Nobody, not even the co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, anticipated the depth and breadth of the group’s success in last Tuesday’s primaries. “If we were to elect all of our candidates tonight, we would almost double our cohort in the State Legislature,” Gustavo Gordillo told me a few hours before the polls closed. “I’d be happy if we won a majority of our races.”

Gordillo and the DSA did a lot better than that. They carried nine out of the ten seats they went after, in some cases with blowout margins, defeating longtime representative Adriano Espaillat and three incumbent state legislators along the way. Much of the credit properly goes to Mayor Mamdani, but the political muscle came from energetic DSA volunteers who ran circles around New York’s aging, creaky network of traditional Democratic clubs and candidates.

Now comes the fight over what it all means.

The jubilant winners, naturally, are claiming a victory for their ideology.  “NYC-DSA is not even close to reaching the ceiling of what the Left in this city can achieve,” columnist Liza Featherstone crowed in Jacobin, a socialist publication. “AIPAC money, racist attacks, and other evil and formidable facts of American life proved weaker than the superpower of thousands of sweaty and smiling volunteers committed to a vision of a better world.”

At the other end of the political spectrum, New York Post columnist Michael Benjamin rejects the notion that the DSA has won a contest of ideas. “Tuesday’s Democratic Socialist romp can’t be blamed on outside factors like inflation or Israel or the national party’s mad obsession with countering President Donald Trump’s every move,” he wrote. “No, it’s the result of 15 years of........

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