Can the Last Kennedy Running Please Turn Out the Lights?

It was a good night for a young and charismatic nepo-baby, leveraging his name to inject new energy and ideas into a moribund Democratic party. But it was a very bad night for John F. Kennedy’s grandson.

On Tuesday, as a slate of candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani knocked off two incumbent members of Congress and cruised to victory in another open House district, Jack Schlossberg finished a distant third in a race the Democratic Socialists had stayed clear of, the Democratic primary to replace retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler. The Kennedy scion, a Democratic activist and content creator, entered the race last fall as a front-runner, but, with most of the votes counted, was hovering at just under 11 percent.

Instead, the race for a seat centered on some of Manhattan’s most affluent neighborhoods became an extraordinarily expensive proxy battle between Silicon Valley donors. Alex Bores, a state assemblyman who positioned himself as a Big Tech skeptic, benefited from $11 million in spending from Public First Action, an Anthropic-funded vehicle. Leading the Future, a super-PAC that’s been funded by the venture-capital firm Andreesen-Horowitz and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, spent $8 million attacking Bores, which boosted eventual winner Micah Lasher, another state assemblyman and a former Nadler chief-of-staff.

There’s an urgency in politics now that makes dynastic inheritance look small.

It would be unfair to view the results in the nation’s most geographically compact congressional district as a straightforward referendum on the Kennedy family (even if Schlossberg did helpfully include his more famous surname on the ballot). But the results suggest that voters weren’t exactly clamoring for a dynastic reboot, either, his loss is the third successive defeat for a prominent Kennedy in a Democratic primary, after uncle Bobby’s abandoned campaign against then-President Joe Biden, and cousin Joseph Kennedy III’s 2020 defeat to Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey. Caroline’s 33-year-old son learned the hard way that the Kennedy brand just doesn’t mean what it used to. His strange campaign only underscores why.

Schlossberg is not the worst kind of Kennedy, by any stretch. He didn’t kill anyone, for instance. He didn’t appease Hitler, grope a waitress, send troops to Vietnam, promote eugenics, or publish a book trampling on the legacy of Reconstruction. If the decline of the WASPs (and their WASP-like Hyannisport cousins) has taught us anything, it’s that there are much worse things in this world than over-educated, well-meaning dilettantes. But you can also perhaps understand why, in this moment of all moments, the Democratic voters of Manhattan weren’t lining up for someone who so closely matched that description.

Schlossberg’s qualifications were slim. None of his previous jobs could historically be described as stepping stones to Congress. He was a political correspondent for Vogue for a period of several months. He was a Democratic content creator, a role that often consisted him doing weird vocal impressions of personas he’d made up. (“I think satire is a really powerful political tool,” he told the New Yorker, which is the kind of statement that never seems to accompany powerful satire.) He was part of the committee that handed out the Profile in Courage awards, a prize that takes its name from the aforementioned book his grandfather mostly didn’t write. He may have meant to merely shore up his district bona fides, but it felt appropriate that the first candidate I’ve ever seen list his pre-school on campaign literature was a Kennedy, and that it came with a boast that he’d graduated not just from Yale, but from Harvard. Twice. (Do you know how hard it was for Boston Mayor John Fitzgerald’s great-great-grandson, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy’s great-grandson, and President John F. Kennedy’s grandson to get into Harvard?)

In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash last May, Schlossberg boasted that his campaign was catching fire because it had released more policy plans than anyone else in the race. You could argue that the idea that people (including House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi) were lining up to support JFK’s grandson because of his position on Social Security was as insulting as anything in Profiles in Courage.

Again, there are worse things than having a familial sense of responsibility to public service that you don’t quite know what to do with, you could instead have a familiar sense of responsibility to selling cryptocurrency and hotels. As Reeves Wiedeman reported in a deeply illuminating New York magazine story last year, being one of the political Kennedys can be a grind. No one’s sitting around the old compound telling you you should really become a dentist.

But if there’s one thing Tuesday’s results showed, it’s that there’s an urgency in politics right now that makes dynastic inheritance look small. The energy that’s animating Democrats in the city where Schlossberg attended pre-school isn’t nostalgia for the lost Kennedy idyll. Across much of the city, primary voters showed up at the polls to tear down the old way of doing things, newly empowered by their 2025 defeat of Andrew Cuomo, another Kennedy-adjacent scion. Like it or not, they’re motivated by idealism and a desire for something new, ironically, the kind of vibe shift the family once purported to embody.

The last few years ought to have once and for all blown up the myth of Camelot, that it was desirable, that it was ever even real. American politics is haunted by a different sort of Northeastern family, ruled by a calcifying and domineering patriarch, digging its pincers into the national story and flaunting its multi-generational ambitions in the service of a misbegotten golden age. The Kennedys are down to their last and thorniest public servant, a sun-baked, worm-addled, crank incubated in a world of entitlement and unaccountability.

Now all that’s left is the ruins. I’m reminded, like a good Kennedy, of Shelley: Look upon their works and despair.