Since Donald Trump’s reelection, progressive and moderate Democrats have spent a lot of time fighting over differences in their approaches to campaign messaging and strategy. But the differences that matter most are those that occur after an election, when it’s time to govern. There’s no better example than the emerging contrast between New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger—one a democratic socialist, the other a centrist former CIA agent—who both rode affordability messages into office last year. Though they have been in office only five months, their respective records demonstrate the true stakes of the factional battle over the future of the Democratic Party.
After the 2025 elections, corporate-backed establishment groups like Third Way and WelcomePAC argued vehemently that Mamdani’s win offered few if any lessons for Democrats outside of New York City, and that the real attention should be on politicians like Spanberger. Just last week, Clinton strategist Paul Begala reiterated this message, saying in an interview with NPR that Mamdani had “the weakest performance of a successful Democrat in New York in a hundred years,” whereas “in a state where the Republicans were controlling every statewide office, Abigail Spanberger wins in a landslide.”
This oft-repeated talking point is easily debunked. Zohran Mamdani won the votes of more New Yorkers than any mayoral candidate in over 50 years. Though his 51 percent vote share wouldn’t be particularly impressive if he had just been running against a Republican, that wasn’t the lineup he faced. Mamdani ran against both a Republican and former Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, scion of a famous Democratic dynasty, who was boosted by a tsunami of billionaire super PAC spending. The apples-to-apples comparison here would be if Spanberger had faced not just the GOP’s gubernatorial nominee but also a former Democratic governor like Ralph Northam or Terry McAuliffe.
As it is, in her one-on-one race, Spanberger earned close to 58 percent. That sounds impressive—even though she was facing an extremely weak Republican opponent—until you learn that this was the exact vote share that Democrats won in the Virginia House of Delegates. It turns out Spanberger didn’t receive 58 percent because she’s an electoral overperformer—she received 58 percent because she was running with a D next to her name in a state with a long record of swerving hard against the party in control of the governor’s mansion and White House, months after DOGE had laid off tens of thousands of Virginians.
Whatever their margins of victory, both Mamdani and Spanberger won their elections. So what have these Democratic executives actually done with their time in office?
Mamdani’s first six months have been a whirlwind of action to reinvigorate the institutions of city government and demonstrate to New Yorkers that Democratic governance can make a positive material impact in their lives. To list a few of these achievements, the Mamdani administration:
- Established free childcare for 2-year-olds.
- Targeted junk fees and subscription traps.
- Announced new rec centers, youth clinics, and early childhood education centers.
- Developed new bike and bus lanes across the city.
- Invested $50 million in park improvements.
- Created a new Office of Community Safety and the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, which has already won over $34 million on behalf of tenants and secured repairs at over 6,000 apartments across the city.
- Launched “rental ripoff hearings” to provide tenants an opportunity to register complaints with city officials.
- Filled 100,000 potholes.
- Established a program to quickly remove unnecessary sidewalk scaffolding.
- Secured a wealth tax on luxury second homes.
- Cut hundreds of millions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse.
- Closed an inherited $12 billion budget deficit to deliver a balanced city budget.
Mamdani’s administration has communicated these achievements to the public in innovative and attention-grabbing ways, telling a story of government actually making things better. Here’s how Mamdani announced plans for his administration’s first city-owned grocery store:
“This store will serve as physical proof of our conviction that government can be a force for good—that government can drive change that improves people’s lives. And standing here this morning, I cannot help but think of the words of our fortieth president, Ronald Reagan. He famously said, ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ It’s a good quote, but I disagree. I think nine more terrifying words are actually, ‘I worked all day and can’t feed my family.’ We are going to use the power of government to lower prices and make it easier for New Yorkers to put food on the table. When government understands its purpose as serving the very working people that it has left behind time and again, it can make a difference in the most pressing struggles facing our city today. It’s not just that government can help; it’s that government must help and our government will help.”
This message is about more than stoking one politician’s popularity. It is laying the groundwork for a new narrative of public-sector action—one that can supplant the right’s decades-long effort to persuade Americans that government is the problem. Convincing the public of this narrative is a necessary step toward establishing a durable governing majority for any left or center-left party.
The right, by contrast, thrives when the public believes that government can’t deliver for regular people. That’s why Spanberger’s recent conduct is so devastating. Not only has she been failing to enact an ambitious agenda, but she has been actively blocking efforts to pass major Democratic priorities in Virginia, vetoing a series of bills sent to her by her own party’s legislative majorities.
Spanberger vetoed legislation giving Virginia’s public workers the right to unionize. This betrayal inspired a wave of condemnation from organized labor, including the Virginia Public Sector Labor Coalition, which stated, “Governor Spanberger today betrayed half a million of Virginia’s public service workers by going back on her campaign promise to support collective bargaining rights for the people who keep our communities running every day. Instead of aligning herself with General Assembly Democrats who unanimously supported this bill, Spanberger vetoed the bill just as her predecessor Glenn Youngkin did, sending Virginia workers the crystal clear message that they are no better off than they were under a Republican governor.”
Spanberger vetoed legislation creating the right to class-action lawsuits, a legal mechanism for seeking redress against malicious corporate conduct that exists in every state but Virginia and Mississippi. Right-wing business groups celebrated her move, while consumer advocates were deeply stung. As the bill’s Senate sponsor said, “This legislation was about leveling the playing field between Virginia consumers and large corporations when widespread harm occurs but no single individual has the resources to fight back alone.”
Spanberger vetoed legislation to stop ICE from conducting warrantless arrests in state-run facilities, leaving immigrants in the state afraid to go to courts or hospitals or to take their children to school. In the words of the ACLU of Virginia’s policy director, “The governor’s position seems to be that if ICE wants to do whatever it wants to do in our courthouses, they can, and that the state’s not going to do anything about that. That sends a terribly dangerous message to the Trump administration when we know that they have acted rogue and lawlessly.”
Spanberger vetoed legislation creating a legal retail market for recreational marijuana in Virginia, an issue that has supermajority support in the state. “We’re left in a position of uncertainty,” said the bill’s Senate sponsor, “for my community, for small-business owners, and particularly for those individuals who thought that under a Democratic governor the question of cannabis would not be a matter of if, but instead a matter of when.”
Spanberger vetoed legislation that would have lowered prescription drug prices for patients by extending Medicare’s negotiated drug prices to people in private health plans and Medicaid. This pleased corporate lobbying groups like the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers of America, who lauded Spanberger for taking “the right step to protect Virginia patients from a flawed policy.” Meanwhile, patient and consumer advocates were crushed, with the director of the affordable health care organization Families USA saying, “Governor Spanberger’s veto is a blow to Virginia families who struggle every day to afford their medications.”
Spanberger also vetoed legislation to stop illegitimate purges of voter rolls, protect defendants with behavioral health issues, and shield universities from speech restrictions like those pushed by Trump. This end-of-session legislative massacre is a substantive disaster for Virginia’s workers, consumers, immigrants, patients, and other communities, who have lost not just an opportunity but perhaps their only opportunity to get their priorities enacted, given the reality that Democrats cannot count on maintaining a trifecta over state government for long.
But it’s also a political disaster for Democrats. In the short term, it risks suppressing enthusiasm among all the constituencies Spanberger betrayed. As Virginia Tech political analyst Dr. Cayce Myers put it, “You certainly could envision a situation where people say, ‘Well, you know, this was something that they promised, but they weren’t able to deliver.’ And they’re less enthusiastic, writ large, about going and voting.”
But the long-term effects of this pro-corporate governance could be even more dangerous. Spanberger has sent millions of Virginians the message that Republicans and Democrats are all the same.
For many liberals, it’s hard to grasp how anyone could believe there’s no difference between the parties. But if you’re a senior struggling to afford your prescriptions, or a public worker who’s sick and tired of crappy benefits, and you see Democratic Governor Spanberger issue the exact same veto of your top priority as Republican Governor Youngkin did, benefiting the exact same corporate special interests, it’s not actually that crazy to say, “None of these crooks are looking out for me; screw ’em all.”
This is political poison—not just for Democrats, but for democracy. After all, if all these politicians are crooks, and our democratic institutions can’t seem to effect any real change, why not throw in with a strongman who promises to blow the whole corrupt system sky-high?
Trump was defeated in 2020, only to return in an even more dangerous form four years later. So we already know that it is not enough to beat MAGA once at the ballot box. If Democrats do not pair their next electoral victory with a strong record of governance—one that reflects the Mamdani commitment to positively improving people’s lives, not the Spanberger model of selling out to corporations—we are going to be right back in the maws of fascism one election later. And this time, we might not be facing an authoritarian as incompetent and self-defeating as Trump has been.
