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How Mamdani built an ‘unstoppable force’ that won over New York
A week before Zohran Mamdani astounded the world by his out-of-nowhere, odds-defying, convention-shattering victory in the New York City mayoral election, members of his vast army of youthful volunteers were amply aware of what was at stake.A group of 16 had assembled in the Bohemian Hispanic neighborhood of Bushwick in Brooklyn for one last push to heave the Democratic candidate over the line.Juuli, the field lead of the group who was coordinating that night’s canvassing on behalf of the Mamdani campaign, was running through the key messages to be delivered to voters on the doorstep. Emphasise the candidate’s policy platform promising to make New York a more affordable city, she said.View image in fullscreenAnd there was one other thing she wanted the volunteers to stress that they wouldn’t find in the official campaign script. “Remember to mention that he’s the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, not just some social media guy.”On Tuesday, that social media guy pulled off one of the great upsets in American politics in the era of Donald Trump. He defeated the Democratic behemoth and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo running as an independent, and the Republican Curtis Sliwa, to become leader of the country’s largest city and its first Muslim mayor.An unashamed democratic socialist had won control of the capital of capitalism.He did so having catalysed the largest voter turnout in the city in more than half a century. And that in turn was in no small part achieved on the back of his foot soldiers, who gathered nightly in Bushwick and in every pocket of New York to spread the word.By election night, that volunteer army had grown to more than 100,000, making it the greatest field operation by any political campaign in New York history. Mamdani paid homage to it in his victory speech, lauding it as an “unstoppable force” that with every door knocked on and every hard-earned conversation had “eroded the cynicism that has come to define our politics”.This is the stuff of political legend. Coming at a time when the Democratic party is in the doldrums, mired nationally in low public ratings and a crisis of confidence following Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris last November, Mamdani’s victory will be pored over by strategists as a possible blueprint for a way out of the quagmire.In nine short months, Mamdani went from a virtually unknown assemblyman in the New York state legislature, ranking alongside “Someone Else” at the bottom of opinion polls, to mayor-elect. At the beating heart of his campaign was the field operation, with its enormous reserves of largely unpaid New Yorkers tirelessly conveying his message of progressive change.View image in fullscreenHow did they do it? What was their secret sauce? And the question that every Democratic candidate will now be asking: can it be repeated across the plains and mountain ranges of America in the battle to resist Trump?“Zohran Mamdani is modeling a different kind of politics,” Bernie Sanders, the US senator from Vermont who was the inspiration for Mamdani’s democratic socialist politics, told the Guardian. “As mayor, Zohran will be a champion for the working people of New York. That idea might frighten the establishment and the billionaire class, but it is precisely why more than 100,000 volunteers turned out to enthusiastically support his campaign.”Very early on, Mamdani’s top team of advisers began to notice that something extraordinary was happening on the ground. That was long before newspaper articles began to appear about the obscure would-be mayor with an army of young supporters.View image in fullscreenÁlvaro López remembers being struck back in December, when the campaign held its first big canvassing event, by the intensity of positive feedback on the doorstep. López is electoral coordinator of the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the political organization to which Mamdani belongs that has acted as a kind of kitchen cabinet for his campaign.Several key positions have been filled by DSA members, including Mamdani’s revered field director, Tascha Van Auken, and communications manager, Andrew Epstein. Elle Bisgaard-Church, his 34-year-old campaign manager who was Mamdani’s chief of staff in the New York state assembly, also has a DSA background.López recalls attending the field launch on 19 December, about six months before the Democratic primary election. They had selected seven locations in which to test out their fledgling on-the-ground operation, with a tight focus on rent-stabilised working-class neighbourhoods where the DSA already had strong roots.The idea was to see whether Mamdani could gain traction by leaning on one of his core policy promises: freezing the rents in the city’s approximately 1m rent-stabilised apartments. If that test-run worked, they would then widen the target group to include other New Yorkers.View image in fullscreenLópez told the Guardian that from the get-go he had high hopes for Mamdani’s populist campaign. It was just six weeks after Trump’s presidential victory, and New York’s left-leaning population was desperate for any sign of hope.What López witnessed that day still took him by surprise. He was knocking on doors in an apartment block in Astoria when he engaged with a woman who was so excited by the promised rent freeze, even though she wasn’t herself living in a rent-stabilised unit, that she took out her purse and handed him several dollars in donation.He was taken aback. At that point the campaign hadn’t even set up a fundraising channel, yet when he talked to other field organizers they reported the same thing: they too had been donated $5, $10, $20 bills, entirely unsolicited.“We had struck gold,” López said. “Voters were identifying with the campaign and its promise to make the city more affordable, and they really wanted an alternative to Trump. We were catching that energy.”That was the start of what quickly grew into a vast fundraising and grassroots mobilization campaign. While Mamdani’s rivals, led by Cuomo, concentrated on attracting big donations from moneyed interests, Mamdani went down the small-donor route pioneered by Sanders in his 2016 presidential bid.In March, just three months after that first December field test, Mamdani suspended fundraising for the primary election after reaching the legal spending cap in record time. He had attracted more than $8m from 180,000 donors.View image in fullscreenIn September he did it again. He called off fundraising for this week’s general election, having hit the $8m ceiling faster than ever before.It wasn’t just fundraising records that were smashed. Campaign organisers set themselves a target of training 250 field leads to run the canvassing network, and within weeks had exceeded 500.The cascade effect replicated itself with volunteers, who descended on the campaign in droves. “There were 50 or 100 showing up, we had to recruit more field leads to cope with the crush,” López said.This was unusual, to say the least. Most Democratic campaigns leave the heavy lifting to be done by 30-second TV ads, with direct door-knocking contact with voters relegated until the final days of the election.Cuomo followed this conventional mould, running such a lackadaisical top-down operation that he had to pay canvassers to do the field work that Mamdani’s eager supporters did for free.Top down is not how Mamdani went about this race. It’s not how he thinks.In an interview with the Guardian shortly before the June primary, Mamdani explained to me how he viewed his bottom-up insurgency. He talked about the need to change “a political impulse of lecturing to listening”.View image in fullscreenListening is exactly what Mamdani set out to do just days after Trump had won the presidential election. He set up shop in working-class streets in the outer boroughs like Fordham Road in the Bronx and Hillside Avenue in Queens where Trump, despite the districts’ large immigrant populations, had enjoyed a double-digit swing from the Democratic party.Mamdani carried out what was in effect his own one-person field operation, asking life-long Democrats why they had voted for Trump or failed to vote at all. “What I learned is that many did so because they remembered having more money in their pocket four years ago” and that they craved from the Democratic party “a relentless focus on an economic agenda”.And that is how he ran his mayoral campaign.The field operation was founded upon that initial voter engagement and the focus on affordability that flowed from it. Just weeks after Harris had lost the presidential race having lectured voters about the threat to democracy posed by Trump, Mamdani decided to go the opposite direction – on the back of what he had heard during his listening tour of the city, he would canvass people not on generalities but around the specific struggles of their daily lives.The rent freeze, free and fast buses, cheap city-run groceries and free childcare were placed at the top of his platform.The field operation was devised consciously as an attempt to win Trump-voting defectors back into the Democratic fold. Exit polls from election night suggest that it worked.Mamdani won the Bronx, a borough that is majority Hispanic and which had swung notably towards Trump, by 11 points.That’s on top of his soaraway success with young voters, with an astonishing 78% of 18- to 29-year-olds backing him.Part of the strategy to woo back Trump defectors was an emphasis on showing respect for everyone on the doorstep. Canvassers were encouraged to engage with people, without judgment.“We’ve emphasised that it’s important not to chastise, not to speak down to people who turned to Trump or who just don’t vote,” López said.You could see that ethos in Bushwick.Cynthia, 37, knocked on the door of a woman who was wearing a Puerto Rico T-shirt and who, when asked, said she never voted.Cynthia shared with the woman that she too had never voted in her life. This time, though, she said, she was casting a ballot for Mamdani because he would make the buses free.View image in fullscreen“And who’s going to pay for that?” the woman said, sounding irked. She revealed that she herself was a bus driver working for the city, and that she feared that if Mamdani made the buses free and it all went wrong she would lose her job.The doorstep conversation lasted more than five minutes, as Cynthia tried to assuage the woman’s fears. It didn’t work – the woman appeared determined not to vote. But at least the interaction had been cordial, the woman’s opinions recognised.Cynthia’s open approach about her own lack of voting history was part of what made the Mamdani field game so powerful. Volunteers were encouraged to air their own personal experiences and views on the doorstep, even if they had never canvassed before and had no experience in formal politics.“We don’t want our volunteers to give elevator pitches,” Juuli, the field lead, said. “If you are passionate about something, and that’s why you are canvassing, then say it out loud.”In most established political campaigns, paid staff make the decisions while volunteers do the donkey work. The Mamdani campaign turned that on its head.Volunteers were encouraged to contribute ideas. Many were rapidly promoted into responsible positions as field leads and then field directors with real influence over campaign strategy.“Mamdani’s campaign gave the keys to his supporters in unique ways that reflected the new political environment,” said Rick Fromberg, who is well versed in the challenges of running a mayoral campaign in New York City. He was the campaign manager of Bill De Blasio’s successful re-election bid in 2017.“Campaigns in general are extraordinarily risk averse,” Fromberg said. “But Mamdani’s campaign was risk forward. They allowed a broad cross-section of his supporters to take ownership of the campaign – and that decision paid off.”View image in fullscreenWhen political historians look back on the 2025 mayoral race it is possible they will fall into the trap that Juuli, the Bushwick field lead, articulated – by casting Mamdani as “just some social media guy”. That, after all, is how he was widely portrayed in the media during the mayoral race.Social media has undoubtedly been an important part of Mamdani’s approach. In his Guardian interview, the candidate told me that he regarded social media as a way of achieving what he calls the “politics of no translation”.“That means you speak directly to people about the crises they are facing, with no intermediaries. They can pull out their phones and see a video right from you. If I tell you I’m going to freeze your rent, you know exactly what I’m calling for.”Mamdani credits Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congresswoman and fellow democratic socialist, with opening his eyes to the potential of such direct communication. It was her launch video in 2018, “The Courage to Change”, that showed him the way.Over the course of the mayoral race Mamdani has proven himself to be a master of the form, releasing a stream of videos that are funny, combative, creative, self-deprecating and authentic-feeling – not to mention invariably viral. Yet what much of the media coverage overlooked is how closely Mamdani connected his social media to the affordability message that his army of canvassers disseminated across the city.View image in fullscreenThe video of a fully suited Mamdani taking the Polar Bear plunge in Coney Island will long be remembered as a surreal piece of political theatre, but its purpose was to drive home his promise to freeze stabilised rents. His spoof of his Democratic primary rivals, Cuomo and Eric Adams, as two old dudes bickering in a New York diner was slapstick fun, but its punch was to present them as archetypes of a party establishment that had had its day.The same duality applies to the eye-catching events staged by the campaign that were both entertaining and relentlessly targeted. In August they held a scavenger hunt that drew about 5,000 New Yorkers from all corners of the city.Last month about 1,500 turned up for a soccer tournament in Coney Island where mixed-gender teams played friendly matches borough against borough. Both events broke the mould of serious politics, while at the same time serving a serious political purpose – they underlined Mamdani’s commitment to, and love of, New York City, and drew people to his cause who had never before participated in the political process.There’s another striking contrast here between Mamdani’s campaign and the failed presidential bid of Harris. Both candidates stressed “joy” in their pitch to voters.But while Mamdani was painstakingly careful always to tie his “joy” to his vision for New York, Harris was imprecise, leaving many people to wonder what she was feeling so joyful about.“The Harris campaign tried to make joy the centrepiece of their platform but it fell flat because where was the substance?” said Denia Pérez, who spent much of this year canvassing for Mamdani. “In our campaign there was lots of joy, but it was always tethered to a substantive promise of change that will make people’s lives easier.”Back with the Bushwick canvassers, you could see that duality – fun plus targeted politics – strongly on display. The volunteers were given “Zetro” cards mimicking Metro cards for the subway: each time they canvassed they got a stamp, and when the card was full they were rewarded with a free Mamdani poster or T-shirt.View image in fullscreenWhen the night’s canvassing was done, the volunteers were invited for a debrief to a Bushwick bar, Misfit Moon, serving botanical kava and katrom. The mood was upbeat and ebullient, but Mamdani’s policies dominated the conversation.Mac Nicholas, 26, dressed in a “Hot Girls for Zohran” T-shirt, reflected on her first time canvassing. She says it had felt good to support a candidate trying to make the city affordable for everyone.“I believe he’s genuine and has compassion, and we need that in City Hall,” she said.Cynthia, the one who had never voted before let alone canvassed, said what had driven her to Mamdani’s cause was that she was fed up with Democratic smugness. “How many times did I hear people say, ‘There’s no way Trump is going to win.’ I’m out here to remind people we no longer have the luxury of being complacent.”View image in fullscreenMamdani’s mould-breaking field operation didn’t come out of the ether. He’s been working towards Tuesday night for many years. Like that other Democratic politician with a magician’s knack for mobilising voters, Barack Obama, Mamdani came to electoral politics via community organizing.He got his first taste of the thrill of engaging voters in 2015 when he volunteered for a city council campaign in Queens. “Climbing a six-story walkup, getting to that top floor, and having a senior open their door – you see a glimpse into what it is that they live with every single day,” he recalled to the New Yorker.That same year he canvassed for a pastor, the Rev Khader El-Yateem, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge, where 9/11 first responders live cheek by jowl with Yemenis and Palestinians.It was that election, in which El-Yateem attracted almost a third of the vote, that taught him the importance of expanding the Democratic base to include Muslims like himself and other New York demographic groups traditionally ignored by the party. It also implanted the idea that one day he might run for office himself.In 2018, Ross Barkan had a chance to experience Mamdani’s nascent field organising skills up close. That year, Barkan had taken a break from his day job as a New York-based writer to run for a Brooklyn seat in the state senate.Mamdani was his first hire. Barkan employed him as canvassing director, then campaign manager.Looking back, Barkan can see the green shoots of Mamdani’s explosive rise already sprouting as they plotted the senate race together.“It’s clear watching him today that he was thinking about this kind of unabashed progressive campaign for many years,” Barkan told the Guardian. “He was always a brilliant leader of volunteers and canvassers. He trained them, he showed them how to connect with voters. For him, field was paramount.”Mamdani took the organizer’s sensibility with him in 2020 when he entered the New York state assembly representing Astoria in Queens. Within a year of taking up the seat he joined a cab driver, Richard Chow, in staging a 15-day hunger strike outside City Hall seeking relief for taxi drivers’ crushing debts.They won, as Mamdani recalled on Tuesday in his victory speech. “My brother, we are in City Hall now,” he said.All these past lessons were brought to bear on the mayoral race, with resounding results. His Bay Ridge experience of expanding the base came into play, with the field operation releasing campaign materials in Urdu, Bangla and Spanish.A huge canvassing push to engage Muslim and south Asian voters across the city, propelled by Mamdani’s condemnation of Israel’s war in Gaza as a genocide, also paid dividends.View image in fullscreenMohamed Gula of the Muslim civic engagement group Emgage, which backed Mamdani, estimates that turnout among the 380,000 Muslim New Yorkers who are registered to vote is likely to have doubled on Tuesday. That’s up from the 22% who participated in the mayoral election four years ago.“So many Muslims have been inspired by Zohran’s campaign. It speaks to a new wave of Muslims who are proud of America being their home,” Gula said.With Mamdani’s thumping victory, thoughts are now quickly turning to the hard road that lies ahead – both for New York’s mayor-elect and for his wider party. As statistics of Mamdani’s win filter through, illuminating the neighborhoods and demographic groups that propelled him into Gracie Mansion, deeper lessons will emerge about how to resist Trump and his Maga insurrection.Mamdani’s top team told the Guardian that they were already thinking hard about what to do with the vast volunteer army and the energy that it commands. How should it be harnessed and put to use in the battle ahead?Obama generated similar kinetic forces in his 2008 “Yes we can!” campaign, but then allowed them largely to dissipate once he was inside the White House. Mamdani is determined not to make the same mistake.So watch this space. We will surely be hearing more from Mamdani’s army that bore his message on their shoulders and delivered it to New Yorkers, one door at a time. More
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Zohran Mamdani is filling disillusioned Americans with hope and inspiration | Osita Nwanevu
The thing that should surprise us most about Zohran Mamdani’s election win is that it wasn’t a surprise. Well before the result was called on Tuesday night, weeks of reliable surveys had already suggested his victory in New York City’s mayoral race, by a nine-point margin over former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, would be a foregone conclusion – an extraordinary finish for a man unknown to the vast majority of New Yorkers when he launched his run just over a year ago. The campaign that followed was one of the greatest in American history.True as it may be that both Cuomo and incumbent mayor Eric Adams were deeply flawed candidates marred by scandal, it was by no means inevitable that Mamdani would be the leading candidate against them. As recently as February, Mamdani was polling at 1% in the Democratic primary, well behind a slew of challengers with more name recognition, more experience and deeper roots in city politics. They were defeated by an ever-growing army of volunteers – 90,000 by the summer – led substantially by organizers from the Democratic Socialists of America. Early in the campaign, it was a given to many commentators that an openly leftist campaign for the mayorship of the world’s financial capital would face impossible headwinds. In Tuesday night’s victory speech, Mamdani opened with a quote from Eugene Debs. Per exit polling from CNN, nearly one in four New Yorkers who went to the polls described themselves as socialists.As contested as the definition of socialism remains, Mamdani offered up a version of it New York’s voters clearly liked. Free buses, free childcare, higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations – the critical test now of course, as we are being reminded hourly by those who hope he fails – will be whether he can actually deliver on these things and more.Fortunately, Mamdani’s campaign has also given us some reason to suspect, beyond his bright and blazing charisma, that he might have the makings of a hard-nosed administrator. Threading the needle on policing, meetings with the business community, taking in new ideas on housing, all while retaining the support and enthusiasm of a progressive base – all of this was a preview of the balancing act Mamdani will have to do if he wants to succeed where recent progressive mayors and a long line of frustrated New York City reformers haven’t.View image in fullscreenWhatever he manages to accomplish as mayor, much of potentially national significance can be learned from his candidacy alone. Mamdani is the first New York mayoral candidate in over half a century to have earned more than a million votes. It is true that he did so in a diverse and heavily Democratic city that looks nothing like the US at large. But the very same can be said about cities such as Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Detroit – among the swing-state urban areas where maximizing Democratic turnout and vote share is critical to winning both state races and the electoral college. Last year, Donald Trump made gains in all three on his way to very narrowly winning Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and the presidency – thanks in large part to increases in support from working-class minorities and young men.Both are constituencies where Mamdani rapidly and remarkably built strength over the course of the year – beating Cuomo by nearly 40 points with men under 30 and by double digits in some minority neighborhoods Cuomo had initially won during the primary. One of the first pieces of media his campaign released was a video of Mamdani doing man-on-the-street videos asking young people, people of color, and immigrants why they either did or didn’t votefor Trump.The answers given – affordability, Gaza, distrust in the system – were obviously the ones the campaign wanted viewers to hear. But the video’s approach, treating voters to be won with an openness and friendly curiosity rather than hostility or pontifications from on high, was instructive. It demonstrated – performed, perhaps – a willingness to listen and learn lacking among moderate pundits and Democrats already making pronouncements that what Mamdani has been able to accomplish tells us nothing whatsoever about what Democrats elsewhere might.That attitude is reflective of the confidence and self-satisfaction that blinded New York’s politicos to the viability of Mamdani’s campaign to begin with – a disposition leading Democrats and their operatives refuse to be shaken from even now, a full decade into Trump’s ongoing exposure of the cracks in the Democratic electoral coalition. It’s often suggested that the main force ailing party leadership is gerontocracy – that Democrats such as Chuck Schumer, who refused to endorse Mamdani as the Democratic nominee, are simply too old and personally embittered to recognize talents like Mamdani, pass the torch on to them and embrace new ideas. But this isn’t even half the story. Mamdani was the only serious candidate in this race.View image in fullscreenHis most significant rivals, Cuomo and Adams, have both faced criminal investigations over their conduct in office, and Cuomo resigned in disgrace in 2021. Despite this, out of sheer timidity and careerism, Democratic leaders around the city and around the country, many of them not especially elderly, embraced the two anyway. So too did a bipartisan front of elites. “The coalition opposing Zohran Mamdani,” Jacobin’s Luke Savage writes, “has spanned the New York Post to the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It now also includes the Trump White House and Elon Musk, to say nothing of Bill Ackman, Michael Bloomberg, real estate tycoon Ronald Lauder, and the wider constellation of plutocrats who’ve pumped more than $40m in outside money into the campaign in addition to the more than $12m spent by the Cuomo campaign directly.”Those expenditures didn’t work. And neither did identity politics – reliably the last refuge of centrists who, of course, also condemn identitarianism from progressives and the right when it suits them. Adams tried to crown Mamdani “king of the gentrifiers” a few weeks ago; less amusingly, the nonstop effort to label Mamdani a threat to Jewish New Yorkers for his stances on Gaza failed so totally that it might encourage other Democratic candidates to be more critical of Israel.Against all odds and despite increasingly desperate and despicable slights against his faith in the last weeks of the campaign, Mamdani will be mayor – which unfortunately means the attacks against him and the city he will run will only get worse in the months and years ahead. The president has openly contemplated sending troops into New York City; already, he is using the policy levers available to him to upend the city’s governance however he can. In all probability, a grand showdown is coming. We have ample reason already to look to Mamdani for inspiration. From here on out, millions of Americans, in New York and beyond, will be looking to him for leadership.
Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist More
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Zohran Mamdani’s biggest threat is not Donald Trump, it’s the Democratic old guard | Emma Brockes
The morning after Zohran Mamdani’s startling mayoral victory in New York, the most arresting visual image was not of the mayor-elect celebrating in an applause-filled room, but the breakdown of voting patterns across the city. Street by street, practically building by building, you could index New Yorkers’ support for Mamdani or Andrew Cuomo to the probable amount of rent they were paying. A middle-income precinct on the Upper West Side, for example, showed up as a small island of Mamdani voters in a sea of Cuomo-voting wealthier neighbourhoods. Solid lower-income support for Mamdani in modest midtown gave way to the incredible banking wealth of Tribeca and its majority support of Cuomo.Allowing for large anomalies – Staten Island, a middle- to lower-income part of the city, voted heavily for Cuomo, as did lower-income Hassidic neighbourhoods in Brooklyn and Queens – the message of the huge turnout for Mamdani in the US’s most expensive city seemed to be one of affordability; even of a referendum on capitalism as we know it. And so the most pressing question became: was it a crank result from an unrepresentative city, or the beginning of a new political wave?The night’s countrywide election patterns indicated a swing away from Donald Trump to the Democrats, which, of course, doesn’t mean that Mamdani’s Democratic socialism is anything the US at large will be willing to buy. Still, the move to the left was sharp enough to return Democrats to some traditionally very Republican areas, including two Democrats voted on to a public service commission in Georgia; the first Democratic female governor voted into office in New Jersey; and a new Democratic governor elected in Virginia. In New York City itself, the swing away from Trump, a mere 12 months after his support surged during the 2024 presidential election, was significant. His endorsement of Cuomo, running as an independent, made no apparent difference whatsoever.It should be said that Cuomo was a terrible candidate, trailing sexual misconduct allegations – all of which he denies – and a record as New York’s governor that foundered horribly during the pandemic. It should also be pointed out that Mamdani didn’t simply beat Cuomo; he galvanised New Yorkers into the highest mayoral election turnout since the 1960s, indicating an electorate voting for him rather than against his opponent.How, then, does the 34-year-old look as a potential leader beyond the very particular ecosystem of New York City, where, at times, it is possible to believe that a tub of margarine promising lower rents, higher minimum wage and fairer taxes might win out over a traditional political adversary? On this question, aspects of Mamdani’s identity – exploited by Cuomo and Trump to racist effect – might actually run in his favour. Mamdani’s age and eloquence obviously flatter him in relation to Trump, but it’s his background that stands out as a decisive advantage.In his victory speech on Tuesday night, Mamdani promised working-class New Yorkers: “We will fight for you, because we are you.” This is a great piece of rhetoric, but let’s be honest: Mamdani has the social and cultural capital of someone who grew up in an affluent family in a wealthy part of Manhattan, with one parent who went to Harvard and became a successful film-maker and the other who is a professor at Columbia. And while the mayor-elect went to an academically selective state high school in the city, he attended a private liberal arts college in Maine that now charges $91,000 a year in tuition and living costs.I don’t mention any of this to be snide. Mamdani sells a political message further to the left than any successful American politician has dared to in recent memory, but he doesn’t sound like an outsider. In fact, he sounds as smooth and polished and – can we say it – arrogant as any mainstream political contender.He has neither Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s scrappy, up-from-her-bootstraps energy, nor can he be played for laughs on Saturday Night Live like Bernie Sanders – who, during the 2016 election cycle, Larry David mercilessly if affectionately skewered as a hopeless crank. Even Trump’s characterisation of Mamdani as a communist – the kind of absurd, inflationary claim the president is accustomed to throwing out and having his supporters swallow whole – withers under the slightest scrutiny.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, none of his campaign promises justify use of the word “radical” in the scaremongering sense. Mamdani’s push for a $30 minimum wage sounds like standard political aspiration. He has promised to make buses in New York free – as they were during Covid without the city falling to communism. (On which subject: when the Staten Island ferry went from fare-charging to free in 1997, New York’s commuters didn’t receive it as a communist gesture.) And his promise to increase taxes on those earning more than $1m a year is substantially more generous to affluent earners than anything Rachel Reeves – also not a communist! – is threatening in the forthcoming budget.The election results this week suggest Mamdani as an effective, inspiring force against the corruptions of Trump. But while you can imagine him, years in the future, going toe to toe with JD Vance in a televised presidential debate, his real enemies may be closer to home. To advance beyond New York politics, it’s not just the Republicans he’ll have to beat, but the Chuck Schumer- and Nancy Pelosi-era gatekeepers of the Democratic old guard – who I suspect may find him even more threatening and obnoxious than Trump.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More
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The Guardian view on Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York: the Democrats can build on an uplifting night | Editorial
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
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The Zohran Mamdani method can work beyond New York. Take the fight to the right | Aditya Chakrabortty
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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Zohran Mamdani’s historic triumph in New York City’s mayoral election – in pictures
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