For all the talk of Democratic unity heading into a defining midterm year, the party’s left flank seems determined to wage a civil war against itself — and against incumbents who have become national symbols of resisting President Donald Trump and defending democratic norms. New York City may be ground zero for the effort, but it is no longer an exception.
What began as a challenge to Rep. Ritchie Torres in the Bronx has now broadened into a full-scale progressive insurrection, with Rep. Dan Goldman facing his own well-funded, ideologically driven revolt in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. Similar battles are unfolding elsewhere. In Washington state, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez faces sustained pressure from activists unhappy with her independence. In Illinois, Chicago-area incumbents are warned off bipartisan cooperation. And in California, members representing Los Angeles and Bay Area seats are routinely targeted for insufficient fealty on foreign policy despite voting records that would have been considered unassailably progressive a decade ago.
The pattern is unmistakable: The activist left isn’t merely taking on moderates; it is policing progressive incumbents who refuse to submit to rigid litmus tests — especially on Israel.
Nowhere is this more visible — or more self-defeating — than in the Torres race. Torres is not some corporate centrist ripe for replacement. He is an openly gay Afro-Latino progressive, raised in public housing, with a record on housing reform, economic justice and government accountability. His supposed apostasy is not ideological drift but his refusal to demonize Israel. For that, he is treated as a traitor to the movement he helped build.
His challengers have now made themselves plain. Michael Blake, a former New York State Assembly member and perennial candidate, is running almost entirely on denouncing Torres’ pro-Israel positions. Dalourny Nemorin, a public defender aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America, casts Torres’ bipartisan support for Israel as a moral betrayal. Jose Vega, a fringe agitator whose last challenge fizzled, has returned with the same slogans and even less of a platform. None seriously engage Torres’ work on LGBTQ protections, affordable housing or Puerto Rican recovery. Their campaigns read less as policy disagreements than as ideological enforcement actions.
The same dynamic now plays out downtown. New York City Comptroller Brad Lander’s entry into the Democratic primary against Goldman has energized the activist left, which sees him as a conduit for Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s democratic socialist coalition. Yet Goldman is no centrist villain. He is a liberal Democrat, a Jewish progressive who helped prosecute Donald Trump before it became fashionable within the party. His affluent, heavily Jewish, deeply anti-Trump district is not clamoring for a referendum on Israel — and is unlikely to reward candidates who insist on making it one.
Lander, meanwhile, faces a sharper contradiction than his boosters admit. A self-described liberal Zionist, he occupies a space the ascendant activist left increasingly regards as illegitimate. If his path to victory depends on appeasing activists who reject his own beliefs, he risks becoming another case study in how ideological pressure warps candidates rather than elevates them.
These primaries expose an unhealthy dynamic: a progressive movement that confuses fragmentation with integrity and treats coalition-building as capitulation. Instead of uniting against the opposition party’s agenda, it is cannibalizing its own ranks.
If Democrats want to project strength in 2026, they cannot keep rewarding ideological purges. A party divided against itself hands its opponents an open lane. The left can keep relitigating purity — or it can start winning elections.
