US Politics

Two days before the New York mayoral election, Michael Lange made a big electoral prediction – not just of who would win overall, or in each borough or neighborhood, but block by block. Lange, a political analyst born and raised in New York City, has spent over a decade in progressive politics and has become something of a local celebrity this year for his deep dives into city data and polling.He published his highly detailed prediction map – which correctly forecast that Zohran Mamdani would win although failed to predict Andrew Cuomo’s strong performance – on his Substack, the Narrative War. Lange has a flair for witty coinages. He highlighted, for instance, the divide between the “commie corridor”, stretching from Park Slope to Bushwick to Astoria, where he predicted (accurately) that Mamdani would win by huge margins, and the “capitalist corridor” on Manhattan’s Upper East and Upper West Sides. There, “the Free Press and Wall Street Journal outrank the New York Times” in readership and most voters leaned toward Cuomo, who ran as a conservative-courting independent.I spoke with Lange on Wednesday morning to discuss the trends and surprises that emerged on election night.You’ve had a very busy election season. I could see you on Hell Gate’s election live stream last night, with your laptop strapped to you like a busking DJ in Washington Square Park. How was your night?I had to do that because they were dropping around 200,000 ballots into the system every few minutes! I was actually a little nervous at the beginning: Mamdani led the early vote by 12 points, but there were two big batches of ballots that came in after that and his lead went from 12 to 8%. I was worried.You know, there was a world in which yesterday went kind of poorly for Mamdani, where Cuomo was going to end up basically doubling his votes from the Democratic primary. But Mamdani added 500,000 votes to his primary coalition, and that’s a huge reason why he won. He went out and massively expanded his base from the primary.Where did Mamdani get those extra votes from?He built the coalition that the left always wanted to build: it’s multiracial, it’s young, it’s renters and it’s people squeezed by affordability. He improved considerably with Black and Hispanic voters, working- and middle-class voters, compared to the primary. Plus he further maximized his base of liberal progressives, young leftists, and Muslims and south Asians. He couldn’t have won without making those significant inroads.There were also some Trump/Mamdani voters – is that a big trend?It’s definitely a real thing, confined to working-class Latinos, south Asians and Muslims. Voters in immigrant strongholds that went for Trump last year went for Zohran this year. But I wouldn’t say he was winning over white working-class voters and Maga voters.One of the big stories of the night was the sky-high turnout. Who did that help?Both sides. Turnout was significantly higher than I had expected. I thought we might go over 2 million, but it’s closer to 2.3 million – that is a lot of darn voters. There was a decent anti-Mamdani block, who were motivated, but the Mamdani base was also motivated, and that was enough to win.You predicted he’d get over 50% of the vote. Is he on course for that?Right now you would say he’s favored to get over 50%. He’s at 50.4% but there’s still, like, probably 200,000 votes left to report [as of Wednesday morning]. So I don’t think it’s definitive, but I think it’s likely, and I hope he does because then no one can say Sliwa was a spoiler.Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, is the other big story of the night. His vote completely collapsed.He didn’t win a single precinct in any borough. Not even Tottenville in Staten Island, which is like an 88% Trump neighborhood. That really surprised me. Cuomo kept very white areas, very wealthy areas and very religiously Jewish areas, and then added all of these Republicans on Staten Island who had a strong turnout. I think there was a lot of tactical voting by the Republicans. They were doing it before Trump tweeted his support for Cuomo, but that definitely helped. It could have even turned the tide if Mamdani’s coalition hadn’t grown.View image in fullscreenWhat about your much mentioned “commie corridor” – was support for Mamdani overwhelming in those parts of Brooklyn and Queens?I think there was a little dilution of the commie corridor in some areas like Astoria or Greenpoint that have more older white ethnic folks. In Astoria, for example, the Greek landlords and homeowners all went for Cuomo. So there was a little resistance. But no, mostly the commie corridor is another huge reason why Zohran won – he was polling between 77% and 83% in Fort Greene, Clinton Hill and Bushwick.In the lead-up to the election we reported on whether Mamdani was making inroads with Jewish New Yorkers. Is there any suggestion that he did?There are neighborhoods with a lot of secular and more progressive-leaning Jews – like Park Slope and Morningside Heights – where he did well. But in the wealthy Jewish communities like the Upper East Side, his position on Israel definitely mattered there. Similarly in the more middle-class Jewish areas like Forest Hills, Rego Park, or Spuyten Duyvil and Riverdale in the Bronx – they all leaned Cuomo. And also, you have Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union in southern Brooklyn, they were pretty staunchly Cuomo. So I don’t know if there were crazy narrative-busters on this one, but Mamdani did hold more progressive Jewish neighborhoods and even parts of the Upper West Side [which has more reform and conservative Jews] by big margins.Has Mamdani rewritten what New York means politically? Will the commie corridor become a launch pad for leftwing candidates?Yes, it’s no coincidence that some of the biggest political leaders from the left come from a handful of neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. I’m sure that we’ll see more of that – people will come from these neighborhoods to be elevated nationally.But I think that every city in America can have their own commie corridor. Urban places are the epicenters of leftwing power in America – because they’re young, people rent and they are places where people are crushed by the inequalities we face. More

Californians overwhelmingly backed Proposition 50, the crucial redistricting measure that Democrats have said is essential to safeguarding democracy and pushing back against the Trump administration.“We stood firm in response to Donald Trump’s recklessness, and tonight, after poking the bear, this bear roared with unprecedented turnout in a special election with an extraordinary result,” Gavin Newsom said on Tuesday after the ballot measure passed.The effort was a direct attempt to counteract Texas’s partisan gerrymander, undertaken at Trump’s behest, to create several new safely Republican districts. Under Prop 50, California will halt the work of its independent redistricting commission until after 2030 and allow the legislature to redraw congressional districts to carve out five additional Democratic seats.The new map is expected to oust longtime Republican officials, and have significant effects on the 2026 midterms.How did the state vote?As of Wednesday morning, results showed that some 63.8% of voters approved the proposition with just 36.2% voting against the measure in what the Associated Press described as a “swift and decisive victory”. More than 8 million people voted in Tuesday’s election and the measure won the majority of votes along much of the coast and in southern California. It was largely unpopular in the northern and inland regions that will be most affected by redistricting.Who is at risk of losing their seat?These Republicans are at risk under California’s new congressional map: Darrell Issa, whose district covers east San Diego county; Doug LaMalfa, who has represented a large swath of rural northern California for more than a decade; Ken Calvert, a Riverside county representative who has served in the US House since 1993; David Valadao, who represents the southern San Joaquin valley; and Kevin Kiley, the representative for much of eastern California. Kiley introduced a bill to ban mid-decade redistricting nationwide, but his proposal did not advance.After the measure passed, Republicans in California sued over Prop 50, and asked the court to block the new maps from taking effect. An attorney representing the plaintiffs – which include Republican state lawmaker David Tangipa, 18 California voters and the state’s Republican party – said that Democrats drew congressional boundaries to increase the voting power of Latinos. The new congressional districts will leave racial representation almost unchanged, according to an analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California.How will Prop 50’s passage affect the midterms?The measure is expected to have a major effect on the outcome of the 2026 midterms. Past elections have shown that the president’s party typically loses ground in midterm elections, and Democrats argued Prop 50 will help ensure Republicans do not retain full control of the federal government.“The passage of this new map – which is designed to protect a slew of vulnerable Democrats and will cost Republicans three to five seats in 2026 – is the most consequential development to date in the mid-decade redistricting wars due to the sheer number of seats that it impacts,” Erin Covey, with the Cook Political Report, said in a statement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The outcome of these races in California could ultimately determine which party wins control of the House next November.”What does this mean for Gavin Newsom?The decisive victory of Prop 50 is a major win for the proposal’s biggest champion, Gavin Newsom. The California governor has been one of Trump’s most high-profile opponents and helped rally massive support for the proposal. Newsom is widely expected to seek the White House in 2028 and the win has further raised his profile nationally and elevated his status as a Democratic leader.Bob Shrum, a veteran Democratic consultant who leads the Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California, told the Guardian this week that Newsom had gambled on Prop 50 and it appeared it would pay off.“But more than that is the fact that he fought back – that he dared to do this, that people said it was dangerous for him, and he forged ahead with it anyway.” More

CNN wanted to try something new on election night, and you can’t blame them.Cable news networks – well, besides Fox News – are struggling to retain viewers, even on a night where voters were getting their first real say on Donald Trump’s second presidency.More and more customers are cancelling their cable packages in favor of cheaper streaming services or free content on social media. So, the network recently launched a new streaming product of its own called CNN All Access – priced at $6.99 a month – that offers online access to a full menu of the network’s news and non-news content, along with a stream of CNN’s television product, something a previous incarnation lacked.On Tuesday, CNN All Access subscribers got exclusive access to an election night broadcast – the CNN Election Livecast – that the network’s data guy and host Harry Enten likened to a “watch party”. Previewing the event on CNN’s main channel, Enten said it would be “kind of like hanging out with your best friends who know the most about politics”.There’s no question that CNN’s cast on Tuesday night featured political experts, including commentators Ben Shapiro (the Daily Wire), Charlamagne tha God (the Breakfast Club), Ana Kasparian (the Young Turks) and the gen-Z conservative activist Isabel Brown, who also hosts a show for the Daily Wire. But the program often felt far from what was actually happening at the polls.Throughout the two-hour program, there were few updates on the results of the election. Those watching the streaming show rather than the main CNN broadcast, which featured the network’s standard election-night fare – anchors Jake Tapper and John King pointing to maps and getting live reports from campaign celebrations – were late to find out that the network had projected Zohran Mamdani as the winner of the New York City mayoral election. (Enten had to interrupt a discussion between Shapiro and Kasparian about the white nationalist Nick Fuentes to actually share the update.)CNN designed a set for the event that featured comfy couches, arcade games, a pop-a-shot basketball game and a foosball table. The idea was that the cast would actually have some fun, playing games while chatting politics and taking in the results. But everyone stayed glued to their seats – until the very end of the broadcast, when Enten made Shapiro play the basketball game. Neither had much success. “We have this lovely room here, and we haven’t actually utilized it at all,” Enten said. A large coffee table in the center of the room featured bowls of snacks that never seemed to get touched.Kara Swisher, who was beamed into the room for a few minutes, perhaps too honestly, described it as “the weirdest living room I’ve ever seen”.The panel also seemed to lack true ideological diversity, with the cast seeming to largely agree that Mamdani would struggle to actually govern – and all affirming that they viewed Joe Biden’s administration as a failure.About an hour in, Charlamagne tha God left the panel because, Enten said, he needed to get up early the next morning for his day job. He was replaced by Tezlyn Figaro, who has appeared on the Breakfast Club.As the event wound down, Enten struggled to actually end it because the panel was in the middle of a heated discussion about whether Mamdani was a “jihadist”.“That, I think, is a lovely way to end this evening,” Enten said, finding a stopping point. “I think it’s been an amazingly fun time – a different experience.”At that, in a nod to what matters most at CNN right now, Enten said he was off to spend a few hours analyzing election results on the television channel. More

Zohran Mamdani has become New York City’s first Muslim mayor, after securing more than 50% of the vote. More

While the soon-to-be first Muslim mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, was in the final throes of his mayoral campaign on a brisk day in New York, Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim of mayor of London, was wrapping up a two-day climate summit in a steamy if overcast Rio de Janeiro.“Hope is not gone,” Khan told the 300 city mayors gathered in the Brazilian city’s museum of modern art.The London mayor was referring to the challenges faced by regional politicians in dealing with the climate emergency in the face of the scepticism or outright denial of the science by national governments – including that led by Donald Trump.But on hearing of Mamdani’s win, Khan suggested that this too had given him hope. London and its mayor have been repeatedly raised by figures such as Trump’s former chief of staff Steve Bannon as the disastrous outcome that New Yorkers had to avoid.“In recent years, there’s been a growing chorus of commentators and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic attacking London and New York for their liberal values,” Khan told the Guardian. “They paint a picture of a lawless dystopia in an attempt to sow fear and division. But ask most Londoners or New Yorkers, and you’ll find that this narrative falls on deaf ears.“Many of the challenges our cities face are similar, but they are not identical. But we are united by something far more fundamental: our belief in the power of politics to change people’s lives for the better.”He later tweeted: “New Yorkers faced a clear choice – between hope and fear – and just like we’ve seen in London – hope won.”Khan, 55, the London-born son of Amanullah and Sehrun Khan, a bus driver and seamstress respectively, who arrived in Britain from Pakistan in 1968, achieved a historic third term as mayor on the Labour ticket in May last year.Mamdani, the son of a Ugandan academic, Mahmood Mamdani, a specialist in colonial and post-colonial history, and Mira Nair, the acclaimed film-maker, made his own history on Tuesday as a Democrat picking up nearly 200,000 more votes in New York than his nearest rival, the former state governor Andrew Cuomo.“It’s never been more crucial for our cities to challenge those who weaponise our diversity and instead stand firm in the belief that no matter who you are, or where your family is originally from, you can achieve anything,” said Khan. “In our cities, hope and unity will always triumph over fear and division.”There are obvious, albeit superficial, similarities between the two men.For all that Mamdami, 34, has been characterised as a diehard socialist, his policy platform bears a distinct resemblance to that of Khan, who would describe himself as of the “soft left” on the British political spectrum – a flavour of progressive politics that is less enamoured of the munificence of market forces than politicians such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, but more sceptical about handing over the running of the economy to the state than the likes of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.They have both proposed types of rent controls. Mamdani wants a $30 (£23) an hour minimum wage in the city, while Khan has long supported a voluntary London living wage, which at £14.80 ($19.30) per hour is more than £2 beyond the UK’s statutory minimum.Mamdani has proposed to impose a 2% levy on earnings above $1m year (affecting about 34,000 households), but that will involve negotiating with the New York state legislature and with Governor Kathy Hochul, who has said she opposes new income taxes. Khan does not have the powers to raise taxes, but he has sought such cash-raising powers to fund major transport projects.Making their cities affordable has also been central to both men’s policy prospectus: Mamdani proposed free bus transit while Khan has frozen fares for years. Both men have been outspoken on Gaza, condemning Hamas’s October 7 attacks but describing Israel’s war as genocidal. Khan was ahead of his party leader, the prime minister, Keir Starmer, in calling for the UK to recognise a Palestinian state.The context, though, is quite different. Mamdani terrifies and excites his party in equal measure, observers say. Unlike Khan, whose 2024 campaign mantra was a “London for everyone”, the New Yorker’s rhetoric draws up dividing lines, and is seen by some as making a bogey figure of the “billionaire”.Khan has been involved in Labour politics for over 30 years and is well-attuned to building electoral coalitions. Asked about warnings that the wealthy would leave New York if Mamdani won, he responded by inviting them to the UK.“If that is the case, come to London,” he said. “I am going to roll out a red carpet and welcome you.”Brett Bruen, a former US diplomat in the Obama administration, said that the major issue is that at 34 years of age, there is very little to go on when judging how Mamdani will actually govern.He said: “He’s certainly managed to stand out as a leader made for this moment, but that comes, obviously, with quite a lot of scrutiny. Some of it, I think, is warranted in questions about his résumé and whether or not he’s got like the requisite experience to lead this huge city.“It’s fair to say that he is on the outer extremities of the political spectrum, even in New York. And you know, we have seen, in the case of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and some others, that while they’ve done well in certain segments, they also become popular targets for Trump and the Republicans.“Those of us who are more in the centre of the party, face a problematic predicament. How do we talk about a party that can appeal to independents, that can even appeal to moderate Republicans, when some of our most vocal and visible voices are those that are out so far on the left?”If the two men differ in terms of experience, rhetoric and level of internal support within their respective parties, there are certainly parallels in the dog-whistle – and worse – politics that their candidatures provoked among their opponents.When Khan first stood for mayor in 2016, his Conservative rival Zac Goldsmith was accused of pursuing arguably the dirtiest campaign in British politics.Tamils, Hindus and Sikhs were sent letters warning that their jewellery was unsafe, because Khan planned to introduce a wealth tax.The Conservative then cabinet minister Michael Gove suggested that Khan would implement sharia law if elected.The campaign culminated in an article by Goldsmith in the Mail on Sunday accompanied by a photograph of a London bus blown up during the 7/7 terror attacks and a headline suggesting that a vote for Khan would put the city into the hands of a party that “thinks terrorists are its friends”.Trump, meanwhile, has described Khan as a “terrible, terrible mayor”, and falsely claimed that London was facing “sharia law”.Mamdani faced similar slurs. “God forbid, another 9/11, can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?” asked Cuomo at one stage to the conservative radio talkshow host Sid Rosenberg.“He’d be cheering,” Rosenberg replied. Cuomo, who had previously referred to Mamdani as “a terrorist sympathiser”, laughed, adding: “That’s another problem.”“Any Jewish person that votes for Zohran Mamdani, a proven and self professed JEW HATER, is a stupid person!!!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Tuesday.Michelle Lujan Grisham, the Democratic governor of New Mexico, said that what united Khan and Mamdani was that they offered a positive vision of the future.“I think that is incredibly attractive to voters,” she said. “They want new ideas. They want innovation. They want optimism. They don’t want somebody who’s dark and negative and angry.“Mamdani is the opposite of dark, angry, moody and he’s very optimistic. So I think that’s the future of the Democratic party, identifying this enthusiasm and optimism for the future.”Leah Kreitzman, who was Khan’s director of external and international affairs until 2021, said that there was a clear parallel between the two men that explained much of the vicious backlash they endured.“The reason why [Sadiq] gets attacked, both by the far right and by Islamist extremists is that the very fact of him and his success means that they’re wrong,” she said.“He completely defies their ideology and worldview: that he can be a Londoner, a Brit, a Muslim, from immigrant parents, liberal in his politics, but religious in his beliefs. If that’s all true and it’s successful and popular, they’re wrong.“[Khan and Mamdani] are quite important people in that sense, because they’re living embodiments of the fact that you can be all of those things.”The two men, who have only spoken once after Mamdani won the Democrat ticket for the mayoral election, have clearly also recognised that there is electoral mileage in having a clear positive vision but also in being the anti-Trump candidate.Khan told the Guardian: “What do nativist populist leaders hate? They hate liberal democracies. They hate progressives. They hate multicultural society. And in London, we have all that, and it’s really successful. So you know, having a really successful liberal, progressive, multicultural city led by a mayor elected not once, not twice, three times who’s of Islamic faith and Pakistani origin must be a real sore to him, a running sore, but that’s his problem not mine.”On winning in New York, Mamdani, with typical swagger addressed the US president: “Donald Trump, since I know you‘re watching, I have four words for you – turn the volume up.” More

Since the re-election of Donald Trump last November, a demoralised Democratic party has struggled to reverse a palpable sense of downward momentum. At a grassroots level, amid plunging poll ratings, there has been a yearning for renewal and a more punchy, combative approach in opposition. Against that bleak backdrop, the remarkable election of Zohran Mamdani to the New York City mayoralty is a moment for progressives to savour.Mr Mamdani entered the mayoral race last October as a socialist outsider with almost zero name recognition. He won it with more than 50% of the vote after the highest turnout in more than half a century, and despite the best efforts of billionaires to bankroll his chief rival, the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, to victory. That achievement makes him the youngest mayor of the US’s largest city for more than 100 years and the first Muslim to occupy the role.New York is a traditional Democratic stronghold and is in no sense a national bellwether. Nevertheless, faced with a Maga movement that has based its success on the support of working-class voters, the Democratic party can learn much from Mr Mamdani’s extraordinary triumph. Leaving culture-war politics to his increasingly desperate opponents, he campaigned relentlessly and almost exclusively on the theme of affordability.Charges of ideological extremism failed to stick because pledges of free childcare, free buses and a rent freeze spoke to an essentially social democratic message, offering public solutions to years of rising inequality. That vision persuaded a vast army of 100,000 volunteer canvassers to knock on millions of doors, more than offsetting Mr Cuomo’s far greater financial resources. The central insight was that values-driven opposition to Maga populism can succeed when supplemented by a positive offer to voters whose living standards have been steadily eroded.On an uplifting night for Democrats, a similar pattern was seen in New Jersey and Virginia, where more centrist-leaning candidates won gubernatorial races by impressive margins. Cost-of-living pledges were again to the fore, including a proposed freeze on electricity prices and a focus on housing costs. California offered further grounds for a cautious rebirth of optimism; after Republican gerrymandering of congressional boundaries in Texas, voters backed countermeasures to redress the balance ahead of next year’s midterm elections.As the Democratic party journeys through the wilderness of a second Trump term, it would be fanciful to believe that a corner has been definitively turned. For New York’s mayor-elect, the hard yards are yet to begin. Mr Trump has already threatened to withhold federal funds from an administration he will do his utmost to discredit, undermine and disrupt. More broadly, the reluctance of senior Democratic figures to endorse Mr Mamdani’s campaign confirms that internal divisions over strategy are a long way from being resolved.However, it would be churlish to ignore green shoots of political recovery when they appear. As Mr Trump’s popularity sinks amid ongoing cost-of-living concerns and high inflation, the hollowness of Maga pledges to improve blue-collar living standards is a major zone of vulnerability. An emerging focus on affordability anchors Democrats in the preoccupations of their lost voters, as well as those who have remained loyal. By campaigning on that basis with elan and conviction, Mr Mamdani has blazed an inspiring trail. More

Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, has been elected as New York City’s mayor. He became the first New York mayoral candidate to win more than 1 million votes since 1969, and looks set to secure over 50% of the total vote.

With almost all of the votes counted, independent candidate Andrew Cuomo seems to have been backed by 41.6% of voters. Republican Curtis Sliwa has secured just 7%.

Mamdani, who has become New York City’s first Muslim mayor, swept to victory on what was characterised as a radical left-wing platform. He has promised to tax millionaires more in order to fund free buses and childcare for all.

He has also vowed to honour an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over alleged war crimes in Gaza if he visits New York. The Israeli foreign ministry has previously called Mamdani a “mouthpiece for Hamas propaganda”.

How did a figure on the far left of American politics, who is also a staunch critic of Israel, win in a city that is full of millionaires and home to a sizeable Jewish population?

The corruption and sexual harassment scandals affecting his main rival certainly helped, as did the focus of his campaign on making life more affordable for New Yorkers. Mamdani’s presence on social media raised his profile and attracted voters, too.

He posted slick videos on TikTok and Instagram throughout his campaign, including one where he criticised the rent increases seen under outgoing mayor Eric Adams while running the New York City marathon.

But journalists and commentators have noticed something else that has helped boost Mamdani’s appeal among New Yorkers. He has what the New York Times called in July “a rare talent for listening”.

Mamdani is unusually reflective in interviews, often thinking silently for more than 20 seconds before responding to questions. And after his successful primary earlier in 2025, Mamdani contacted every business and cultural leader in the city he could get hold of to hear about why they opposed him.

The viral campaign videos that made his name also see him walking the streets of New York, asking voters questions and listening to their answers at length without interruption. Mamdani may be a radical, but he really listens.

Talking to voters

Democratic theorists are likely to celebrate Mamdani’s approach. Many philosophers embrace what is known as the “deliberative theory of democracy”, which argues that talking – as opposed to voting – is the central democratic institution.

These people suggest that politicians should talk to a diverse range of voters respectfully about their decisions. Listening to diverse perspectives improves policy because it requires leaders to consider a range of ideas and arguments, relying less on their own gut intuitions.

As a respectful and inclusive political style, it can also help citizens feel heard and challenge the idea that politicians are interested only in power and will say whatever it takes to win. A more deliberative kind of responsiveness to voters can therefore increase political legitimacy and trust.

The New York Times has praised Mamdani over his ‘rare talent for listening’.
Sarah Yenesel / EPA

Political scientists are likely to point out that Mamdani has an important strategic reason for his deliberative political style. New York City uses a system of ranked choice voting, or “the alternative vote”, which asks voters to rank candidates in order of their preference rather than choosing just one.

This encourages politicians to find policy proposals that are supported by large majorities, such as taxing millionaires to pay for free childcare, and to communicate respectfully with people of all political persuasions in the hope they might win their second-preference votes.

Larry Diamond, a leading American democracy expert, has called ranked choice voting the “Archimedean lever of change” for solving the deep polarisation currently affecting US politics. This is because it penalises candidates who rely on divisive rhetoric to appeal to a passionate base of supporters.

They are unlikely to win second-preference votes from people whose first preference is for one of their rivals. Conversely, ranked choice voting rewards politicians who try to bridge political divides with respectful and inclusive campaigning.

Depolarising US politics

There are many lessons that the political left in the US and beyond can learn from Mamdani’s victory. Most obviously, it shows that a socialist and pro-Palestine candidate can win in a major US electoral contest by combining a lively digital campaign with a strong focus on the cost of living.

It also suggests that candidates perceived as being radical are more likely to succeed in elections when they are visibly willing to listen to and deliberate with voters from all sorts of backgrounds.

Mamdani’s rise should also encourage a wider embrace of ranked choice voting. The system has been used to elect members of Australia’s House of Representatives for more than a century and it is now used in the US states of Maine and Alaska, as well as in the San Francisco Bay Area.

It should be adopted elsewhere too, as an antidote to political polarisation. The UK held a referendum on changing the electoral system to the alternative vote in 2011. However, UK voters unfortunately rejected the proposal.

Finally, Mamdani’s victory shows that radicalism and reflectiveness can come together, especially when the electoral system promotes it. Ranked choice voting is so good at encouraging a politics of respect and listening that it is sometimes accused of creating boring centrist candidates.

But Mamdani has reminded us that this does not have to be the case. Reforming US election systems could encourage deliberative responsiveness and depolarise American politics, without taking radical options off the menu. More

Zohran Mamdani was forged in the era of Donald Trump. He came to socialism through watching Bernie Sanders run for the US presidency in 2016, in the contest that ultimately gave us Trump I. Last November, a few days after the election of Trump II, he asked voters why they’d backed that guy. The conversations prepared Mamdani in his battle for New York, and the film of them reveals so much about the politics of this era that it repays watching.Those of us schooled in the tactics of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair might roll our eyes at yet another “listening exercise”, starring a powerbroker and his retinue in some beautifully lit hall, but this is no such thing. Here stands an unknown on a street corner in the Bronx, waving a placard as doughtily as a Seventh-Day Adventist. Rather than read off a Rolodex of platitudes, this politician sees his public – some of whom look a little like him, yet whose faces and bodies are etched with the strains of the city. Never having spoken to power, even a lowly state assemblyman such as Mamdani, they talk of lives made smaller and shorter in an economy where the daily basics are too costly. Politics has failed them, so they consider politicians to be failures.Such frustrations propelled Trump into the White House. This week they made Mamdani mayor of the US’s largest city. Analysts have often put the two side by side, only to utter banalities about how they are both good on TikTok or – that giveaway from pundits striving to earn their keep – “populist”. Yet the comparison carries far higher stakes.Both New Yorkers, they embody opposite sides of the metropolis: Manhattan versus its suburbs ; towers versus the streets. They also represent alternative paths for the US. Trump leads his country towards ethnonationalism and Darwinian economics; Mamdani stands for immigrants and a city affordable for all. Crucially, he understands the urban working class is not just white, but often black and brown. It is only through an understanding of the grave dangers posed by Trump that you can glean the hopes vested in Mamdani.A few examples: in September, Trump’s guards grabbed Korean engineers, who had their papers in order, from a Hyundai factory to force them out of the country and thousands of miles away. Last month, ICE agents abducted a British journalist travelling the US on a valid visa for criticising the brutalities committed by Israel. Last week, only hours before 42 million low-income Americans lost their access to food aid, the president hosted a Great Gatsby-themed bash, featuring a scantily clad woman in a giant martini glass. The fete was titled: “A little party never killed nobody.”Such guffawing, lethal thuggishness is why other cities are so enlivened by a contest of otherwise glancing importance to their own lives. Even in a globalised social media, the question of who heads five boroughs on the eastern seaboard of the US does not usually command transnational significance. In the country, the centre of financial power is shifting from east coast to west, from Atlantic to Pacific, Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Nor does the new boy’s crowd appeal derive solely from his youth and charm, or even his recognition of the enduring greatness of the Wu-Tang Clan – although none of those hurt.Still, the chief reason Mamdani has aroused such keen interest is because he is the first leftwinger to show that politicians can not only face down Trumpism, they can beat him. That is the defining task of our era, as New York’s new mayor knows. Amid the thank-yous of last night’s victory speech, he declared: “If anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him.”Over the past year of Trump II, the finest talents on the centre-left have been stumped how to respond. Obama? Almost nothing. Kamala Harris? Writing her memoirs, of course. The fiercest hostility to Mamdani has come from those supposed to be on his side. After losing in the primary, serial sex pest Andrew Cuomo ran as an independent – and campaigned as Trump’s pick in this week’s contest. The man who is today the first Muslim to lead New York has faced constant innuendo that he is a terrorist sympathiser.Across Europe, the prefects of social democracy have kowtowed to the US’s extremist-in-chief. Keir Starmer treated him to an unprecedented second state visit, while Nato chief Mark Rutte has called him “daddy”. Five years ago, US media moguls took the knee to show off their commitment to diversity; now they bend the knee to a racist loudmouth. Columnists and podcasters talk utter sausage about a “vibe shift” in US politics, even while two days of mass rallies against Trumpism drew something like 12 million people.The centre-left should be taking on the extreme right and acting as the anti-Trump. Instead, as Fintan O’Toole writes in the latest New York Review of Books, it is playing at being not-Trump. Or: not-Farage, not-Weidel, not-Le Pen. In the UK, Starmer’s pitch is basically: we’ll adopt the language and the flags, but deploy them with greater civility. As a response to this moment, it is morally contemptible and politically myopic.In his fine new book The Great Global Transformation, the former World Bank economist Branko Milanovic describes how our political and economic order is now coming to an end. China and the global south now account for more of the world economy than the US, Japan, Europe and the many others put together that he terms the “capitalist core”; at the same time, capitalism is being redefined. The elites who prospered under the regimes shaped by Reagan and Thatcher are now redefining their nations into narrower, meaner, harsher societies, ditching the old commitments to multiculturalism and equality for women. They are forcing upon the rest of us capitalism without secure contracts, unions or even the HR department.Hold Milanovic’s lens over Trump and what do you see? Not an all-powerful emperor, nor some scheming bureaucrat like Putin – but the US’s Yeltsin. He is the buffoon presiding over his country’s decline in influence and importance, while behind him in the shadows the oligarchs carve up the spoils. And if democracy proves too troublesome, why, they’ll buy it. One of the biggest players in the New York elections was hedge-fund guy Bill Ackman, who offered to bankroll anyone who could bring down Mamdani.In the 90s and 00s, the centre-left’s response to Reagan and Thatcher was Clinton, Blair and the third way. They compromised with the new money and triangulated their electoral bases – and they held power, for a while.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut this is a new era: you can’t reach an accommodation with an ICE agent when he’s kneeling on your neck. Climate chaos does not come with a moderate option. An oligarch is not interested in your pitiful attempts to strike a deal. To see the logical endpoint of the new left’s embrace of money, look no further than Peter Mandelson. Famous for being “intensely relaxed” about people getting filthy rich, he became especially relaxed in the company of the filthy rich, such as money man and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein – and is now discovering anew the meaning of “disgraced”.The old foxholes and get-out clauses, abstractions and moist eyes, won’t work for the left now. Voters don’t talk about inequality; they worry about paying the bills and getting by. The young aren’t mollified by talk of “suffering” in Gaza; they want it stopped. And bang opposite, the right are bending politics and economics to their will.You can see the past year between Trump’s election and Mamdani’s as real-time dialectic. Thesis, antithesis; right hook, southpaw. It is foolish to pretend that there is any equivalence of power between the White House and Gracie Mansion, but at least the left is still in the fight.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

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