Donald Trump has, somehow, only been president for six months, but he’s already done deep, unimaginable damage to America’s institutions, laws, and norms, leaving chaos and wreckage that will take years of hard work to repair. But there are some things in this country that are still sacred; some laws remain inviolable, such as the ironclad guarantee that if you are in a Bushwick nightclub after 10 p.m., people will start dancing ecstatically when the DJ finally plays Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own.”
The Swedish cult pop star’s anthem has long had a hold on America’s hipper citizens, and never fails to get the dance floor packed. But last night, watching young members of the Democratic Socialists of America sing and embrace each other at a victory party for Zohran Mamdani, who won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday, you could practically see the molecules in the air vibrate. There was an exhilaration in the air, a mix of defiance, relief, and joy. The gaggle of assembled democratic socialists and Zohran supporters hugged each other, screamed the “Oooh” part near the song’s end, thrilled and stunned at what they accomplished, some of them clearly still processing their disbelief. They saluted themselves, the future, and a once seemingly improbable candidate who ended the night as one of the brightest political stars in America. And they danced firmly and beautifully on the grave of Andrew Cuomo’s once seemingly unstoppable political career.
But before all that, I started my evening at the East Village bar d.b.a., which was hosting one of several election night viewing parties for members and volunteers of the DSA, an organization that will never be considered marginal again—at least in the nation’s largest city. New York had been experiencing a heat wave all day, and it was an oven inside; homemade fans were almost as plentiful as bicep tattoos. Two of the televisions were tuned to election results from Spectrum News; there was also a televised livestream from the independent media organization HellGate on one television and a muted live event from NXT wrestling on another. I overheard a young man next to me tell his friend, “I’m pushing 30, man. I’m 26, I want to see some changes.” At 9:41 p.m., the polls showed that Zohran was beating Cuomo by 43.2 percent to 35.5 percent. But it was still early. Everyone in the room knew that.
A man whose name I’ve been asked not to use told me the story of watching the ongoing suffering in Palestine with despair and feeling hopeless after Trump’s victory last November. He recounts that after Columbia student activist Mahmoud Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he went to a DSA office looking for something to hold onto, and it was there that he first encountered Mamdani, already hard at work. He was one of many similar volunteers—and the DSA was taking a deserved victory lap.
“I’m feeling really good about a project that I started working on, one way or another, in 2019,” Andy Simpson, a DSA spokesperson said. “The work that has come before builds something like this now. We were only able to do this with 40 or 50,000 volunteers, whatever the final number is,” he said, “because there were so many people who worked so hard in previous campaigns and who believed in our theory of change and who believed in our mission, and this is not something that ends here.”
As the polls tightened in the days leading up to election night, there had been an absolute Death Star of political action committee donations to Cuomo—a reported $25 million—and establishment politicians who had previously ignored Mamdani’s campaign made last-minute endorsements of Cuomo, handwaving away the numerous accusations of sexual harassment that had forced him to resign as governor of New York in 2021 and allegations that he misled the public about Covid-related nursing home deaths during the pandemic. Mamdani’s victory was also a victory over an establishment that has for years oscillated between dismissing the left and vilifying it as an existential threat.
“Leftists are cursed with object permanence, and a lot of other people forget. The natural move is to do a sort of Jedi mind trick,” Simpson said. “Power doesn’t want you to remember the things that it does to you.”
The polls were looking great with Mamdani ahead with 86 percent of the vote when I left Manhattan, but I was well aware that the results could take days to tally, so my night would likely be anticlimactic. New York’s ranked-choice voting rules meant that an official winner wouldn’t be declared until July 1 at the earliest. Most pundits who weren’t predicting a Cuomo victory anticipated an extremely tight race.
Instead, I walked into the Brooklyn club 9 Bob Note to deafening cheers. Andrew Cuomo had just conceded. It wasn’t even 11 p.m. Madami had done it, winning the first round 44 percent to 36 percent—not even close, really.
A very mustachioed fellow in a Zohran volunteer shirt and a face filled with pure glee appeared and offered me a much-needed fist bump. “Let’s fucking go,” he said. “This is just the beginning.”
Cuomo appeared on the news to offer a concession speech, which the room drowned out with boos and “We want Zohran” chants. Eventually, the DJ read the room and began blasting Chappell Roan’s “Hot to Go!”
The dancing went on for the next hour or so, people losing it to Lorde’s “Green Light” and the rest of those club classics. In between, results were pored over—a friend I had unexpectedly run into was practically levitating when she realized Cuomo had only won Staten Island by nine points. Across the gender spectrum, people were wearing “Hot Girls for Zohran” T-shirts, the summer’s hottest accessory.
Eventually, Mamdani addressed his supporters from his reportedly modest election night headquarters in Queens. He brought out Comptroller Brad Lander, whom the viewers in Bushwick cheered on like a hero for his cross-endorsement.
“Today, eight months after launching this campaign with the vision of a city that every New Yorker could afford, we have won,” Mamdani said, when he finally got down to business. “I will be the mayor for every New Yorker, whether you voted for me, for Governor Cuomo, or felt too disillusioned by a long, broken political system to vote at all. I will fight for a city that works for you, that is affordable for you, that is safe for you.”
Looking at the crowd, smiling, crying, and leaning on each other, I remembered how I felt at a different election night party in ’08, not too far from where I stood. I felt something shift in real time, in the room and in myself. I dropped whatever baggage I had and began to believe in possibilities again.
The club cleared out after Zohran’s speech. Brooklyn used to party all night—another issue Mayor Mamdani will have to address. As the crowd gathered on the street to figure out whether to hail a ride or find the afterparty, a young woman in a yellow polka-dot shirt hugged her friends. “We did it,” she exclaimed, tears in her eyes.
The post The Political Youth Movement That Propelled Zohran Mamdani to Victory appeared first on New Republic.
