The Name is Mamdani

What Zohran's Win Means and What it Doesn't

With all of the votes tabulated, Zohran Mamdani is officially the victor in the race to become the Democratic Nominee for the Mayor of New York City. After only a few rounds of ranked-choice voting, Mamdani had over 50% of the vote, at 56% to the disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo 44%. This confirms what everyone already knew when the results first began being released last Tuesday: Mamadani had done the impossible. A Muslim immigrant who advocates for rent freezes, city-run grocery stores, free buses, and putting money into alternative responder programs to divert people from police is the front-runner for Mayor of the largest city in the country.

Before this race, Mamdani was a little-known New York state assemblyman who was polling at 1% when he first joined the race for Mayor. Mamdani overcame being outspent 3-to-1, constant Islamophobic attacks, red-scare fear-mongering about choosing to call himself a Democratic Socialist, and the mobilization of the pro-Israel lobby against him. And he did all this while capturing a near-religious fervor from his supporters that has made him an overnight political celebrity.

For any of my readers who have not followed this race at all, here is a video that captures the political aura this man got.

I no longer live in New York City, and probably will not for the rest of my life. But, Mamdani’s is a victory in the face of heightened repression everywhere. I took last week to bask in that light and be excited for a second. You know me, though, it's time to think about what comes next, and how Mamdani’s win tells us a lot about our current political moment.

What Does Zohran’s Win Mean

First, and probably most importantly, this primary serves as an effective referendum on the vision the Democratic party presented at the general election. And based on the results, Kamala Harris and the Democrats' vision fell flat in the face of a campaign that centered working people and affordability while holding principled positions about the genocide happening in Gaza at the hands of Israel. After Kamala Harris’ loss, there was a lot of grandstanding from progressive liberals and leftists, including me, about how you cannot boil down Harris’s loss to only misogynoir. An election reflection that overlooks a critique of the Democrats’ campaign, one that leaned heavily on the law-and-order and shock-and-awe themes of Bush’s 2000s run, does not paint a complete picture. Further, any election analysis that focuses on only the bigotry of American voters conveniently leaves the Democratic party with no blame for setting the stage for a second Trump presidency by running an out-of-touch campaign.

Although Cuomo, a white man and a sex pest, is literally not that similar to a candidate to Harris, we can draw parallels between their campaigns. Cuomo followed the same playbook as Harris, attempting to present himself as a law-and-order candidate who would fund the NYPD even more than Mayor Adams. He framed New York City as a city in crisis, similarly to how Harris leaned into Trump’s bigoted attacks on immigrants by arguing she would build the wall in the face of a migrant “crisis.” Lastly, similarly to Harris, he took every opportunity to signal that he was in support of the genocidal actions in Israel. Americans wholly rejected this vision in November, with Kamala Harris losing ground to Trump with young and non-white voters, the same voters who carried Zohran to victory over Cuomo just last week. For people who do not follow elections closely, it is a notable anomaly that the highest turnout is among young voters. When we compare the turnout in the 2024 election, the share of young voters among non-voters increased from 25% to 30% between 2020 and 2024, as the Biden presidency and Harris’ campaign left them feeling overlooked.

People tried to make this argument during the election cycle, and we were dismissed. We were told that moderating towards Trump was the way forward, but where did that get Democrats? Losing every single swing state, and losing the popular vote to Republicans for the first time in 20 years. The Democrats have a new path to victory in Zohran’s footsteps, but whether they choose to embrace it is entirely up to them. There is still a chance that the mainstream Democratic machine and Republicans will unite behind Eric Adams to tank Zohran's campaign, similar to what the Democrats did to India Walton. Walton is a socialist who won the Democratic Primary in Buffalo in 2021 but was defeated in the general election by Byron Brown, the person she had beaten in the primary. Brown ran as a write-in candidate, supported by the Democratic Party establishment and Republicans. Does a similar fate lie in wait for Zohran? There is already a list of prominent elected officials in New York who have refused to endorse him, including Governor Hochul and both of New York's sitting senators. I doubt it. Zohran will more than likely win in November, but whether the Democrats choose to export his vision to other mayoral races or the midterms remains to be seen. Knowing them, the perpetual losers that they are, probably not, but, as Mamdani shows, you do not really need the establishment anyway. The power is always with the people.

What Mamdani’s Win Does Not Mean

As much as I would like it to be the case, Mamdani is not going to establish the free socialist city-state of New York City. We can be excited, and I reject any analysis that frames this as a non-win because it is not enshrining socialism, communism, or anarchism at a structural level. But Zohran will be an elected official, and elected officials are not friends; they are targets and opponents. I think Mamdani has a similar view of the world, and probably agrees on most policy issues. Still, he is operating within a white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal system, and those levers will not allow him to change New York City as much as he would like.

For example, Zohran is proposing the creation of a Department of Community Safety that aims to mobilize New York City funds to establish a team of mental health workers to respond to crises, rather than relying on armed police officers. Multiple very brutal instances of police violence could have been prevented if a trained mental healthcare professional had responded to someone in crisis instead of a police officer. This is an abolitionist reform that removes responsibility from police officers, but it does not abolish the police force itself. Even if Mamadani wanted to, she could not defund the NYPD overnight without the state's machinations getting in the way. Trump has already threatened denaturalization and the arrest of Mamdani, and he is not even in office.

Electoralism will not even save us, but Mamdani’s win does mean something. The election of one Mayor in one city is not a revolution, but any attempts to minimise the hope in people after this win are misplaced pessimism. If Mamdani meant nothing, if his win would be meaningless, a Super PAC would not have spent $22 million trying to defeat Mamdani. We cannot elect ourselves into a socialist utopia. Still, we can put people in office who are more aligned with our goals and can work to reduce the brutal repression working Americans face every day. When we look at the numerous coups done in Latin America with the support of the United States, they were not done because countries like Chile and Guatemala would be dangerous to the powerful military in the world. They were done because of the danger of a good example. The establishment wanted to defeat Mamdani because they knew that whatever Mamdani could deliver would expand the imagination of all Americans. They will begin to ask why their cities cannot do more to improve affordability, public transit, and public safety. Mamdani’s victory is a starting point, but it is a good one.

Thank you for reading another one of my pieces. I hope you enjoyed it! Or at least got some new things to think about. Let us experience joy for a moment, but we have work to do. If you fed your brain, please share this with someone, or drop a like.

Much Love.