Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York’s mayoral election was long anticipated. But it is no less remarkable for that. A year ago, when the 34-year-old launched his selection campaign, he was an assemblyman with 1 per cent name recognition up against Andrew Cuomo, a donor-backed former governor and heir to one of the city’s most storied dynasties. This morning the self-described democratic socialist became New York’s first Muslim mayor and its youngest for more than a century.
It’s easy to dismiss Mamdani’s election as a local phenomenon. But the trends that underpinned it are those reshaping politics across the West. “Lessons for progressives the world over,” declared Wes Streeting this morning.
How did Mamdani carry 50 per cent of the vote – with a sour Cuomo trailing on 41.6 per cent – in the highest turnout election since 1969? Above all through a relentless focus on the cost of living. His wasn’t a platform built on vibes but on policy: a rent freeze, universal childcare, free buses and affordable, city-run food stores, funded through progressive taxation. By centring these issues Mamdani showed that he had learned from his party’s defeats a year ago.
“You have to speak in a language everyone can understand and see themselves in, and you also have to speak to the struggles that people are living through and the ones that dominate their day-to-day lives,” he told Ross Barkan in a recent NS interview. “Oftentimes [Democrats have] spoken about democracy, but if you cannot afford to live in the city you call a home, you don’t have all that time to be concerned about values. Fiorello La Guardia said that you cannot preach self-government and liberty to a starving people.”
Mamdani was a candidate made for the era of the attention economy, the same force that, in different ways, Nigel Farage, Zack Polanski and Ed Davey are harnessing (and that some argue Keir Starmer must). “I’m freezing… your rent,” he declared before diving into the waters off Coney Island, suit and tie included.
But Mamdani’s most telling video came a year ago when he interviewed Trump voters on the streets of Queen’s and the Bronx where working-class neighbourhoods swung heavily towards the president. As they regaled him with their cost-of-living woes, Mamdani promised “a little bit more of an affordable life”. It was this message that carried him to victory.
He now faces the burden of high expectations and of governing rather than campaigning. To succeed he will need to build alliances, something that Mamdani understands. “This has to be a party that actually allows for Americans to see themselves in it and not just be a mirror image of just a few people who are engaged in politics,” he said when asked about centrist Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill (who won comfortably in Virginia and New Jersey last night). “To me, what binds all of us together is who we are fighting to serve, and that is working people.”
For a Labour Party committed to the same aim there is cause for reflection. Rather than achieving positive definition, it has been burdened by negative associations – the government’s most well-known policy remains the winter fuel payment cuts. As she plans a tax-raising Budget but vows to address the cost of living, Rachel Reeves knows this has to change. If it doesn’t, the same insurgent forces that propelled Mamdani to victory will be turned against Labour.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: Anthony Bourdain reheated]
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