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      In New York, Zohran Mamdani showed how it’s done: ‘identity politics’ can win elections | Nesrine Malik

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      It is inevitable that too much will be laid on Zohran Mamdani’s head. So large is the vacuum on the left of politics that his victory will occupy an outsized space for progressives beyond New York City. And so, before I lay too much on his head myself, some caveats. New York is a specific place. It has a specific demographic and economic profile. And Mamdani is a man of a specific background, racial, political and religious. But with that out of the way, I think the successful practice of “identity politics” during his campaign offers some universal lessons.I put identity politics in quote marks because the term now means little that is universally agreed upon. Broadly, it has come to mean something derogatory, kind of in the same way that “wokeness” has. It increasingly has negative connotations: a political appeal to race or other markers of identity that is shallow, rooted in perpetual victimhood, focused only on representation and disconnected from material reality. Seen this way, identity politics is not about universal goals, such as lifting people out of poverty and so mobilising broad coalitions of voters, but simply about visibility.But identity politics as an organising political force has its origins in precisely the opposite idea. Coined by the Black feminist socialist organisation the Combahee River Collective in 1977, identity politics was defined as a path to a liberation that could only come about through the understanding that systems oppress many different people along the lines of their identity, and so could only be dismantled if all groups worked together. “We believe,” the collective declared, “that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity”, but that “we also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.”That “simultaneous experience” is what I am talking about here. Mamdani tapped into that. He rooted his campaign solidly in the experience of being a New Yorker, and how the city needed to be made more affordable, then expanded that to include all the ways in which different groups live that experience. He released campaigning videos in Urdu, Hindi, Spanish and Arabic, and consistently made all of them about a retail economic message: rent freezes, free buses, universal childcare, making New York a place to raise your children and build small businesses. Then he threw in a bespoke little twist. In his Arabic message he quipped that something more controversial than his political message is his belief that the knafeh, an Arab dessert, is better on Steinway Street in Queens than it is in New Jersey. Talk about hitting a sweet spot.Including the languages of underrepresented identities is an exercise in enfranchisement. He quoted the Arabic phrase ana minkum wa alaikum – “I am of you and for you” – in his victory speech, and named those “forgotten by the politics of our city”, the “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties”.He combined that with being in the places that working-class people, many of whom are people of colour, occupy. Visiting those on the taxi ranks and working the late-night shifts, he forged a powerful metaphor of a city that is kept going by those who labour in the dark. And he drew that all together by bringing his own identity, as he himself put it, “into the light”. A Muslim who grew up in the shadows of Islamophobia, he suffered an outrageously racist campaign against him, but resisted the pressure to play down his identity in order to fit in, to succeed. “No longer will I live in the shadows,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThose shadows are vast and, in this moment, encompass not only Mamdani, but huge swathes of people across all identities living under a regime of fear, economic struggle, deportations, suffocation of freedom of speech and an entire political establishment that has made bullying and cruelty its modus operandi. The coalition that Mamdani built, across all ethnicities, became about closing the yawning gap between people and power. In a revealing contrast to establishment Democrat politicians, when Mamdani was heckled last week over his position on Gaza, he did not say, as Kamala Harris did when she was heckled, “I’m speaking”. Mamdani smiled and said: “I want you to be able to afford this city too, my brother.”But there is something else about Mamdani’s approach that reveals how identity done right is generative. His is a politics that is forged and defined by being on the margins, but not as a single individual who wants to escape alone. Those who see their identity as a way to become part of an establishment that can then hold them up as exemplars of inclusive politics will always have limited appeal, and therefore limited success as changemakers. To see those margins, racial, economic and political, as spaces in which a majority can be mobilised, as spaces where people don’t want to hear about victimhood but justice, is to create coalitions and escape together. It is to reveal to the voting public that the problem is not particular racisms or prejudices, but an entire system that excludes all those who don’t have capital in all its forms.That message resonates with the college-educated white parents who are struggling with childcare costs, as well as the immigrant taxi driver struggling to pay rent. But above all, ironically, Mamdani exemplified the virtues of the American “melting pot”, a nation of immigrants at the sharp end of capitalism who together increasingly recognise all the ways in which the country is failing to live up to its ideals. All the ways in which Mamdani has been fought, not only by the right but by his own party, prove that American liberal politics has long lost its way in its service to capital and its preening approach to identity. What works in New York doesn’t necessarily map perfectly on to the rest of the US and beyond, but Mamdani’s win is a reminder that the people, whatever their identities, all want one thing – leaders who are of them, and for them.

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist 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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      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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      More than 1,000 flights canceled on second day of cuts tied to government shutdown

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      US airlines again canceled more than 1,000 flights on Saturday, the second day of the Federal Aviation Administration’s order to reduce air traffic because of the government shutdown.So far, the slowdown at many of the nation’s busiest airports hasn’t caused widespread disruptions. But it has deepened the impact felt by what is now the nation’s longest federal shutdown.“We all travel. We all have somewhere to be,” said Emmy Holguin, 36, who was flying out of Miami on Saturday to visit family in the Dominican Republic for the week. “I’m hoping that the government can take care of this.”Analysts warn that the upheaval will intensify and be felt far beyond air travel if the cancellations pick up and move closer to the Thanksgiving holiday.Already there are concerns about the impact on cities and businesses that rely on tourism and the possibility of shipping interruptions that could delay getting holiday items on store shelves.Here’s what to know about the flight reductions:Both of the first two days of the FAA’s slowdown have seen more than 1,000 flights canceled, according to FlightAware, a website that tracks flight disruptions.On Saturday – typically a slow travel day – the airport serving Charlotte, North Carolina, was by far the hardest hit, with 120 arriving and departing flights canceled by midday.Airports in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver and Orlando, Florida, were among the others with the most disruptions. Staffing shortages in Charlotte and Newark, New Jersey, slowed traffic too.Not all the cancellations were due to the FAA order, and those numbers represent just a small portion of the overall flights nationwide. But they are certain to rise in the coming days if the slowdown continues.The FAA said the reductions affecting all commercial airlines are starting at 4% of flights at 40 targeted airports and will be bumped up again on Tuesday before hitting 10% of flights on Friday.The US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, has warned that even more flight cuts might be needed if the government shutdown continues and more air traffic controllers are off the job.Air traffic controllers have gone without paychecks for nearly a month as the shutdown continues, leading many to call in sick and add to already existing staffing shortages.Most controllers are working mandatory overtime six days a week during the shutdown without pay, and some are taking second jobs to pay their bills, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) has said.Most travelers were relieved to find that airlines largely stayed on schedule on Friday, and those whose flights were called off were able to quickly rebook. So far, longer international flights haven’t been interrupted.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere’s still a lot of uncertainty about what flights will be canceled next.And not everyone has the means to pay for a hotel or deal with a last-minute disruption, said Heather Xu, 46, who was in Miami on Saturday after a cruise and flying home to Puerto Rico.“Travel is stressful enough. Then you put these disruptions in place and it really makes everything more challenging,” she said.Rental car companies reported a sharp increase in one-way reservations on Friday, and some people are simply canceling flights altogether.Other repercussions from the air traffic slowdown might also include higher prices in stores, as nearly half of all US air freight is shipped in the bellies of passenger aircraft.Major flight disruptions could bring higher shipping costs that get passed on to consumers, said Patrick Penfield, professor of supply chain practice at Syracuse University.More losses will ripple through the economy if the slowdown continues – from tourism to manufacturing, said Greg Raiff, CEO of Elevate Aviation Group.“This shutdown is going to impact everything from cargo aircraft to people getting to business meetings to tourists being able to travel,” he said. “It’s going to hit the hotel taxes and city taxes. There’s a cascading effect that results from this thing.’’ 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

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      Passengers start to feel bite of flight cuts amid US government shutdown

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      A US government order to make drastic cuts in commercial air traffic amid the government shutdown has taken effect, with major airports across the country experiencing a significant reduction in schedules and leaving travellers scrambling to adjust their plans.The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has said the move is necessary to maintain air traffic control safety during a federal government shutdown, now the longest recorded and with no sign of a resolution, in which air traffic controllers have gone without pay.While airlines have started to reduce domestic flights, global hubs such as JFK in New York and LAX in Los Angeles will be affected, meaning delays and sudden changes that could have a cascading effect on international air traffic. The FAA said the reductions would start at 4% and ramp up to 10% by 14 November. The reductions are set to be in effect between 6am and 10pm and impact all commercial airlines.“We are seeing signs of stress in the system, so we are proactively reducing the number of flights to make sure the American people continue to fly safely,” said Bryan Bedford, the FAA administrator.As of Friday morning, more than 800 US-linked flights had been cancelled, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware. The data showed about four in five cancelations globally were related to the US.Transportation secretary Sean Duffy warned on Friday that cancellations could rise to 15% or 20%. “If the shutdown doesn’t end relatively soon, the consequence is that more controllers don’t come to work,” he told Fox News, as US airspace became a potent proverbial weapon in the political standoff.Since the beginning of the shutdown, which began last month after a breakdown between Republicans and Democrats over spending plans, air traffic controllers have been working without pay, which has already caused delays.A potential agreement between the parties to reopen the government appeared to crumble again on Friday after Democrats in the Senate, emboldened by Tuesday’s favorable election results for them, rejected an emerging proposal that would have linked a stopgap funding bill known as a continuing resolution to three full-year appropriations bills.The US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, has announced 40 “high-traffic” airports across the country that would need to reduce flights. A 4% reduction in operations at those airports has taken effect but this will increase to 10% over the next week.Duffy has accused Democrats of being responsible for any “mass chaos” that ensues, even though the shutdown is the result of both Republicans and Democrats refusing to agree to a deal.The director of the National Economic Council​, Kevin Hassett, told Fox Business on Friday that he did not discount a broader impact on US economic activity from the air space restrictions.“Business travel is a really big, important part of air travel – and if business travel isn’t happening then those are deals that aren’t being cut and hotel rooms that aren’t being filled,” he said.“Travel and leisure is a place that’s really being heavily hit right now and if it continues to get hit, if the air travel thing goes south for another week or two, then you could say that they would have at least a near-term downturn,” Hassett added.View image in fullscreenThe cuts could represent as many as 1,800 flights and upwards of 268,000 seats combined, according to an estimate by the aviation analytics firm Cirium.With deep antagonism between the two political parties, Donald Trump’s government has beaten the previous record for the longest shutdown, which was set during his first term in 2018-19.United, Southwest and Delta airlines began cancelling flights on Thursday evening.Affected airports cover more than two dozen states including the busiest across the US – such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Denver, Dallas/Fort Worth, Orlando, Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco. Flight schedules will be reduced in some of the US’s biggest cities, including New York, Houston and Chicago.Scott Kirby, the United Airlines CEO, said in a statement that the airline “will continue to make rolling updates to our schedule as the government shutdown continues so we can give our customers several days’ advance notice and to minimise disruption”.Delta Air Lines said it would comply with the directive and “expects to operate the vast majority of our flights as scheduled”.The airspace disruption comes two weeks before the Thanksgiving holiday – typically the busiest travel period of the year – and raises the pressure on lawmakers to reach a deal to end the shutdown.Politically inspired flight chaos, with its potential to continue into or beyond the Thanksgiving holiday later this month, has exacerbated pre-existing structural issues in air travel scheduling, airspace constraints and safety considerations, including outdated air traffic control equipment and a long-term shortage of air traffic controllers.“The FAA is a slow-moving bureaucracy,” said Michael Taylor, a travel analyst at JD Power. “It has a daunting task keeping planes from colliding with each other, and they do a really good job with that, but it makes them ultra-conservative in terms of the technologies they could be using. It’s not like your living room where everything is digital. The FAA still relies on technology invented for the second world war.“Under-staffing is long-term problem and that’s not going to change with a political solution to the shutdown,” he adds. Coupled with underlying technological issues, politicians have learned that travel is an unique opportunity to apply pressure. “This is a leverage point that politicians can use to try to drive public opinion towards one party or the other. It’s a shame but that’s where we are today,” Taylor added.In a statement, American Airlines said most customers would be unaffected and long-haul international travel would remain as scheduled. Customers could change their flight or request a refund. “In the meantime, we continue to urge leaders in Washington to reach an immediate resolution to end the shutdown,” the airline said.The government shutdown has left shortages of up to 3,000 air traffic controllers, according to the administration, in addition to at least 11,000 more receiving zero wages despite being categorised as essential workers.“I’m not aware in my 35-year history in the aviation market where we’ve had a situation where we’re taking these kinds of measures,” Bedford has said. “We’re in new territory in terms of government shutdowns.” More

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      Leftist and centrist Democrats won on Tuesday. So what’s the party’s lesson? | Dustin Guastella

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      On Tuesday, Democrats won right, left and center.In purple Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, the staunchly anti-socialist former CIA official won handily over her Republican counterpart. Meanwhile, Mikie Sherrill, a poster child for centrist Democrats, won big in light-blue New Jersey. And in ultra-progressive New York, the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, predictably, took the mayoralty. With such varied success, what could be the common lesson?First, all of these candidates took the economy seriously. Mamdani has long been praised, even by moderates, for making his campaign all about affordability. But this was no less true for Sherrill and Spanberger, who moved in a decidedly populist direction with their campaigns. At times, centrist Sherrill even sounded like Bernie Sanders. That’s good.Second, all of these candidates successfully distanced themselves from unwise (and unpopular) progressive positions on crime and the fringier elements of the social justice brigade. As a result, they broadened their appeal. Also good. And suggestive that a commonsense populism can serve as the path back to power for Democrats.To be sure, enduring structural problems remain; for one thing, all of these candidates are rich. That’s not good. Sherrill was hammered on the campaign trail about the millions she made while in Congress. But Mamdani, too, is the son of elites; his mother is a world-famous millionaire moviemaker with homes on three continents. These aren’t great credentials for Democrats trying to demonstrate their everyman qualities to working-class voters who have turned their backs on the party.Still, Mamdani was the big star of the night. And for good reason. Not only was Mamdani the only outsider candidate, facing down long odds and big money; he alone offered the inspirational vision that Democrats so desperately need. He has a compelling theory of society, one that helps voters make sense of the madness that is our new Gilded Age, and a political program that flows naturally from that theory. As a result he offers a more persuasive political vision than the establishment’s poll-tested “popularism” – which amounts to asking voters what they already like and then insisting that Democrats conform to the survey results. Voters want to elect leaders, and leaders have to have a vision of the way society ought to look. Mamdani does. The Democrats, by and large, do not.The cruel political irony is, of course, that candidates such as Mamdani, who have the far-reaching vision to propose a new economic model, who have the bravery to challenge the political establishment and who have the charisma to inject some life into the political scene, tend to win in the kinds of places where they have the least leverage – uber-progressive, rich, global cities. This, in turn, threatens to limit their appeal, and their power, to the level of government least capable of winning the world they want.Municipal government – even in a city that is home to Wall Street – is simply not fit to fuel real economic change. It’s not that Mamdani has promised policies far beyond the scope of feasibility. His program was limited. And given that New York City is very rich, from a budget perspective, his policies are affordable. But class politics aren’t like accounting: it’s not whether the government can afford it, it’s whether the rich will allow it.Billionaires have long been threatening that a Mamdani election would send the rich packing. An exodus of well-to-do New Yorkers, who feel they are already overtaxed, would starve the budget and force a conservative turn at city hall. The flight of the rich isn’t particularly likely, but it is a danger. This is why so much of social policy must be decided at the national, and not the local, level. Just look at the exodus of California residents to low-tax red states such as Texas and Florida, which has been a boon for those states and headache for California. With the continued allure of remote work, it’s not something Mamdani can afford to ignore. Which is why he went out of his way to assure the elite that he won’t be soaking the rich so much as splashing them.This structural challenge is compounded by the nature of liberal urban politics and the perceptions of voters in a nationalized political environment. Of course, Mamdani made great efforts to broaden the left’s base. He steered his campaign away from wrongheaded activist slogans about defunding the police or abolishing prisons. He very intentionally projected a sense of respectability and responsibility – he was almost exclusively pictured in a suit and tie. And as a result he was able to win voters well beyond the narrow confines of New York’s “commie corridor” and reach deep into working-class outer-borough neighborhoods.Yet, as Woody Allen said in Annie Hall: “The rest of the country looks upon New York like we’re leftwing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers.” And despite his clear moderation on a whole host of liberal cultural crusades, Mamdani does advocate a soft touch on drugs, crime and sex work. Again, this is fine … for New York. But for their political program to succeed, populists like him need federal power and for that they need national appeal. Mamdani’s supporters need to confront a real danger. As the mayor-elect is catapulted to the unofficial position of leader of the American left, progressive populism risks being even more tightly associated with the views and values of Park Slope’s young professionals.National Democrats have a lot to learn from Mamdani. If they want to retake Congress, they need to learn what it is to have conviction and a vision that goes beyond tinkering with the tax code. At the same time, if populists are to have a hope of implementing their program, they must break out of the political confines of deep-blue cities.

      Dustin Guastella is the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia, and a research associate at the Center for Working-Class Politics More

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      Democrats should celebrate this week’s victories, but beware: Trump is already plotting his revenge | Jonathan Freedland

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      After the joy, the trepidation. Or at least the preparation. Democrats, along with many others around the world, cheered this week’s wins in a clutch of off-year elections that saw Donald Trump’s Republicans defeated from sea to shining sea. But now they need to brace themselves for the reaction. Because Donald Trump does not like losing. And he will do everything he can to ensure it does not happen again – by means fair and, more often, foul. Indeed, that effort is already under way.For now, the Democrats are still clinking glasses, enjoying a success that tastes all the sweeter for coming exactly a year after they lost everything – the House, the Senate and the White House – to a returning and triumphant Trump. The most dramatic win was Zohran Mamdani’s history-making victory in America’s most populous city, New York, but there was success too at the other end of the continent, as voters in California backed Democrats on an apparently technical measure that could prove hugely significant. In between, Democrats won the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia by healthy, double-digit margins.All this has displeased Trump, but it is the election of Mamdani in Trump’s home city that brought the swiftest response. The forces of Maga have wasted no time in making the man Trump calls a “100% communist lunatic” the face of the Democratic party. The New York Post went early, with a front page showing the new mayor clutching a hammer and sickle, next to the headline “The Red Apple”, with the R reversed to looks suspiciously Soviet. Fox Business also broke out the Bolshevik graphics for a segment on the global threat posed by socialism, featuring international testimony on the failures that ensue when profit is not paramount – including reports on Britain’s own “broken” National Health Service.The Republican goal is clear enough: to ensure that next year’s nationwide midterm elections – where control of the House of Representatives is on the line – can be fought against a Democratic party recast as Mamdani Marxists. Right now, Democrats are confident they can see off that danger, uniting behind a common message of “affordability”, even as they tailor it to different audiences in different places – much as they did this week, with the victors in Virginia and New Jersey pressing the same cost of living themes as Mamdani but in moderate, suburban colours. That approach could work next year, when the battle for the House amounts to 435 separate elections. Come the presidential election of 2028, however, when Democrats will have to forge a single, national message behind a single, national candidate who can appeal to both cities and suburbs, it will be harder.View image in fullscreenStill, that is the kind of challenge politicians are used to tackling. A darker menace looms, and not only in Trump’s heavy hints that he could cut off federal funding to New York. Recall that the president has already broken all precedent by sending US troops into Washington DC and Los Angeles and by attempting to do so in Chicago and Portland, Oregon, supposedly to crack down on rampant crime but, in fact, to assert control over politically disobedient centres of power. No wonder many New York observers suspect it is only a matter of time before Trump dispatches the National Guard to Brooklyn and the Bronx, now that Gotham is in the hands of a sworn foe. Trump always wanted to conquer New York City; now he might just do it.Such a move would be of a piece with the series of actions Trump seems set to take – or is already taking – to ensure the elections of November 2026 are not allowed to go the way they did this week. Put simply, next year’s contests matter too much for him to let that happen. As of now, Trump has total control of all three branches of the US government: the White House, obviously, but also the supreme court and both houses of Congress, thanks to pliant judges in the former and Republican majorities in the latter. The Senate is unlikely to shift, but given the currently tiny Republican majority in the lower chamber, and the usual midterm swing against an incumbent party, every conventional sign would point to a Democratic takeover of the House in 12 months. If that happens, the rubber stamp will be replaced by a genuine check on the president’s power, one that – especially worrying for him – would have the authority to investigate and hold to account both Trump and those who serve him.He is determined to avert that outcome. That’s why he leaned on Republicans in Texas, demanding they redraw congressional boundaries to eke out five more safe Republican seats. It was to offset that earlier Texas move that California Democrats asked voters this week for the power to do some redistricting of their own, to give their party up to an extra five Democratic seats in the House. Californians said yes, even those who fear this tit-for-tat gerrymandering represents a race to the bottom that can only weaken US democracy.But Trump is not done. He has pushed Republicans in North Carolina, Ohio, Missouri and Indiana to follow Texas’s lead, hoping to squeeze out enough extra seats so that his party keeps the House even if voters desert them next November. Others are bracing for a supreme court decision that could weaken a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, one that currently permits state legislatures to consider race when deciding congressional boundaries. That measure has allowed for the crafting of districts that ensure that voters from minorities see their favoured candidates elected. If the court outlaws that practice, Republican-controlled state legislatures could move to eliminate those districts altogether, depriving Democrats of around a dozen seats in the south.Those are only the most visible threats. In an essay in The Atlantic, David A Graham charts the myriad ways in which Trump and his allies are already working to subvert the midterm elections. Some of it is old-fashioned voter suppression – making the casting of a ballot harder by, say, reducing the availability of early and postal voting or demanding specific forms of ID – while some of it is intimidation.In the elections just gone, the Trump-controlled department of justice sent “monitors” to watch over polling places in Democratic-leaning areas. When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are snatching even US citizens off the streets, you can see how the presence of Trump-loyal “monitors” might have a chilling effect, persuading some voters that they’d be safer staying home. The presence of troops in battle fatigues on the streets, which a year from now will come to seem normal in several US cities, will have the same effect – only more so.All of this comes as Trump has gutted the agency charged with keeping elections secure, slashed funding for the protection of voting from cyber-attack and looked on as many diligent election officials, including traditional Republicans, have been driven out of office and replaced by Maga activists.Even if the 2026 elections go ahead unhindered, the danger does not end there. Graham warns that Trump could declare a state of emergency, seizing voting machines before a tally is made official. A defeated Republican House speaker could refuse to seat victorious Democrats (as, in fact, Speaker Mike Johnson is already doing). And, through it all, there would be loud voices on Fox News, on social media and perhaps even on some of the mainstream networks that have recently bent the knee to Trump, defending if not applauding his every move.This week’s results suggest that, if it’s a fair fight, Democrats can win a year from now, finally putting a brake on Trump’s march towards autocracy. But that’s a big if – and with each passing day, it’s only getting bigger.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist and host of the Politics Weekly America podcast

      Guardian newsroom: Year One of Trumpism: Is Britain Emulating the US? On Wednesday 21 January 2026, join Jonathan Freedland, Tania Branigan and Nick Lowles as they reflect on the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency – and to ask if Britain could be set on the same path. Book tickets here or at guardian.live More