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      Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani’s supposedly radical policies as ‘normal’

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      After New York City’s race for mayor catapulted Zohran Mamdani from state assembly member into one of the world’s most prominent progressive voices, intense debate swirled over the ideas at the heart of his campaign.His critics and opponents painted pledges such as free bus service, universal childcare and rent freezes as unworkable, unrealistic and exorbitantly expensive.But some have hit back, highlighting the quirk of geography that underpins some of this view. “He promised things that Europeans take for granted, but Americans are told are impossible,” said the Dutch environmentalist and former government adviser Alexander Verbeek in the wake of Tuesday’s election.Verbeek backed this with a comment he had overheard in an Oslo cafe, in which Mamdani was described as an American politician who “finally” sounded normal.“Normal. That’s the word,” Verbeek wrote in his newsletter, The Planet. “Here, taking care of one another through public programs isn’t radical socialism. It’s Tuesday.”That view hit on the wide differences in how Mamdani’s promises are seen by many across the Atlantic. “Europeans recognize his vision about free public transit and universal childcare. We expect our governments to make these kinds of services accessible to all of us,” said Verbeek. “We pay higher taxes and get civilized societies in return. The debate here isn’t whether to have these programs, but how to improve them.”More than a decade ago, Tallinn, the Estonian capital, became the largest city in the world to introduce fare-free public transport. Financed by the city’s resident tax, the scheme faced heavy opposition before its rollout, with some describing it as a political stunt that the city couldn’t afford.Nearly a year later, researchers found that public transport use had increased by 14% and that the mobility of low-income residents had improved. Similar schemes have since sprung up across the continent, in France’s Montpellier and Dunkirk, for example, and expanded across countries in the case of Luxembourg and Malta.When Mamdani promised to launch one city-owned grocery story in each of New York’s five boroughs, with a view to expanding if the pilot was successful, it reminded Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, of the city-run grocery store she had visited in Istanbul in 2014.Back then, she had been surprised to see the heaving shelves, laden with products that ranged from bread to lentils to basic household appliances, much of it provided by small, little-known manufacturers. Access to these stores was limited to low-income households, with families receiving a preloaded monthly loyalty card to use at these shops, she said. “These city-run grocery stores in Istanbul were successful and replicated by other cities.”More than a decade on, the experience convinced her of the viability of Mamdani’s promise. “I was struck by the fact that New York elite and Republicans wanted to paint these proposals as sort of coming from the moon,” she said. “Things like non-profit stores or free buses, these are not outrageous ideas, nor are they socialist. They’ve been tried in different parts of the world.”For New Yorkers, precedents for city-run grocery stores can also be found closer to home. Chicago is mulling similar plans, while Atlanta and St Paul, Kansas have launched their own takes on municipal-run grocery stores.Mamdani’s campaign also promised to make childcare free for all children in the city, ages six weeks to five years. Days before the election, the state of New Mexico provided the city with a precedent-setting example, becoming the first US state to offer free childcare to all of its residents, in an effort to boost its economy and raise education and child welfare levels.Across the Atlantic, Portugal’s government began introducing free childcare in 2022, starting with children ages one and under with promises to gradually expand the program to children up to the age of three. While the program is open to all, places are limited and can be tough to access, with priority given to low-income and single-parent families.In Berlin, childcare has been free for children from their first birthday until they start school since 2018, though centres are allowed to levy additional charges for provisions such as lunches and extracurricular activities. Across the Nordic countries, free childcare is not universal, but is heavily subsidised by the state for most families.Mamdani’s platform also included a promise to provide new parents with a free baby basket that includes items such as diapers, baby wipes, nursing pads, swaddles and books. In Finland, the baby box has been a universal benefit since 1949 and has since been emulated by nearly 100 programs in 60 countries around the world.The sharp contrast in how Mamdani’s policies were seen within the US and abroad probably has much to do with the scant existence of a welfare state in the US, writer Mary Holland noted this week. “To anyone living in a western European state, the self-professed democratic socialist’s ideas probably sound entirely reasonable,” she wrote in Monocle. “But to many Americans, they’re wildly ambitious – radical, even.”Perhaps the most widely panned of Mamdani’s ideas is his vow to freeze rent for nearly 1 million rent-stabilised tenants in the city. The former US treasury secretary Larry Summers was among those who slammed the idea, writing on social media that rent control was the “second-best way to destroy a city, after bombing”.In 2020, Berlin passed a law that resulted in a five-year rent freeze, at June 2019 levels, for 90% of the flats in the city. While the law offered relief to about 1.5 million households who had seen rents rise by an estimated third in the six years prior, it was ruled as unconstitutional in 2021 after Germany’s highest court sided with landlords and property investment lobbyists who had argued it was inappropriate and illegal for the state to meddle with the private market.A 2022 paper, however, marked out an interesting impact of the short-lived measure, in that it found that while rent control was in place, residents were seemingly more receptive to new housing developments in their area. The finding suggests that if Mamdani is able to carry out the rent freezes as promised, it could help to pave the way for his promise to also triple the city’s production of affordable homes.Perhaps the strongest precedent, however, for rent freezes comes from New York’s own recent history. In the past 10 years, during Bill de Blasio’s tenure as mayor, members of the city’s rent guidelines board voted to freeze the rent four times, one former member of the New York City rent guidelines board, Leah Goodridge, noted recently in the Guardian. “This is why criticisms of Mamdani’s rent freeze ring hollow for me – it’s painted as out of touch, yet there’s already a precedent, backed by government reports and data.” More

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      How Mamdani built an ‘unstoppable force’ that won over New York

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      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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      in US Politics

      Zohran Mamdani is filling disillusioned Americans with hope and inspiration | Osita Nwanevu

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      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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      in US Politics

      Zohran Mamdani’s biggest threat is not Donald Trump, it’s the Democratic old guard | Emma Brockes

      by

      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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      Trump’s supreme court strategy is to redefine ‘tariffs’. Will the justices buy it?

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      Donald Trump faced arguably the biggest test so far of his contentious use of executive power at the US supreme court on Wednesday. The stakes could not be higher – “literally, LIFE OR DEATH” for the US, at least according to the president.Trump’s signature, globe-rattling economic policy, his sweeping tariffs regime, was in the dock – specifically, the legal mechanism his administration has used to enforce it. And the man dispatched to defend the White House put forward a somewhat puzzling argument.“These are regulatory tariffs,” D John Sauer, US solicitor general, assured the court. “They are not revenue-raising tariffs. The fact that they raise revenue is only incidental.”It was a curious, and more than a little confusing, explanation – tariffs on goods from overseas might raise revenue, but are not revenue-raising – designed to counter rulings by lower courts that set the stage for this test before the highest court in the land.A federal appeals court in Washington DC ruled in August that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law Trump invoked to impose many of his tariffs, did not grant “the power to tax” to the president.Congress is granted sole authority under the constitution to levy taxes. Trump bypassed Congress – lawfully, his aides insist – to drive through a policy estimated to equate to the largest tax hike since 1993.Thus, on Wednesday morning, the administration appeared to argue before the supreme court that these tariffs – taxes paid by myriad US companies on imported products – were not really taxes at all.Critics are not having it. “Anybody can look up in the dictionary,” Maria Cantwell, Democratic senator from Washington, told the Guardian. “Tariffs are an import tax, plain and simple. I would assume the administration understands that.”“I actually am surprised that it was so lacking,” Cantwell added, of the administration’s case.The court did not appear persuaded, either. “You want to say tariffs are not taxes,” said the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor. “But that’s exactly what they are.”Some conservatives on the bench also sounded skeptical. “The vehicle is the imposition of taxes on Americans, and that has always been a core power of Congress,” said the chief justice John Roberts.The administration’s argument that the fact tariffs raise money is “only incidental” might be more persuasive if the president spent less time boasting about the amount of money they raised. “My tariffs are bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars,” Trump declared in a speech hours after the hearing.The president has argued – in typically binary terms – that the fate of his flagship economic strategy is aligned with that of the nation. But there are many business owners in the US, grappling with the abrupt imposition of steep tariffs, who believe the fate of their companies has been jeopardized by this regime.While official statistics (at least, those published before the government shutdown) have shown persisting inflation and a stalling jobs market, Trump continues to erroneously claim his agenda is producing stellar results. “Our Economy is BOOMING, and Costs are coming way down,” he wrote on social media during Wednesday’s hearing.It is ultimately down to voters, as some did on Tuesday, to deliver their verdict on Trump’s agenda. For now, a handful of small firms, together with a dozen states, have joined forces to challenge the way in which he has rammed it through.“We think that this case is really about executive overreach,” said Stephen Woldenberg, senior vice-president of sales at Learning Resources, a toy company based near Chicago that sued the administration to invalidate Trump’s tariffs as exceeding his authority.At the heart of this case is really a “broader issue”, according to Woldenberg, of who sets taxes – and how – across the US. “We weren’t really willing to let politicians, and really a single politician, decide our fate,” he said.That fate is now in the hands of a court Trump has shaped. The justices have pledged to fast-track their decision. On Wednesday, at least, most sounded unpersuaded by the administration’s defense. More

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      US to cut airline traffic by 10% due to shutdown, Trump transport chief says

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      The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, and the FAA administrator, Bryan Bedford, said on Wednesday the federal government would be reducing airline traffic by 10% at 40 “high volume markets” beginning on Friday if the government shutdown does not end by then.The announcement did not specify which 40 airports would see the reduction and said that a complete list would be announced on Thursday with cuts likely at the nation’s 30 busiest airports, including those serving New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Dallas. The reduction will affect cargo, private and passenger traffic.Reuters reported that the cuts would begin at 4% on Friday, escalate to 5% Saturday and 6% at Sunday, before reaching 10% next week, and that international flights were to be exempted from the initial cuts. Aviaion analytics firm Cirium estimated that the cuts would reduce as many as 1,800 flights and over 268,000 airline seats.The comments come after Duffy warned earlier this week that the US may close portions of its airspace if the shutdown, now on its record-breaking 36th day, does not end.Duffy and Bedford repeatedly framed the decision as a pre-emptive, safety and data-driven measure. Bedford said that air traffic was currently operating safely, but that the FAA was concerned about widespread reports of fatigue from flight controllers.“As we slice the data more granularly, we are seeing pressures build in a way that we don’t feel, if we allow it to go unchecked, will allow us to continue to tell the public that we operate the safest airline system in the world” Bedford said.“Many of these employees, they’re the head of household,” Duffy said. “When they lose income they are confronted with real-world difficulties on how they pay their bills.”The 10% reductions are aimed at reducing the stress on air traffic controllers, who have been working throughout the shutdown without pay.Duffy said that the FAA was offering cash bonuses to retiring air traffic controllers to stay on staff, and that the FAA academy was increasing recruitment in efforts to ease the shortage.View image in fullscreenBedford said that the FAA would be meeting with airline representatives to discuss how to implement the traffic reduction. Bedford and Duffy said that there was potential for further action if the shutdown continued, and if it was deemed necessary for passenger safety. He did not offer specifics when asked about how to ensure that routes or airlines would not be disproportionately affected, or how smoothly the FAA expected the reduction to go, given that the agency estimates it handles more than 44,000 flights and 3 million passengers per day.The air traffic reduction is expected to exacerbate the flight delays and long security wait times that have plagued American airports since the shutdown began.“I’m not aware in my 35-year history in the aviation market where we’ve had a situation where we’re taking these kind of measures,” Bedford said. “We’re in new territory in terms of government shutdowns.”The shutdown, which began on 1 October, has since 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 working as essential workers over the last two weeks. The FAA is already short roughly 3,500 positions from targeted staffing levels.Duffy said that the controllers received a partial payment at the onset of the shutdown and “a big fat zero” for their checks two weeks ago, and could expect the same tomorrow.Troubles with the American air traffic control system did not begin with the shutdown – a 2023 study found that 20 of the nation’s 26 most critical airports had staffing levels below the 85% minimum level, and communications outages this spring at Newark’s Liberty Airport brought national scrutiny to the issue, as well as the collision of a military helicopter and passenger jet that killed 67 people outside of Washington DC’s Reagan National airport.Stocks of major US airlines dipped around 1% in extended trading. The announcement comes just weeks before Thanksgiving kicks off the holiday season, and some of the busiest travel of the year.On Wednesday morning, the shutdown entered its 36th day, becoming the longest in United States history. Duffy’s tweets announcing the 10% reduction in staffing came on the heels of a post he made with AI-generated art blaming congressional Democrats for the shutdown.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Trump news at a glance: supreme court examines president’s global tariffs

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      The conservative majority of United States supreme court justices has been widely criticized for granting Donald Trump an increasing amount of leeway to wield his presidential power. On Wednesday, the court questioned one avenue of the president’s authority: his ability to impose sweeping global tariffs.Justices heard oral arguments on the legality of the tariffs, with conservative justices expressing skepticism of the strength of the Trump administration’s position.“The vehicle is the imposition of taxes on Americans, and that has always been a core power of Congress,” said Chief Justice John Roberts.The arguments center on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, a 1977 law which in some circumstances grants the president authority to regulate or prohibit international transactions during a national emergency. Trump cited the law as he slapped steep duties on imports into the US.About 40 legal briefs have been filed in opposition to the tariffs, including from the US Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobby group in the US.US supreme court justices express skepticism over legality of Trump tariffsThe Trump administration faced tough questions at the US supreme court over the legality of its sweeping global tariff regime, as justices expressed skepticism over the law it used to slap steep duties on almost every US trading partner.Should the supreme court ultimately rule against Trump’s tariffs it will force the White House to go back to the drawing board and reconsider how to enforce an aggressive economic policy which has strained global trade ties.Read the full storyUS to cut airline traffic by 10% due to shutdown, Trump transport chief saysTransportation secretary Sean Duffy, said on Wednesday the federal government would be reducing airline traffic by 10% at 40 locations beginning on Friday if the record-breaking government shutdown does not end by then.The reductions are aimed at reducing the stress on air traffic controllers, who have been working throughout the shutdown without pay.Read the full storyTrump goes on posting frenzy a day after Democrats win key electionsDonald Trump appeared to be sharing everything on his mind all at once on Wednesday as he posted more than 30 Truth Social posts in less than two hours.Trump’s posts ranged in subject matter and included recommendations to his followers to buy books written by several of his supporters and allies. Other posts included videos of Trump appearing to read nearly verbatim from his own previously posted Truth Social text posts. They appeared to be artificially generated, but the Guardian could not independently confirm.Read the full storyDemocrats celebrate while Republicans stew over Mamdani’s winLeft-leaning Americans awoke to a rare recent moment of political celebration with Democratic victories in several elections across the country, led by the election of Zohran Mamdani as the next mayor of New York, while Republicans breathlessly hailed the end of the country. Many Republicans’ immediate reaction was to attribute Mamdani’s win to an electorate overrepresented by immigrants, snidely implying they were not “real” Americans.Read the full storyRepublicans file lawsuit challenging California’s redistricting measureThe suit, filed by David Tangipa, a Republican assembly member, 18 California voters and the state Republican party in the US district court for the central district of California, argues that the new maps are unconstitutional because they were drawn to increase the voting power of a particular racial group. It asks the court to block the new maps from taking effect, at least temporarily.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      A new sign was spotted adorning the White House this week, prompting backlash from lawmakers who have noted that Donald Trump is quite literally gilding the White House during a government shutdown.

      Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show is stepping up to help during the US federal government shutdown by opening a new center for food donations.

      Democrats set historic records on election night. Here are six of the firsts they accomplished.

      Trump voters for Mamdani and a new left coalition: political analyst Michael Lange discusses the New York City election’s trends and surprises.

      Trump ally and Fifa president Gianni Infantino announced the creation of a peace prize, which it plans to award at the draw for the World Cup on 5 December in Washington.

      A federal judge on Wednesday ordered prosecutors in the criminal case of the former FBI director James Comey to produce a trove of materials from the investigation, saying he was concerned that the justice department’s position had been to “indict first and investigate later”.

      Hopes of a composed and level-headed rightwing reaction to the Democrats’ across-the-board electoral success were unceremoniously dashed as leading Maga figures spewed unrestrained vitriol at their victorious opponents.

      Which of our warnings came true in the first year after Trump’s second election?From military-level force in cities to tens of thousands of federal workers fired by the Trump administration, effects have been felt at every level.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 4 November 2025. More

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      Armed US immigration agents drive off with toddler after arrest of father

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      Masked, heavily armed federal immigration agents arrested a US citizen in the parking lot of a Los Angeles Home Depot store, then entered his car and drove away with his toddler, who is also a US citizen, in the backseat.The child’s grandmother said the incident had left the whole family shaken. “I am devastated by what has happened to my son and demand an explanation,” she said at a press conference on Wednesday.The 32-year-old father was picked up during a major enforcement operation at the Home Depot in LA’s Cypress Park neighborhood on Tuesday morning. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), five undocumented immigrants were also arrested.Later that morning, Maria Avalos, the 32-year-old’s mother, got a call from an unidentified number. It was agents with the US Border Patrol, asking her to come pick up her one-year-old granddaughter. “We didn’t know what happened to her while she was in their care, and they wouldn’t give us information about when my son would be released or where he was,” Avalos said at a press conference on Wednesday.Avalos said she still has not been able to speak to her son to find out where he is being held. The incident was captured on video and first reported by the Los Angeles Times.Avalos said she had to wait for hours at an immigration office in downtown Los Angeles to take custody of her granddaughter, and was made to provide a birth certificate. “My granddaughter didn’t even know what was happening. She’s too small. She didn’t know what was happening to her father,” she said.The DHS has alleged that the 32-year-old “exited his vehicle wielding a hammer and threw rocks at law enforcement while he had a child in his car”. The agency did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about why agents drove away with the child rather than wait for another family member to come pick her up from the parking lot.The agency added: “He was arrested for assault and during his arrest a pistol was found in his car, that is reported stolen out of the state of New York. The individual has an active warrant for property damage.”Avalos did not comment on the agency’s accusations, and said that the family is searching for a lawyer to represent her son. She believes he was targeted because of the color of his skin, she said.It frightened her, she added, to later see videos from bystanders who had recorded her son’s arrest. In a video reviewed by the Guardian, bystanders are heard yelling in alarm as multiple heavily armed agents extort the father, and then enter his car and drive away. The agent in the passenger seat is holding a gun in his hands.At one moment, the father drops his weight to the ground, but masked agents pull him up and continue escorting him away from his daughter.“I was sad to see my son throw himself on the floor to stop them from taking his daughter,’ she said. “He was protecting his daughter.” She was also alarmed to see masked agents, who were heavily armed, drive away with her granddaughter. “This is something very, very frightening, because it’s not clear who these people are,” she said.Immigrants’ advocates have raised alarm about the incident, which is one of several cases where agents have arrested parents or guardians in front of their children. This summer, officials in Waltham, Massachusetts confirmed that a 13-year-old was abandoned on the street after an immigration raid. In southern California, a 19-year-old and a minor child were left behind after their father was arrested at a gas station.“Surely there is a better way of enforcing their policies in a way that does not separate families or place tender aged children like this child in questionable circumstances,” said Renee Garcia, the communications director at the legal aid nonprofit ImmDef. “I think that it’s absolutely traumatizing for a child to be placed in that situation.”“This is insane, what we are witnessing in this country,” said Jorge-Mario Cabrera, the communications director of Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (Chirla), an advocacy organization. “This should not be happening.”Avalos said she is hoping her son will be able to return home soon. “My son is a good, quiet, hard-working person. He works in the restaurant industry and just got his new job. And his family is everything to him,” she said.“He is the best dad. And his little girl follows him wherever he goes. She is safe now, though. She needs her father. And I need my son back.” More