The most expensive House primary in US history has ended in defeat for democratic socialist Jamaal Bowman, soundly beaten by Westchester county executive George Latimer.

According to the New York Times and much of the national media, the winners and losers here are fairly straightforward. Bowman’s defeat was a victory for the pro-Israel lobby, which spent $14 million to oust a major critic of the war in Gaza, and for leading centrist Democrats, from Hillary Clinton to Josh Gottheimer, who had endorsed Latimer. “The outcome in this race,” said an American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spokesman quoted by the Times, “once again shows that the pro-Israel position is both good policy and good politics.”

Meanwhile, the paper called the election “an excruciating blow for the left,” including Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and “the Squad” in Congress. They had rallied behind Bowman but could not save the gaffe-prone representative from his own voters, who ultimately rejected him as “too extreme to help solve the nation’s problems.”

Every single element of this fable is perfectly accurate — if only the entire district, the national Democratic coalition, and the whole of the American body politic resided in the village of Scarsdale, New York.

This elite Westchester suburb, with its manicured lawns, seven-figure mansions, and an average income of over $500,000 a year, had given Bowman nearly 40 percent of its vote in his upset victory four years ago. But this year Scarsdale decided it could not abide the congressman’s “far-left views,” on Israel or anything else: in the early vote there, Latimer led Bowman by the astonishing margin of 92 to 8 percent.

This was the pattern across wealthy Westchester suburbs, like Rye, Harrison, and Mamaroneck, where the early vote showed Latimer winning over 80 percent support. Residents there may have indeed rejected what the Times suggested were Bowman’s “extreme viewpoints,” including support for a cease-fire in Gaza, where Israel’s war has killed nearly fifteen thousand children.

Yet in most working-class portions of the district, Bowman’s far-left views seem to have held up just fine. He took 84 percent of the vote in the Bronx. Analysts looking to find a popular repudiation of pro-Palestine politics will have to look somewhere beyond working-class Yonkers and Mount Vernon, where the congressman led the early vote by margins similar to his victory in 2020.

Unfortunately for Bowman, too much of his district did, in fact, reside in Scarsdale or somewhere similar. Though Times reporters did not see fit to mention it, last year NY-16 was redrawn so that the Westchester share of its primary vote jumped from about 60 percent to over 90 percent. This was of course the story of the entire election. The new and wealthy suburban areas in the district — including parts of Tarrytown and at least five additional country clubs north of Rye — all voted heavily against Bowman.

The good news for Bowman’s national supporters is that losing Westchester to an AIPAC-funded centrist is not a meaningful defeat for the American left. Any real challenge to corporate Democrats or the pro-Israel lobby will have to come from somewhere else. Scarsdale is what we thought it was — a tiny, eccentric sliver of an enormous, diverse, and largely working-class country.

The bad news is that the American left has not managed to make many inroads into that giant country, either. Perhaps the brand of politics that gave us the Squad in the first place — nine members in a Congress of four hundred and thirty-five — has run its course. If Bowman’s defeat is a wake-up call, it is not because he lost the neighborhoods around the Horseshoe Harbor Yacht Club and Blind Brook Country Club, but because the Left found itself fighting a battle there in the first place.