When Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, the whole national conversation changed. I remember watching the New York Times results map that night, as precinct after precinct lit up in his favor, and not believing my eyes. Even Mamdani’s most optimistic supporters expected a narrow, squeaking win after several rounds of Byzantine ranked-choice math; instead, we got a blowout, and Andrew Cuomo waved the white flag of surrender that same night. In the space of 24 hours, Mamdani overturned decades of conventional wisdom about politics in this country. He proved that an unabashedly socialist platform—government-run grocery stores, free universal childcare, alternatives to armed police—-can be wildly popular, if you communicate it properly. He proved, too, that the Democratic Party establishment is growing weak, and all their corporate media and billionaire backing can be beaten by enough dedicated volunteers knocking doors. Best of all, he provided a model for success that can be copied in other states and cities, and candidates like Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed are already pulling from his playbook. For the first time since Bernie Sanders won Nevada in 2020, I’ve allowed myself to feel hope about the future of U.S. elections.
But this is class war, and the enemy never rests. In New York City, the wealthy and powerful do not want Zohran Mamdani to become mayor and enact his agenda. They do not want to pay higher income taxes, even if it’s a modest 2 percent increase. The grocery retailers don’t want public alternatives to their price-gouging stores to exist. DoorDash does not want to pay decent wages to its workers. Above all, the landlords want to charge more and more for already-expensive housing, and are reportedly “gripped by hysteria” at the prospect of a rent freeze on cost-stabilized apartments. So before the confetti had even settled on Mamdani’s victory party, multi-millionaires like Larry Summers were railing against his “Trotskyite economic policies.” Hedge fund manager and would-be tennis star Bill Ackman is openly plotting his downfall, saying there are “hundreds of millions of dollars of capital available to back a competitor” and that “funds will pour in.” They have the New York Post firmly in their corner, and the New York Times too. And even if Mamdani does win the general election this November, the big capitalists will still be there, trying to block, sabotage, and subvert his policies at every turn.
If he wants to deliver real change for New Yorkers, overcoming all the political and economic forces arrayed against him, Mamdani and his supporters can’t afford to get complacent for a second. He has to run like he’s ten points behind at all times, and he’ll need to learn from recent history. Specifically, he should study the examples of three brilliant young Democratic politicians who went before him, who failed in three distinct ways. Like the three ghosts of Christmas who haunted Scrooge, they have vital warnings to offer.
India Walton
The story is a familiar one. In a large, majority-Democratic city in New York, the race for the mayor’s office is heating up. On one side, there’s a scandal-plagued and allegedly corrupt centrist; on the other, a dynamic young socialist endorsed by the DSA. The newcomer is charismatic, and offers people a platform they can actually feel proud of voting for. They support publicly owned grocery stores and curtailing the power and violence of the police. They win the primary in a stunning upset. But conservative Democrats in the party establishment—most notably Governor Kathy Hochul—refuse to endorse their party’s nominee. In the opening left by their noncommital, the defeated centrist decides to defy the will of the voters who already rejected him, come back, and run again in the general election, this time as an independent. And thanks to an influx of cash from wealthy donors and logistical support from Republicans, he wins, dashing everyone’s hopes for progress in the city.
I’m referring, of course, to India Walton’s 2021 campaign for the mayorship of Buffalo. Four years ago, Walton was considered one of America’s brightest hopes for socialist governance at the city level, just as Zohran Mamdani is today. But the business elite, working together with a fifth column of centrists within the Democratic Party, pulled out all the stops to crush her. Their weapon of choice was Byron Brown, who had been a pretty bad mayor, but was a fixture of the party leadership; from 2016 to 2019, he’d been the chair of the New York Democratic Party. Today, it’s Andrew Cuomo, the corrupt nepotistic pervert who just won’t stay down. Like Brown, he’s ignoring the decision of Democratic voters and running again in the New York City general election, this time under the “Fight and Deliver” party line, which he created for the purpose. No doubt he’s studied what Byron Brown did in 2021, and hopes to pull off the same trick.
Already, the first element is in place. Just as they did with Walton, top Democrats have declined to endorse Mamdani, revealing that “vote blue no matter who” was only ever a cudgel against the Left, not a real principle. In the Senate, Chuck Schumer has praised Mamdani’s “impressive campaign,” but will go no further. In the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries—a longtime enemy of the DSA who’s known for meddling in city council races to prevent socialists gaining ground—says he’s not yet ready to endorse Mamdani because “we don’t really know each other well.” And in Albany, Kathy Hochul is back at her old tricks. She, too, refuses to endorse her party’s nominee, saying that she wants to “find out positions on specific issues” first. (She also called him “Mandami.”) It doesn’t take Robert Caro to see what’s going on here. These people are fundamentally conservatives, and they’re up to their necks in corporate money. They don’t want Mamdani to be mayor, and they’re stalling to see if Cuomo, or someone else, can take him out for them.
They have options to pick from. Along with the disgraced ex-governor, there’s still equally disgraced incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, plus Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, a fascinating crank who got his start in politics by running a “tough-on-crime” vigilante group called the Guardian Angels. (Sliwa wears a red beret everywhere and keeps 15 rescue cats in his apartment, which would be charming if not for the vigilante thing.) Right now, Mamdani’s greatest advantage is that the anti-progressive vote is split three ways: recent polls show him leading the pack with 40 percent support, followed by Cuomo at 24, Adams at 15, and Sliwa at 14. But that’s also a problem, because the other candidates’ numbers add up to 53, higher than Mamdani’s total. So if two people drop out, he could be in trouble. For anyone who followed the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2020, this should be ringing alarm bells. It’s exactly what happened in that race: abrupt drop-outs from Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, consolidation behind Joe Biden, and a historic defeat for the Left. Today, Cuomo is proposing the same strategy:
I don't want to be part of a suicide mission. If Adams is a stronger candidate, I'm not going to be a spoiler and I'll defer. I'm not going to be a reason that this assemblyman became mayor of the city of New York[...] I think everybody will say that to Eric Adams.
There’s only one wrinkle: Sliwa, apparently a stubborn man, says he will not drop out “unless they figure out a way to put me in a pine box and bury me six feet under.” Still, that may change, and there’s a strong possibility Mamdani will face a one-on-one election this November, just as India Walton did.
Walton really is the best comparison here. Back in 2021, the establishment strategy against her was to invent an endless series of supposed scandals and force her to address those instead of her actual policy agenda, thus robbing her of momentum. And the attacks came from all quarters—both from her opponent, the media, and the Democratic Party itself. As Branko Marcetic wrote at the time:
[Byron] Brown successfully turned the election debate to the petty personal mistakes of Walton, a woman who became a working mother as a teen, before becoming a nurse: she was charged with $295 worth of food stamp fraud in 2003; she owed $749 in back taxes in 2004; she was stopped for driving with a suspended license; she visited her cousin before he went to jail; she failed to show up for a court summons sent to the wrong address; she wrote a rude Facebook post; and her car was towed just last month over unpaid parking tickets.
It worked: a week before election day, more than half of voters said their opinion of Walton had gotten worse since the primary.
Each time, the press seized gleefully on the controversy, running headlines like “As the fall campaign begins, India Walton confronts questions over her past” or “Walton says she is not running from past legal and financial issues.” There was a distinct note of sexism in the focus on politically irrelevant facts like her becoming a mother as a teenager, and the fixation on her supposed benefits fraud—she says she just made a mistake reporting her income one year, and paid back the extra $295 in food stamps—evoked the ugliest Reagan-era stereotypes about Black “welfare queens.” And that wasn’t the worst of it. At one point, the chair of the New York Democratic Party explained his refusal to endorse Walton by comparing her to a Ku Klux Klan leader, saying “[if] he wins the Democratic line, I have to endorse David Duke? I don’t think so.” To him, apparently, a socialist and a white supremacist would be equally unacceptable.
Today, we’re seeing the same pattern of manufactured scandal play out with Zohran Mamdani. In the last few weeks, he’s been attacked for eating rice with his hands, with a sitting member of Congress telling him to “go back to the Third World.” Kirsten Gillibrand, a fellow Democrat, has accused him of condoning “global jihad,” only later making a half-hearted apology. Most recently, the New York Times ran a hit piece about Mamdani’s college application to Columbia, where he checked the boxes for both “Asian” and “African American.” It was factually true, since Mamdani is both ethnically Indian and born in Africa; he even wrote “Ugandan” elsewhere on the form to clarify. But the Times implied it was a huge scandal, only to get egg on their own faces when it turned out their source was a racist blogger who’d hacked Columbia’s databases. Meanwhile, right-wingers are dusting off slurs nobody’s heard since the 1920s, with Charlie Kirk accusing Mamdani of spearheading “the Mohammedan march in the West.” It’s the same scattershot assault that Walton got, and we can expect more of it in the months to come.
In a recent interview with Briahna Joy Gray, Walton says one of her biggest regrets is that she was too conciliatory: “I felt as if I needed to bend, and capitulate, and moderate, and become a part of the party that never wanted me in the first place, and I wish that I had stayed the course.” In an attempt to win over big business, she indicated she might support “school choice” and charter schools, angering the Buffalo teachers’ union. At one point she was persuaded to apologize for a 2020 Facebook comment where she’d called a white legislator, who made a pro-police post during the George Floyd uprising, a “tender [expletive] white man.” But making concessions doesn’t placate your opponents. It only emboldens them to make more attacks and demand more concessions, because it worked once, and they can reasonably expect it’ll work again. It makes you look weak. It was the same with Jeremy Corbyn, who tried his best to make peace with the people who slandered him as an antisemite, always apologizing for this or that. It only served to validate the accusation in the public’s eyes, and he lost ground each time. By contrast, one of Donald Trump’s rules for political victory is to never, ever apologize or admit wrongdoing, and it’s worked out beautifully for him. He can do and say the most outrageous things imaginable, and it all rolls off him. Tactically, Mamdani needs to be more Trump than Walton or Corbyn.
To his credit, he seems to know that. So far, one of the most impressive aspects of Mamdani’s campaign has been the way he’s handled attacks over Israel, which have been absurdly frequent for a municipal election. When debate moderators grill him about Israel’s “right to exist,” he makes a smart riposte, saying it has a right to exist “as a state with equal rights.” It looks like a concession, but it puts the attacker on the back foot, because they’re forced to admit what they really mean is existence “as a Jewish state”—a more extreme ethno-nationalist demand than just “existence.” It’s the same with the endless whinging over the word “intifada.” Mamdani makes clear that he doesn’t use that language himself, but so far he hasn’t ritually “condemned” people who use it, the way his opponents want. He hasn’t given in to Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who arrogantly demanded a private meeting and told him he “doesn’t get to pick and choose which Jewish people he talks to,” either. That’s the right stance. If he did have tea with Greenblatt and condemn the Arabic word for “struggle,” that would not make the complainers happy. There would just be a new demand to condemn something else the next day, and so on forever. Meanwhile, it would demoralize Mamdani’s base, who would conclude that he’s weak-willed and unreliable. They would be right. To win, he has to stand firm, secure in the knowledge that his position on Palestine—and on free childcare, and taxing the rich, and any number of other issues—is the broadly popular one, and paint his opponents as the fringe weirdos who should be apologizing. Never give these people an inch, because they’ll use it as a foothold to take the next inch, and before you know it you’re six feet deep.
Brandon Johnson
Let’s look a little further down the track, though. Suppose Mamdani pulls it off, and becomes mayor this November. It would be historic, no question about that. But there’s a difference between getting elected and achieving your goals, and the mayorship of a major U.S. city can easily become a toxic job where the incumbent is blamed for everything wrong in town. Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson has been finding that out.
Johnson still has two years left in his first term, so it would be a mistake to consider him an outright failure yet. For that matter, he’s scored a few policy wins, most notably ending the “subminimum” wage for tipped workers. But it’s notable that left-wing publications like Jacobin, which used to write about him in the enamored tones they now use for Mamdani, don’t have much to say about Johnson these days—and with Chicagoans, his approval rating is undeniably in the toilet. (The friendliest polls have him around 26 percent support, while some have him as low as 14 percent. Call it the “reverse Assad.”) It’s safe to say this is an outcome Mamdani wants to avoid.
Some of Johnson’s woes, as Davis Giangiulio points out in the American Prospect, are his own doing. His plan for helping nearly 51,000 new immigrants to Chicago has been disastrous, as his administration first struck a $29 million deal with a company called GardaWorld—which also builds detention centers—to construct makeshift tent cities, then had to abandon the plan when it turned out the land they’d intended to use was contaminated with mercury, arsenic, and lead. Johnson tried to spend up to $1.5 billion in tax money to build a new stadium for the Chicago Bears, a fairly indefensible use of public funds that was similarly halted by Governor J.B. Pritzker and the state legislature. More recently, he’s launched a quixotic crackdown on large signs in store windows, passing an ordinance that they can only cover 25 percent of a window’s surface and issuing a wave of tickets for violations. This is apparently meant to “improve both public safety and retail corridor aesthetics,” the former by ensuring there’s always a “line of sight into businesses.” But whatever you think of the merits, the size of shop signs is hardly a priority issue worth burning political capital over. Mistakes, clearly, have been made.
But whatever Johnson’s shortcomings, his dismal approval ratings owe at least as much to the sabotage he’s received from two of society’s worst groups: the landlords and the cops. After taking office in 2023, one of his top priorities was a ballot initiative called “Bring Chicago Home,” which was meant to raise funds for homeless services and affordable housing by raising the tax on property sales above $1 million in value—a “mansion tax,” as it’s often called. It was a straightforwardly good and humane idea, redistributing wealth from people in a position to sell a multimillion-dollar building to those without a roof over their heads. For Johnson it was personal, as he frequently talks about how his brother died unhoused and struggling with addiction. So as you might expect, the city’s landlords and realtors screamed bloody murder about it, and they mobilized to defeat the policy with everything they had. The Illinois REALTORS® group, a trade association and “advocate for private property rights,” spent more than $1 million on a campaign against the initiative, and that was on top of “over seven figures” raised by a pro-business consultant called Greg Goldner. But individual landlords got in on the action, too. At apartment buildings owned by the real estate companies Group Fox and Horizon Realty, every tenant received an email threatening a rent hike if the new taxes passed, and some buildings even had paper flyers pinned everywhere: “Landlords won’t pay more, they’ll just pass on the cost to renters like you.” Like employers who force their workers to sit through anti-union speeches, the landlords knew they had a captive audience, and they took full advantage. Ultimately, it worked, and “Bring Chicago Home” was voted down.
And then there’s the police union. They opposed Johnson from the start, with Fraternal Order of Police leader John Catanzara darkly warning about an “exodus [of cops] like we’ve never seen before” and “blood in the streets” in Chicago if Johnson won. The exact same rhetoric is now being deployed against Mamdani, with the Police Benevolent Association taking to the pages of the New York Post to claim that “He has an extremist attitude and it’s going to scare other cops and they will go out the door.” In Chicago, no actual “exodus” of cops occurred; in fact, the number of officers barely changed from 11,641 in 2023 to 11,580 in 2024. But just like the landlords and realtors, the police union fought Johnson on everything they possibly could. Catanzara drummed up a big dispute about parental leave for cops, demanding 12 weeks’ worth (even though his union already had “a generous sick pay policy allowing them to take up to 365 days off every two years”), and said cops should get days off “not only for Juneteenth, but NASCAR.” The union also fought Johnson on reform and accountability, demanding that discipline for police officers accused of misconduct be handled through private arbitration, not a more transparent public process. Needless to say, being perceived as constantly in conflict with the police is bad for a mayor’s image, even when it’s the police picking the fights, and Catanzara knows it. That’s why he’s doing it, despite Johnson agreeing to a 20 percent raise for officers and trying his best to be conciliatory. Now, the Fraternal Order of Police is among the organizations seeking a recall vote. Conciliation got him nothing.
In New York, we can expect to see a Mayor Mamdani run up against the same kind of opposition, coming from the same vested interests. The grocery store owners will be dead set against him, as billionaire John Catsimatidis has threatened to pull all of his Gristedes supermarkets from the city if Mamdani wins. Like the predictions of a police “exodus,” there’s a decent chance this is an empty threat; at the end of the day, Catsimatidis needs the massive consumer base of New York City a lot more than New Yorkers need a grocery chain nicknamed “Grosstedes” for its questionable sanitation. But this is the kind of local oligarch who will attempt to throw banana peels in Mamdani’s path every chance they get.
Here, Mamdani has two advantages. First, the people he’s fighting against are widely despised. Virtually nobody who has to deal with a landlord on a monthly basis likes their landlord, and 69 percent of New Yorkers rent their homes, making the interests and narratives of the property-owning class a minority concern. Nobody is an avowed fan of John Catsimatidis, either. Second, Mamdani has a volunteer army and a social media presence unlike anything most politicians—and certainly Brandon Johnson—can dream of. If he’s smart, he will not throw away those weapons when the election is over. Instead, he’ll do what FDR did: keep making modern-day “Fireside Chats,” in the form of TikToks and Instagram reels, and direct his supporters to campaign for particular issues and policies, putting pressure on their city council members, Governor Hochul, and so on. Always be campaigning. His opponents have all the money; he has the numbers, and that’s his path to victory.
Back in 2008, Obama ran on a platform that scared a lot of conservatives. He said he wanted to close the prison base at Guantanamo Bay, “crack down on the culture of greed and scheming” in Wall Street, and pass “card check” laws to make it dramatically easier to form a union. Depending on the crowd he was talking to, he could sound a bit like Bernie Sanders, and before all the silly smears about socialist “Bernie Bros,” there were silly Salon op-eds decrying “Obama Boys” for their “fanatical support of Barack and gleeful bashing of Hillary.” Obama was proud, justifiably so, of being a “skinny kid with a funny name” who had ascended to the highest ranks of U.S. politics, and later the first Black president. Today, Mamdani shows a rare flash of anger when he tells his opponents how to spell his name, and he would be New York City’s first Muslim mayor. Like Mamdani, Obama was branded both a communist and a radical Islamist. Hillary Clinton’s surrogates sent out racist campaign materials featuring Obama in a turban; 17 years later, one of Andrew Cuomo’s super PACs designed racist mailers where Mamdani’s beard was artificially darkened and enlarged. Just like Mamdani, Obama built a formidable volunteer operation, and was a pioneer in using new digital technologies to spread his message. There was even a moment when Obama seemed like he might be decent on Palestine, since he’d once had dinner with Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi, and ought to have learned something from it. But he sold off every principle he ever claimed to have, one by one. The bankers responsible for the 2008 crash were never prosecuted; card check never happened; Gitmo was never closed; the bullets and bombs to Israel flowed unabated, and the Obama volunteer force was quietly dismantled, never to be used again.
This is the greatest risk for Mamdani: not that New York’s financial and political elite will defeat him, but that they’ll seduce him to their way of thinking, and slowly, by degrees, make him just another normal Democrat. That in time, he may betray his supporters and himself. The offer would be presented subtly, in the name of “compromise” and “bipartisanship” and “trade-offs.” He’d be given cooperation from top Democrats like Governor Hochul, from the so-called “business community,” and from the NYPD if he softens his positions, with the threat of capital strikes and police opposition always waiting in reserve if he balks. We’ve seen this kind of thing countless times. Along with Obama, the transformation of John Fetterman from jovial champion of organized labor to sadistic war-crime cheerleader comes to mind. Even AOC allowed herself to be taken in by the Biden-Harris administration, and to be made the mouthpiece for their lies about “working tirelessly for a ceasefire.”
Now, to be clear, nothing Mamdani has done or said has yet crossed a red line. He does have to get elected, so he can’t just yell “ACAB, eat the rich!” at every press conference. But co-optation is still a real concern. His supporters should keep the possibility of another Obama in the back of their minds, because they can’t rule out that the politician they raise up may one day have to be put down. And if Mamdani betrays the working class once he’s in Gracie Mansion, he should know there’ll be hell to pay.