One of the worst habits of political types is the tendency to over-generalize. What works in one time and place, though, won’t necessarily work in others, as I argue at New York with respect to Zohran Mamdani:

The thing about off-year elections is that there are so few of them that it’s tempting to over-interpret their significance. That’s particularly true when the key races are viewed as tests for a Democratic Party that is terrified about its past and future and unsure of its identity.

Right now the four off-year contests that are getting the most national attention are the mayoral race in New York City, gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, and the Prop 50 retaliatory gerrymandering ballot initiative in California. Prop 50 seems to be gliding toward an easy win. Democratic advantages in New Jersey and Virginia seem fragile. So the really exciting story for Democrats, and particularly for self-identified progressives, is Zohran Mamdani’s upcoming mayoral victory.

It really is a great story: An obscure young Muslim socialist state legislator ran an upbeat, issues-oriented campaign and leapt over the many obstacles to change and reform posed by New York City’s byzantine political system. He beat the front-runner, former governor Andrew Cuomo, like a drum in the Democratic primary, overcoming Cuomo’s huge advantage in money and name ID. And despite an extraordinary deployment of attack ads and oppo research by a coalition of opponents that stretched from the city’s Democratic Establishment to the Trump White House, Mamdani has failed to self-destruct as many expected. That he positioned himself to win despite clear skepticism if not disdain from House and Senate minority leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer makes his success even sweeter for Democrats yearning for ideological or generational change. And Mamdani’s clear and disproportionate appeal to young voters who seemed so tuned out in last year’s disastrous elections has made his campaign an instant classic.

But it’s more than a bit of a reach to compare the excitement Mamdani has generated to the iffier campaigns of Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia, as this Wall Street Journal analysis appears to do:

“Democratic leaders hoping to revive the party’s fortunes this fall pinned their hopes on two gubernatorial candidates—Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia—betting on both women’s moderate pragmatism and experience in national security. …

“Spanberger and Sherrill still hold leads over their opponents, but their relative underperformance stands in contrast to what is shaping up to be a runaway victory in the New York mayoral election for the democratic-socialist assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, who represents another vision for the party. Mamdani has been leading the race against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo by double digits. …

“Spanberger and Sherrill were backed by Democratic national leaders who saw them as more-suited for attracting suburban, swing voters than the populist alternative supported by the party’s progressive flank. Mamdani touts a rent freeze, free daycare and grassroots power, drawing endorsements from the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.).”

The implied message is that the “moderates” from New Jersey and Virginia are leaving voters cold and unmotivated, and that a hypothetical “populist alternative” might have emulated the excitement Mamdani is generating in New York.

That’s a big stretch. There wasn’t a “populist alternative” on the table in Virginia, where Democrats canceled their primary after no one filed to challenge Spanberger. And Sherrill, in her own primary, handily dispatched five viable rivals, including two running clearly to her left.

But more important is the broader context. New Jersey and Virginia are not much like New York City politically. For all the talk of Trump making gains in his native city — and he did gain roughly 7 percent in 2024 as opposed to 2020 — he still lost the NYC vote to Kamala Harris by a 68 to 30 percent margin. Harris won both New Jersey and Virginia by a less than 6 percent. The Democratic advantage in New York City, which has likely grown over the last year, is quite simply large enough to indulge a risky mayoral nomination that would not be possible in a more politically marginal jurisdiction. It’s no accident that Mamdani’s nationally prominent sponsors, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, represent overwhelmingly Democratic constituencies as well. And it’s also no accident that the conservative opposition to Mamdani has now coalesced not around a Republican but around the minor-party candidacy of the deeply flawed former Democratic governor of New York. It’s also worth noting that for all his merits, Mamdani has benefited a great deal from the intense unpopularity of his most prominent opponents, Cuomo and incumbent mayor Eric Adams.

None of this is to say that Democrats elsewhere can’t learn from Mamdani’s success. It’s been obvious that the cost of living absolutely had to be an emphasis for Democrats going forward, given its central role in Trump’s 2024 win. Spanberger and Sherrill have talked a lot about “affordability” on their own dime. But no one has succeeded in identifying a simple and deeply relatable affordability agenda quite like Mamdani. And the connection he has made with young voters should be of urgent interest to Democrats everywhere given the catastrophe they experienced with that segment of the electorate in 2024.

Mamdani has earned his success in this unique political space called New York City. But it’s not directly translatable to very different places with different electorates and political cultures. Yes, both progressive and centrist factions of the Democratic Party perpetually claim to have found the formula for political victory everywhere. But a party big enough to accommodate different strokes for different folks remains the best bet.