Interview by Ella Mahony

Election season in New York is effectively over. After a left-wing primary challenge by Democratic Socialists of America–backed candidate Cynthia Nixon, incumbent governor Andrew Cuomo remains in place. But the political situation around him has changed.

Turnout doubled this election, handing Nixon over 500,000 votes — a good deal more than the 361,380 Cuomo claimed in 2014. Her campaign forced him to disband the Independent Democratic Conference, a group of Democrats in the New York State Senate that caucused with Republicans. The IDC lent the Republicans an artificial majority in the state senate and kept progressive bills from reaching Cuomo’s desk, allowing the governor to maintain a left-wing image without actually passing any left-wing legislation.

Activists went further, forming a coalition called No IDC NY that mounted a slate of challengers to the onetime IDC senators. With Nixon highlighting their project at every turn, they were overwhelmingly successful. On election night, challengers ousted six of the eight IDC senators, including IDC founder Jeff Klein. What’s more, socialist candidate Julia Salazar, who sustained such an onslaught of inquiries into her personal history that she became the most-covered state senate candidate in history, trounced her landlord-backed opponent Martin Dilan by seventeen points.

Salazar and the six anti-IDC challengers enter the state senate in a precarious alliance that mirrors the relationship between DSA and a broader milieu of progressive activism in the city. That milieu is less ideological than the growing socialist left and more dedicated — as can be gleaned from names like True Blue NY — to refurbishing the Democratic Party. But it shares the same appetite for challenging incumbents, gravitates towards the policy pole DSA has erected, and aims at the same base. Together, these two forces have succeeded in shifting the terrain of New York politics.

To understand the No IDC effort that bracketed DSA’s runs, and the new political reality New York organizers now operate in, Jacobin editor Ella Mahony spoke to Susan Kang. Kang is an associate professor of political science at the City University of New York; a co-founder of No IDC NY, and an active DSA member in Queens. They spoke about how No IDC got started; its political character; and the barriers the Left still faces with Cuomo in Albany.