Stop Unmarrying Economic and Social Concerns
The centrist instinct from a fossilizing age.
One of the recurrent features of yesterday’s electoral chatter I have noticed is the need to reframe the results to fit someone’s prior narrative about the Democratic party. The centrist camp brings elite proximity and lived experience in the middle of policy and political environs that guided the nation into this moment. But that same environment is filled with miscalculations rooted in the belief that you can separate economic and social messaging.
Some centrist pundits are concluding that “affordability” is the reason Zohran Mamdani, New York’s first Muslim mayor, was able to inspire New Yorkers to come out and vote in numbers not seen in a mayoral election since 1969. This is true, to an extent. Mamdani was also very forthright about his disgust with global Islamophobia and how it is weaponized, while clearly denouncing Antisemitism repeatedly, despite a lot of centrist political talk claiming that he didn’t. In this way, Mamdani marries economic concerns with straightforwardness about social problems. These two things matter greatly to voters in a time of rising cultural animosity and anxiety as demographic change knocks on America’s doorstep.
The WelcomePAC crowd, the self-appointed whisperers of suburban moderates, would have you believe that Democrats must split their message like a cold grilled cheese: keep the economy on one plate, the social stuff on another, and don’t let the sauces mix. In a 2025 memo, they advised Dems to affirmatively moderate not just their campaigns but also their governance on issues like climate, democracy reform, and identity.
God forbid anyone mention race and rent control in the same breath.
But here’s the rub: that split doesn’t reflect how people actually live. Nobody wakes up saying, “Today I’ll care about inflation, but tomorrow I’ll think about whether I feel safe in my neighborhood as a queer person or a person of color.”
Mamdani didn’t make that mistake.
His rent freeze platform, his commitment to city-run grocery stores, and his refusal to separate the economic from the cultural resonated. He treated New Yorkers like they’re smart enough to hold two thoughts in their head at once, because they are.
Sadly, the formal neoliberal and neoconservative center thought the two could be separated by a need for easy messaging and a lack of imagination in the way backlash would dictate the politics of post-Civil Rights America. The former political center that logically gave us Donald Trump after ignoring a rising racism that tragically nestled into the Republican party after decades of short-sighted strategy, throwing social animosity at a base not friendly to the social gains of midcentury America, is now making the same mistakes.
It was the old triangulating logic: pitch economic deregulation and welfare “reform” to win over suburbanites while offering nods to multiculturalism that cost nothing and change less.
It’s the Clinton model, the Obama compromise, and the Harris flameout.
The separation strategy has repeatedly failed, at scale. Voters feel it. You can’t un-marry economic and social life in a country that literally industrialized slavery, baked racism into housing codes, and then told working-class people that tax breaks for billionaires would trickle down like moral clarity.
Donald Trump’s administration understood that, albeit through the dark glass of right-wing grievance. He fused a kind of economic populism (phony, sure, but rhetorically potent) with White identity politics. And that cocktail, as ugly as it was, sold. Mamdani, thankfully, offers a radically different, but equally fused vision. Bread-and-butter issues delivered through a framework of inclusion and equity. He didn’t run from his identity, nor from the city’s economic decay. He ran through them. That matters.
And let’s not pretend Mamdani’s success came from some fluke progressive bubble. He won with real turnout — over 2 million votes cast — the highest since 1969. He won despite being red-baited relentlessly. He won because he put his platform where voters live: in their rent bills, in their commutes, in their dignity. And yeah, he won with a plurality in a fractured race. But guess what? So did plenty of other mayors, governors, and presidents we now quote in coffee table books.
It’s challenging to see Virginia and New Jersey as bellwethers for whether Democrats should channel the old center, because they are states with relatively high income and educational levels compared to the rest of the nation, and those candidates also benefit from the extremities of the Republican party going full Southern Strategy in the post-Obama era. You could say the same about California Proposition 50, a move to counteract GOP gerrymandering by suspending independent redistricting—a desperate maneuver, yes—but one born from structural reality. Gerrymandered states like Texas, North Carolina, and Florida have rigged the map so tightly that even if Dems win the popular vote nationally, they could still lose the House.
This is the world Mamdani and voters are navigating: one where the Senate overrepresents conservative rural states, the House is gerrymandered into unreality, and the Electoral College ensures that a few counties in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin matter more than millions in New York or California. Against that backdrop, a mayor who says the quiet part out loud about social inequity and offers actual economic relief is revolutionary.
Candidates who can be forthright about both social animosity, like bigotry, and also how, in America specifically, that is connected to economic demagoguery and decline, will be successful. Even if it reveals a darkness about the practical outcomes of decades of centrist messaging that swept bigotry under the rug, even as it was openly connected to hollowing out the social safety net by saying it is only helping minorities and the lazy, and not all Americans. That is a legacy of the Goldwater-to-Bush Republican party and of the Democratic party's catering to that framework. That was the limiting principle that led to many of the failures in the Obama administration, but also repudiating that led to its successes in health care and gay marriage.
And if some centrist pundits are struggling to compute that, if it’s still emotionally too taxing to admit what they helped enable, then no shade.
I get it.
It must be hard to watch someone use a class clown framework to turn a decades-old debate club into an egg-on-face contest. But that’s what happens when the debate club spends half a century ignoring the fire under the floorboards.
The centrist punditry from the “before times” is still writing from an operating system that treats identity as a PR problem and class as a series of minor tweaks. But voters know better. Mamdani’s win wasn’t just about being left-wing. It was about telling the truth: that you can’t fix the economy without confronting the ways it’s been designed to exclude, exploit, and extract based on race, religion, gender, and geography. The political class may flinch from that marriage. But the electorate, especially the working-class and multiracial electorate, knows they’ve been hitched from the start.
The Democratic party and pro-democracy coalition as a whole needs to leave centrist pundits from the “before times” as footnotes in a dying political tradition that allowed for racist carnival barking to move into the White House twice, the second time after a coup attempt. It’s a lot simpler than the centrist elites and pundits make it seem, and Zohran Mamdani showed that, and you can be a democratic capitalist or fan of mixed economies and see that with intellectual honesty and an eye for history.
So here’s the real takeaway: Democrats don’t need to sound more like the past or storytellers clinging to it emotionally. They need to sound more like Mamdani: grounded, bold, unafraid to connect the dots between your rent, your rights, and the rotten infrastructure of American politics.
That’s not radical.
That’s reality.
