Last night, visibly tired millennials sloshed American IPAs in bars across New York City as polls declared Zohran Mamdani the city’s next mayor. I watched the results come from a jam-packed Hell Gate watch party in Gowanus, where BBC reporters hurriedly ran through the crowd and onlookers passed phones back and forth, poring over election data coming in from Virginia and New Jersey. Democrats performing equally well in both. Of course, after last night, it seems like the question for the rest of the midterms will be: *Jesse Plemons in “Civil War” voice* “What kind of Democrat are you?”

After attending a Mamdani rally last week, I wrote that the Democratic Tea Party is officially here. It was there, in Forest Hills, Queens, where I saw firsthand the tension between young New York socialists and centrist Albany Democrats. Mamdani’s supporters completely turned on Gov. Kathy Hochul before she could even get a word out on stage, interrupted by heckling and chants of “do something,” and “tax the rich!” And Hochul, unlike Sen. Chuck Schumer, had actually endorsed Mamdani.

What’s fascinating is that for all their work flooding the information ecosystem this year, the American right doesn’t totally know how to handle a winning leftist insurgency. Mamdani’s win successfully cracked President Donald Trump’s authoritarian veneer and MAGA world is reeling.

White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, who we covered in our deep dive into Trump’s digital machine last month, wanted everyone to know he’s not mad actually, posting a photo from the Rose Garden, writing, “No Panicans!” And Sean Hannity was also definitely Not Mad, visibly crying as he started a segment with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last night. Hannity said he was just crying from laughing because of all the memes people were texting him about Mamdani. Ah ok, very normal.

Oh, also, the viral post being shared on X right now that claims Alan Dershowitz threatened to blow his brains out on live TV if Mamdani won is fake, apparently. “A fake headline is circulating saying that I promised ‘to blow my brains out on live TV’ if Mamdani wins,” he wrote on X this morning. “I will contribute $180 (chai) to Mamdani’s reelection campaign if anyone can show I actually said it.”

Andrew Cuomo’s living funeral last night was equally manic, with supporters shrieking at each other about how Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa spoiled Cuomo’s chances. Trump, though, honestly, summed up the night best, writing on Truth Social last night, “‘TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,’ according to Pollsters.” The New York Post, though, was cooking the hardest, with a front page I absolutely need a wall print of.

But what should we make of last night’s blue sweep? Semafor’s Dave Wiegel astutely pointed out that “every victorious Democrat ran on ‘affordability,’ betting correctly that voters who trusted Trump to bring down prices this year would be angry that he hadn’t.” Which was also Vivek Ramaswamy’s take, who is still cosplaying as someone anyone cares about.

But Wiegel pointed out that Democrats, as a whole, are still unpopular. Virginia exit polls report that half of voters there don’t like the Democrats, even though former Rep. Abigail Spanberger crushed her GOP rival in the governor’s race. For a party that ran against Trump last year on a national platform of “we don't have Coke, only Pepsi,” as I wrote last spring, it’s probably not great voters are begrudgingly finally buying Pepsi because the Coke they ordered turned rancid.

Sherwood News’ Walter Hickey had take that slightly differed from Wiegel’s, writing on X, “Centrist Democrats definitely overplayed the hand going hard on the socialist branding for Mamdani… If he sucks, opinion of socialism in America literally cannot get lower anyway. But if he’s fine? Well, now you made DSA a national brand.”

It’s unclear what lessons Democrats across the country will learn from the Democratic Socialists of America and Mamdani’s big win, however. Funny enough, the first time I wrote about Mamdani was last March, in a piece about California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s awful podcast. (Whatever happened with that?) “Zohran Mamdani is a New York State Assembly member, who is currently running for Mayor of New York City,” I wrote at the time. “This morning he went up to Albany and unloaded at Border Czar Tom Homan… screaming at Homan in the hallway. It makes for good content. But it was also passionate, focused, and appropriately aggressive. Maybe Newsom’s team could call him up and ask for a few pointers.” Which is the most optimistic outcome here actually.

Maybe this country’s vast network of liberal strategists will see this excellent X thread from DSA organizer Aaron Narraph Fernando, written over the summer, which outlined the precise demographic work the DSA did to prioritize voter outreach. TL;DR they focused on progressives, Muslim and South Asian voters, rent-stabilized tenants, and first-time voters. A savvy way to build off Mamdani’s first big viral video based on his genuinely shrewd political observation that the working class, immigrants, and people of color were duped into voting for Trump because they believed his lies about fixing the economy and could be won back with leftist economic populism.

But the cynic in me says that the clown car that is the Democratic establishment and what’s left of the mainstream media will over-index Mamdani’s “Lin-Manuel Miranda energy.” As streamer Hasan Piker wrote on X last week, “The upcoming midterm cycle is going to be very funny. Lot’s of politicians trying to do stuff like this, not realizing why it isn’t hitting the same way,” referring to Mamdani’s appearance on a New York DJ’s livestream. Weirdly enough, Charlamagne Tha God, Ben Shapiro, and The Young Turks host Ana Kasparian were all on CNN’s election show last night saying more or less the same thing. And it doesn’t help that the Gregory Brothers have already turned Mamdani’s victory speech into a rap song. Yeah, ok, everybody, you can lib out today, but you better cut that shit out before someone loads it on to Nancy Pelosi’s iPad and she forces Schumer to go on the Throwing Fits podcast.

But as policy-focused as Mamdani was, his use of influencers is worth reflecting on. Before it all gets flattened into How Make Go Viral by pundits on cable news. As we wrote last week, Mamdani’s team focused heavily on individual internet creators, granting them the same level of — and sometimes more — access than they did national outlets. The result was, in the final weeks of the campaign, an onslaught of content across X, Instagram, and TikTok competing with mercenary cyber armies operating on both ends of the political spectrum.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, on an episode of The View this week, as part of her current media tour unveiling her own economic populist rebrand, revealed, “There's a lot of paid social media influencers. I found it very interesting that they were the MAGA accounts, but they're all paid.” (Vice President JD Vance is test-driving an economic populist pivot, as well, this morning.)

And according to an investigation from WIRED in August, all the Democratic dark money went to influencers who would toe the established, centrist party line. “If I want to work with another politician, I have to fully collaborate with them,” one creator told WIRED. “If I get Zohran and he wants to [do an] interview with me, I don’t want to give that to them.” Also, the r/Democrats subreddit currently bans any mention of Democratic Socialist candidates. Just so you have a sense of how pervasive all of this even still this week.

None of the influencers we spoke to at Mamdani’s events were paid, but some did admit they showed up because of the network effect. As he got more popular, so did their content about him. And so, when you take all of this together, last night’s blue sweep, especially in New York, actually feels a little retro. No wonder former President Barack Obama is, reportedly, so impressed with Mamdani. It’s not just Obama noticing the shift, however.

On Sunday, likely expecting a Mamdani blowout this week, New York Magazine raced to canonize the current intra-Democratic uprising. They gave 25 young Democrats a cushy — literally, they posed them all on a couches lol — photoshoot and outlined their connections to the American left’s new political tastemaker, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Mamdani isn’t on the list, they assume you already know about him. But two former Panic World guests are, federally-indicted Illinois congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh and Florida Rep. (and Habbo Hotel power user) Maxwell Frost. Also on the list is the Senatorial candidate who easily has the record for most times an American politician has done an interview without his shirt on, Graham Platner.

Platner, even more than Mamdani, is probably the best embodiment of the unchartered waters Democrats have found themselves in this election cycle. A strange moment where the new world and the slightly older new world exist at the same time. A charismatic, young politician like Mamdani can organically build Obama 2.0 by connecting the live wires of grassroots canvassing, soft identity politics, and online populism, and topple a political dynasty, the new mainstream media — Republican dominated social platforms — and his own party’s national infrastructure. While an ornery and repeatedly canceled Marine can tout the same politics, even as he’s barking out mea culpas for his Totenkopf tattoo on podcasts. And both are drawing huge crowds and fending off attacks from their own party.

As chaotic as all of this is — and will continue to be until the midterms — there is one very clear conclusion here. American politics has changed. The Republicans felt it first. And the same way the Tea Party ate the GOP out from the inside, laying the groundwork for Trump and his MAGA rebrand, so too has what we once called The Dirtbag Left begun devouring the Democrats. The effects of the internet, a deeply alienating globalized economy, and the rise of a technofeudal billionaire class have finally cracked American Democrats wide open. We’re in a class war and it plays out on video feeds and those same billionaires own the algorithms that decide what side of it you end up on. And Mamdani and his team — and the burgeoning DSA political machine — arrived at the exact moment Americans were ready to talk about class and found the best way to hijack our new world of short-form (and long-form) video to make sure you actually heard them. Successfully turning his mayoral campaign into not just a referendum on President Donald Trump and the horrors of his second first year in office, but also the Democratic establishment. And with Mamdani’s big win this week, it’s safe to assume the Democratic civil war will be arriving on a ballot near you soon.

P.S. here’s a good post.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***