Andrew Cuomo’s allies spent a fortune shouting that Zohran Mamdani is a socialist. Consequence? A Mamdani landslide within the Democratic major.
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Zohran Mamdani attends the 2025 New York Metropolis Pleasure March on June 29, 2025.
(Noam Galai / Getty Photographs)
Fifty-six p.c of New Yorkers supported a democratic socialist for the Democratic Celebration’s nomination to steer the nation’s largest metropolis, based on New York Metropolis’s ranked alternative voting tabulation. The outcomes, which had been launched Tuesday, gave Zohran Mamdani a powerful 56-44 victory over former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, confirming that Mamdani’s marketing campaign had upended not solely the calculus of municipal politics of New York Metropolis but in addition of a nationwide Democratic Celebration that’s struggling to establish its ideological path following its 2024 election setbacks.
Mamdani’s grassroots marketing campaign helped gas the very best turnout in a Democratic mayoral major since 1989. He secured a hanging 545,334 major votes in spherical three of the ranked alternative voting course of, and declared, “Democrats spoke in a transparent voice, delivering a mandate for an inexpensive metropolis, a politics of the long run, and a pacesetter unafraid to combat again in opposition to rising authoritarianism.” He additionally achieved a much-coveted objective of the left: increasing the voters by getting tens of 1000’s of latest voters, notably younger voters, to the polls.
Mamdani’s sweeping victory got here after a marketing campaign during which he and his opponents had been completely clear about the place the 33-year-old state legislator was coming from.
Two days earlier than New York Metropolis’s June 24 major, Cuomo made a final determined try to scare Democrats away from supporting the surging marketing campaign of a rival who had begun his bid with scant title recognition and single-digit ballot numbers. The previous governor used the “S” phrase, warning that the celebration was being “taken over by this far-left socialist mentality” and complaining that his ideological rivals wished to do issues like “make investments all the cash in training.”
Cuomo’s assault wasn’t simply an end-of-the-race Hail Mary. In the course of the lengthy course of the marketing campaign for the Democratic nod in New York Metropolis, the Cuomo camp and the free-spending political motion committees that backed it left zero doubt that, like Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, 1963 March on Washington organizers A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, and Pledge of Allegiance writer Francis Bellamy, Mamdani had embraced a socialist imaginative and prescient for reaching financial and social and racial justice in the US. Media shops—particularly The New York Publish—highlighted each “grim warning to New Yorkers about electing a socialist mayoral candidate.”
But, Mamdani refused to run scared. He defined on a pre-primary Bloomberg podcast that, “I’m a democratic socialist, sure. I began to name myself that after Bernie Sanders’ 2016 marketing campaign for president, once I lastly had a language that described how I noticed the world, and the best way that I consider the world needs to be — which is one the place each particular person has the dignity they should dwell an honest life.” Whereas Cuomo complained that Mamdani’s program was “only a fantasy,” Mamdani leaned into his formidable platform, providing a costed-out plan to tax the wealthy and multinational firms with a purpose to pay free of charge buses, inexpensive housing, extra entry to healthcare, common childcare and, sure, plenty of training.
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Mamdani put an exclamation mark on issues by welcoming the lively help of Democratic Socialists of America campaigners in New York, together with endorsements from the nation’s two most outstanding democratic socialists: Sanders, I-Vermont, and US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York.
By finish of the first marketing campaign, New Yorkers had gotten to know Mamdani and his agenda, they usually accepted. But, his critics nonetheless thought that attaching the socialist label would in some way disqualify the first-time mayoral candidate within the eyes of New York Metropolis voters. They had been sorely mistaken. The preliminary election outcomes weren’t even shut. Mamdani completed to this point forward of Cuomo—with 44 p.c to 36 p.c for the previous governor—that the previous governor conceded on election night time.
Headlines recognized Mamdani because the winner lengthy earlier than the conclusion of the ranked-choice-voting course of, which might solely enhance his numbers. The maps of the place and the way Mandani gained had been hanging. The assemblyman was carrying Brooklyn by a staggering 17 factors and sustaining snug leads in vote-rich Manhattan and Queens. Certainly, Mamdani gained so many various neighborhoods within the huge metropolis that, on election night time, he was in a position to declare, “We now have gained from Harlem to Bay Ridge. We now have gained from Jackson Heights to Port Richmond. We now have gained from Maspeth to Chinatown.”
That freaked out the editors of The Publish, which headlined its Wednesday morning post-primary paper, “NYC SOS: Who will save metropolis after radical socialist batters Cuomo in Dem mayoral major?” Fox Information and different conservative media shops took up the decision, referring to Mamdani’s proposals to make hire, transportation, and meals extra inexpensive as “type of bonkers.” President Trump labeled Mamdani “a 100% Communist Lunatic” in a post-primary Reality Social publish that students and fact-checkers instantly rated “false.” (He additionally questioned Mamdani’s citizenship and threatened to arrest him if Mamdani blocked New York from cooperating with ICE brokers.) Company-aligned Democrats resembling US Rep. Laura Gillen, D-New York, griped in regards to the alternative the voters had made. “I simply didn’t assume that New York would elect somebody who’s a self-proclaimed socialist to steer the town that’s the world epicenter of capitalism. So, I used to be very shocked.”
However she shouldn’t have been shocked. The difficulty was litigated within the major marketing campaign—in debates, tv appearances, TV adverts, and mailings. It was everywhere in the media. But, voters weren’t dissuaded. They selected a candidate who stated, “This whole race was in regards to the query of affordability, and in the end I’ve run a marketing campaign that speaks in regards to the instruments that metropolis authorities truly has to ship that affordability within the wealthiest metropolis and the wealthiest nation on this planet.”
Mamdani defines his democratic socialism in an American context, saying, “Finally, the definition for me of why I name myself a democratic socialist is discovered within the phrases of Dr. King many years in the past, when he stated: name it democracy or name it democratic socialism, there have to be a greater distribution of wealth for all of God’s kids on this nation. And that’s what I’m centered on: dignity and taking over earnings inequality. For too lengthy, politicians have pretended that we’re spectators to that disaster of affordability. We’re truly actors, and we’ve the selection to exacerbate it, like Mayor Adams has accomplished, or to reply to it and resolve it, like I’m doing.”
Mamdani will face scandal-plagued incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who’s looking for reelection on a third-party line, in November. Republican Curtis Sliwa is within the operating, and Cuomo has reportedly determined to maintain his title on the poll, although it’s unclear whether or not he’ll truly mount a severe marketing campaign.
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Within the fall race, there’ll undoubtedly be loads of discuss socialism. However New York is acquainted with that. It’s a metropolis that despatched a Socialist Celebration chief, labor lawyer Meyer London, to Congress within the 1910s and Nineteen Twenties, and that continues to elect AOC and lots of democratic socialist state legislators at the moment. It’s additionally a metropolis that repeatedly elected Fiorello La Guardia as its mayor within the Nineteen Thirties and Nineteen Forties. Earlier than he turned mayor, La Guardia was a US Home member who as soon as gained reelection to Congress on the Socialist Celebration ticket. As mayor, he steadily aligned with leftist political tasks such because the outdated American Labor Celebration.
La Guardia took warmth for these decisions in his time, simply as Mamdani does at the moment. But, La Guardia was elected mayor of New York Metropolis in 1933, beating an incumbent Democrat on the top of the Nice Melancholy. In his 1937 reelection bid, he once more defeated the Democratic machine. And he did so as soon as extra in 1941. In the course of the interval of his mayoralty, considered one of La Guardia’s city allies was Milwaukee Mayor Dan Hoan. One in all three Socialists who led Milwaukee for a lot of the interval from 1910 to 1960, Hoan was credited with making the town a mannequin of sound and equitable governance. Certainly, throughout his 24-year tenure, Time journal reported, “Milwaukee turned one of many best-run cities within the US.”
Hoan did so in a lot the best way Mamdani proposes to do now: as a defender of immigrants, a champion of racial justice, a supporter of labor unions and an advocate for daring applications to enhance the circumstances of the working class. He even arrange municipally operated grocery markets to decrease meals costs, as Mandani proposes to do in New York Metropolis. Like Mamdani at the moment, Hoan was attacked for his ideology. “He counts the town’s bankers, utilities males and massive actual property homeowners his sworn enemies,” famous Time in a 1936 profile of Milwaukee’s Socialist mayor. “The Press, aside from a small Socialist sheet, is solidly in opposition to him. Republicans and Democrats have just about misplaced their separate identities in uniting to oppose him. But Daniel Webster Hoan stays one of many nation’s ablest public servants, and beneath him Milwaukee has change into maybe the best-governed metropolis within the U.S.”
John Nichols
John Nichols is a nationwide affairs correspondent for The Nation. He has written, cowritten, or edited over a dozen books on subjects starting from histories of American socialism and the Democratic Celebration to analyses of US and world media programs. His newest, cowritten with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Instances bestseller It is OK to Be Indignant About Capitalism.
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