The left would do well to revisit New York’s Democratic primaries two weeks ago – it was a sunnier news cycle, yes, but those races were also an object lesson in progressive realpolitik.

Zohran Mamdani, busy as he already was, devoted a remarkable amount of time, resources, and political capital to selecting and backing the eventual victors in three different races – in one case reversing a promise to support an incumbent, Adriano Espaillat, in favor of activist Darializa Avila Chevalier, and in another case supporting Claire Valdez, a relatively unknown assemblywoman, even as the Working Families party, major unions and other progressives backed the Brooklyn borough president, Antonio Reynoso.

He also did what he could to push other candidates out of the running entirely, including the city councilwoman Alexa Avilés, who might have run against the mayor’s pick, Brad Lander, and Dan Goldman in New York’s 10th congressional district, and the city councilman Chi Ossé, whose planned run against the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, was torpedoed.

Only time will tell just how deeply these decisions will affect Mamdani’s standing with city leaders and key constituencies moving forward. But he and his team clearly thought long and hard about which races to prioritize and why, ran the political calculus on what it would take to win, and succeeded with a slate of candidates chosen with intention – whose only outward liabilities, collectively, are some old social media posts and a few once-controversial positions on issues such as immigration and the US’s relationship with Israel that their constituents are increasingly receptive to.

Here, by contrast, is the process by which Graham Platner, who suspended his Senate campaign on Wednesday night, became the progressive standard bearer in Maine. Last summer, after seeing footage of him speaking out against the development of a salmon farm, a group of national progressive operatives working with local activists and labor groups to find a candidate worthy of taking on 29-year incumbent Susan Collins decided Platner – a veteran, harbormaster and chair of a local planning board, with a small oyster farming operation on the side – was their man on presentation alone.

He was then put through a rushed vetting process at a discount – without a full research book on his vulnerabilities or a candidate questionnaire. The next month, Platner was introduced to Maine voters and the world with a viral ad featuring shots of him boating and chopping wood, some now-boilerplate progressive rhetoric about taking on billionaires and rescuing the middle class, and the kind of heave-ho........

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