These Gen Zers Want to Make the Democrats Cool Again. They Have a Plan.

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The walls and ceiling of the Black Sheep Sports Bar, where the Manhattan Young Democrats are hosting their fourth social of the year, are still covered in World Cup banners and flags. Even though the tournament ended only three days ago, the soccer paraphernalia feels like a forsaken Christmas tree wilting in February. Down the stairs, I am welcomed by the yipping of a dozen Pittsburgh-hating Yankees fans. Oh no! There are both regulars and Young Dems at this sports bar on a Wednesday. How will I tell them apart?

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s galvanizing effect on the city’s youth has done more than swell the ranks of the city’s Democratic Socialists of America. It’s also brought growth to the MYD, the borough’s official youth arm of the Democratic Party. According to the organization’s 27-year-old vice president Courtney Curd, MYD’s membership has doubled from 300 to 600 over the past year. To onlookers, that growth might seem pretty unexpected: One might reason that the anti-establishment sentiment that fueled the rise of the NYC-DSA since Mamdani’s successful mayoral bid would stay within the left flank, not inspire young adults to join up with the very establishment the movement bemoans. Sure, MYD is tiny compared with the roughly 15,000-member NYC-DSA, but the kind of growth it’s seeing is indicative of how leftist politics have begun to take shape within the party’s staffer class. This bar is, after all, stuffed with the political operatives who will be running campaigns in a few years.

As the DSA continues to rack up midterm primary victories across the country, and the Democratic Party’s moderates come to understand just how insurgent the insurgency seems to be, the direction of the party is up for grabs in a way it hasn’t been in decades. And if Democratic moderates are serious about making a concerted effort to fend off the left, they’ll have to compete for that ever-lauded youth territory the DSA has capitalized on. What I learned is that, at least inside of this one representation of the Democratic Party on this one very particular island, the establishment is getting ready to compromise.

Compared with NYC-DSA’s base, which skews young, college-educated, and not especially well paid—heavy on teachers, social workers, and nonprofit employees—the MYD crowd runs established. (I scan the room to take a head count and quickly find myself counting receding hairlines instead. The mixer quickly revealed two truths 1) I have some coping to do over the apparently brutal reality of male pattern baldness, and 2) not all of these young Dems are quite so young.)The Black Sheep is packed with Democratic congressional and state legislature staffers, fundraisers, and political consultants. The organization is headed by a man on the inside: New York Assemblyman Jordan Wright, 31, who just won his first primary as an incumbent against 33-year-old DSA-backed Conrad Blackburn. Wright was the only incumbent to survive a DSA challenge in the state’s June primaries.

Heineken in hand, I park myself at a high top, watching as a mix of blazers and khaki shorts crowd around the bar’s repurposed whiskey barrels. Among the crowd are various politicians, including New York City Council member Virginia Maloney, 38, and Ryder Kessler, 40, who lost his primary for Assembly in June. Attendees strain their voices talking about elections and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey as they compete with indiscernible house music and the baseball game.

When MYD chief of staff Sophia Secor, 28, became involved with the organization in 2023, it was “kind of lame,” she said, with a lack of buy-in from the organization’s few members. The state Democratic Party never really needed a concrete organizing presence in the city, instead sending resources upstate into the districts with viable Republican challengers. But with the rise of NYC-DSA, the party suddenly needed a face in the city. Secor and now-VP Curd, who joined around the same time, started asking how to turn it into “the cool kids’ club.” Their model was the city’s Young Republicans, who were throwing grand balls that “just looked aesthetically cool,” Secor said. At the end of 2024, Secor sat down with Wright for dinner after a Nancy Pelosi fundraiser and pitched her vision for the future of the group: party like the New York Young Republicans and knock doors like the DSA. Less than two years later, the MYD is the second-highest-fundraising Young Democrats chapter in the country, according to Secor.

A few feet in front of me, Assemblyman Wright is dressed in all-white linens and Air Force 1s, fielding greetings from all angles. Wright comes from a family entrenched in the city’s political machine—his father, Keith, served in the same Assembly seat for over two decades and now runs the Manhattan Democratic Party as its county chair, and his grandfather was Bruce Wright, a Harlem judge so notorious for freeing defendants on low bail that the tabloids nicknamed him “Turn ’Em Loose Bruce.” In 2025, Wright originally endorsed Andrew Cuomo for mayor, before throwing his full weight behind Mamdani after he won the Democratic nomination. When asked about the endorsement, Wright points to the long history between the Wright and Cuomo families.

The three senior leaders have a clear message: MYD is pitching a “wide tent.” Eventually, I start to count. I hear that phrase at least 13 times by the end of the night. It comes from a place where we’ve seen the Democrats many times before: “A lot of us, like myself, are pragmatic,” Curd says. Not that long ago, this was the pitch you’d hear from the party’s moderates: the fiscal conservatives and social liberals who’d remind everyone you can’t win anything without the center and maybe a few Republicans. But it seems those tent poles are getting set up in the opposite direction these days. “All of us work in the Democratic Party whether we like it or not because we run on the Democratic line,” Curd says. She points out that she serves as the campaign manager for Eli Northrup, a non-DSA but progressive candidate who won his primary for a New York State Assembly seat. Curd is, by her own account, “extremely progressive.” She speaks fervently about a platform that sounds indistinguishable from the DSA’s. “There’s a lot of communities that aren’t ready to have a DSA candidate, but it’s important to still bring them in, and still have conversations about universal healthcare, taxing the rich,” she says.

Five years ago, Curd and Secor would likely have been written off as the party’s idealist left flank. But now, given the rise of the DSA as a relevant reference point on the spectrum of the left, they find themselves having to insist on just how progressive they actually are. In Mamdani’s New York, the “extremely progressives” might be the party’s new pragmatists.

Kieran Blunnie, a New York–based political strategist familiar with the MYD, thinks this phenomenon just might make it out of Manhattan. “In a weird way we’re going to start seeing it more across the country,” he said, “progressives who largely align with the DSA and choose the establishment party to incite change from within.” One might take former President Barack Obama’s decision to campaign with Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive who beat Michigan’s establishment pick in a bitter Senate primary, as a sign the party may be ready to meet the left halfway.

For the next hour and a half, the bar remains packed. I float amid the hundred-ish attendees, moving from conversation to conversation with various election geeks and wanna-be Josh Lymans. I join two lovely politicos in a cheers to recent congressional primary loser Alex Bores before downing a shot of some sort of alcoholic iced green tea; I chat with an NYU student determined to get his money’s worth in networking out of the cost of his Heineken; and I listen to Wright give a barely audible speech in which he laments the “nonsense in Washington” and implores attendees to grab a drink.

The following morning, just when I thought my Young Democrat adventures had come to an end, I received a call from Curd inviting me to the statewide organization’s annual gala at an Indian restaurant in Nassau County. How could I resist?

Inside the marble ballroom of the Las Vegas–ready restaurant on Long Island, the award ceremony flies by as I work my way through a plate of samosas and nurse a mango lassi. The crowd is a mix of younger staffers and more veteran New York politicians, many of whom are receiving awards. Among them, Mike Gianaris, the state Senate’s deputy majority leader (age 56), picks up the FDR Trailblazer of the Year Award. He spends most of his time at the podium reliving 2018.

After the first half of the award ceremony, I follow a few MYD members, including Curd and Jasper Price, outside for a smoke break. “They should’ve had an award for GOATED young democrat,” Price says. He’s one of the two known DSA members on the MYD’s 54-person board. (Curd said there could be more, but that the MYD does not inquire.)

As a member of both, Price has a lot to say about the relationship between MYD and DSA. He seems to oscillate between a collaborative and combative view. “It’s not a permanent opposition,” he says, “There’s enough overlap already that we might see a staffer class that starts in DSA and is willing to entertain joining MYD.”

While Price and his colleagues go to take advantage of the open bar, I chat with New York State Young Democrats chief of staff Avi Presberg, 28, upon the restaurant’s lion-headed thrones. He describes a vision for collaboration between the two organizations but comes off a bit more matter-of-fact than the MYD folks. “At the end of the day, they run as Democrats, so they need us,” Presberg says.

After the event, some of the Manhattanites peel off to attend a pool party, while the rest pile into the bus and turn back onto the Jericho Turnpike. On the ride back into the city I picture Assemblyman Wright pitching a comically large tent over the island. If these optimistic progressive Dems are right, he’s going to need an even bigger one.