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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a newsletter that could have chosen to do a fun “ranking the World Cup teams by their fans”–type deal but instead has chosen, once again, to torture you with information about American politics.

This week, Congress slopped it up once more before heading into a long recess. We examine the quietest of the big Senate races, check in on the poisonous green slime dump on the National Mall, pull out our wallets to pay for the Iran war, and question which powerful and connected figure who was 79 years old in April—Donald Trump’s age at the time, weirdly—could have received the latest miracle weight-loss drug.

But first, New York has gone red. (Not Republican red—the other one.)

The socialist kingmaker.

It was a big night for the left and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday, as three leftists the mayor had endorsed in congressional primaries won—two of them defeating incumbents. The most notable of these was Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won the Democratic primary in New York’s 13th District, which covers Upper Manhattan and a smidge of the Bronx, against Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat. Meanwhile, Brad Lander, a former NYC comptroller, defeated incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman, while democratic socialist Assembly member Claire Valdez won the primary for an open seat representing parts of Brooklyn and Queens.

Let’s put it this way: Avila Chevalier’s win, especially, doesn’t make national Democrats’ lives any easier. We’d say that Fox News is going to make her into a cartoon character, but she already is a Fox News cartoon character. The Ph.D. student and activist, who has worked in a public defender’s office, is a prison abolitionist who opposes any and all deportations. She also has a much longer and more provocative posting history that was uncovered during the course of the campaign, though she has said she’s “grown considerably” since posting those tweets. But there’s more than enough for Fox News and the broader Republican apparatus to make her a celebrity.

That’s not the end of the world for national Democrats, as candidates in difficult races should have no problem stating they don’t support her when asked. Besides, Republicans have a bit of a cry-wolf problem here, in which they’ve been calling any and all Democrats “communists” for so long that the public may yawn once someone approximating the real thing comes around. What could be a problem is if Democrats nationally get in their heads that this sort of candidate is a replicable winner across the board, when she essentially could have won only in this specific city with its well-organized Democratic Socialists of America. Indeed, with Mamdani as mayor and New York’s old political machines broken down, DSA is becoming New York City’s new establishment.

Why do funny things always have to take an authoritarian turn?

A week ago, Trump’s........

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