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      The Guardian view on Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York: the Democrats can build on an uplifting night | Editorial

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      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

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      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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      ‘Turn the volume up’: Mamdani invokes Trump in fiery speech laying out plan of action

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      Zohran Mamdani, the newly elected mayor of New York City, issued a direct call to Donald Trump in his victory speech on Tuesday night, saying he would enter City Hall with a firm plan to counter the politics of division and cronyism that helped elevate him to the White House.Mamdani, speaking to supporters in Brooklyn after a decisive victory over Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, said New York had shown it would be the “light” in a “moment of political darkness”.“Here we believe in standing up for those we love, whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many Black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall,” Mamdani, who will be the city’s first Muslim mayor, said. “No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.”The mayor-elect then issued a direct message to the president, saying if any city could show the nation how to defeat Trump, it was the “city that gave rise to him”.“So, if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump, it’s how we stop the next one. So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: turn the volume up,” Mamdani said, to raucous applause.He was leading Cuomo by more than 8 percentage points, with 91% of the vote counted, around midnight ET. The result capped a stunning surge for the Democratic socialist after he won the June primary, and a dramatic fall from grace for Cuomo, who had waged a well-funded independent bid.Mamdani reiterated a slate of his key policies to supporters on Tuesday night and how they would counter the Trump agenda. They included a plan to hold landlords to account for how they treat tenants; ending a “culture of corruption” that has benefited the billionaire class; and expanding labor protections and standing alongside unions “because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed”.“New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant,” Mamdani said. “So hear me President Trump when I say this: to get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.“When we enter city hall in 58 days, expectations will be high,” he added. “We will meet them.”Mamdani’s projected win was just one of a many for Democrats on Tuesday night. Mikie Sherrill was elected governor of New Jersey in a closely watched race and Abigail Spanberger was elected Virginia’s first female governor.Trump responded to the slate of Democratic victories on Truth Social late Tuesday night, urging lawmakers to immediately move to end the filibuster and pass voting rights reform. That would include, the president wrote, stricter voter ID laws and a ban on mail-in ballots.As Mamdani was speaking, mere moments after telling the president to turn the volume up, Trump also posted a cryptic note on Truth Social: “…AND SO IT BEGINS!” More

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      ‘A historic victory’: our panel reacts to Zohran Mamdani’s triumph | Panel

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      Osita Nwanevu: ‘a historic victory of the American left’Set aside for a moment the interminable back and forth over whether Zohran Mamdani represents the future of the Democratic party. This much is beyond dispute: Mamdani represents the immediate future of New York City, America’s largest town and the financial capital of the world.His win, just as indisputably, is a historic victory for the American left, which has been buoyed in spirit and resolve since Mamdani’s underdog victory in the mayoral primary. In New York, it will have a measure of the governing power its own pessimists and its dogged opponents within the Democratic party alike have doubted it was capable of winning.And the country at large will be watching the city closely ⁠– less out of a belief in the coming apocalypse only Republicans are convinced the city is in for than out of curiosity as to whether Mamdani can actually deliver on the promise of his campaign and manage the city at least as well as an ordinary Democrat could.But the challenges sure to face him as he works to prove himself shouldn’t overshadow the significance of what he’s already done. An organizing effort that will be studied for many years to come, highly disciplined messaging, a moral stand on the genocide in Gaza that has shaken up the Democratic party’s internal politics on confronting Israel, a level of charisma and creativity unseen on the American political scene since at least Barack Obama, a conceptual bridge between the material politics of affordability and a politics of values, speaking to what it means to be a New Yorker and an American ⁠– Mamdani’s run has offered us lessons that ought to be put to work well beyond New York City’s limits.

      Osita Nwanevu is a columnist at Guardian US and the author of The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding
      Judith Levine: why are Democrats running from Mamdani?The last door on my canvassing turf, a Brooklyn brownstone, looked like a gut renovation: minimalist plantings, spot lighting. The woman welcomed me. Her vote for Mamdani “felt historic”, she said. And her husband? “Are you voting for Zohran?” she shouted into the house. The reply: “Just don’t raise my taxes.”There it was. Israel and Islamophobia moved voters one way or another. But in the end, it was pure class warfare.The city’s richest man donated $8m to defeat Mamdani. The New York Post predicted that Wall Street would move to Dallas if the democratic socialist won. “This election is a choice between capitalism and socialism,” Cuomo declared.Mamdani’s platform, “affordability”, is hardly radical. Indeed, Americans support what he promises: free childcare and raising taxes on millionaires. Gallup recently found that Democrats view socialism more positively than capitalism – 66 to 42%.Still, if not quite socialist, the spirit of city hall will be different: pro-immigrant, pro-tenant, pro-government, anti-billionaire. Last week, three Democratic leaders told the press they wouldn’t let the Republicans use 42 million hungry food stamp beneficiaries to force an end to the shutdown, letting healthcare subsidies lapse to bankroll tax giveaways to the rich. Then Chuck Schumer hurried out, ducking a question about whether he supported Mamdani.“A city where everyone can live with security and dignity.” Mamdani’s message, applied nationally, was the same as the message Democrats were trying to push at their press conference. In New York, it prevailed. Why are Democrats running from this gifted messenger, who embodies the only vital future for a moribund party?

      Judith Levine is Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism
      Malaika Jabali: ‘flicker of hope amid the gloom’If conservatives wanted to fearmonger about the specter of socialism to keep Mamdani from winning New York City’s mayoral race, it couldn’t have come at a worse time.Donald Trump, billionaire president and self-appointed foil to the new mayor-elect of New York City, has been playing games with the country’s food stamp program as families show up in droves to food bank lines. Authoritarianism, expensive healthcare and unaffordable housing have threatened the average American household, and the country’s elites have cruelly mocked them.New York City residents have felt this acutely. The city’s voters cited cost of living, and housing in particular, as the top concern as they exited the voting booths Tuesday.Mamdani’s popularity will be attributed to his social media savvy and connection with young voters. But the bigger factor is that Mamdani tapped into their economic anxieties in ways the Democratic establishment has failed to while it stubbornly commits to a neoliberal agenda.In the years ahead, Mamdani will not only face antagonism from Trump but the antipathy of his own party, home to Democratic leaders such as Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, none of whom endorsed him in the race. But for one night at least, New Yorkers can celebrate this flicker of hope amid the gloom.

      Malaika Jabali is a columnist at Guardian US
      Bhaskar Sunkara: don’t chalk this up to ‘viral moments’I spent most of tonight thinking about how improbable this once seemed. Mamdani – a democratic socialist – is the next mayor of New York City.Zohran is an incredibly gifted communicator and he built a campaign team that matched that talent. But it would be a mistake to chalk up his victory to charisma or viral moments. It was built on knocking on doors, talking about rent, wages and the everyday costs that define people’s lives. It was a reminder that the left wins when it shows that democratic socialists are laser-focused on meeting human needs, not fighting culture wars.They tried to make the race about Israel. They tried to paint Mamdani as an extremist or a threat. But he refused the bait, staying disciplined and universal in his appeal – talking about housing, transit and affordability with the same clarity to every audience. It was politics rooted in working-class issues, not posture.Does this victory matter beyond New York? Absolutely. The style will differ in deep red districts, but the lesson is the same: build politics around the pocketbook issues workers care about most.

      Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, the founding editor of Jacobin, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in An Era of Extreme Inequalities More

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      US Senate rejects funding package for 14th time with shutdown in 35th day

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      The US federal government shutdown was poised to move into record-breaking territory on Tuesday after the Senate rejected for the 14th time a funding package already passed by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.With the shutdown now in its record-equalling 35th day, frantic behind-the-scenes talks were under way to bring the standoff to a close amid expressions of alarm from Democrats and Republicans alike about its disruptive effects on millions of Americans.The shutdown threatened services such as the federal food stamps program and has seen employees furloughed or working unpaid. It will exceed the 35-day closure that occurred during Donald Trump’s first presidency, in 2018, if it continues past midnight tonight.With concerns over its impact mounting, the Trump administration moved on Monday to provide emergency funds that would keep the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) operating at 50% capacity following court rulings stating that it could not legally withhold financial backing. The program provides food aid to 42 million Americans and costs around $9bn a month.But Trump, who has hitherto made little effort to end the impasse, reopened the fears over Snap on Tuesday, by threatening to hold the program hostage until Democrats capitulate and vote in favour of the government funding package.He wrote on social media that Snap benefits “will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!”While the Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate, Democrats are able to block the bill’s passage thanks to the filibuster, which needs the votes of 60 senators for passage. Trump has urged Republicans to use their majority to scrap the filibuster.The president’s latest threat over Snap seemed to be a sign of growing edginess over a shutdown that he has sought to blame on Democrats but which polls indicate a majority of the public believe is the responsibility of the Republicans and his administration.Unlike the earlier shutdown during his first term, when he fought Congress in 2018-19 for funds to build the US-Mexico border wall, the president has been largely absent from this shutdown debate.Republican and Democratic senators are quietly negotiating the terms of an emerging deal. With a nod from their leadership, the senators are seeking a way to reopen the government, put the normal federal funding process back on track and devise a resolution to the crisis of expiring health insurance subsidies that are spiking premium costs across the country.“Enough is enough,” said John Thune, the Senate majority leader and a South Dakota Republican, as he opened the deadlocked chamber.Labour unions have stepped up pressure on lawmakers to reopen the government.“We’re not asking for anything radical,” the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, said. “Lowering people’s healthcare costs is the definition of common sense.”With the House speaker, Mike Johnson, having sent lawmakers home in September, most attention is on the Senate, where party leaders have outsourced negotiations to a loose group of centrist dealmakers from both parties.Central to any solution will be a series of agreements that would need to be upheld not only by the Senate, but also the House and the White House.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSenators from both parties, particularly the powerful members of the appropriations committee, are pushing to ensure the normal government funding process can be put back on track.“The pace of talks have increased,” said Gary Peters, a Democratic senator from Michigan.A substantial number of senators also want some resolution to the standoff over Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at year’s end.However, the White House is demanding that Democrats vote to fund the government before talks over healthcare can begin. White House officials are said to be in close contact with GOP senators who have been quietly speaking with key Senate Democrats.The loss of federal subsidies, which come in the form of tax credits, are expected to leave many people unable to buy health insurance.Republicans, with control of the House and Senate, are reluctant to fund the healthcare program, also known as Obamacare. However, Thune has promised Democrats a vote on their preferred proposal, on a future date, as part of any deal to reopen government.That’s not enough for some senators, who see the healthcare deadlock as part of their broader concerns with Trump’s direction for the country.Democrats, and some Republicans, are also pushing for guardrails to prevent the Trump administration’s practice of unilaterally slashing funds for programs that Congress had already approved, by law, the way billionaire Elon Musk did earlier this year at the “department of government efficiency”. More