Zohran Mamdani's triumph changes everything
The ossified machine has been shattered, a new coalition has risen
Welcome to a Tuesday edition of Progress Report.
Democrats scored major victories in elections across the country on Tuesday, posting unexpectedly large margins in races expected to come down to the wire and scoring upsets in elections where Republicans had been considered frontrunners. It was also a tremendous night for leftist mayoral candidates and progressive ballot initiatives.
I’ll be back with specific highlights tomorrow, but tonight, we’re taking a deep dive into the remarkable campaign run by NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and what it means.
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Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani was elected Mayor of New York City on Tuesday night, completing a historic campaign with a commanding victory over disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. In doing so, the 34-year-old democratic socialist has defied conventional wisdom and smashed generations of entrenched political power, delivering a jolt to the Democratic Party that will reverberate far beyond the five boroughs.
Rage Against the Machine
If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s shocking victory over powerful Queens Rep. Joseph Crowley in 2018 exposed cracks in the city’s Democratic machine, Mamdani’s pair of victories this year have together blown a hole right through it.
The party and its allies really couldn’t have done more to rig the game for Cuomo. Democratic lawmakers who once called for his resignation debased themselves by lining up behind the former governor. Union leaders held endorsements until Cuomo’s late entry into the primary in March. Religious leaders absolved the alleged serial sex pest of his sins and lent him their pulpits. Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries refused to truly support the party’s nominee.
And in hindsight, it may be that the lack of institutional support, as well as the active loathing of the city’s billionaire class, that served as a catalyst for Mamdani’s insurgent victories, not something he had to overcome.
“It’s not a fluke: what you would describe as ‘normie’ Democratic voters are just very unhappy with the party establishment,” says NYC political journalist Michael Lange, who has covered the race extensively. “I certainly anticipate more Mamdani-esque candidates in the midterms.”
Sunshine Socialism
Still, sheer antipathy for elites wouldn’t be enough to turn an unknown Assemblyman from Queens into an electoral juggernaut. Likewise, while it was helpful that unions got on board after the primary, they only have so much sway over their members’ votes. For Mamdani, the key to taking down the Democratic machine was creating his own coalition, stitching together a wide cross-section of voters, many of whom had been previously disengaged or ignored in city politics.
Mamdani received an early boost from the Democratic Socialists of America’s most organized and influential chapter; having done work for Sen. Jessica Ramos’s campaign early on, we were always impressed by the volunteer manpower and grassroots fundraising, which provided a long shot candidate an unusually developed campaign infrastructure. With DSA’s help, Mamdani was able to mount an expansive effort to connect with the city’s massive Muslim and Asian communities.
There had never been any concerted campaign to court the former group, leaving swaths of Brooklyn and Queens prime for organizing. Many Asian and South Asian communities had moved to the right in recent years, but a combination of affinity for the candidate and the appeal of his concrete plans, aimed at working class New Yorkers, brought them into the coalition as well. And in the end, he won Black voters by a bigger margin than any other group, unifying communities that for decades were pitted against one another in New York City.
That unification is a stunning development, one that shatters outdated political assumptions and strategies.
Whereas the 67-year-old Cuomo ran a depressing campaign that portrayed a city in terminal decline, millennial Mamdani offered a brighter, more affordable future that young people in particular were desperately craving. NBC News’s exit poll today found that 56% of New Yorkers considered the cost of living as their most pressing concern, compared to just 22% who listed crime as the top concern.
“Listening to people, the ‘I’m fighting for you,’ the showing up everywhere, learning all these different language scripts for campaign videos, he really put in a lot of effort in a way that a lot of politicians don’t,” Lange observed. “I think politicians really take the voters for granted so often, but he didn’t.”
The Mamdani campaign was less a political operation than a movement, complete with citywide social programming (soccer tournaments and scavenger hunts), daily volunteer opportunities, and those tailored appeals. Its strong digital game was designed to compel people to leave the screen behind. That inclusion helped inoculate Mamdani against the massive swell of Super PAC money from the city’s richest residents (and plenty of billionaire outsiders).
Record turnout — one in six voters cast their ballots for the first time — vindicated the strategy, and Mamdani’s victory in many ways resembles the tidal wave presidential campaign run by then-Sen. Barack Obama in 2008. The former president is said to be impressed with Mamdani’s campaign — not that it required a keen eye for talent — and communicated his willingness to provide advice going forward.
As Mamdani starts to figure out how he’s going to deliver on the big promises he made during the campaign, he’d be smart to avoid repeating one of Obama’s most consequential decisions: disbanding the independent organizing arm that turned his campaign into a mass movement. If he’s going to convince Gov. Kathy Hochul and state legislators to raise taxes on the wealthy and fund priorities like universal childcare and free buses, it’s going to require maximum pressure from the newly activated voters in eastern Queens, southern Brooklyn, and Pelham Bay.
If there’s one takeaway from this election for Democrats everywhere, it’s the fact that Mamdani was able to create a unique coalition by not flinching from his identity while emphasizing economic issues. His coalition even includes working class white voters, proof that when Democrats are most associated with populism, they can defy the derogatory “woke” label.
Exposing the Rot
Cuomo will end his political career the same way it began: hurling bigoted smears in service of a losing mayoral campaign.
Still, even for a guy who governed as a petty tyrant until being forced to resign amid more than a dozen allegations of serial sexual harassment, Cuomo was shockingly brazen in his attacks on Mamdani’s Muslim faith and culture. What began as attacks on Mamdani’s criticism of the Israeli government and genocide in Gaza soon morphed into slander and then unbridled Islamophobia from both the Cuomo campaign and its allies.
Whereas Democrats have traditionally positioned themselves as the party of tolerance and plurality, Cuomo’s heavy reliance on Islamophobia was aimed at driving a wedge between the city’s large Jewish and Muslim communities. By the end, he was laughing along as conservative radio hosts fantasized about Mamdani celebrating another 9/11 as his allies called into question a story Mamdani told about his aunt’s fears as a Muslim woman in a hostile city after the attack on the World Trade Center. One Cuomo-aligned Super PAC ran a late ad featuring Mamdani standing in front of the Twin Towers as they collapsed.
Cuomo first attempted to run for governor soon after 9/11, and after a career spent performing strategic tolerance when politically expedient, he went back to a campaign playbook rooted in that earlier era’s reactionary politics. By the end, he was on Fox News touting an endorsement from Donald Trump, desperately seeking to flip Republicans like so many centrist establishment Democrats unwilling to cede power without first torching any semblance of a legacy.
“I wish Andrew Cuomo the best in private life, but let tonight be the final time I utter his name as we turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few,” Mamdani said in his victory speech tonight.
Mamdani ran through the finish line, defying the city’s traditional power brokers and shattering their sense of imperiousness. Change does not happen overnight, but New York City politics will never be the same.
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I hope Mamdani will ignore Obama. Obama said “change” and then upheld the status quo. He was a suave empire manager. Leave him in the past.