For once, money has not prevailed in American politics. The social democrat Zohran Mamdani is set to become the Democratic candidate for New York mayor after beating the former governor Andrew Cuomo by over seven points in the primary. It is the most pivotal progressive victory since Trump returned to power, one that could steer the party to the left and catalyse its populist instincts.
This was a match-up between stale and new, young and old, establishment and outsider. After the current Democratic mayor Eric Adams flirted with Trump and was outed as corrupt, he gave up the nomination and is running as an independent. Cuomo, the aged insider who previously resigned as governor over alleged sexual harassment, became the frontrunner in a race considered a foregone conclusion from the start.
But Cuomo campaigned in the old style: rallies, not podcasts; wealthy fundraising dinners, not small donors. His rhetoric was full of scaremongering and had no fresh vision. Staid, tired and establishment. He rolled out alleged sexual predator Bill Clinton as if an endorsement from the master triangulator would sway the Mamdani faithful. He treated the campaign with an aloof disdain. Millions of dollars poured in from the corporate elite and billionaires such as Bill Ackman and Michael Bloomberg, all fretful at Mamdani’s surge. But the cash fell flat. We live in a populist age; American politics today demands exuberance.
Enter Mamdani, a 33-year-old social democrat, critic of Israel and supporter of city-owned grocery stores. He was an obscure state assemblyman before he entered the race. He went from polling around 0 per cent to winning 43.5 per cent of the vote. He bounced from podcast to podcast, promising a rent freeze, free buses and taxes on New York’s plutocrats. His social media videos were colourful, savvy and viral.
Mamdani’s stand against Israel’s destruction of Gaza chimed with an electorate watching Columbia University protesters being taken off the street by men in masks. At the same time, he campaigned with a jollity which precluded the unyielding, righteous tone in which such issues are so often couched. The gerontocracy atop the party establishment will look at this with anxious alarm. But the message they should take away from it is threefold: Victory is possible with a candidate who is populist on economics, who is young and not a dynastic scion like Cuomo, and who is willing to passionately criticise America’s unequivocal support for Israel.
This victory has given voice to the fervent pro-Palestinian sentiment boiling beneath the party elite’s vacant demeanour. His success suggests support for Palestine has replaced woke progressivism as the left’s chief impetus. He campaigned less on the rote identity politics which has long preoccupied Democratic progressives (though he’s been more than happy to preach that line in the past). Instead, he offered voters tangible policy, not merely the opportunity to elect New York’s first Muslim mayor, or symbolic opposition to something as nebulous as systemic racism. And he’s proof that Trump’s monopoly on political charisma is ephemeral. Anti-institutional politics is no longer the preserve of the Maga right.
Mamdani is evidence that progressive politicians are no longer dead on arrival. But a note of caution: New York is not America. Presidential elections are not won in a wealthy, hyper-liberal metropolis on the East Coast (though remember New York is not a monolith: it swung towards Trump last year). Refusing to condemn a “global intifada”, as Mamdani did last week, points to a radicalism which might not thrive outside his New York coalition. But Mamdani is running for mayor, not the Oval Office, and his victory should only be seen as a lesson, not a warning.
He still needs to win the main election in November and then govern without the municipal incompetence which Republicans so often attack local Democrats for. But the appetite for a radical politics which has long been lurking among the young left has now broken onto the national stage. Mamdani has become a leader of national prominence. He has shown that a disciplined left-populism, founded on universalism not sectional politics, could vitalise the campaign to unravel Maga’s deathly grip on American power. A new progressive tribune has emerged.
[See also: Keir Starmer has a problem: the left is organising]
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