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      US Senate vote marks step towards ending federal shutdown

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      The US Senate on Sunday took a key vote on a bill that would end the record-setting federal government shutdown without extending the healthcare subsidies that Democrats have demanded.Senators began voting on Sunday night to advance House-passed stopgap funding legislation that Senate majority leader John Thune said would be amended to combine another short-term spending measure with a package of three full-year appropriations bills.The package would still have to be passed by the House of Representatives and sent to Donald Trump for his signature, a process that could take several days.Senate Democrats so far have resisted efforts to reopen the government, aiming to pressure Republicans into agreeing to extend subsidies for Affordable Care Act health plans, which expire at the end of the year. Thune said that, per the deal under consideration, the Senate would agree to hold a separate vote later on the subsidies.Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic senator for Connecticut, told reporters that he would vote against the funding measure but suggested there could be enough Democratic support to pass it.“I am unwilling to accept a vague promise of a vote at some indeterminate time, on some undefined measure that extends the healthcare tax credits,” Blumenthal said.“The Senate might get a vote” on the health insurance credits, Ben Ray Luján, a New Mexico Democrat, said. “I’ll emphasize ‘might.’ But is Speaker Johnson gonna do anything? Is the president gonna do anything?”Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, has previously said he would not hold a vote on a plan to extend the tax credits that make health insurance affordable for millions of Americans who are not insured through their employers.Two leading progressives in the Senate Democratic caucus were even more dismissive of the emerging compromise. “It’s a mistake,” Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts told Punchbowl News. “It would be a policy and political disaster for Democrats to cave,” Bernie Sanders of Vermont said.Democrats in the House expressed their dismay. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, promised to fight the proposed legislation. “We will not support spending legislation advanced by Senate Republicans that fails to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits. We will fight the GOP bill in the House of Representatives,” Jeffries said in a statement.“A deal that doesn’t reduce health care costs is a betrayal of millions of Americans counting on Democrats to fight for them”, Greg Casar, a Texas Democrat who leads the House progressive caucus, wrote on X. “Republicans want health care cuts. Accepting nothing but a pinky promise from Republicans isn’t a compromise – it’s capitulation. Millions of families would pay the price.”“Unacceptable,” Florida congressman Maxwell Frost chimed in. “There are 189,000 people in my district who will be paying 50-300% more for the same, and in many cases worse, healthcare. I won’t do that to the people I represent. I’m a NO on this ‘deal.’”Democrats outside Washington denounced the compromise as well. “Pathetic. This isn’t a deal. It’s a surrender. Don’t bend the knee!” California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, wrote on social media.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSunday marked the 40th day of the shutdown, which has sidelined federal workers and affected food aid, parks and travel, while air traffic control staffing shortages threaten to derail travel during the busy Thanksgiving holiday season late this month. Thom Tillis, a Republican senator from North Carolina, said the mounting effects of the shutdown have pushed the chamber toward an agreement. He said the final piece, a new resolution that would fund government operations into late January, would also reverse at least some of the Trump administration’s mass layoffs of federal workers.“Temperatures cool, the atmospheric pressure increases outside and all of a sudden it looks like things will come together,” Tillis told reporters. Should the government remain closed for much longer, economic growth could turn negative in the fourth quarter, especially if air travel does not return to normal levels by Thanksgiving, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett warned on the CBS Face the Nation show. Thanksgiving falls on 27 November this year.Americans shopping for 2026 Obamacare health insurance plans are facing a more than doubling of monthly premiums on average, health experts estimate, with the pandemic-era subsidies due to expire at the end of the year. Republicans rejected a proposal on Friday by Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer to vote to reopen the government in exchange for a one-year extension of tax credits that lower costs for plans under the Affordable Care Act, often referred to as Obamacare.Adam Schiff, a Democratic California senator, said on Sunday he believed Trump’s healthcare proposal was aimed at gutting the ACA and allowing insurance companies to deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.“So the same insurance companies he’s railing against in those tweets, he is saying: ‘I’m going to give you more power to cancel people’s policies and not cover them if they have a pre-existing condition,’” Schiff said on ABC’s This Week program. More

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      They flew to New York to help Mamdani – now they want to bring the hope to LA

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      While the excitement for mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has radiated through New York, his win has also energized young activists across the country – particularly some in Los Angeles, who flew to the east coast to canvass for Mamdani and now want to bring their experiences westward.Standing near the poll site at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Neda Davarpanah – a screenwriter and actor based in Los Angeles – was inspired by Mamdani’s campaign for mayor so she flew out to New York in late October to canvass on the Upper East Side.Davarpanah had walked alongside the picket lines in Hollywood in 2023 as a newly minted Writers Guild of America member. Despite initial momentum, she felt the energy from the frontlines of the strikes had dissipated in the last year. That energy reignited when Mamdani entered the picture.“We felt so motivated and energized to help people in a city we don’t even live in because of the broader impact on the country,” she said.Many of the people interviewed are part of the 4,000 young members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Los Angeles chapter who felt inspired by Mamdani’s campaign and its national implications. Looking ahead, they want to bring the hope and lessons from field organizing back to Los Angeles.New York and Los Angeles have very different geographies and spreads of power. In Los Angeles, city council members’ elections tend to have more weight compared to a mayoral race. And given the DSA-LA chapter has endorsed five candidates so far in the city council and local school board elections, there are plenty of volunteer efforts for these hopefuls to work on in the coming year.View image in fullscreenLeslie Chang, who serves as the East San Gabriel Valley coordinator for Democratic Socialists of America, flew out during the primaries to canvass for Mamdani. She volunteered to canvass in Chinatown, where she spoke the language, and the Red Hook public housing projects.“These were tough conversations,” Chang said, noting residents felt left out in the city’s development. “They would say: look at the condition of this place that I live in. We are still waiting for repairs from the hurricane. Why should I give a shit who is running for office if my life hasn’t gotten better?”During her volunteer field training, Chang met two New York City council members who were vouching for Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. They told Chang to give out their phone numbers to start conversations with constituents.“I thought that was really powerful, because in almost all of the canvases that I do here [in Los Angeles], there isn’t that level of engagement,” she said. After canvassing, there was even a social event for volunteers to get to know one another and discuss what strategies worked best.Paul Zappia, an animator and illustrator who also serves in DSA-LA leadership, first met the mayor-elect in 2023 at the DSA national conference in Chicago, where Mamdani served as a keynote speaker. He flew out in late October to canvass with friends in Bushwick. At the beginning of his shift, the field lead asked why each volunteer had come out.“I shared with everybody that I was here from Los Angeles because the victory of Zohran Mamdani is bigger than New York City,” said Zappia, who attributes his involvement in politics to the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign.View image in fullscreenEven walking to lunch a few blocks away, he encountered another canvassing group. “It’s just a bunch of people who are there on their free time and want to spend a couple hours on their Saturday together with other people that also care about their fellow working class people. And it was just such a blast,” he said.The geography and public transportation layout of New York’s five boroughs makes it easier to canvas in groups. Zappia said he could feasibly knock on hundreds of doors in a one-block radius there. In Los Angeles, a street could be filled with mostly single-family homes. And with the abundance of Ring doorbell cameras, people can easily decline a visitor from the comfort of their couch.Clayton Ryles, 31, only canvassed for one afternoon in Manhattan’s Chinatown in late October and felt the contrast between Mamdani’s campaign and others. In September last year, Ryles canvassed for Kamala Harris with his fellow United Auto Worker labor organizers in Las Vegas. Knocks on doors yielded intrepid voters who were “upset and suspicious”. Despite many people being pro-union, they felt that their cost of living was too high under Joe Biden.“Nobody was excited about the election. Everybody was like this is being inflicted upon us. We have to decide one way or another. For Zohran, most of the people were enthusiastic about what could happen with his mayoral tenure,” Ryles said.Davarpanah agreed, pointing to the call and response levels of Mamdani’s speech when crowds could clearly repeat phrases such as “fast and free buses” and “universal childcare”.“You can name them. Harris 2024 was not successful in articulating a vision,” she said. “A policy vision that materially impacts your constituents is something every candidate should take to heart. This is what actually inspires people to get involved when they actually see what you’re going to deliver.”View image in fullscreenAcross social media, users have been making posts about how California, and Los Angeles specifically, needs a Mamdani.For Zappia, that means bringing back hope after a tough year that started with the Altadena wildfires and has continued with ICE raids, cutbacks to Snap benefits, and rising inflation, among many other difficulties.“People are just really looking for a sort of sign that things can turn around. In order to actually affect the change that we want to see, we have to first believe that we can actually do it,” he said.“And what happened in New York City is proof that it can be done, it’s proof that organized people can beat organized money.” More

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      Trump’s assault on voting intensifies as midterms loom: ‘a wholesale attack on free and fair elections’

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      A year out from the 2026 midterms, with Republicans feeling the blows from a string of losses in this week’s elections, Donald Trump and his allies are mounting a multipronged attack on almost every aspect of voting in the United States and raising what experts say are troubling questions about the future of one of the world’s oldest democracies.While Democratic leaders continue to invest their hopes in a “blue wave” to overturn Republican majorities in the House and Senate next year, Trump and some prominent supporters have sought to discredit the possibility that Republicans could lose in a fair fight and are using that premise to justify demands for a drastically different kind of electoral system.This is not the first time Trump has questioned the credibility of US elections – he did it almost as vigorously in 2016 and 2024, when he won his bids for the White House, as he did in 2020, when he did not – but now the president’s confidants are threatening emergency powers to seize control of a process over which presidents ordinarily have no control.Trump’s former chief political adviser, Steve Bannon, is urging him to get the elections “squared away” even before the voters have a chance to weigh in. Former legal advisers have suggested the electoral system is in itself an emergency justifying extraordinary intervention, possibly including federal agents and the military stationed outside polling stations.When Bannon was asked whether voters might find this intimidating, he replied: “You’re damn right.”View image in fullscreenThe administration itself, meanwhile, is moving on multiple fronts. Most visibly, Trump is pressuring Republican-run states to redraw their congressional maps outside the usual once-a-decade schedule and lock in as many additional safe Republican seats as possible.Texas has gerrymandered an additional five GOP seats, Ohio two, and Missouri and North Carolina one each, and other states are considering whether to follow suit. (California voters, in response, have just approved a map promising five additional Democratic seats.)Meanwhile, the justice department has abandoned its decades-long defense of voting rights, and in some instances – notably, a pending supreme court case that risks erasing a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act – has switched to the side arguing against protecting minority rights. The Department of Homeland Security has slashed funding and cut staff at an agency dedicated to protecting elections from physical and cybersecurity threats.The administration is also demanding states hand over sensitive voter data and purge voter rolls, despite grave concerns about this deterring or disenfranchising large numbers of legitimate voters. In an executive order issued in March, the White House said it wants voters to produce birth certificates or passports as proof of eligibility. It wants the vote count to be over on election night, disregarding provisional and late mail-in ballots. In fact, Trump would like to do away with mail-in balloting altogether.View image in fullscreenIf all that doesn’t suffice – if Democrats still threaten to prevail next year – the administration has a multi-agency infrastructure set up to trumpet allegations of voter fraud and threaten legal action, including possible criminal prosecution of poll workers, election administrators, political adversaries and individual voters. “We’re going to come after the people … who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Kash Patel, now FBI director, vowed in the run-up to the 2024 race. (No court has ever substantiated Trump’s claims that Biden was not the rightful winner in 2020.) “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”Another possibility is that Trump will seek to wrest control of voting machines from state and local officials, as he came close to doing five years ago.“Those of us engaged in this fight are witnessing a wholesale attack on free and fair elections,” said Marc Elias, a prominent election lawyer involved in more than 60 election-related suits. “From executive orders to budget cuts, the Trump administration is undermining election security and promoting voter disenfranchisement.”Perhaps the biggest underlying fear is that Trump has no interest in democracy and aims, ultimately, to destroy it. “I don’t think Donald Trump wants another election,” California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, opined as Trump invoked legally questionable emergency powers to deploy national guard troops to US cities.Administration officials insist their concern is to prevent cheating by the Democrats and improve electoral security. But on the campaign trail last year, Trump told evangelical Christian supporters they would need to vote for him only one more time. “Four more years, you know what, it’ll be fixed,” he said. “We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”Whatever the ultimate goal, the question uppermost in the minds of many voting rights advocates is how much Trump and his allies will be able to pull off over the next 12 months. The president has almost no power over elections under the constitution, and much of what the administration has advocated is being challenged in court. It is, for example, a federal crime to deploy troops at any election site. Voter intimidation of any kind is similarly prohibited.For that reason, advocates and lawyers say, the risk is less about what Trump is allowed to do and more about what he can persuade people to do anyway.View image in fullscreen“Donald Trump is a marketing machine, and what he is doing right now is marketing power he does not have,” said Justin Levitt, a lawyer who served as a senior adviser on voting rights in the Biden administration. He described Trump’s March executive order, with its demands for strict voter identification procedures and new voting equipment standards, as just “a piece of paper with a scrawly signature on it”. (A federal judge recently blocked the order, saying the president was improperly asserting powers the constitution assigned to Congress and the states.)“It’s an attempt to fool people,” Levitt added. “Trump’s primary power is the power we give him when he asserts he is in control of everything, and we believe him.”Jasleen Singh, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice, has no doubt Trump is “directing, dismantling and weaponizing agencies” with the ultimate goal of “election subversion”. But she, too, said it was important not to give in to the force of Trump’s personality.“The law is on our side,” she said. “We have the right to vote. We have the right to participate … Part of this is not letting voters forget the power that they have.”The White House had no specific comment about Trump’s actions or intentions. Deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson limited herself to a crack about “Newscum” – Trump’s favored term of abuse for the California governor – and his “doomed-to-fail” (but unannounced) presidential campaign.Resisting Trump’s pull is proving easier said than done. On a variety of seemingly settled issues – from district maps to the grace period granted for postal ballots to reach their destination – Republican state legislatures have either reversed their own decisions or are considering doing so because of instructions from the White House. “States are under enormous pressure to do what they can to pacify this incredibly vindictive administration,” said Elisabeth Frost, a partner with Elias’s election law group.Election administrators have expressed widespread fears of doxing and physical threats, and many hundreds have quit their jobs under the pressure. The Maga movement has encouraged supporters to run for election offices to influence the process from the inside.In a worst-case scenario, voting rights activists say, Trump would win the rhetorical battle and convince large numbers of Americans that voter rolls are corrupted and ineligible voters are casting ballots in large numbers. He could thus muster support for the emergency intervention his allies are pushing for.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe administration certainly seized on this week’s elections to keep beating the rhetorical drum. The justice department sent federal monitors to California and New Jersey, which some local officials saw as intimidation. Trump called the California ballot initiative a “giant scam”. And New Jersey’s US attorney, Alina Habba, put out a video vowing to prosecute a long list of virtually nonexistent election-related crimes.View image in fullscreenExperts still said they thought that invoking a national emergency remained a remote possibility. More likely, they said, was a continuation of the pressure campaign to suppress votes and cast doubt on results Trump does not like. They expected the administration to continue to push legal limits first and deal with any blowback from the courts after.“Everyone is seeing the polls,” Frost, the Elias Law Group lawyer, said. “Literally none of their policies are popular, so they are terrified of this election. The more Trump can say that the vote count can’t be trusted, the more it serves his purpose … Either voters will be repressed by laws or they will be repressed by misinformation and made-up bombastic nonsense.”Marpheen Chann, a Cambodian American advocate in Maine, has seen first-hand how pressure from the Trump administration – and, in particular, demands for sensitive personal data in the state’s voting records – has deterred community members from participating next November.“Personally, I’m concerned because I’m politically active. I’m a Democrat,” Chann said. “Will I end up on a list?”What is true for him, a community leader with a law degree, runs even deeper through the membership of his organization, Khmer Maine. Many either experienced the 1970s Cambodian genocide first-hand or have been traumatized by it across generations, making them particularly sensitive to any hint of authoritarian behavior. “The fact that the federal government is trying to break into our voting data and violate our privacy definitely does not feel good for the community,” Chann said.Top of mind is the fear that immigration enforcement agents might seek to use inconsistencies in the data – a missing birth certificate, or a mismatch between a birth name and a name on a passport, both of which are issues for Chann – as a pretext to pursue even naturalized citizens for arrest and deportation. Regardless of how justified those fears are, Chann said they are vivid enough to scare people away from civic engagement. “It makes it really hard for me to get people participating and making their voices heard,” he said. “If they make their voices heard, they feel they’re going to be targeted.”In some parts of the country, Republican state legislatures have needed no pressure from the administration to suppress votes – they have been tightening voter ID requirements, cutting early voting hours, restricting voter registration drives and reducing the number of polling stations for the past 20 years. In other places, though, they have done Trump’s bidding even though it offers them little or no partisan advantage.Kansans, for example, recently voted to get rid of a three-day window for mail-in ballots to be counted after election day, even though the mail is notoriously slow there and mail-in voting is popular in rural areas, where voters tend to be conservative.Frost, who is part of a lawsuit to reinstate the three-day window, agreed that Trump’s personal animus against mail-in voting was not necessarily aligned with Republican partisan interests. Still, she saw a political advantage for Trump in demonizing parts of the electoral system.“The same way he’s been painting the Oval Office with gaudy gold adornments,” Frost said, “he’s been trying to pre-paint all these conspiracy theories so if the election doesn’t go the way he wants, he and his allies can point to the sea of litigation they’ve triggered, or they can point back to the March executive order, and say these were things that should have been done to begin with.”To counter the chaos and the conspiracies, voting rights groups have most often turned to lawsuits and have been heartened to see lower courts, at least, blocking crucial parts of the Trump agenda. Increasingly, they have also seen judges reprimand political appointees arguing on behalf of the justice department following a wave of career lawyers being fired or resigning.“The quality of lawyering they are doing now is, in a word, garbage,” Levitt, the former Biden official, said. “You’re going to see the [justice department] lose a lot of cases, and these are cases they should lose.”View image in fullscreenIn the voter data lawsuits, for example, government filings have repeated far-right talking points – and the language of Trump’s executive order – about voter rolls being vulnerable to “illegal voting, discrimination, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error”. That assertion flies in the face of mainstream research going back decades that shows it is passingly rare for ineligible voters to cast a ballot.“This tells you a lot about what the [justice department] is willing to endorse,” Frost said. “There are not going to be arguments too wild as we get deeper into the election cycle and we start to see other conspiracy theories float to the top.”Chann, the Cambodian American advocate, worried that facts and the law would not be enough to protect voting rights, especially in immigrant communities. “Even though people I trust in local and state government are saying they’re doing what they can,” he said, “that doesn’t give me any consolation when it comes to whether the federal government will obey its own election and voting laws.”Still, Chann acknowledged that legal avenues were the best hope for holding on to democracy, and he did not hesitate in coming forward as a named defendant seeking to keep the federal government at bay in a lawsuit over Maine’s voter data.“Congress isn’t going to do anything, and the executive branch is overreaching,” he said. “We need to make our last stand in the courts.” More

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      How Mamdani is defying immigrant expectations by embracing his identity: ‘His boldness resonates’

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      Across the country, Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants has shaken neighbourhoods, torn apart families and engendered a sense of panic among communities. But in New York, on Tuesday night, Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor of New York, and an immigrant from Uganda, chose to underline his identity. “New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant,” he told an ecstatic crowd at Paramount theater in Brooklyn.The son of a Muslim father and a Hindu mother, he was born in Kampala, raised in New York, and identifies as a democratic socialist. Almost every aspect of Mamdani’s identity had been an issue of contention during the election. Earlier this week, the Center for Study of Organized Hate published a report highlighting the surge in Islamophobic comments online between July and October, most of which labelled Mamdani as an extremist or terrorist.Two days before the election, a Super Pac supporting Andrew Cuomo had run an ad depicting Mamdani in front of the Twin Towers crashing down on 9/11. Earlier, it had artificially thickened and enlarged Mamdani’s beard to make him appear more menacing on a flyer circulated around the city. Towards the end of October, a tearful Mamdani had addressed these accusations in a moving speech in the Bronx. He vowed that as an immigrant, and especially as a Muslim: “I will no longer be in the shadows.”On Tuesday night in Brooklyn, he drove that point home: “I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”Minhaj Khan, who works with the Indian American Muslim Council of North America, a New Jersey organisation that focuses on the tri-state area, told me what “Zohran offers is something different than any other Muslim candidate who fought an election anywhere in the United States: he took a pretty bold stand against the ill that is spoken about Islam and Muslims in this country and his boldness actually resonates a lot with the community right now.”“I think the way that he is not diminishing his identity and all the parts of his experience that have driven him to be pushing his affordability platform is huge,” said Alina Shen, the organising director of CAAAV Voice, the sibling organisation of Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, which played a crucial part in engaging South Asian residents of the city in Mamdani’s campaign. “I think it’s part of what made him stand out as a political candidate, that he’s not changing who he actually is.”Mamdani also started his victory speech by quoting Eugene Debs, the American socialist who was the son of French immigrants, and borrowed the hopefulness for a new dawn in New York City from Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous address to Indians on the eve of the country’s independence: “A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”Khan, who moved to the US from India in the 1990s, said he was “proud” to hear Mamdani quoting Nehru from the podium. “Nehru was a man who brought everyone together,” Khan told me. “At the time of partition, it was a very vicious environment in India, and in that moment, Nehru stood up as a secular leader, brought people together.”In Khan’s eyes, Mamdani offers something similar: “Zohran’s campaign has shown how you can bring together Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Christians in this highly divisive time in this country.”View image in fullscreenMamdani’s own parents are both children of the Nehruvian age of Indian democracy, steeped in the ideas of pluralism.His father Mahmood Mamdani, a scholar of colonialism and a professor at Columbia University, was born to Gujarati Muslim parents in Mumbai. But he grew up in Kampala, Uganda, and first came to the United States on a scholarship to study at the University of Pittsburgh and became involved in the civil rights movement; he was among the students arrested for travelling to Montgomery, Alabama, from northern universities during the bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr.After finishing his master’s at Tufts University, Mahmood moved back to Uganda, only to be expelled from his adopted country as part of Idi Amin’s expulsion of the Indian diaspora, ending up at a refugee shelter behind the Kensington Palace in London. In the 1980s, Amin’s successor, Milton Obote stripped Mahmood of his Ugandan citizenship for criticizing government policies. His status as a thinker and writer only rose, culminating in a tenured professorship at Columbia University, where he continues to work today.The celebrated filmmaker Mira Nair, Zohran’s mother, was born in Orissa, on the other side of the subcontinent from Mumbai, in a family of high-ranking bureaucrats. While in her teens, she turned down a full scholarship to Cambridge University – the scars of British colonialism were still fresh in the Indian psyche – and instead went to attend Harvard. She spent her summers in New York city among the artists and writers, developing an affinity for theater and films. Her first forays into filmmaking explored the lives of residents of Old Delhi, an Indian newspaper dealer in New York, and strippers and street-children of Mumbai.It was while researching her second feature film, Mississippi Masala, which follows the lives of Ugandan Indians displaced by Idi Amin, that Nair first met Mahmood, as part of her research. In 1991, the same year the film was released, the couple got married, and had a son: Zohran Kwame Mamdani, who got his middle name in honour of Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian revolutionary who became the country’s first president.Zohran spent the first five years of his life in Kampala, living in a bungalow overlooking Lake Victoria, where part of Mississippi Masala was shot. In a 2002 profile of Nair in The New Yorker, he was introduced as “Nair’s talkative doe-eyed son, Zohran, who exudes the charm of the well-loved, [and] is known by dozens of coinages, including Z, Zoru, Fadoose, and Nonstop Mamdani”.Like his father, Zohran lived an itinerant childhood. After his father moved to New York in a faculty apartment close to Columbia University, Zohran, leaving behind Kampala, was enrolled in the private Bank Street School in Manhattan. Evenings were spent in Riverside Park. At home, dinner guests included Columbia scholars like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi, close friends of his father. For high school he went to a selective public school in the Bronx, and attended college in Maine, graduating in Africana Studies in 2014.Zohran’s first meaningful brush with the desperation among the city’s working-class families came during his work as a foreclosure prevention and housing counsellor in Queens. During the 2016 presidential election, he was inspired by the campaign of Bernie Sanders, which focused on costs-of-living, affordability and healthcare. Those same issues would go on to become the bedrock of his mayoral campaign. At a town hall in Brooklyn with Sanders this September, Zohran said it was Sanders’s campaign that first exposed him to the language of democratic socialism. During his term as the representative of New York’s 36th state assembly district, his most notable work was with the taxi drivers in the city.At a time when immigrants around the country are feeling increasingly threatened under the Trump administration, as masked agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stalk the streets of American cities, harassing, arresting and deporting immigrants, Zohran’s campaign has cultivated a sense of hope among the community.“We are an organization made up of immigrants,” Irene Hsu, communications and media manager at CAAAV, said. “The people who work with us, they’re cooks, they’re restaurant workers, they’re cab drivers, they’re home care workers, they’re students, they’re teachers, they’re parents, they’re elderly folks who have retired from working jobs as construction workers. It’s all these people who really run the city. And I think that Zohran’s platform, which is their own platform, is about shifting the terrain of power in this country.”On Tuesday night, as the results started to trickle in, Faidra Tzedakis, who moved to New York from Greece in 2014, went to a watch party organised by the Democratic Socialists of America in Astoria, Queens. Tzedakis became a US citizen during the summer and has been grappling with what that means.“The previous generation had the American Dream of this nice big house with a fence, and a stable nine-to-five job and that, kind of, has died,” said Tzedakis, who grew up amid the economic crisis in Greece. “It doesn’t really exist anymore.”“I think this campaign just proves that immigrants and younger people and educated people have a voice, and there’s hope: like we can change things,” she said. “So I think that the new dream is that we would live in a world where our leaders speak up and stand up for reproductive rights, against genocides, against Islamophobia and antisemitism, and do their best to protect marginalized groups like undocumented immigrants.”“We’re not afraid of the money or the establishment anymore,” she said. “And we can create a world that is just more accepting, and, yeah, loving.” More

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      Palestinian American hails Virginia win: ‘You can be bold on the Gaza genocide and still be victorious’

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      Sam Rasoul, the Virginia Democrat who is currently the longest-serving Muslim state lawmaker in the US and who faced accusations of antisemitism over language condemning Israel’s assault on Gaza as genocide, scored a resounding victory in Tuesday’s election that he believes shows voters are craving honesty from politicians.Rasoul, an American Palestinian state legislator since 2014, strengthened his majority as he was re-elected to an area of Virginia where the city of Roanoke leans Democrat and the surrounding areas are deeply conservative. In an election seen as a referendum on Trump’s policies, which have disproportionately affected Virginia, Rasoul increased his vote share from four years ago by more than 5% as Democrats trounced Republicans from the legislature to the governor’s mansion.“A 70% victory in the Bible belt of Virginia for a Palestinian Muslim is really a validation, beyond just Democrats winning, that you can be bold on the Gaza genocide and still be victorious,” Rasoul told the Guardian.His win came despite months of attack ads and rebukes from other party leaders in the state. He was accused of hate speech and antisemitism by his opponent, a Jewish Republican party member who ran as an independent, pro-Israel groups and senior members of his own party after he called the killing of at least 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023 “the most evil cleansing in human history” and blamed Zionism, which he labelled “a supremacist ideology created to destroy and conquer everything and everyone in its way”.“But I don’t believe that issues win campaigns,” Rasoul said. “It’s good organizing and deep, trusted relationships that win elections because people are really only looking for two things. Are you being honest with me? And will you work hard for me?”Rasoul is part of the most progressive faction of the Democratic party, and like his friend and the newly elected mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, has put affordability at the centre of his politics.“The reality is that over the past 40 years, the Democratic party was so desperate to please special interests, that we’ve lost touch with middle- and working-class Americans,” he said. “The establishment voices are too often on the wrong side of history, and representing the wrong interests. What people are desperate for, as we saw with Zohran and locally in my race, are bold solutions that make them feel like we’re genuinely batting for them.”Mamdani first reached out to Rasoul in November 2023 – a month after Israel launched its full-scale invasion of Gaza, inviting him to participate in a hunger strike outside the White House. At the time, Rasoul had a much higher profile, and he had to Google the relatively unknown New York City assembly member before saying yes.“Forget about him being a democratic socialist, people are tired of political talk and just desperate for honesty. Zohran was able to provide real substance in an entertaining way that allowed people to connect emotionally to what he was conveying,” said Rasoul.Rasoul, 44, was raised in Roanoke valley in south-west Virginia, where his Palestinian parents eventually settled after leaving the occupied West Bank following the 1967 war that left thousands dead and forcibly displaced.He has a background in health administration and strategic planning for non-profits, and since 2014 has represented Roanoke City – an ethnically diverse Democratic-leaning district (around 60% white, 30% Black and 10% other, mostly Hispanic) with 86,000 predominantly Christian constituents.Rasoul, who is one of three Muslim members of the part-time Virginia general assembly and among only seven state (and one federal, Representative Rashida Tlaib) lawmakers of Palestinian heritage, has faced Islamophobia throughout his political career.In his first run for office, Rasoul was accused in a widely distributed mailer of being funded by the terror group Al-Qaida. In an unsuccessful bid for lieutenant governor in 2021, Rasoul was the only candidate asked during a debate if he would represent his constituents “regardless of faith and beliefs”, prompting accusations of Islamophobia and an apology from the TV station.The recent flurry of attacks accusing him of antisemitism began in July 2025 after he posted a picture online of the award-winning Palestinian writer Omar El Akkad’s book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.He said the social media post was meant to “clarify that the genocide in Gaza has nothing to do Judaism, but rather the result of Zionism”.Despite the attacks, and the impact of the war on voters, Rasoul believes it’s his principled stance and focus on affordability, housing and utility costs that have resulted in his re-election“It’s not that the genocide is at the top of everyone’s list, but issues like Gaza are proxies for people’s gauge on our moral compass. Until we have that trusted relationship, it doesn’t matter what we say. People know that when it’s hard, I will speak the truth and fight for the issues that they do deeply care about and that impact their lives,” he said. “We show up at their doors, to their fish fries, at their churches, and to their schools, and they know that I’m ready to work hard for them.“That’s how you win elections.” More

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      Democrats just won back Latinos who voted for Trump. Will they be convinced to stick around?

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      Latino voters delivered sweeping support to Democratic candidates across multiple states in Tuesday’s off-year elections, reversing what many Republicans had come to believe was a lasting political realignment after Donald Trump’s historic gains with the community in the 2024 election .The rapid reversal represents one of the most volatile electoral swings in recent memory and threatens to upend Republican redistricting strategies that banked on sustained support from Latinos, the fastest-growing voting bloc in the country. It also suggests that Trump’s appeal to Latino voters was highly personal rather than an embrace of the Republican party itself – a miscalculation that could reshape the landscape heading into the 2026 midterms.“What we saw on Tuesday wasn’t just a vote for specific candidates: it was a vote against the current situation that the Trump administration has sparked,” said María Teresa Kumar, president of Voto Latino, a non-partisan voter registration organization. “People are feeling that it’s becoming increasingly dangerous to be Latino in this country.”While exact data can take time to be collected after an election, exit polling from the 2025 gubernatorial races revealed the extent of the Democratic resurgence. In New Jersey, Democratic representative Mikie Sherrill captured 68% of Latino voters compared with Republican Jack Ciattarelli’s 31%, according to NBC News, a reversal of the national 2024 presidential result, where Trump won 46% of Latino voters to Kamala Harris’s 51%, according to Pew Research. In Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger, a fluent Spanish speaker, secured 67% of Latino voters.MSNBC chief data analyst Steve Kornacki noted that the shift in municipalities in New Jersey with Latino populations exceeded 60%, where Trump had been more competitive or even victorious in 2024. Those same precincts swung dramatically toward Democrats in 2025, with shifts ranging from 15 to more than 40 percentage points. In Passaic county, which is approximately 45% Latino, Sherrill won by 15 points after Trump had carried it by three points the previous year.While the majority still voted for the Democrats, Trump’s 2024 performance among Latino voters represented a historic achievement for a Republican presidential candidate. Among Latino men specifically, 54% said they voted for Trump, driven largely by economic concerns and frustration with inflation, according to an Edison research exit poll. That breakthrough fueled Republican confidence that demographic trends were shifting in their favor, with House Republicans drawing congressional districts in states like Texas and Florida under the assumption these gains would persist with generic Republican candidates.But the 2025 results suggest those assumptions were premature. According to exit polling conducted by SSRS, 63% of California voters – and 70% of Latino voters specifically – said the Trump administration’s immigration actions had “gone too far”. In Virginia, those figures reached 56% overall and 77% among Latino voters.“You can’t come into my neighborhood and talk to me about rent or bread-and-butter issues if you can’t speak to the fear and dehumanization people are living with,” Kumar said. She noted that “almost a third of Latino voters who voted in 2020 didn’t vote in 2024 – and 70% of them were Democrats.”The timing of the electoral shift coincided with heightened immigration enforcement activity. Just days before the New Jersey election, Ruperto Vicens Marquez, a restaurant owner in Atlantic Highlands with work authorization and three young children, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), prompting community outcry.A Democratic congressional aide familiar with Latino voter engagement said the explanation was simpler than many analysts assumed. “Latinos didn’t swing back to Democrats because they suddenly became liberal. They swung back because the economy improved and Republicans crossed a line on immigration enforcement. People were scared – not politically activated, but genuinely scared.”The aide, who asked to remain anonymous to protect their job, added that many Latino voters who supported Trump in 2024 “thought they were voting for tough talk on border security, not militarized enforcement in their communities. No one voted for urban-warfare-style raids.”Despite the new electoral evidence, some Republican leaders remained confident the 2024 gains would endure. Mike Johnson, the US House speaker, told reporters: “I do believe that the demographic shift that we were able to see and experience in the 2024 election will hold.”Kumar, on the other hand, believes Latino voting behavior shifts based heavily on turnout, but also on economic conditions, candidate quality and the emotional salience of particular issues.“Republicans misread Latino voters this year,” she said. “Instead of doing oversight and accountability, they abdicated their responsibility to the whims of the president.”The Latino voter swing creates potential vulnerabilities in Republican-drawn congressional maps. In Texas, GOP mapmakers drew several south Texas districts with narrow margins, calculating that Trump’s gains represented a stable coalition. Those districts now appear more competitive than intended. Meanwhile, Democrats are seizing opportunities to redraw maps in states where they hold power, with California voters approving a ballot measure allowing the state’s independent redistricting commission to redraw congressional boundaries.Despite the backlash to immigration enforcement, economic concerns remained the top issue for Latino voters across all states where exit polling was conducted. The Democratic aide said that while “immigration is rarely the top issue on its own”, “ICE raids are activating, and when people feel targeted in their daily lives, that changes votes.”Still, the results underscore a fundamental reality about Latino voters that both parties have struggled to accept: the community is not a monolith, and does not represent a permanent coalition for either side.“It’s a swing vote … and so it’s for the Democrats to lose, and they have to start speaking to the real duress that the community is in, because it’s not small,” Kumar said. “When I have conversations with my Latino colleagues, it is a wholly different conversation than every other American that I interact with every day. There are two different lived experiences happening right now.” More

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      A year after devastating Trump loss, have the Democrats begun to find their way back?

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      It has been a year of soul-searching, hand-wringing, and self-flagellation for Democrats after a ballot-box rejection so thorough that some had come to believe that the party had lost not only the White House and Congress but the culture itself.Shell-shocked, Democrats entered Donald Trump’s second term in a political stupor – unsure of who they were or what they stood for. Their base had lost faith in its aging leadership class, and their brand, in Democrats’ own words, had become “toxic”: a party increasingly confined to coastal states, big cities and college towns. And even there, warning signs were flashing.Then came Tuesday night – a coast-to-coast romp in the first major elections of Trump’s turbulent return to the White House that exceeded even the party’s most optimistic projections.“What a night for the Democratic party,” California governor Gavin Newsom marveled, after news networks projected the redistricting ballot measure he spearheaded had passed so decisively that some voters were still in line to cast ballots. “A party that is in its ascendancy,” he continued, “a party that’s on its toes, no longer on its heels.”Abigail Spanberger, a congresswoman and former CIA agent, stormed to victory in Virginia, becoming the first woman elected governor of the state, an office currently held by a Republican. In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill, another congresswoman and former Navy pilot, turned what was expected to be a close race into a rout. And in New York, Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist, made history by vanquishing the former three-term Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo to become the city’s first Muslim mayor, in a race that drew the highest turnout in decades.“Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship,” Spanberger proclaimed in her victory speech, while in New York, Mamdani celebrated “a new era of leadership” and declared that “no longer will we have to open a history book for proof that Democrats can dare to be great”.Their wins did little to resolve the big, existential questions of whether Democrats’ future lay in a full-throated adoption of leftwing populism or a tactical turn to pragmatic centrism. The night offered ammunition for either path, or perhaps both.Yet a year after Kamala Harris’s concession to Trump, Democrats have repeatedly found success not by picking a single ideological lane, but by embracing the forces of disruption that have dominated Trump-era politics. Their victories, while strikingly different in style and approach, point to a party less bound by orthodoxy and old notions of decorum – a recognition that the times have changed, and so must they.“This is not your grandfather’s Democratic party,” Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said the next morning. “We are not going to play with one hand behind our back. We’re not going to roll over. We’re going to meet you, fire with fire.”For much of the past decade, Democrats cast themselves as guardians of the system – defenders of the democratic institutions under siege by a “wrecking ball” former builder who bulldozed his way into the White House and then clawed his way back.After the tumult of Trump’s first term, Democrats turned to Joe Biden, a consensus-builder and institutionalist who once predicted that history would view his adversary “as an aberrant moment in time”. In office, Biden dedicated his presidency to restoring domestic political norms while preserving the liberal international order abroad. But with his legacy now framed by Trump’s re-election, many Democrats have abandoned Biden’s return-to-normalcy appeal, seeing it as ill-suited to the politcal moment.Instead, as Trump moves aggressively to consolidate power and tilt the electoral map in his favor, the party’s instincts have shifted sharply away from caution, yet many progressives felt they had been too slow to adapt. Shortly before the 2024 election, a survey found that the overwhelming majority of voters valued a candidate who could deliver “change that improves people’s lives” rather than one who was committed to preserving institutions.Tensions built earlier this year, when angry Democrats began calling on their leaders in Washington and in state capitols around the country to do something – anything – to stop Trump’s attacks on the federal government, the rule of law and his political opponents. Those fears grew into the No Kings protest movement, which saw an estimated 7 million people in all 50 states take to the streets last month.Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, argued that Tuesday’s wins, following mass days of protest, were proof that a more combative and less deferential politics was the way to defeat Trumpism. “The No Kings era is here to stay,” he wrote.That assertive posture extended to Capitol Hill, where Senate Democrats are refusing to lend the votes needed to reopen the government – now the longest federal shutdown in US history – unless Republicans extend healthcare subsidies: a bare-knuckle approach they had resisted as recently as few months ago.Meanwhile, in the redistricting battles unfolding across the states, party leaders and longtime champions of fair maps including Barack Obama campaigned for California’s retaliatory gerrymander, as Newsom called on other Democratic governors to follow suit.View image in fullscreen“Politics has changed. The world has changed,” Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential contender, told NBC earlier this month. “The rules of the game have changed.”In nearly every election held this year, Democrats improved on their 2024 showing. Exit polls in Virginia and New Jersey show that both governors-elect not only held their base but peeled off Trump voters, while re-engaging young men and Latino voters who defected in 2024. In New York, Mamdani saw enormous youth turnout for his candidacy.“On Tuesday night, we saw a lot of different kinds of Democrats win – and that’s kind of the point,” said Rebecca Katz, a veteran political strategist whose political firm, Fight, worked for Mamdani’s campaign. “To win big, we need a big tent.”Voters, she said, sent a clear message that a back-to-basics formula – a relentless focus on improving affordability and a campaign built around authentic and visible candidates – resonates.Katz, who also advised the successful swing-state Senate campaigns of John Fetterman in 2022 and Ruben Gallego in 2024, argued that the central divide in the party was no longer where a candidate falls on the moderate to liberal spectrum but a choice between boldness and caution: “Playing it safe is the riskiest thing Democrats could do right now.”Winning has given the wounded party a much-needed morale boost. In a fundraising appeal this week, Democrats told supporters to “remember this feeling”. Yet beneath the celebration, the old fault lines – over age, ideology, tactics, and style – still run deep.Several seasoned House Democrats are facing contentious primary challenges, fueled by generational impatience and a desire for the party to take a more combative approach to Trump. Democrats’ prospects in 2026 may hinge on whether progressives and moderates can unite behind a message that addresses both economic anxiety and the fears of Trump’s presidency.In 2028, Democrats say they need a nominee who can articulate a vision beyond their opposition to Trump, the glue that has held together a Bernie Sanders-to-Liz Cheney coalition.Appearing at a live taping of the podcast Pod Save America this week, Obama said it was exhilarating to see progressives “get off the mat”. But, he added, “we’ve got a lot of work to do” and cautioned progressives in the audience against pushing ideological “litmus tests”.“We had Abigail Spanberger win and we had Zohran Mamdani win,” the former president said, “and they are all part of a vision for the future.”Sanders, the progressive Vermont senator who campaigned for Mamdani, told reporters this week that ideological divisions in the party were “no great secret”.But he sensed a party-wide shift: “I think there is a growing understanding that leadership and defending the status quo and the inequalities that exist in America is not where the American people are.”Republicans have sought to downplay Democrats’ string of victories this year. Since 2016, Democrats have tended to perform better when Trump was not on the ballot, their coalition proving more reliable in off-year and special elections.“They say that I wasn’t on the ballot and was the biggest factor,” Trump said this week. “I don’t know about that. But I was honored that they said that.”Historically, the party out of power typically fares well in the midterm elections. But redistricting efforts are expected to tilt the 2026 House map toward Republicans. In the Senate, the task is even more daunting for Democrats, who will have to win in states Trump carried by double digits. While Trump’s plunging popularity has Republicans worried, Americans hold markedly negative views of the Democratic party as well.Still, Democrats see momentum building in parts of the country where they haven’t been competitive for years.This summer, Catelin Drey, a Democrat and first-time candidate, won a special election for a state senate seat in Iowa, breaking the Republican supermajority by flipping a district that backed Trump in the 2024 election. It was a consequential victory and one that gave Democrats a jolt of hope.For weeks after her election, she kept getting the same question: how did she pull it off?“I knocked on thousands of doors,” said Drey, 38, a mother whose campaign centered on affordability, especially the rising cost of childcare. “I had people tell me, ‘I’ve never had a candidate come to my door before,’” she said. “Seeing that kind of work ethic – having someone show up and say, ‘Yeah, life is really tough right now. What’s the hardest thing for you? How can I help? What would make things better?’ That type of attention is not what we’re seeing across the board right now.”Since Harris’s defeat last November, Democrats have produced a glut of election postmortems, polling memos and policy white papers offering theories about why they lost — and how to win again. Drey thinks the answer might be surprisingly simple.“Show up and work for the people you serve,” she said. “It’s not rocket science.” More

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      Zohran Mamdani’s win shows the power of mobilizing non-voters | Ben Davis

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      One of the main media takeaways from the 2024 election was the much-discussed “vibe shift”. That is, a resurgence of cultural conservatism and a backlash to the shifting cultural attitudes on race, LGBTQ+ rights, immigration and the “wokeness” of the Obama and first Trump eras. The conservatives were in control not only of the White House, but, more importantly to them, the culture. Corporations, media outlets, and even Democratic politicians who had sought to portray a tolerant, inclusive image rushed to match this new vibe.Of course, the evidence for this shift was scant. Trump had won the election without a popular vote majority, and a closer look at the results showed a more conventional explanation: voters, rather than yearning for the days before there were interracial couples in television commercials or demanding a military crackdown on their cities, thought that they were working too hard for too little and maybe Trump would change it. They wanted lower prices, higher wages and a feeling of security. A year into Republican government and its top-down imposition of a new vibe, perhaps the reaction shows there finally is a vibe shift. Just not the one they planned on.The first electoral message of the second Trump era was an extremely strong one. Democrats beat Republicans up and down the ballot by shocking margins. In blue cities, progressives and democratic socialists beat moderates. Turnout was unprecedented for an off-year election. Democrats won the races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia by significantly more than both the 2024 results and the polls projected. Democrats won 64 out of 100 seats in the Virginia house of delegates. They also won over 60% of the vote in statewide races in Georgia and Pennsylvania, states that went for Trump in 2024.Democrats broke a Republican supermajority in Mississippi. Colorado voted by massive margins to increase taxes for free school meals. Maine voted for new gun control measures and against restrictions on absentee voting and new voter ID requirements by over 25%. Even scandal-tarred Democrats like Virginia attorney general candidate Jay Jones, who joked about murdering Republicans, won easily, by more than Harris carried the state a year ago.In California, voters passed a proposal essentially nuking most of the state’s Republican house delegation. Counties that voted for Trump last year voted by double digits to eliminate their own Republican representatives in response to Trump’s demands that Republican states eliminate their own Democratic seats. And in New York City, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani followed up his shocking primary win by winning a majority of voters in the general election, winning over a million votes, nearly as many as voted at all in the last mayoral election.Will this send a message to the White House and the right? Will it send a message to the Democratic establishment? While the Trump administration is clearly taken aback by the scale of the rejection, it is unlikely they will change their behavior. Indeed, they may even increase their aggression toward most of the country. For the Trump administration, backlash was anticipated. They knew everything they did would be unpopular, and they made the calculation that what they could do in two years with control is more valuable than whatever they lose.Their assault on the government and constitution cannot easily be rolled back. The entire political project is based on winning with minority support and using that power to further entrench minority rule. All of their actions have been aimed toward cementing minoritarian rule, and if anything, the scale of electoral backlash will cause them to accelerate their project. There’s a reason it’s called Project 2025, not Project 2027.What they’ve brought to the country is chaos and authoritarianism. Masked secret police kidnapping people in broad daylight, sending them to prison camps for life without charges or trial. Armed troops occupying major cities. Massive cuts to science and academia, even cancer research. Open graft and corruption. Gleeful cruelty, videos of immigrants and protesters being brutalized shared with pride. Under Republicans, even the air and the water are less clean. It’s no wonder people are upset, from base Democratic voters to working-class Latino voters who pulled the lever for a Republican for the first time in 2024.How do people resist a regime that is overtly anti-democratic as a principle? And why didn’t polls catch the scale of the Democratic wins? The answers to these questions are connected and can be seen in the historic Mamdani campaign. The Democrats won, in large part, from voters who do not like the Democratic party. The party’s favorable ratings are at historic lows. Huge majorities disapprove of the party’s leadership, and in particular, their lack of resistance to Trump.This is a wholesale change from 2017, when angry and upset Democrats rallied behind their party and its leaders. The second wave of resistance is far more anti-establishment, strident and left-wing. Rank-and-file Democratic voters now have far more positive views of democratic socialism than party leadership. These feelings opened the door for the Mamdani campaign, but the campaign showed how to harness them and provide real resistance.Trumpism is built on the disintegration of working-class institutions and civil society. Only a society with fraying bonds can produce a movement built on fear and resentment like this. The key to stopping it is rebuilding these institutions and this community. While many have known this for years, actually showing a path was easier said than done. Many campaigns have sought to bring the disaffected back into the political process in huge numbers. Mamdani’s was the first to succeed.In both the primary and the general, Mamdani reshaped the electorate, bringing hundreds of thousands of non-voters out to the polls, from young people to left-behind immigrant communities. For the first time, the electorate who came out to vote actually reflected the city’s demographics, rather than being predominantly older homeowners. Mamdani also built a coalition based on class, winning the city across races, powered by the lower-income renters and public transit users who make the city run, while losing among wealthy liberals and conservatives alike.But the most important number from Mamdani’s campaign is 100,000. That’s the number of people who actively volunteered for the campaign, knocking on doors, talking to their neighbors and co-workers. That’s one in every 10 people who even voted for Mamdani. They recognized politics as a living, breathing act of being in community, beyond just showing up to tick a box every few years. This has been foreign in this country for decades, but the Mamdani campaign and the Democratic Socialists of America are trying, and succeeding, in rebuilding this community and solidarity – in rebuilding working class political agency. To defeat Trump and the far right, this is what is necessary, across the country and on a massive scale. That’s the vibe shift we are just starting.

      Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign and is an active member of the Democratic Socialists of America More