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A big new test of Zohran Mamdani’s influence

Three reasons to care about the New York congressional primaries on Tuesday.

The latest test of the anti-establishment wave sweeping the Democratic Party comes this Tuesday in New York. One year after Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City and became a partywide icon, the state has turned into a live read on the rift between the party’s left flank and its centrist establishment.

This week on America, Actually, we talked to two candidates on the front lines of that insurgency. Here’s what they said, and why Tuesday’s primaries could reverberate nationally:

1. AI regulation is on the ballot

Alex Bores, an assembly member running in New York’s 12th District in Manhattan, wrote what he calls the strongest AI safety law in the country, the RAISE Act. Then Gov. Kathy Hochul stepped in and forced lawmakers to water it down before she signed it into law — stripping the provision barring companies from releasing models that fail safety tests, scaling back penalties, and more. So I asked him: If that kind of watered-down legislation is coming from a Democrat in a safe blue state, what’s the hope for robust AI legislation nationally, where we haven’t even seen the willingness to take the first........

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