A big question for national Democrats is whether it’s good news that Zohran Mamdani is their party’s nominee for mayor of New York City.
The 33-year-old, Ugandan-born Muslim socialist who bested former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary with surprising ease on Tuesday night would have once seemed like a walking advertisement for making Republican Rudy Giuliani mayor for life. Or at least Michael Bloomberg.
But it is 2025, not 2001, and Mamdani cannot be dismissed lightly. What does his nomination mean for Democrats?
On the positive side of the ledger, Mamdani ran a disciplined, modern campaign tightly focused on cost-of-living issues while downplaying his more radical cultural and foreign-policy stances. He succeeded where former Vice President Kamala Harris failed.
This may have also been a failure of Mamdani’s political opponents. Harris also pledged to make things more affordable and tried to create doubt about whether she was as progressive as she presented herself as being during her first failed presidential campaign in 2019. President Donald Trump and his allies did not allow her to get away with this, and a plurality of voters rejected her attempted rebranding.
But Mamdani, who started with much lower name ID than a sitting vice president of the United States to whom he can be compared or the former governor and son of a New York liberal political dynasty he was actually running against, was able to establish his own identity during the primary rather than allow his opponents to define him.
Upending dynastic politics in favor of a generational change in leadership is another positive for Democrats in Mamdani’s win. Cuomo is 67, has been around forever, and was at least partially discredited by both #MeToo and COVID-19. His father was elected to his third and final term as governor more than 10 months before Mamdani was born. (Mario Cuomo was first elected nearly 10 years before Mamdani entered the world.) Not a bad change for a party that has battled gerontocracy and was just forced to replace aging former President Joe Biden at the top of its ticket last year.
Mamdani also made the best use of social media and emerging technologies since Barack Obama decamped to the mean streets of Kalorama. Harris ran a campaign highly dependent on traditional media, when she wasn’t hiding from such outlets. Cuomo also ran as if it were still 1999, driving a daily message and piling up conventional endorsements. Mamdani was everywhere, hitting the high price of chicken and rice at halal food trucks more cleverly and effectively than Biden, Harris, and company ever did “shrinkflation.”
Defeating dynasties, appearing on new media, running against the effects of inflation — it almost sounds like Trump on the other side of the aisle.
“Affordability” has been the buzzword about Mamdani’s primary win for national Democrats. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), chairwoman of the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm for next year’s midterm elections, said New York City’s mayoral race might not be “applicable to most parts of the country.” Ditto House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who told Morning Joe on Wednesday, “The relentless focus on affordability had great appeal. He outworked, outorganized, and outcommunicated the opposition.”
There is also plenty of bad news for Democrats, however. Mamdani’s past and current positions on a number of issues — on Israel, defunding the police, government takeovers of grocery stores, and dealing with criminals — divide his own party’s base. His election would also be a setback for Democrats who believe the party needs to pivot to the center to be competitive in the battleground states.
It is possible that, rather than competing for populist and working-class voters as some Democrats hoped Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) could do in 2016 and 2020, Mamdani doubles down on the party’s fixation with college-educated, relatively affluent voters. And even Sanders himself struggled with black voters.
“Mr. Mamdani may claim to run a grassroots, working-class oriented campaign, but college-educated urbanites birthed it,” writes Daniel Idfresne in RealClearPolitics. “Socialist organizations like the Working Families Party and Democratic Socialists of America fueled it. Progressive celebrities like Lorde, Spike Lee, and Stavros Halkias endorsed it.”
Idfresne calls Mamdani the candidate of “young, childless, college-educated New Yorkers chasing a Sex and the City lifestyle in gentrified enclaves” rather than the oppressed masses.
Early numbers bear that out. Mamdami’s strongest support came from precincts where residents were more white, higher-income, middle-income, and college-educated. In the neighborhoods that had the highest percentages of nonwhites, Mamdani lost the predominantly black and Hispanic areas while doing better in the heavily Asian ones.
DEMOCRATS MAKE THEIR LEFTWARD MOVE ON IMMIGRATION
Whether Mamdani can win depends largely on whether opponents of his candidacy can coalesce around an alternative. Incumbent Mayor Eric Adams is seeking reelection as an independent, but there is also a Republican nominee and other independents on the ballot.
If Mamdani does win, it remains to be seen whether he is helpful to the Democratic national brand once it becomes clear there is much more to him than mere affordability. Start spreading the news, as they say in New York.