The Agreeable Primary
Why Candidates In 2026 Democratic Primaries Around the City (And Nationwide) Refuse to Disagree with Each Other on Policy. (Plus, a Podcast Announcement!)
Programming Note: I’m launching a new podcast series about the NY-12 race. It’s called District Twelve, and the first three episodes are out now. If you enjoy this blog, I hope you check them out, I think you’ll really like them. I spoke to the West Side Rag’s Gus Saltonstall, the Three Parks Independent Democrats’s Daniel Marks Cohen, and Four Freedoms Democrats’s Jaime Berman.
“You have a bunch of wonderful candidates up here who would all make great members of Congress,” Alex Bores told the crowd at a candidate forum a few weeks ago. “I want to emphasize that we’re going to vote the same way 90 to 95% of the time. You’re hearing that in the debate today.” He was right; the nine candidates for New York’s twelfth congressional district had spent the past two hours agreeing with each other on almost every issue. With few exceptions, they all supported Medicare For All, emphasized the need for more affordable housing in the district, called for the abolition of ICE, and expressed righteous fury and disgust about the Trump Administration. Bores was responding to moderator Michael Lange’s closing question on what it was about each candidate that they believed made them stand out from the field. It wasn’t his policy positions, Bores emphasized. “What will make the difference is, can you be effective as a legislator?” he argued. Micah Lasher had made the same point in his opening statement: “We all feel passionately about fighting back against Donald Trump. What distinguishes me is a legislative record on issue after issue of how we use the law to protect New Yorkers, our values, and our programs.” For opposing candidates in an increasingly fierce race, Lasher and Bores are incredibly aligned. So aligned, in fact, that they are aligned on how aligned they are, and aligned on how to communicate that alignment to voters at a candidate forum.
This can be incredibly frustrating for the policy-obsessed voter. I’ve had many conversations with political junkies in the district with strongly held, highly specific political beliefs, who are desperate to learn which candidate is “better” on their favorite issues and are grasping at straws as they try to figure it out. They’ve resorted to dissecting the word choices in their identical Working Families Party questionnaire responses for hidden meaning, combing through each candidate’s Linkedin page (“Lasher worked for Bloomberg,” “Bores worked for Palantir,”) and monitoring social media accounts with a stopwatch in hand (“Lasher tweeted his statement of disapproval at NYU-Langone’s decision to stop providing gender-affirming care within an hour, while Bores didn’t tweet out his equally condemnatory statement until 90 minutes later”).
This dynamic is not exclusive to NY-12. Across the East River, Claire Valdez and Antonio Reynoso are battling it out in the heart of the Commie Corridor, in North Brooklyn and Western Queens’s NY-07, while agreeing on absolutely everything. There is a similar alignment in the hottest race in the country, this Tuesday’s Texas Senate Primary that pits former schoolteacher-turned-minister, current State Senator, and Mamdani-tier digital media communicator James Talarico against MSNBC-Resistance-Lib firebrand US Representative Jasmine Crockett. Everyone writing about that race acknowledges that the differences between these two candidates are not ideological, from the New Yorker’s Tad Friend, (“Crockett and Talarico take similar positions on most issues; it’s everything else about them that forms a contrast,”) to the Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey, (“Rather than policy, [voters’] preferences came down to style—and not much else”), and even to editorials from local newspapers like the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which have endorsed Talarico nearly unanimously: (“With two major candidates to choose from and not a lot of distance between them on the issues, Democrats are better off with James Talarico at the top of the ticket than Jasmine Crockett”).
Why are Democrats in such an agreeable mood? The first reason is structural, and has to do with the nature of the job of an elected legislator. This person will be a coalition-builder, a committee member, maybe a co-sponsor if they’re lucky. They will not, on their own, drive policy priorities. Their greatest formal power is their vote, and they will almost always wield it as their caucus leaders instruct them to. As long as they are not secretly opposed to major party priorities (see Sinema, Kristen), their personal policy positions do not matter very much.
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t care who you and your neighbors end up electing to Congress. What a terrible, self-sabotaging conclusion that would be from a blogger writing obsessively about congressional primaries! “Read my nine-part-series (and listen to my podcast!) about this Congressional race that has no actual stakes, because your legislators are just impotent puppets and everything will be the same no matter who they are.” Your legislators are incredibly powerful! Elected representatives can bend legislation to better accommodate their constituents’ needs. They can use their oversight roles to hold private industry leaders and other branches of government accountable for their misdeeds. And they can use their informal but significant local “clout” to influence key local policy issues, even if those issues technically have nothing to do with their job description in the federal government.
All of which is to say, a candidate’s “effectiveness as a legislator” does probably matter more than the minutiae of their policy opinions. Their prioritization of issues, the local elites and interest groups that they choose to form the closest alliances with, and their overarching worldview all matter more too.
And so NY-07 is a race about differing worldviews, about whether the problems facing working people in Brooklyn and Queens should be solved through a partnership with local nonprofit service providers, networks of advocacy organizations, and a “rainbow coalition” of ethnic groups standing together in resistance with the Trump Administration, or whether they should be solved through collective bargaining, with workers and tenants organizing to seize as much of the pie from their landlords and employers as they can. NY-12 is a race about establishing trust and proving competence, about which candidate possesses the technical skills to execute at the high level that the educated elites of this district demand. The Texas Senate is race about different communication strategies, and about whether Democrats need to bring in a whole new bloc of disaffected, low-information voters in order to flip the state, or whether they get over the top just by feeding red meat to the base, and juicing turnout among the loyal diehards who show up every cycle. None of these races are about ideology, and maybe that’s fine, because a legislator’s ideology doesn’t matter that much.
But that shouldn’t be overstated. Primary candidates do usually disagree at least a little bit. That they aren’t this cycle to this extent speaks to the insecurity at the heart of the Democratic Party right now. Democrats are still shook. They are traumatized by the collapse of the Biden coalition, and the ensuing, catastrophic loss of 2024. They have no idea how it happened, and still find it too raw and traumatic to investigate. They’d rather not think about it. And though Democrats have benefited from a swift reversal of fortune, as thermostatic backlash to the increasingly unpopular Trump Administration lifts them into a dominant position in the polls for this cycle (they might actually win Texas!), they don’t know why that’s happening either. It’s not like they’ve done anything differently since 2024, besides writing endless memos and books and Twitter threads about how they probably should try to do something differently.
They remain stunned, and they lack the confidence to disagree with each other publicly. It seems too risky. They spent so much time and energy disagreeing in the run-up to 2024, on Gaza, on whether Biden should seek a second term, on which 2020-era progressive positions needed to be jettisoned to appease the swing voters that were fleeing their coalition. These internal squabbles were incredibly painful for everyone, and they feel pointless now that Trump won. Who cares which faction of the Democratic Party should predominate if the Democrats have no power?
Democrats do, of course, still have lots of power, and the real-world stakes of many factional disputes of the 2024 cycle remain as urgent now as they were then. But candidates no longer have the will to relitigate these disputes.
Nowhere is this dynamic more glaring than in South Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan’s NY-10 race, between Brad Lander, the ex-Comptroller, Park Slope dad, and inveterate avatar for the city’s progressive advocacy nonprofit industrial complex, and Dan Goldman, the current incumbent, former federal prosecutor, heir to a blue-jeans-based fortune, and ringleader of the completely-failed-and-wildly-unpopular-but-for-some-reason-still-fondly-remembered-on-MSNBC “Russia-gate” impeachment hearings. These guys are polar opposites. Goldman is a creature of DC (born and raised, went to Sidwell Friends, the whole deal), who settled in Lower Manhattan for his prestigious federal prosecutor job at the Southern District of New York after graduating from Stanford Law. Lander moved from the midwest to attend urban planning school at Pratt, then settled in Park Slope in the 1990s (where he probably was able to buy a nice home at a vomit-inducingly low price), led a nonprofit affordable housing provider, and then ran for city council. Goldman is most comfortable when he’s wearing an impeccably tailored suit that probably costs more than your car, at a lectern in a wood–panled room with impressive government seals and American flags everywhere, in a white, neoclassical building that is at least two hundred years old, crafting an elaborate, ten-part question to a witness that will expose some tiny discrepancy, or exploiting a procedural loophole that allows his side to stall for another week. Lander feels most at home at a makeshift podium on a street corner or at the entrance to a park, in a blue Oxford shirt that he hopefully hasn’t completely sweated through yet, standing in front of a small crowd of organizers and advocates wearing branded T-shirts and holding garishly colored signs with agitating slogans on them, as he gives brief but impassioned remarks on how important this cause is, how grateful he is to the relevant union leaders and advocates for inviting him, and how when they all speak together in a forum like this (a street corner with a few dozen people and hopefully like five reporters), the powers that be cannot ignore their righteous voices. Goldman refused to support Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, in the general election of last year’s mayoral race (and wrote in Zellnor Myrie instead). Lander enthusiastically endorsed Mamdani even before he dropped out himself, and became one of his most active surrogates in the general election. These two guys are polar opposites.
And yet they agree! They agree on everything! “I would ask [Lander] to point to specific policies that he supports that I don’t,” Goldman told journalist Ben Max last month, desperately refuting the widely held perception that Lander is challenging Goldman “from the left.” “I don’t think he’ll find any. My voting record is one of the most progressive in Congress.” Max interviewed Lander that same week, and asked whether Lander agreed with this characterization. “On [fighting Trump], I really think it’s about orientation and how you do it… I’m out there with the elected officials who believe this is a moment for getting out in the streets. Yes, you want people who are good on the inside, and I know how to do that… but you also want people who aren’t just introducing a new piece of legislation that people know isn’t going to pass, but finding new tools and avenues and ways of organizing.” A stylistic critique, not an ideological one. Later on, Lander tried to make a more ideological argument. “Let’s just state this: Zohran won 75% of this district. It’s a progressive district. Its median voter has a political point of view closer to mine than to his… I will be better aligned with the progressive values of the district.”
He did not spell out the specific policy positions that distinguished his political point of view from Goldman’s. Except one. “I was one of the few Jewish elected officials to cry out against the occupation in Gaza, and say aid should be conditioned on human rights observation,” Lander told Max. “Six weeks after the war began, I was out there calling for a ceasefire. I’m not sure that Congressman Goldman ever got to calling for a ceasefire… and I do believe what Israel is perpetrating in Gaza is a genocide.”
Goldman did, in fact, call for a ceasefire, in February of 2024. (Brad beat him by two months.) And while he is clearly the pro-Israel candidate in the race (bearing the poisoned chalice of an AIPAC endorsement), I would not be shocked if he puts out a bland statement in support of adding some vague conditions to Israel aid at some point in this campaign. He has proven adaptable already, adding the slogan “Abolish ICE” to his latest slew of TV ads.
Lander could tack further left in response, and dare Goldman to follow him (is Dan Goldman ready to support a wealth tax, for example?). Or he could get more specific about his own aid-conditioning policy proposal, accentuate their differences, and really make Israel the front-and-center issue of this campaign. So far, Lander has been unwilling to take it to this level. I imagine this is partly because the forces that are influencing Democrats across the city and country into agreement have an effect on Lander as well. Disagreeing with fellow Democrats is so unpleasant, especially when it’s about Israel. It’s much nicer to win on “orientation and how you do it.”
There’s another reason Lander hasn’t gone full tilt on Goldman yet. After a surprise court victory, Democrats have won the right to redraw the boundaries of NY-11 (Staten Island and South Brooklyn, R+29), fuse it with NY-10 (D+67), and create two districts that Democrats could win safely. If this occurs, Dan Goldman will likely switch races and run in the new NY-11, which would combine Goldman’s Lower Manhattan with Staten Island, against Republican incumbent and enthusiastic Trump ally Nicole Malliotakis
This has created an even goofier dynamic than the incessant agreeing of NY-12. Lander has a strong incentive not to disagree with Goldman too intensely, or in a way that might do real damage, because he wants him to be able to win the redrawn NY-11. But Goldman has no such incentive to go easy on Lander. If the maps are redrawn, Lander would win NY-10 virtually unopposed (it would probably end up around D+40), so there’s no downside. As Lander told City and State Magazine last week, “Goldman is ‘no holds barred’ against me, but I’m ‘holds barred’ against him.”
One wonders how long Lander can endure this asymmetric, self-imposed holds barring. Goldman’s lead spokesman, Simone Kanter, has been absolutely vicious to Lander on Twitter, finding new, disingenuous ways to attack his record as Comptroller, accuse him of being secretly corrupted by corporate influences, and mock his “sputtering campaign,” sometimes with assistance from Lander’s predecessor, former Comptroller Scott Stringer. Lander is keeping his spokespeople muzzled for now, and is content to just sit there and absorb blow after blow. Perhaps he’s confident that the new maps will come into effect imminently. Perhaps he thinks (probably correctly) that he has such a big lead on Goldman that he can coast to victory without getting his hands dirtier than he wants to. Or perhaps he’s comforted by the knowledge out of all the barbs Goldman’s camp throws at him, none of them involve a substantive policy disagreement. Even in this one-sided, no-holds-barred onslaught, actually disagreeing is a bridge too far.