AI-generated symbolic illustration of MAGA and “Blue MAGA” breaking political orbit.
CIVPAC has endorsed Representative Adriano Espaillat in the Democratic primary for New York’s 13th Congressional District.
When CIVPAC began, we expected much of our work to involve supporting center-left and center-right candidates in primaries, with the hope of nudging both parties toward the political center. That task has changed. Increasingly, CIVPAC finds itself supporting conventional left-wing or right-wing candidates against more extreme alternatives that, not long ago, would have seemed unlikely to gain serious traction in American politics.
When this effort began, through CIVPAC’s predecessor organization, the New Independent Party, the national political world was still recognizable. The 2012 presidential race was Mitt Romney against Barack Obama. CIVPAC would have had criticisms of both candidates, but both were serious, constitutional, mainstream figures. The distance between that world and today’s politics explains why CIVPAC’s task has changed.
Espaillat is not a centrist Democrat. He is a mainstream progressive Democrat with a reliable party-line voting record. But the question in NY-13 is not whether voters should choose a centrist over a progressive. The question is whether Democratic primary voters should replace an experienced incumbent with Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic-socialist challenger backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
That race is part of a larger pattern. Mamdani has endorsed three congressional candidates in New York: Avila Chevalier in NY-13, Brad Lander in NY-10, and Claire Valdez in NY-7. CIVPAC is not making endorsements in all three races at this time. But the slate matters because it has become a national signal about the direction of the Democratic Party in its most heavily Democratic urban districts.
Deep-blue primaries are not politically isolated. New York City helps shape the Democratic Party’s national brand. When candidates running on democratic-socialist, movement-left politics become the face of the party in highly visible urban districts, voters outside New York notice. So do Republican media and campaign strategists.
If Democrats believe Mamdani’s strategy and the candidates he is backing are likely to succeed nationally, they should ask why Fox News is so eager to make that strategy visible to voters outside New York City.
CIVPAC does not object to new candidates merely because they are new. Parties need competition, new voices, and serious challenges to complacency. Nor does CIVPAC believe incumbents are entitled to renomination. But not every insurgency is an improvement.
This is one of those situations. The work now feels less like gently nudging the parties toward the center than trying to keep the planets from being flung out of the solar system.
Our concern is the road to “Blue MAGA.” We do not mean that left-wing populism and Trumpism are identical. They are not. But both can reward tribal certainty, ideological escalation, contempt for persuasion, and the belief that political intensity is a substitute for broad public appeal.
In NY-13, CIVPAC believes the better choice is clear. Representative Espaillat is not a CIVPAC ideal candidate, but he offers experience, institutional knowledge, and continuity. Replacing him with a movement-left challenger would strengthen the very tendency CIVPAC has warned about: the temptation to make deep-blue urban politics the face of the national Democratic Party.
That is bad politics for Democrats and bad politics for the country.
CIVPAC therefore endorses Representative Adriano Espaillat in the Democratic primary for the U.S. House in New York’s 13th Congressional District.
