I keep telling you that I'm not interested in talking about if Mamdani's campaign is good or not. If that's all you want to talk about, then I guess I can humor you: Hypothetically, the janitor could be working for literally any socialist third party or independent. That would not produce a won election that term, most likely, but you run into an AOC or Contrapoints problem (not saying those two are the same) where you're making "pragmatic compromises" to "gain power," but you didn't actually gain power, you just became a vessel for the DNC, because if you deviate from their directions more than a little they will fucking smoke you. Power isn't being the person who gets to cast the vote that they were told to by the DNC. Third parties and independents need to glacially crawl over broken glass, but at least when they make progress it's really theirs.

Mamdani has a lot more individual leeway than a Congressperson, of course, so let's see if he is actually able to carry out a positive agenda that is more than a shadow of what he promised, if he gets cowed by the Democratic establishment, or if he gets fucked over and fails despite trying to work against them. As I said, I'm not really invested in divining which of those will happen, I just care about people working from reasonable principles instead of excuses.