I’m in charge now.’ And it’s not hard to see why. Today marks the one year anniversary of Joe Biden dropping out of the presidential race. The timing could not be more poetic given what happened over the weekend.

On Saturday, 35-year-old Minnesota State Senator Omar Fateh won the Minnesota governing party’s endorsement for mayor of Minneapolis. Without any major organizational backing, Fateh defeated the two-term incumbent Jacob Frey, who had the backing of Senator Amy Klobuchar, former Minneapolis Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton, and a long list of party officials. 

Mamdani meanwhile is poised to become mayor of America’s largest city, winning the primary without the support of his party’s leadership and now snubbed by those very same “leaders” who made excuse after excuse for Biden right up until it was too late to find a candidate who might defeat Donald Trump.

Trump is left having to argue that the Jeffrey Epstein scandal is a nothingburger in response to an uprising of unruly MAGA voters, including even prominent influencers and members of Congress from his own party. Having flip flopped too many times to count, Trump has lost control of his once-faithful base.

Party discipline is on its deathbed. Good riddance.

Yes, Mamdani and Fateh are both millennial-aged Muslim men born to immigrant parents. But more substantive is their common message: both Fateh, and Mamdani ran campaigns focused on affordability and economic relief for the working class, including rent control to address the insane cost of housing (by now a national humiliation having put not only homeownership but even just renting out of reach for many.) Unlike many of their colleagues who might talk a good game about affordability, by focusing on rent control, Mamdani and Fateh gained credibility by identifying the problem as landlords, a powerful lobby others avoid crossing.

They both had gained further credibility by showing they were willing to go to war with their own party. Mamdani, of course, chose to campaign against the notoriously vindictive former Governor Cuomo, who had a seemingly endless list of party endorsements, including Bill Clinton, numerous members of Congress and countless state officials. Many were the very same officials who called for Cuomo’s resignation in 2021 amid allegations of misconduct!

Fateh had his own high-profile run-in with the most powerful figure in Minnesota. Legislation he introduced that would have provided minimum wage protections for rideshare app workers was vetoed by Governor Tim Walz in 2023. Yet Fateh was not afraid to criticize the governor and national party figure. 

“Today, we saw the power corporations hold on our government despite the trifecta,” Fateh said in a statement, referring to Democratic control of all three branches of Minnesota government. He then singled out the Walz administration, saying: “While Uber and Lyft had access to the administration and elected officials, I want to make it clear that not once has the administration reached out to the drivers. Not one conversation.”

The revolution will not be authorized by the party — at least not in its current form.

Democratic Party leaders still refuse to endorse Mamdani, who is poised to win the City with the same Uber and Lyft drivers and other unprecedented voices who have the temerity to vote. When asked if he would endorse Mamdani, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries continues to trot out the laughable excuse that “I don’t know him well.” 

In a lot of ways the intransigence by party leaders makes sense because this battle is existential for them. Polling shows that a majority of Democrats want to kick their party leaders to the curb. If the Mamdanis of the world keep winning, that’s what will happen.

Mark Halperin, the consummate Washington insider who was first to report that Joe Biden would drop out of the presidential race last year, alluded to this recently.

“ Hakeem Jeffries strongly believes that if Mamdani wins, he [Jeffries] can't win the majority,” Halperin said in a video discussion with Axios political reporter Hans Nichols, citing “people who’ve spoken directly with the leader.” 

For what it’s worth, Christiana Stephenson, a spokesperson for Jeffries, told me that Halperin’s claim “is patently false.” In any case, there’s already chatter about progressive Democrats considering primarying Jeffries next year. When asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about the possibility, Jeffries replied that “The problem is Donald Trump and House Republicans.”

That’s where both party leaders want their bases to focus: on the other side. President Trump made the same move when he declared that demands for the release of the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files was the work of the dastardly Democrats. 

"These files were made up by Comey, they were made up by Obama, they were made up by Biden,” Trump said. But Republican voters aren’t having any of it, with similar numbers of Republican voters (43%) feeling “dissatisfied” with the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein disclosures as Democrats (60%), according to a CNN poll. What’s more, only 4% of Republicans said they were satisfied vs. 3% for Democrats!

“You rarely ever see this type of agreement,” CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten said of the poll.

It’s also rare, maybe even unprecedented, to see Trump’s base stand up to him in such a fashion. But the Epstein issue is just a symptom of deeper discontent people have with the president as opposed to candidate Trump. Support for Trump’s immigration policies, his signature issue, is collapsing, recent polls suggest.

Stephen A. Smith, the sports commentator, captured the mood of the country best when he described Trump’s reelection as the voters having “forced the Republican Party to capitulate to the demands of their constituency” after the Party did everything they could to nominate someone else.

“Trump has been around since 2015. They had Christie, they had Kasich. They had Carly [Fiorini]...You had, later on, you had DeSantis, you had Nikki Haley, you had Ramaswamy. You had all of these people. It didn't matter … They looked the public in the face and they said — ‘We want him; we don't care what y'all want!’ — and forced the Republican Party to capitulate to the demands of their constituency.”

Smith’s remarks, made in an interview with a former Obama administration spokesperson Tommy Vietor, then turned to the Democratic Party, who he said “are too busy trying to pick candidates for the American people instead of listening to the American people tell you who they want.”

Then began a tirade that I think diagnosed the political moment better than anything I’ve seen:

“The last Democrat that the American people told you they wanted was Barack Obama.

Hillary Clinton — ‘It’s her turn.’ Bernie Sanders had momentum! [But] ‘It's Hillary's turn.’

Joe Biden captured momentum because representative Clyburn got involved in South Carolina, saved his behind … ‘It's really, really his turn.’

Okay, he has no business running for reelection, but everybody went for it, knowing he was supposed to be transitioning, he's going to be 81 years of age. Then you sit up there. He doesn't have a primary. Then he goes on the debate stage, embarrasses himself. Then y'all still let him take three damn weeks to walk away instead of getting the hell out there immediately, so you can see if there's somebody other than Kamala Harris who could be the Democratic nominee.

Then she gets the nomination and everybody wants to act like she's the rock star. All of y'all wanted all along. Oh my God, let's throw up our hands and just to say, ‘Hey, she is The One,’ when you know, good and damn well, that wasn't the truth … 

 The Democrats somehow, some way, have gotten away with ignoring the constituency and compelling the constituency to capitulate to what they want as a party.

And that is the problem. And that's why I said it all needs to go.

Some of those candidates need to go, the pundits, the strategists, they need to go. Whoever was involved with the latest election from a strategy standpoint, every one of them should be fired. Every one of them. We're cleaning house.”

On the one year anniversary of Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential election, a humiliation that could have been avoided had he listened to the majority of voters — including even those from his own party — that did not want him to run for reelection. Public polling had shown that for months, as I wrote then.

This time, voters aren’t asking. Or waiting.

— Edited by William M. Arkin