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New York City Mayor-elect Zohan Mamdani cast his election Tuesday as a permanent populist shift and “a new age” in the city’s politics—and possibly beyond if Democrats care to dig out of their doldrums with an aura of revolution.
“Over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater. Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it,” the 34-year-old democratic socialist roared at his campaign party in Brooklyn. “The future is in our hands. My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty.”
Combined with statewide wins in Virginia, New Jersey, and California, Mamdani’s triumph over former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent, signaled that there is still a pulse in the Democratic Party, and it’s trending younger and away from business-as-usual efforts. While Mamdani won as an avowed progressive in the mold of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Governors-elect Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey ran as get-stuff-done, mainstream Democrats. But one thing united that trio, ages 52 and younger: they abandoned the buffet-style pick-your-priority agendas and focused with an intensity on one issue, affordability. Mamdani pledged to freeze rents, Spanberger promised to make it easier to cover day-to-day costs, and Sherrill proposed using emergency powers to freeze utility costs.
That, right there, may finally start to break the fever of Trumpism. Adrift at a national level for most of the last decade, Democrats are heading into next year’s midterms that could curb President Donald Trump’s last two years in office and then chart a path past his time in the White House. In a way, Mamdani may emerge as a helpful tutor for Democrats desperate to stop posting Ls. Crucial to that is winning back voters under 30, which supported Trump to the tune of 43% nationally last year. In New York this week, they broke 3-to-1 for Mamdani.
The Mamdani agenda—“the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost of living crisis since the days of Fiorella La Guardia” to his mind—clearly resonated. More than half of voters Tuesday said costs were the top factor in the election, outpacing the next topic of crime by a 2-to-1 margin. It was a sweet spot for Mamdani, who carried that bloc with 66%.
“New York, tonight you have delivered a mandate for change,” Mamdani said. “A mandate for a new kind of politics. A mandate for a city we can afford. And a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that.”
A disciplined, charismatic figure who reeked of authenticity and social-media savvy, Mamdani showed Democrats there is an upside to being upfront with voters and dropping the shape-shifting games too common in politics. “It can be worse than what we have, but that’s a chance I’m willing to take,” said 30-year-old Divya Hill, who voted for Mamdani in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
Mamdani wrapped himself in how he is different—the city’s youngest Mayor since 1892 and the first Muslim to lead the nation’s largest city. “I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all: I refuse to apologize for any of this,” Mamdani said to cheers. “If tonight teaches us anything, it is that convention has held us back. We have bowed at the altar of caution and we have paid a mighty price.”
That doesn’t mean his win was easy. There were plenty of reasons national Democrats were chugging antacids in recent months as one by one Mamdani’s past statements came back to Page One. His strident support for Palestinian causes never wavered and he maintained that he views Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a criminal, but Mamdani did walk back some of his harshest criticism of police. While he was critical of Barack Obama in social media posts years ago, the pair spoke twice during the campaign and Obama offered to be a sounding board for the relative neophyte. Mamdani never shed his democratic socialist label but he also spent hours meeting with Wall Street and business leaders to assure them he was not going to go on a taxing spree for a giggle.
On any one of those issues alone, Mamdani’s campaign could have been in a free fall if not conscripted to a quick and public immolation. Instead, he read his new political reality and purposefully defanged the Establishment. Even among some voters who were sincerely uncomfortable with Mamdani’s past rhetoric, many rationalized that an authentic Democrat with a pulse was still better than someone who might be manipulated from afar. The mental gymnastics felt very familiar to how Republicans wrestled themselves to yes with Trump a decade ago.
The take-aways may echo far beyond New York. Residents of Washington, Los Angeles, and Chicago, all led by Democrats, have watched as Trump has flooded their cities with military assets. Red states fare little better; Nebraska meat-packing workers, Georgia autoworkers, and Texas farmers have all experienced raids. The administration has gleefully posted imagery of individuals being rounded up and deported to a high-security, low-human rights facility in El Salvador. In New York City—where 37% of residents are first-generation immigrants, including the Ugandan-born Mamdani—voters decided it was time to try something else.
“Together, we will usher in a generation of change and if we embrace this brave new course rather than fleeing from it, we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves,” Mamdani said.
Andrea Vasquez, a 71-year-old staff member at the City University of New York and a lifelong New Yorker, was in that Brooklyn crowd. “He touched the heart of so many New Yorkers. I’ve lived in New York my whole life and I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said. “[Democrats] can learn and they can try to copy.”
First up are next year’s midterm elections that could install a new Congress to block Trump. The GOP has zero margin of error if they want to keep their majority in the House, and the Senate map could get tricky if Democrats manage to run perfect campaigns in places like Ohio, North Carolina, Michigan, Maine, and Texas.
For their part, House Republicans—when they are not pushing Attorney General Pam Bondi to open an investigation on whether Mamdani’s 2018 naturalization should be revoked based on his criticism of the United States see the potential to weaponize Mamdani against the Democratic brand. The Republican National Committee has hardly been subtle about it, writing in a memo last week that “Republicans will ensure the Mamdani Effect is a kiss of death for Democrats in House and Senate races.”
While some Democrats in Washington fear that strategy might work, the broader message coming out of Tuesday was optimism that the party had found a playbook going forward. For instance, two Democrats won seats on Georgia’s state public services commission after campaigning on affordability and lowering utility rates; they are the first Democrats in Georgia to win a non-federal statewide race in almost 20 years. Elsewhere, Democrats picked up 13 seats in the Virginia state House, broke Republicans’ supermajority in Mississippi’s state Senate, picked up a supermajority in New Jersey’s Assembly, defended their majority in the Minnesota state Senate, and swept Supreme Court races in Pennsylvania.
Mamdani, who will take office on Jan. 1, was already signaling his strategy could serve the party well beyond the city limits. “If there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump, it’s how we stop the next one,” Mamdani said.
Mamdani’s message of change, frankly, worked. It was the most sought-after quality in a candidate this week. And among that slice of the New York electorate, 77% backed Mamdani.
This was, clearly, not what Trump wanted. For months, Trump has trolled Mamdani and attacked him, threatening to move the World Cup if Mamdani emerged victorious and preemptively scrapping $18 billion in infrastructure projects already approved by Congress. “It can only get worse with a Communist at the helm, and I don’t want to send, as President, good money after bad,” Trump wrote on his social media platform on Monday threatening to choke off the federal spigot.
Federal funds pick up more than 6% of the city’s budget, so it may fall to Mamdani to defend his province—and maybe even show his fellow Democrats how it’s done. After all, nothing they’re doing right now seems to have made a dent.
—Connor Greene contributed reporting from New York.
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