A socialist was elected Mayor of New York City. That’s really not shocking. Trump had 69% disapproval amongst NYC voters yesterday, and the only other real option was Andrew Cuomo. I don’t need to add to that. 50.4% selecting Zohran Mamdani given that Donald Trump was backing Andrew Cuomo and the other guy was a vigilante, is not all that impressive. If Mamdani wasn’t a socialist and didn’t make it clear he doesn’t like Jewish people, he’d probably have reached 69%. The fact that he didn’t means a lot of anti-Trump voters couldn’t come around to backing him. In fact, only a little better than 7 in 10 anti-Trump voters selected him, and I assume the rest probably voted for Cuomo. When you think about it that way, it’s not so wildly impressive.

Ok, here’s the small reality check, if you need one. Yesterday definitely suggested 2026 could be a really good year for Democrats. Joe Emrick might finally lose. We should beat Ryan Mackenzie if we nominate the right candidate. Let’s go back to the Mamdani example for a moment, and treat him as charitably as we can. Let’s assume he’d still get 7 in 10 anti-Trump voters in the Lehigh Valley and everywhere, even though most of the places we are going to discuss are less liberal than the Big Apple. 55% of New Jersey voters didn’t approve of Trump. If Mamdani got the same 73% of the anti-Trump vote there, he would be at 40.15%. Mikie Sherrill got 56.3% in the actual New Jersey race, or a bit more than 100% of those votes. How about in Virginia, where 56% of voters didn’t approve of Trump? That comes out to 40.88%. Abigail Spanberger got 57.2%, or also just north of 100% of anti-Trump voters. Sherrill and Spanberger got about 102% of the anti-Trump vote and Mamdani got 73%. More of the country will have Trump’s negatives in the 50’s and maybe low 60’s next year, as opposed to New York City’s 69%. Since Mamdani literally got a bare majority of the vote with Trump at 69% disapproval, you would basically need Trump’s actual disapproval to be at 68% in any district to be able to win with a candidate like Mamdani. That’s not going to be the case in any competitive race. For argument’s sake, California had Trump’s disapproval at 63% last night. If Mamdani got that same 73% of anti-Trump vote in California, he’d be at 45.99%. There are going to be a lot of races on the board in California next year. A socialist candidate viewed as friendly to Hamas/oppositional to Israel, like Mamdani, would probably lose in many California seats. For what it’s worth, Proposition 50, the re-districting question, got 63.9% of the vote, or roughly 101% of anti-Trump votes.

Here in the Lehigh Valley, Nadeem Qayyum won a seat on the Northampton County Council. Let me be clear, I didn’t support him. I waited until after the election to say this because it’s not my place, but Qayyum told members of the Lehigh Valley Labor Council in an endorsement interview that he planned to announce after he was elected that he was the first socialist elected in Northampton County. Even Nadeem knew he had to hide some things. Even as Nadeem lied about being a socialist, he still only got 85.25% of what Tara Zrinski received with the same voters. We know even less about Theresa Fadem. Never the less, they won in spite of plenty of other problems. All of the Democrats beat all of the Republicans though, and by a lot (almost 10,000 votes out of 91,000 votes cast). I’ll get deeper into this later, but the key to the Democratic victory *appears* to not just be vote-by-mail, which was up by close to 5,000 votes in the end, but actually the Election Day surge of anti-Trump voters. Election Day voting was up by 14,000 votes from 2023 to 2025. It’s rather clear by the margins that these people were voting for Democrats, and Democrats only.

So what does all of this mean here? Let’s assume for a second that Tara Zrinski and Josh Siegel got an even 100% of the anti-Trump votes last night in the County Executive races. That’s 59.38% in Northampton County and 60.61% in Lehigh County. A Mamdani-like candidate would get 43.35% in Northampton County and 44.25% in Lehigh County. That’s also assuming next year’s electorate is exactly like this year’s, and well, look at the 2022 numbers (which probably won’t be exact either, but still much closer) in Northampton and Lehigh. You go from just shy of 187,000 votes in the two counties to well over 260,000. The GOP, even if they’re doing awful, will do a little better than this year, and I’m not including Carbon, which actually voted NO on retention for the Supreme Court Judges last night, so Trump may still be in the positive there. I’ll go with the average in Northampton and Lehigh County though today, 60% anti-Trump voters. That’s 43.8%.

Where am I going with this? Well first off, Mark Pinsley basically has the same policy views as Mamdani (I don’t consider him to be as bad of a guy), so nominating him is very likely to end in a loss. Then there’s Bob Brooks, a guy who has deep flaws that cut across party lines, and has the same consultants as Mamdani, and is supported by Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, a large cadre of the Mamdani supporters on the national level. Assuming Democrats can stomach the racism and other issues, he doesn’t deteriorate further than Mamdani’s share of the anti-Trump vote, Brooks is probably not doing much better than 44% because his policies and rhetoric is Mamdani’s rhetoric. I’m sure he’ll try to distance himself, like say John Fetterman, but does anyone want to send another version of Shrek to Congress. And what if he does fool people into thinking he’s not a bad guy, like Fetterman? Maybe he gets the more like 85% of the anti-Trump vote and gets to 51.15%, not factoring in Carbon and increased Republican turnout? He still probably narrowly loses. Candidates like Bob Brooks are gigantic risks to maybe lose a winnable race, or be the next John Fetterman. He should be DOA in the PA-7 Democratic Primary, and any efforts to push him by the state Democratic Party are emphatically stupid. We don’t need the Harrisburg insiders pushing their candidate.

As for Ryan Crosswell? Maybe he could win a general election running as a union busting, Trump Democrat. Why would you want that?

Candidates like Zohran Mamdani are fine for New York City. I wish he had lost, and I think the result was bad for New York, but they chose him. Candidates like Zohran Mamdani are not going to win us seats like NJ-7 or PA-7. Candidates like Mamdani wouldn’t represent upgrades in state legislative races in the Lehigh Valley either. We need to reject these folks. Failure to do so will not be unlike Tea Party Republicans nominating the “witch lady” for Delaware Senate in 2020, but they also have the longterm impact the Tea Party had on the GOP as well. I don’t want the Democratic Party to simply be a liberal flip side of the Trump coin. It won’t win, and it’s bad for America.