Ten Thoughts on Zohran Mamdani's Victory

He's shown how strong he can run. What's to come won't be a walk

1. The most obvious and important takeaway from the extraordinary upset in New York’s mayoral primary is that the Democratic establishment that backed Andrew Cuomo deserved to lose, and now deserves to be further humiliated. Cuomo was a terrible candidate who ran a terrible campaign. He had no rationale for running other than his personal vanity, and no asset in running but his fame. Numerous establishment figures who had called for Cuomo to resign as governor beclowned themselves by turning around to endorse him for mayor, thereby torching their future credibility. If Democrats were worried about Zohran Mamdani’s delusional economics or his manifest lack of experience—and they were, and should have been—there were numerous other candidates in the race whom they could have supported instead. Instead they allowed themselves to be bullied into backing a widely-disliked figure from the past and repudiating every offered version of the future.

2. The second obvious and important takeaway is that there’s nothing like sheer political talent, and Mamdani clearly has it. So does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Talent isn’t limited to self-identified Democratic Socialists, of course. Pete Buttigieg had it, or he wouldn’t have gotten so far in 2020 despite being manifestly unqualified for the presidency. Barack Obama obviously had it, or he wouldn’t have defeated the Clinton machine despite a thin record and despite being named Barack Hussein Obama. Rebecca Kirszner Katz connects this point to the previous one in exactly the right way, because she notes that the current Democratic Party leadership is no more comfortable with emerging talents with a more moderate profile than they are with emerging talents who are more left-wing; they have come perilously close, in fact, to being hostile to talent as such. A party leadership that can’t figure out how to promote its greatest talents to positions of actual power is a party leadership that is going to strangle the party to death, or be overthrown.

3. We’ve seen the latter movie before. In 2015, Donald Trump confronted a Republican Party leadership that was completely out of touch with and discredited in the eyes of its own voters. Ten years later, he completely dominates the party he conquered. That doesn’t mean he has effected a policy revolution—the monstrosity of a bill currently making its way through the Senate looks much more like Paul Ryan’s legacy than anything distinctly Trumpian, and “bomb, bomb Iran” was Senator John McCain’s refrain in his 2008 campaign before it was a Truth Social meme. But there is no question that Trump is deciding who within the party he now controls has power and who doesn’t. It’s important to recognize that that prospect, far more than earnest policy differences, is the fundamental reason why members of the Democratic establishment get so nervous about anybody who is actually good at politics: because people like that are potentially capable of deciding their fate.

4. I don’t know that November will be a cakewalk for Mamdani. A great deal depends on what his opponents do. Will Cuomo run again after such a humiliating drubbing? (I hope not.) Will someone else run on the otherwise vacant Fight and Deliver Party line? (But who?) Mamdani benefitted in the primary from a field that mostly wasn’t prepared to really criticize him—Brad Lander, his most potent potential competitor, who was aligned with him on values but was far more accomplished and experienced, cross-endorsed him enthusiastically and focused his fire on Cuomo. In the general election, though, however many candidates run they will all be aiming to beat him. Moreover, the prospect of a Mamdani victory could focus the minds of those who might otherwise be debating between the various alternatives on offer, and cause the field to consolidate. And Mamdani has specific weaknesses beyond his wild-eyed platform and his inexperience. He didn’t break through with Black voters during the primary, for example; that could be an opening for Adams, if Cuomo decides not to run in the general. Just based on Adams’s baggage and the strong Democratic tilt of the city, Mamdani has to be favored, maybe by as much as 2-to-1. But that’s far from a certainty. A lot could happen between now and then—and most of what could happen is more likely than not to be bad for Mamdani.

5. Notwithstanding the last point, Mamdani is now the clear favorite to be the next mayor. What kind of mayor would he wind up being? The optimistic case for a Mamdani administration is that it will actually be the Brad Lander administration: that Mamdani will hire Lander basically to be his Dick Cheney, the guy who runs things behind the scenes while Mamdani focuses on the theatrical side of politics. That’s certainly something I can imagine happening. It would mean a mayoralty that was very left-wing but not entirely out of touch with economic reality, and potentially capable of pursuing at least some important reforms. But remaining within the bounds of economic reality means delivering a policy mix that is rather different from what Mamdani ran on. What happens to Mamdani’s political magic once he has to confront the realities that his very effective politics are designed to obscure, and back off or modify some of his more destructive proposals? Will his own voters trust him if he tells them they won’t actually get the unicorn he promised? Will they turn on him? Or will they blame someone else for their dissatisfaction, whether Governor Hochul or other members of Mamdani’s own administration (such as Lander), and rally to the cry, “let Mamdani be Mamdani?”

6. Of course, we can’t be sure that we will get the Lander mayoralty with Mamdani’s face at the podium. We might get a mayor who does a lot of walking around smiling and shaking hands and making speeches but without the backup of someone actually trying to get anything done. Or we might get the DSA’s version of everything bagel policymaking, which is to say: a policy apparatus incapable of delivering anything at all. Or Mamdani might try to deliver on the most extravagant promises of the campaign regardless of the consequences. Mamdani can’t do everything he says he wants to do on his own—he can’t raise income or corporate taxes without Albany’s approval, for example, and without more revenue or other spending cuts he can’t deliver free buses, or free childcare, or government grocery stores, or his new mental health agency. But he could stack the rent guidelines board with members who will vote for his freeze, and more generally he could be very aggressive with the powers he does have both to achieve his policy goals and to play a game of fiscal chicken with Albany, a game that could go very badly for the city indeed. Mamdani could be a failure without doing much damage, but he could also do a lot of damage. I can’t help but think about the way that Trump was a lot more appealing to voters as an idea when he was critiquing the Biden Administration’s mediocre record and reminding them how good the economy was in his first term than when he starting hiking tariffs, deporting people to prison in El Salvador, and trying to gut Medicaid.

7. Crime and disorder were not important parts of Mamdani’s campaign—he largely ignored his 2020-era extreme-left views on policing rather than running on them or explicitly repudiating them (though he did run on creating a new agency to help deal with the mentally-ill, which he promised would relieve some of the burden on the police of dealing with violence perpetrated by this population). They will be central to Adams’s reelection effort, but with crime down dramatically, law and order simply may not be as salient as affordability. Nonetheless, if Mamdani becomes mayor, I can assure you that the NYPD will test him early, as they did Mayor Bill de Blasio early in his first term (and as they would test any other progressive, like Lander). I honestly have no idea how he will respond when that happens, whether he will mostly fold, as de Blasio did, or whether he will try to assert his authority, and potentially immolate his mayoralty before it’s even gotten off the ground. Progressives may not like this reality (frankly, I don’t like it), but it is a reality, and one that Mamdani will have to reckon with as surely as he will have to reckon with the economic costs of his most extravagant proposals.

8. It is fascinating to me the degree to which Mamdani’s support came from the mass upper-middle-class. He won precincts with an average household income over $100,000 per year by a wider margin than he won those with an average income between $50,000 and $100,000, and he lost precincts with an average household income below $50,000 per year to Cuomo. That’s partly an artifact of Cuomo’s strength in the Black community, and it’s partly a reflection of the general trend in left-wing parties worldwide to become more upscale and less working-class focused. (It may also say something about which voters do care about a law-and-order message most of all, even when crime is down.) But Mamdani ran a relentlessly materialist campaign, focused on the cost of living, the kind of thing that was supposed to reverse that trend. Government groceries and free buses are not policies aimed at the material needs of voters in Park Slope. Yet on the evidence, the people who went for Mamdani in overwhelming numbers are the young who see themselves being priced out of the places they want to live as opposed to the poor who live where they have to.

9. It’s also been interesting to compare the 2025 primary map with the 2021 primary map, which was a more complicated three-way (to some degree four-way) race. Mamdani, as one might expect, won a lot of neighborhoods where Maya Wiley, the most left-wing major candidate in that race, did well. He also picked up some areas, particularly in Manhattan, where moderate reformer Katheryn Garcia did well, while losing some of the middle-class outer-borough areas where she did well to Cuomo. But he also won some Adams territory. I particularly note that he won South Asian neighborhoods like Jackson Heights and Ozone Park. These are areas that, in past elections, would have been quite receptive to a law-and-order and small-business-oriented message. They are neighborhoods that shifted particularly strongly towards Donald Trump in 2024, even as they were won by Kamala Harris. I have to assume that Mamdani’s ethnicity was an important factor in his breakthrough in these neighborhoods—maybe a decisive one.

10. Which brings me to my last comment on Mamdani’s election. I know a lot of people who are quite scared of Mamdani specifically because of his views on Israel and Palestine. I also know other people who are ecstatic about him precisely because of those same views. From my own perspective, Mamdani was and is running for mayor of New York City, and the mayor of New York City does not have a foreign policy portfolio. It is true that there’s a long history of New York’s mayor pretending to have a foreign policy portfolio, because that’s one way of managing the city’s crazy ethnic quilt. Since October 7th, 2023, though, I’m not sure this approach is viable any longer. New York is roughly 12% Jewish and roughly 9% Muslim; add the Arab Christian population of New York to the latter number and you probably get close to 10%. Jewish voters very reasonably are not reassured by being told that “globalize the intifada” is not a call to violence, nor that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was an example of an “intifada,” because the latter was violent, and if Gaza is analogous to the Warsaw Ghetto then calls to globalize its resistance sound an awful lot like calls for violence against institutions outside of Israel that support Israel, which in turn would mean violence against a wide array of mainstream Jewish institutions—including the synagogue I attend. But by the same token, Arab and Muslim voters very reasonably are not reassured by being told that standing against antisemitism requires pussyfooting around both the horrific toll of the war in Gaza and the declared intent by ministers in the Israeli government to ethnically “cleanse” some or all of the territory of its inhabitants, nor that it requires endorsing the ideological foundations of the Israeli state, a country they neither chose to live in nor have any reason to support. I do not think Mamdani has done a good job of meeting both communities’ reasonable expectations, but doing so, and thereby performing the actual job of a mayor, is a trickier proposition than a lot of people, both his supporters and his critics, seem to recognize.