Mamdani’s victory, above all, is a rebuke to the conventional strategies of the Democratic party, which in the year since Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election had been in a state of malaise and decline. Democratic congressional leadership seems to have replaced the work of politics with a sort of learned helplessness; alumni of the Biden administration are publishing dueling memoirs blaming everyone but themselves.
Meanwhile, consultants – long the devil on the Democratic party’s shoulder – have fallen under the spell of “popularism”, a mode of politics advanced by pollsters like David Schor and bloggers like Matt Yglesias, which posits that Democratic candidates must refine their platforms by the median of public opinion; a prescription that has almost always, in practice, meant shifting right, abandoning vulnerable constituencies, and treating the public as implacable belligerents to be coddled, rather than as intelligent adults to be persuaded.
It is not only pragmatism, but cynicism, and no small degree of fear, that has led to the widespread adaptation of this approach: the rapidly proliferating number of centrist and center-right thinktanks and consultancies looking to shape Democratic party strategy exist, in part, to channel the preferences of their own ultra-wealthy funders, and to signal what the billionaire class will accept. The result is a Democratic Party that appears listless and unprincipled, unwilling to fight because they do not believe in anything.
Mamdani’s electrifying campaign rejected this strategy completely. Rather than define himself by what he wasn’t, via the conventional path of left punching, shifting rightward, and abandoning in the general election stances that he had taken in the primary, Mamdani ran on a remarkably consistent message of the injustice of economic inequality and an insistence on the possibility that the city could become a place where working people could live with dignity.
When Cuomo and his backers launched racist attacks suggesting that Mamdani, an Ugandan-born South-Asian Muslim, would celebrate terrorism, he responded by cutting an ad in Arabic. When Republicans and other Cuomo backers tried pushing a red-baiting line promoting fear of Mamdani’s socialism, he evoked Vito Marcantonio, a socialist who represented Harlem in Congress for seven terms. “We need to look only to our past for proof of how socialism can shape our future,” he said. In a record turnout election, a majority of the people of New York City agreed with him.
The Democratic party leadership, it should be said, does not. Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader whose Bed-Stuy district overwhelmingly went for Mamdani, did not endorse the young socialist after he won the Democratic primary, giving only tepid, reluctant support in the days immediately before the election.
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