“We are showing there is a new path for politics in our city and in our country,” Zohran Mamdani told stunned, giddy followers in Harlem at one of the many primary-night victory parties he helped make possible. “We are showing that last June, a year ago tomorrow, was not an anomaly,” said the mayor, comparing the wave of victories by socialist candidates to his own unlikely elevation. “It was not the end. It was the beginning.”

If anything, Mamdani understated the explosive expansion of his new governing coalition — especially the field army of activists from the Democratic Socialists of America — and the collapse of old alliances that have long powered New York politics. “What you’re going to see is a referendum on just how frustrated people are,” Morris Katz, a Mamdani strategist, told me the night before the primary.

He wasn’t kidding. The sheer familiarity that comes from years of toiling in the political vineyards used to be enough to secure victory. Not anymore. Two incumbents, Representatives Adriano Espaillat and Dan Goldman, members in good standing of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, were defenestrated by voters, rejected as not progressive enough — with progressive now being defined, in many cases, as taking symbolic actions like introducing or signing onto flowery, nice-sounding bills that die in committee without a hearing or a vote.

Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso, who once served in the City Council’s progressive caucus, was backed in his bid for Congress by the Working Families Party, the Progressive Action Network, departing representative Nydia Velázquez, and major unions, including DC37,........

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