Parsing the Results of a Chaotic New York Primary

Four years ago, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's shock victory in a low-turnout midterm primary election in New York changed the shape of American politics. On Tuesday, the state held low-turnout midterm primaries with no such results. Instead, what the most-watched races offered was the latest glimpse of the ongoing fight between progressive insurgents and Democratic Party loyalists in New York. Loyalists claimed the day's biggest victories, thanks in large part to the state's new political maps--a consequence of a 2020 redistricting process that some of those same Party loyalists, led by then Governor Andrew Cuomo, botched so badly that a state judge ultimately outsourced the job to a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon. The race that got the most attention, and which had the closest outcome, was for an open seat in the newly redrawn Tenth Congressional District, where the attorney Dan Goldman--who served as the House Democrats' lawyer during Donald Trump's first impeachment--squeaked out a victory in a crowded field.