The era of Mamdani

It's a new day, and New York City has chosen a new mayor.

This month, the voters spoke clearly. They elected Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, as the next mayor. It's the culmination of one of the most improbable rises in American politics. Is it a fluke, or the first rumblings of a larger political shift?

An improbable rise

Mamdani's triumph defied cynics' predictions and flummoxed the establishment. It's not how politics usually goes in America.

At the start of the campaign, Andrew Cuomo was the heir-in-waiting. The son of a popular former mayor and a member of President Bill Clinton's cabinet, he was governor of New York during the COVID era. He resigned in 2021 after accusations that he sexually harassed women in his staff, but he decided to make a comeback.

By contrast, Mamdani, a city councilman from Astoria, started out as an unknown. The earliest polls showed him at 1%, tied with "someone else". He's a Muslim—long thought a liability in the city that went through 9/11—and a naturalized citizen who emigrated from Uganda—at a time when the U.S. is experiencing a violent resurgence of xenophobia. As mentioned, he's also a democratic socialist, an ideology that one party distrusts and the other despises.

But he ran a smart, media-savvy campaign. He combined an unapologetic progressive platform with undeniable personal charisma and a string of viral videos: like jumping into frigid January water in a suit to promote his proposed rent freeze, or a ferocious confrontation with Trumpist border czar Tom Homan, or walking the entire length of Manhattan while talking to voters along the way.

Most of all, he focused on addressing the high cost of living. He pledged to build more affordable housing and to freeze the rent for rent-controlled apartments; to make city buses fare-free; to institute universal child care; to set up government-run grocery stores that sell at cost in food-desert neighborhoods; and to pay for it all by raising taxes on the wealthy.

This message resonated with New Yorkers. Mamdani attracted an army of volunteers to knock doors for him, and he steadily rose in the polls. On primary night, he won 56% of the vote—a stunning upset.

READ: Does Zohran Mamdani's win herald a socialist future?

In Democratic-majority New York, this practically guaranteed victory in the general election, but Cuomo didn't concede defeat. He waged a third-party bid, funded by millions from wealthy donors. He hammered on Mamdani's criticism of the Israeli government, calling it antisemitic by definition. He spread fears of crime and disorder and courted right-wingers who engaged in blatant Islamophobia.

But none of it availed him. In a three-way race between Cuomo, Mamdani, and Republican Curtis Sliwa, Mamdani eked out a majority, winning 50.4% of the vote. It was the highest turnout for a mayoral election since 1969.

The Necker cube of politics

Like a Necker cube, you can view this election in two distinct and incompatible ways.

You could say that Mamdani should have won by more, considering all the advantages he had: a young and charismatic politician, in a progressive and multicultural city, running a nearly flawless campaign focused on kitchen-table affordability issues. He benefited from a surge of youth enthusiasm and a massive groundswell of volunteers. Despite these advantages, Mamdani only defeated Cuomo by nine points—less than his margin of victory in the primary, and a smaller percentage than the last few mayors won with.

On the other hand, you could say it's astonishing Mamdani won at all, considering all the disadvantages he had: a Muslim socialist immigrant, with little experience, who launched his campaign from a base of near-zero support. He ran against an establishment figure who enjoyed universal name recognition and unlimited money from billionaire donors. He faced an onslaught of gross racism, scaremongering ads, and a blizzard of accusations of antisemitism. Some members of his own party pointedly refused to endorse him. Despite these disadvantages, he triumphed by a decisive margin, securing a majority in a three-way race. In raw numbers, he got over a million votes—the most of any mayoral candidate in over fifty years.

Whichever way you spin it, Mamdani's win presents overly cautious, triangulating Democrats with a dilemma. They want to keep him at arm's length, afraid that they'll be tarred for associating with him. (Indeed, Republicans in conservative white Christian areas are already using his name as a boogeyman.) They fear being cut off by mega-wealthy donors for supporting his tax-the-rich platform.

But they need his voters.

Mamdani won thanks to huge youth turnout, drawing previously politically disengaged people into his campaign. This should be a strong signal about the future of the party. Democratic voters are sending a loud and clear message about what policies they want their leaders to fight for. Will those politicians listen? Will they get on board—or will they go to war with their own voters, and risk being rolled over like Andrew Cuomo?

The wellspring of Mamdani's victory

In a strange way, Zohran Mamdani's victory springs from the same source as Donald Trump's. Both of them tapped into the same energy: voters who are suffering and fed up with the status quo, who feel the system isn't serving them, and who want radical change.

Obviously, in Trump's case, voters who thought he would help them were wildly ignorant or self-deluded. It is and always was obvious that he's a narcissistic oligarch who only cares about himself and sees other people as objects to be used and discarded. It is and always was obvious that the Republican party stands for enriching the already wealthy at everyone else's expense.

But Trump voters aren't wrong about some of the problems they perceive. They just fail to understand the causality or the real solutions. Often, they're brainwashed by propaganda into aiming at precisely the wrong targets.

Mamdani tapped into this same popular discontent, but steered it in a positive direction. He reignited the hope that politics can make our lives better, and he rode that hope to victory.

Now comes the hard part—he has to deliver on his promises. I don't envy the weight resting on his shoulders.

He'll have to win over skeptics in the city and state legislatures. He'll have to withstand right-wing media that's rooting for him to fail and will seize on any misstep. He'll have to fend off a criminal president who thinks he's a king and can punish states and cities that don't do what he wants. Some conservatives even want to see him deported, on the nakedly racist grounds that a non-white, non-Christian person can't be a real citizen.

Optimistically, I hope he can achieve the goals he campaigned on. Realistically, he'll probably have to scale back or compromise on some of his ambitions. That's a normal part of the sausage-making process of politics. No one gets everything they want.

But if he succeeds in his bigger ambitions, he can restore what's been absent from our politics in recent years—a sense of unity and common purpose. It's the idea that we can work together to make things better for everyone, rather than treating politics as a zero-sum contest where you just have to grab as much as you can at everyone else's expense. That's an idea that resonates far beyond the boundaries of New York City.

As Mamdani himself ironically noted, the billionaires who lined up against him spent more money trying to defeat him than they'd pay under his proposed tax increases. That's comical, but it's not a coincidence. It's a clue to what they're really defending: not a tax rate, but an order of things.

The billionaire class and the ossified political establishment wants to preserve a regime where they're on top and almost always get their way, regardless of who's in office. They've tasted the prospect of losing that power, and they're terrified. If that's the change Zohran Mamdani is about to usher in, this will be his era indeed.