David Hogg and his fellow idealists firmly believe that the Mamdani model can be applied nationally because there is a suppressed national appetite for it.

The perky, hyperkinetic neophytes at Teen Vogue seem to be taken with the unceremoniously defenestrated former Democratic National Committee official and self-styled youthful activist, David Hogg.

It was only “due to a procedural error” that Hogg’s election to the DNC was “subjected to a do-over,” the outlet recently wrote with maximum credulity. “In the end,” they added, Hogg “decided not to run again,” perhaps because his commitment to unseating congressional incumbents is inconsistent with his former role as a fundraiser for the party’s incumbents. Teen Vogue still has a chip on its shoulder over the whole thing, as does Hogg.

In Hogg’s interview with the magazine, the insurgent activist talked up his plan to support upstart challengers to “the status quo” — especially in “safe blue seats” where incumbents can become complacent and where there are few risks that internecine political conflict will imperil the Democratic nominee in November.

“One of the only things across the board that will make a politician do the right thing, regardless of whether or not they support you, is by threatening the one thing all of them [seem to] care about, which is their job,” Hogg told his wide-eyed interlocutor. Teen Vogue had already taken his advice.

You’ve probably never heard of Deja Foxx, but that’s not for lack of effort among supporters of Hogg’s project. In a piece published in the feminist journal The 19th and republished by Teen Vogue, the 25-year-old abortion activist was promoted as the progressive answer to the sclerotic politics practiced by the creations of Democratic machines who populate safe blue districts.

Foxx made herself one of those upstart challengers Hogg wants to see. She set out to challenge Adelita Grijalva, who is running in a special election to replace her late father, the longtime representative of Arizona’s seventh congressional district, Raúl Grijalva. Foxx had the right pedigree, the right racial background, and the right progressive politics. “On TikTok and Instagram, she has hundreds of thousands of followers and was able to raise nearly a million dollars through small donors,” the authors marveled. And her central campaign theme — that Congress must not be a dynastic enterprise in which seats are bequeathed like titles of nobility — should have generated broader traction.

But it didn’t. Adelita Grijalva won the endorsement of party stalwarts and self-styled progressive outsiders within the Democratic firmament, including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, raised a boatload of campaign contributions, and shut Foxx out. On July 15, that special election’s primary day, polls closed at 7 p.m. At 7:06 p.m., Decision Desk HQ called the race for Grijalva. She won 61.5 percent of the nearly 63,000 votes cast in that race to Fox’s 22.4 percent.

There’s a lesson here, not that Hogg and his fellow idealists will see it. These results are sure to confirm for them that everyone else is the problem: the party, the establishment, the press, the donors, the voters, etc. Nothing can shake the faith that the Zoran Mamdani model can be applied nationally because there is a suppressed national appetite for it. Here’s to hoping that they keep the faith alive.