
Zohran Mamdani’s Victory Is Just What The Left Needed
He has shown that a socialist message can win people over. His campaign is a model that should be emulated everywhere.
“It makes me so happy to see, like, somebody who gives a shit about this city.” —Stephanie Garace, 31-year-old New York City Public school teacher, on Zohran Mamdani
Socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani has pulled off the “biggest upset in modern history” in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. Running on a platform of free buses, free childcare, building city-run grocery stores, and freezing the rent in rent-stabilized apartments, Mamdani defied the odds and defeated former Governor Andrew Cuomo. As the New York Times notes, Cuomo had formidable advantages. He “had almost universal name recognition and was leading in the polls before he even entered the contest.” A pro-Cuomo SuperPAC with $25 million shattered campaign spending records, and both Republican and Democratic billionaires did everything they could to ensure that Cuomo would prevail.
But Cuomo was complacent. He limited his public appearances, hoping to avoid awkward confrontations with voters. He thought his name and his money could get him into office, and he flooded the airwaves with attack ads against Mamdani. Mamdani, on the other hand, while he could be vicious towards Cuomo, ran a largely positive and joy-filled campaign, meeting New Yorkers on the streets, deploying humor and whimsy, and relentlessly hammering his core theme of affordability. When I interviewed Mamdani last year, he returned to the core concern of New Yorkers that “they couldn't afford groceries, that they couldn't afford their rent.” He presented an uplifting vision of New York becoming “the city that it was always meant to be, which is a place that working people can flourish in, where working people can dream of more than simply getting off the hamster wheel to go to sleep and getting back on it in the morning to go back to work.” (I would note with some pride that Current Affairs was one of the earliest outlets to take Mamdani’s campaign seriously at a time when it was a long shot. And while The Atlantic was running attack pieces accusing Mamdani of “magic realism”—huh?—our much better magazine was debunking this nonsense.)
Cuomo was well-funded and powerful, so much so that major Democratic politicians refused to condemn his long history of sexual harassment. But in a certain way Mamdani was fortunate in the opponent he had. Cuomo was sour, joyless, and a perfect punching bag. He embodied everything people dislike about politics: he is corrupt, dishonest, and abusive. There was very little enthusiasm for his candidacy. If you want to run an insurgent anti-establishment campaign of the kind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez famously ran against Joe Crowley (who?), you need an opponent like Cuomo who embodies every terrible thing about the political establishment.
Cuomo was not easy to beat, though. My God, the Mamdani campaign worked hard. A good deal of credit for this surely goes to campaign manager Elle Bisgaard-Church, Mamdani’s incredible messaging and social media team, and his legion of organizers and volunteers. The ground game was astonishing. The video operation was stellar. I particularly enjoyed a video in which Mamdani mocked a local politician who had accused him of handing out hijabs—pointing out that these were in fact bandanas featuring images of pigeons and hot dogs. The whole campaign emanated joy, especially since Mamdani has a sense of humor and a winsome smile. As Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor observed, it seemed to be “powered by a profound authenticity, an irrepressible love and respect for the city.” A former rapper, Mamdani is naturally charismatic (his music, like his campaign, is uplifting and cosmopolitan). Seeing him on the stump, my first reaction was: the socialists may finally have found our Barack Obama, a young, energetic, inspiring politician who can effectively deliver a left political message in a way that captivates audiences.
Mamdani was deft. He had no scandals. No embarrassing revelations from his past, no campaign contributions from controversial figures, no disastrous gaffes. Mamdani did some unique political jiu-jitsu. He co-opted the centrist phrase “abundance” and used it to refer to his affordability agenda. Standing in front of Rev. Al Sharpton, Mamdani justified his campaign using a quote from Sharpton himself. Mamdani made nice with his non-Cuomo primary opponents, cleverly realizing that with New York’s ranked-choice voting system, it was in his interest to get his opponents’ voters to rank Mamdani #2 or #3.
Mamdani spoke movingly of the Islamophobic attacks (including death threats) that had been made against him. These were deeply ugly, with critics trying to paint Mamdani as an antisemite, and Cuomo’s SuperPAC even printed an Islamophobic mailer that photoshopped Mamdani to look more heavily bearded and swarthy. Immediately after Mamdani won, social media was already full of warnings that bread lines and pogroms would be coming to New York City if this Muslim socialist gets into power.
These attacks won’t let up just because he’s won the primary, of course. There’s a strong chance that the establishment is going to double down on its attempt to defeat Mamdani, as it did (successfully) when democratic socialist India Walton won the Democratic primary in Buffalo. Unpopular incumbent mayor Eric Adams is running in the general election, and so is the perennial “tough-on-crime” Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa. The billionaires may well continue to try to thwart Mamdani using whatever dirty tricks they can.
But I don’t think it’s going to work. Mamdani’s victory over Cuomo was so resounding that he’s made himself much more difficult to defeat in a general election. Even the New York Times, which initially urged voters not to rank Mamdani on their ballots, was forced to admit it was a “sharp rebuke.” (And not just to Cuomo. The selection of a socialist who has supported “defund the police” also destroyed the narrative that New Yorkers crave Tough On Crime centrist politics.) It was expected that because of ranked-choice voting, Cuomo would be ahead on election night, but that Mamdani could catch up once all the second and third choice ballots were tabulated. Even those who thought Mamdani could win did not think they’d see Cuomo conceding on election night, and the Times observes that in his concession speech Cuomo “conspicuously did not vow to carry on his campaign in the general election.” Mamdani now has a campaign of incredibly committed volunteers and that ineffable thing called “momentum,” while the opposition is disorganized, deflated, and its options are all corrupt and disliked (Adams made a dirty deal with the Trump administration, promising city cooperation with ICE in exchange for the dropping of Adams’ federal criminal charges).
The thing is: Mamdani is just really good at this. He’s good at this in a way I’ve been desperately hoping a left politician would be for some time, and that only Bernie Sanders seems to really be able to pull off. His message discipline was so good that when he was asked for his opinion on the Kendrick Lamar-Drake feud, he was somehow able to pivot to affordability. His campaign was social media heavy, but not the kind of childish stuff we saw from John Fetterman. Instead, Mamdani recorded videos like: talking to food vendors about the costs they face, walking Manhattan from top to bottom, visiting his small donors at home to ask why they'd given money, and speaking to Latino voters in impressively fluent Spanish. Even the goofiest videos were also about universal childcare and lowering rents. His campaign used clever perks like the "Zetro card" (a spin on the famous Metro Card), a punch card for canvassers to show how many volunteer shifts they'd worked.
When you see Mamdani speak, all of the smears instantly seem ridiculous, because he’s so likable and compassionate and sincere. He’s obviously not an antisemite, he’s just pro-Palestine, and is in fact eloquent and empathetic in condemning antisemitism. He’s also deeply pragmatic about his socialist commitments, understanding (like the famous “sewer socialists” did) that a left administration must, first and foremost, deliver good governance that actually makes people believe he is fighting for them. I think he has learned from FDR (and from the failures of Joe Biden) that effective politics demands communicating with people directly, showing them you understand what they’re going through and explaining to them what you’re doing to fix it. He also talks about making government work more efficiently and effectively, not just embodying ideological aspirations. That’s what gives me hope that he would actually, despite his inexperience, be a very effective mayor. I think that, should he make it to City Hall, he’s going to be a more skilled administrator than people expect.
And yet: he doesn’t back down, and that’s the other thing I like. He’s principled but pragmatic. Mamdani’s pragmatism means, for example, that he is not proposing to nationalize all grocery stores, but to try a pilot program of five city-run grocery stores in food deserts and see how it goes. (If it doesn’t go well, he says, it won’t continue.) This kind of pragmatism means being sensitive to political realities, but it does not mean bending on core principles, and I was encouraged by the way Mamdani consistently resisted pressure to disavow the pro-Palestine movement. He has not gone the way of some progressive politicians and shied away from confrontation with the powerful. Instead, he understands that people want a fighter, that they want to see someone standing up for them, even if he does not win.
If Mamdani does become mayor of New York City, and he does govern well, and he does continue to inspire people by talking to them regularly about what their government is doing (don’t stop doing TikTok videos, Zohran!), this could be the beginning of a sea change for the American left. Of course, there will be all sorts of nonsense about how New York City is going to turn into Communist China or the Islamic State. But if Mamdani can show good socialist government at work, the way the legendary Daniel Hoan did in Milwaukee, it will be a template for the left around the country and the world. I have seen warnings on social media from conservatives that New York is “about to become San Francisco,” with accompanying pictures of tent cities. What these critics don’t understand is that San Francisco has been governed by liberals, not leftists. (The distinction eludes conservatives.) Liberals are wealthy virtue-signalers who talk a lot about how much they care while doing nothing to upset the status quo. Socialists get to work and organize and get stuff done.
My hope is that Mamdani can deliver real socialist—not liberal—governance, that does not just announce flashy new initiatives that spend money while achieving nothing, but focuses on delivering results that people can actually see: an affordable, safe, clean, tolerant, welcoming, multicultural city. This will be the best antidote imaginable to Trumpism. It will put the wind back in our sails. Mamdani has the power to make people feel hopeful again, to inspire us to move forward with confidence, to believe again that the future is not necessarily bleak.
Last night was a good night, the best we’ve had in ages. We needed a win like this in dark times. But the real work is just beginning.
Listen to our interview with Mamdani here.