The party was on its knees. It failed to beat Donald Trump, a twice impeached convicted felon, and lost both chambers of Congress. Since November, Democrats have been searching for a path out of the wilderness. On Tuesday, they found one.
But instead of celebrating Zohran Mamdani’s apparent victory in the New York mayoral primary election, the first major Democratic contest since Trump’s win, many in the party establishment went into panic mode.
Mamdani, 33, a self-described democratic socialist who would be the first Muslim mayor of America’s biggest city, represents a unique threat to the entitled elites, gerontocrats and consultants who have helped take Democrats’ approval rating to a record low of 29%.
His defeat of Andrew Cuomo, a 67-year-old from a political dynasty vying to come back from a sexual harassment scandal, could hardly have been better scripted as a pivot point for Democrats who ruined their brand by closing ranks to cover up concerns over former president Joe Biden’s decline.
Cuomo, bankrolled by corporate donors and endorsed by former president Bill Clinton and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, personified the twitching tail of a dying animal. Mamdani, an aspiring rapper turned state politician backed by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a fellow New Yorker, represented a dare to imagine what a post-Trump future might look like.
“What’s happening in NYC is a blaringly loud message to those in the Dem establishment who still cling to old politics, recite focus-grouped talking points, and are too afraid to say what needs to be said,” tweeted Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama.
It was a campaign that triangulated ground game, digital style and policy substance. Mamdani was a shoe leather candidate who put himself all over the city, talked to countless voters, projected optimisim without sounding preachy and had thousands of volunteers knocking on doors multiple times.
He also learned from Ocasio-Cortez’s mastery of the attention economy. Where other Democrats seem contrived and cringy on social media, Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez are of a generation that swims naturally in such waters, proving that you cannot fake authenticity.
Born in Uganda to a family of Indian descent, he is a cosmopolitan and charismatic New Yorker. In November, a week after Trump’s victory, he went to Queens and the Bronx with a microphone and interviewed working class New Yorkers about why they voted for Trump or did not vote at all. A video of the exchanges has 2.7m views on the X social media platform.
On New Year’s Day, dressed in full suit and tie save for bare feet, he ran into freezing waters off Coney Island then strolled along the beach talking policy and tweeted some pleasingly bad puns: “I’m freezing … your rent as the next mayor of New York City. Let’s plunge into the details.”
For all Democrats’ angst over messaging, none if it matters if the policies fail to resonate. The Democratic party has come to be seen as the party of the college-educated elites, something that Trump, with no sense of self-irony as a millionaire New Yorker, has exploited to maximum effect with blue collar voters.
But Mamdani evidently struck a chord in a city feeling the pinch of the affordability crisis. The average Manhattan rent now stands at $5,000 a month. His proposals include freezing rent for many New Yorkers, free bus service, universal childcare paid for by new taxes on the rich.
When Trump identified some of the frustrations and offered fake populism, he was twice rewarded with the White House. When Mamdani offers solutions that would be regarded as mainstream in many European countries, he is demonised as an extremist. On Wednesday the New York Times newspaper characterised him as “running on a far-left agenda” while the front page of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post declared: “NYC SOS. Who will save city after radical socialist batters Cuomo in Dem mayoral primary?”
Mamdani showed the value of fearlessness. A staunch supporter of Palestinian rights, he has called Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide”, joined a hunger strike outside the White House calling for a ceasefire and championed the cause of Mahmoud Khalil, a student activist at Columbia University who spent more than three months in detention on the orders of a federal judge.
Cuomo and his allies’ efforts to portray Mamdani as antisemitic fell flat. There is a lesson for Democrats who denied a Palestinian American a speaking slot at their national convention last year and saw Kamala Harris lose to Trump in the Arab-majority suburb of Dearborn in Michigan, potentially costing her the crucial swing state of Michigan.
Expect the Democratic establishment to fight back, just as Hillary Clinton did against Senator Bernie Sanders’s insurgent candidacy in 2016 (Sanders endorsed Mamdani). They fear the loss of the control they have long enjoyed. They also fear that Republicans and rightwing media will cast Mamdani, Ocasio-Cortez and the rest as radical Marxists, as sure to lose elections as Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn.
Matt Bennett, a cofounder of the centrist thinktank Third Way, wrote on social media that it is “dangerous to believe a NYC Dem primary offers a roadmap for winning” in swing or conservative places and urged Democrats to follow moderates, “not the siren call” of socialism. He added: “Mamdani diagnosed the right problem: the affordability crisis facing the working class. But he has the wrong solutions: his ideas can’t work and would make matters worse.”
There will certainly be much debate over whether New York City, a Democratic stronghold with many distinct characteristics, is a useful for template for candidates in cities, towns and rural areas the length and breadth of the country. “As New York goes, so goes the nation,” is not really a thing.
Even so, after six months of anguished soul searching, Democrats now have one answer. Some don’t like it. Mamdani – likely be the favourite in November’s general election for mayor – signifies a generational change and rebuke to a party establishment grown complacent and hypocritical in its deference to figures such as the Clintons, Biden and Cuomo despite their obvious flaws.
The odds of Ocasio-Cortez, currently 35, running for and winning the Democratic nomination in 2028 just got shorter. It is a leap of political imagination for America that progressives would savour – but so, too, would the Republican election machine.
