Zohran Mamdani’s victory over Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary Tuesday offers plenty of lessons for the party writ large—the need for it to embrace younger, charismatic leaders; the base’s appetite for the kind of progressive populism the 33-year-old assembly member represents; the inability of establishment clout alone to transcend a fundamentally flawed candidacy.
But the biggest one, perhaps, is the simplest: that the public is hungry for politicians who actually offer them something. Or, as Mamdani put it in his victory speech: “We can demand what we deserve.”
Much attention has been paid, amid Mamdani’s rise and now after his stunning primary triumph, to his novelty—from his youth to the various firsts he’d represent if elected to his buzzy, new media-focused campaign style. But Mamdani also got back to basics: He identified the issues facing the people he hopes to lead and put forth a plan to make their lives better.
Democrats have too-often failed to do that over the last decade, as they scrambled to keep up with the latest Donald Trump outrage and to advance their latest focus-group vetted talking points. Not that they haven’t done things. From the state and local levels to the national, Democrats have fought for—and accomplished—substantial things for everyday Americans. But the party can be much more adept at staking out what it’s against than what it’s for, and too many Democrats simply seem to be trying to sell voters a shoddy status quo in new packaging. See Chuck Schumer’s limp rebranding of Trump’s “big, ugly bill,” the party’s embarrassing anthropological efforts to understand why men have drifted further into the arms of the GOP, the Democratic National Committee’s preoccupation with messaging—as if they lost two out of three elections to a cartoon villain, and much of the country to the party that supports him, because its graying leaders aren’t posting enough on social media.
Mamdani has demonstrated himself a remarkable campaigner, taking his message and his charisma wherever he could. But he did more than “make good videos,” as one of his challengers lamented: He ran on a platform centered around making life more affordable—a resonant message, it turns out, in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Of course, Mamdani benefited from the extraordinary flaws of his foil: Cuomo, who resigned as New York governor in scandal four years ago, premised his mayoral campaign as the comeback of a common sense moderate. But the thing he was trying to come back from was a series of sexual harassment allegations. Though his name was disgraced, it was basically the main selling point of his bid: He did little campaigning, instead relying on establishment endorsements and donor dollars (some of which came from figures, like investor Bill Ackman, who also support Trump). He was something of a carpet-bagger, only registering his home address in the city—in an apartment his daughter recently vacated—last September. And, maybe most damning, he has offered little in the way of an actual vision; as the writer Tom Scocca put it recently, Cuomo’s version of moderation has largely amounted to “reversals, hedging, gestures and process, caveats, generalities,” a “man with a famous name declaring that nothing can really be different.”
Would Mamdani have prevailed over a stronger moderate? Maybe not. But that can be a lesson for the party, too: Its more centrist bloc must still offer vision, must make an affirmative case to voters beyond the awfulness of Trump and his allies.
As for Mamdani’s vision, it now faces even bigger tests. Tuesday may have been “his night,” as Cuomo said after conceding. But between now and the general this fall, he’s going to have to sell the whole city on an agenda that is either ambitious, unrealistic, or radical, depending on your view—while incumbent Eric Adams, now running as an independent, Republican Eric Sliwa, and maybe even Cuomo (who hasn’t ruled out an independent run) sharpen their knives against him. And if he manages to win out on his big ideas, there’s still the question of whether he can deliver on them. The struggles of Brandon Johnson in Chicago and Karen Bass in Los Angeles to fulfill the bold progressive promises of their campaigns may be cautionary tales.
But Cuomo, too, is a cautionary tale, if nothing else: “Zohran ran a positive campaign talking about affordability,” as former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio put it on CNN. “Cuomo ran a very negative, fear-based campaign. That just made a huge difference.”
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