Playbook: “In case you hadn’t noticed, Democratic insurgents are having a moment. In Colorado tomorrow we’ll find out if that’s shifting to momentum, as a quartet of closely watched primary races reach their climax.”

“Mountain high: In the context of last week’s New York City earthquake, what had once looked like a relatively low-key primary date tomorrow is now anything but. We have a professional Donald Trump-basher threatening to block a senator’s path to the governor’s mansion. We have a political novice — not even born when her veteran opponent first took her seat in Congress — on the verge of an extraordinary ouster. We have a key midterm battleground shaping up to be fought sharply from the left. And we might — might — even see one of Colorado’s best-known politicians face a radical progressive challenge.”

“New York is one thing, but Colorado is another. Expect to learn plenty tomorrow night about how insurgent messaging really lands outside of a coastal metropolis, and what that means for the future of the Democrats — and perhaps the presidential contest in 2028.”

“Joe Biden, 83, is largely out of the conversation. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, 86, is retiring this Congress, as is Rep. Steny Hoyer, 87,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is 84. And the independent who caucuses with the Democrats looks to have more influence over the party than he ever has before.”

“The emergence of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a Democratic kingmaker is right out of Sanders’s left-wing populist playbook. And his influence isn’t just confined to New York. Look at the Michigan Senate primary. Sanders has endorsed Abdul El-Sayed in the primary, and polls have him up comfortably over two other Democrats.”

“Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic congressional nominee endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who ousted longtime Rep. Adriano Espaillat in Tuesday’s primary, maintained a since-deleted Twitter account with repeated sympathetic references to communism, Marxist ideology and Soviet figures, including Vladimir Lenin,” CNN reports.

New York Post: Bill Maher savages NYC radical Darializa Avila Chevalier as “patient zero” of the “woke mind virus.”

CNN: “He practiced no consultant conventional wisdom of tacking center or soft in a purple state. Nor were there any swings for or against socialism. He made just one passing reference to the Reflecting Pool, but it centered on incompetence and wastefully sending the National Guard to surround the site, rather than giggling about the color. Ossoff drove hard at Donald Trump again and again, in a state the president won twice, while including his disgust at the conspiratorial obsession after Trump lost it the other time.”

“This is the strategy that appears to be working in a must-win race in 2026’s trickiest territory for Democrats and has turned Ossoff into an online sensation along the way. The rallies have become such events that vendors set up around the block from Saturday’s event to sell their own knock-off Ossoff T-shirts and bespoke spray-painted Barack Obama ‘Hope’-style portraits for lawn signs.”

“He’s gone from flash-in-the-pan failed 2017 House candidate running for a written off Senate seat in 2020 to being pulled into presidential speculation.”