Last week, The New York Times reported that the victories of candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York DSA over candidates (many of them incumbents) backed by the party establishment in the city’s recent Democratic primary had particularly unsettled many Black political leaders. Young middle-class whites had been moving into and gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhoods with longstanding Black majorities, and many of those newcomers were DSA members who’d flocked to the polls in greater numbers than the working-class Black and Latino constituents who’d been electing Black and Latino officials for decades. To be sure, most of the victorious Mamdani and DSA-supported candidates were Black or Latino, too, and their political concerns weren’t really all that different from the incumbents they ousted, though they certainly weren’t as friendly to major business interests as, say, a Hakeem Jeffries, much less an Eric Adams.  

But their political base was distinctly different from the party establishment’s. In the 2025 mayoral runoff, exit polls showed Mamdani winning younger Black voters handily, but losing to Andrew Cuomo among Black voters 65 and older. In party primaries for down-ticket offices, like those held this June, it’s generally older voters who dominate turnout, which normally means that the establishment candidates backed by Democratic clubs and district committees—themselves dominated by older voters—tend to prevail. 

But not this June. One Black leader quoted in the Times story noted that the establishment had relied on “the institutional way of doing things,” at a time when those institutions—the Democratic clubs and so on—no longer reflected the neighborhoods’ changing populations.

What struck me about the Times story, however, is that they’d written it many times before, since this kind of political regime displacement and succession is endemic to urban politics. In 1962, for instance, the leader of New York’s legendary, venerable Tammany machine lost his district leadership post in that summer’s Democratic primary to a middle-class anti-machine insurgent. Carmine DeSapio had represented lower Manhattan’s working-class Little Italy neighborhood for decades, rising over time to the heights of political power as Tammany’s boss. But Little Italy had grown steadily littler as its residents moved to outer boroughs, Long Island and New Jersey, even as the numbers of Greenwich Village bohemians, bohemian-wannabes, and just plain middle-class reformers had swelled to the point that they could dominate the district if they assembled a political organization of their own. 

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By 1962, they’d done that. DeSapio lost to the candidate from the Village Independent Democrats, a young rather lefty lawyer with close ties to the civil rights movement and civil liberties groups—a wholly different world (more culturally than ideologically) from the official and increasingly geriatric party organizations that DeSapio headed, which drew what strength they had from the city’s shrinking white ethnic working class. (The victorious reform lawyer, by the way, was Ed Koch, who, by the time he’d finished his third term as mayor, had come to personify a politics well to the right of any that DeSapio had ever embraced.)

Still, the unease that now haunts the more senior leaders of Black politics runs deeper than their anxieties over urban regime change and even the Supreme Court’s war on Black elected representation in Southern states. It was visible in the dispute over which small state would kick off the Democrats’ presidential primaries in 2028: South Carolina (where Democrats are overwhelmingly Black) or Nevada (where Democrats are preponderantly, though not overwhelmingly, Latino).

The unease that now haunts the more senior leaders of Black politics runs deeper than their anxieties over urban regime change.

On Friday, the Democratic National Committee chose South Carolina to lead off the ’28 season, partly as a kind of response to the Supreme Court’s assault on the ability of Southern Black voters to amass any political power. But there are more profound anxieties about the future of Black political power that are harder to allay. Not only are Black people losing political power at the hands of a hostile Supreme Court; they are also losing majority or plurality status in any number of big cities, as the in-migration of Latinos, which dwarfs that of gentrifying whites, transforms once heavily Black neighborhoods. In Los Angeles, the South-of-the-I-10-Freeway neighborhoods that for decades sent three Black representatives to the U.S. House, are now overwhelmingly Latino. 

For this reason, paradoxically, it may be that the kind of voting we’ve seen from the Mamdani electoral base will turn out to be the best guarantor of Black elected officials. Whatever allegations may be made against America’s new new left, they don’t include voting based on race. Its candidates won’t be Black candidates from the ancien régime, but that’s because they won’t be anyone from the ancien régime. The political concerns of the Black officials they elect will reflect issues that matter to their own distinct cultures (as Koch’s did to DeSapio’s in 1962), while maintaining the focus on Black America’s fight for political and social equity, and intensifying that on economic equity.  

That’s what happens when regimes change. And if there’s one thing we know about cities (at least, cities that are growing), it’s that they’re always changing regimes. 

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