The national Democratic Party faces a similar class divide between highly educated urbanites and the working-class voters for whom it often claims to speak.

They were left to navigate a complicated city as “isolated individuals rather than as part of coherent social wholes.” The people of the Village, she suggested, lived side by side but had little contact with one another. But Professor Ware had a different interpretation. Some at the time saw the Village as a success story of immigrant assimilation. In the mid-1930s, the Columbia University sociologist Caroline Ware wrote a study of Greenwich Village that focused on the Irish and Italian immigrants who moved there in the late 19th century and whose Catholic churches still dot the neighborhood. The primaries reflected the tensions and divisions within contemporary liberalism itself and raise the question of how (or whether) Democrats can effectively represent such radically different constituencies.īeyond the numbers, though, the primaries were part of a continuing story of class divisions in New York City. Goldman is a political newcomer whose star has risen through his association with opposition to Donald Trump - but their shared success nonetheless highlights socioeconomic divisions in Manhattan that have a long history. Nadler, a longtime congressman, has deep roots in the old grass-roots liberalism of the Upper West Side, while Mr. They represent different kinds of New York City Democrats - Mr. The winners of two races in particular, Jerrold Nadler and Daniel Goldman, who will almost surely represent much of Manhattan (and a bit of Brooklyn) in the House, emerged as the victors of complicated congressional primaries in districts that were redrawn to reflect national shifts in population. The results of the Democratic congressional primaries in New York City on Tuesday give us a hint of just how far the working-class liberalism once associated with city politics has declined.

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