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The walls and ceiling of the Black Sheep Sports Bar, where the Manhattan Young Democrats are hosting their fourth social of the year, are still covered in World Cup banners and flags. Even though the tournament ended only three days ago, the soccer paraphernalia feels like a forsaken Christmas tree wilting in February. Down the stairs, I am welcomed by the yipping of a dozen Pittsburgh-hating Yankees fans. Oh no! There are both regulars and Young Dems at this sports bar on a Wednesday. How will I tell them apart?

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s galvanizing effect on the city’s youth has done more than swell the ranks of the city’s Democratic Socialists of America. It’s also brought growth to the MYD, the borough’s official youth arm of the Democratic Party. According to the organization’s 27-year-old vice president Courtney Curd, MYD’s membership has doubled from 300 to 600 over the past year. To onlookers, that growth might seem pretty unexpected: One might reason that the anti-establishment sentiment that fueled the rise of the NYC-DSA since Mamdani’s successful mayoral bid would stay within the left flank, not inspire young adults to join up with the very establishment the movement bemoans. Sure, MYD is tiny compared with the roughly 15,000-member NYC-DSA, but the kind of growth it’s seeing is indicative of how leftist politics have begun to take shape within the party’s staffer class. This bar is, after all, stuffed with the political operatives who will be running campaigns in a few years.

As the DSA continues to rack up midterm primary victories across the country, and the Democratic Party’s moderates come to understand just how insurgent the insurgency seems to be, the direction of the party is up for grabs in a way it hasn’t been in decades. And if Democratic moderates are serious about making a concerted effort to fend off the left, they’ll have to compete for that ever-lauded youth territory the DSA has capitalized on. What I learned is that, at least inside of this one representation of the Democratic Party on this one very particular island, the establishment is getting ready to compromise.

Compared with NYC-DSA’s base, which skews young, college-educated, and not especially well paid—heavy on teachers, social workers, and nonprofit employees—the MYD crowd runs established. (I scan the room to take a head count and quickly find myself counting receding hairlines instead. The mixer quickly revealed two truths 1) I have some coping to do over the apparently brutal reality of male pattern baldness, and 2) not all of these........

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