In 2018, I briefly worked on a state Senate campaign in south Brooklyn, and the field organizer was Zohran Mamdani. He was charismatic, indefatigable, and could talk to anybody, and as I watched him fire up a crowd of volunteers before they set out to canvass the district, I remember thinking, that guy should be running for office. This was no knock on the candidate we were both supporting, but Mamdani was in a different class. He sold the candidate’s policies better than the candidate did himself, and his enthusiasm was infectious.
He is now the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City—which is an ostensibly local government position but only in the sense that The New York Times is an ostensibly local newspaper. New York City is often a bellwether for how Democrats operate nationally, and the mayoralty routinely produces presidential candidates. It will be interesting to see how established Democrats—especially the self-identified centrists of a certain age who make up the core of Democratic leadership—choose to evaluate Mamdani’s performance if he wins the general election. But regardless of whether he does, they should look at how he won against a candidate whose profile is more akin to theirs, Andrew Cuomo.
Mamdani cut his teeth as a field organizer and has a natural gift for coalition building. This is a skill that national Democratic leadership often pays lip service to but does not seem to understand as anything beyond a shallow consolidation around an ideological center that may or may not exist. The spectre of a single hypothetical swing voter is enough to make some centrist elected officials throw entire populations of marginalized people under the bus. (Just ask any trans Democrat.)
Mamdani’s inclinations run in a different direction. His instincts are to bring people into the fold, not just by embracing uncontroversial economic issues like affordability that Republicans also claim to care about, but by maintaining a consistently progressive value structure that does not leave the most vulnerable behind, and refusing to bow to pressure from the center to eschew things like trans rights and the fate of Palestinians in Gaza. He has also refused to patronizingly tell people who were struggling financially that they were one tax credit or job training session away from not being poor—bootstrap bromides that completely fail to address the most serious problems low-income people have, but which are acceptable to Republicans when paired with work requirements and taxable-income restrictions.
In fact, this varietal of Democrat is so accustomed to producing messages that are only marginally different from what Republicans put out that when Andrew Cuomo spent his campaign fearmongering about crime rates, there was little pushback from the party, even though by some measures crime has been going down. In May, the city’s murder rate was the lowest it’s been since 1944. And taking a leaf from the GOP playbook generally, Cuomo claimed in mailers that Mamdani was running on defunding the police, which is only true in the sense that Mamdani wants to get rid of the NYPD’s astronomical overtime spending, which is the highest of any city agency. This is not exactly eliminating the police department.
But anything that looks like a culture-war issue or leftist overreach will be weaponized by centrists, often at the expense of marginalized populations. As a result, they alienate people who are affected by those issues, and so those who would naturally be part of any Democratic coalition are less motivated to participate (much less volunteer and engage at a high level). It is taken for granted that these voters will turn out on Election Day, even if their needs and preferences are ignored. After all, where else can they go? Well, the answer is, often enough, they go home and are never activated as voters in the first place.
Even on the issue of affordability, which affects nearly everyone, Mamdani spoke more directly to material needs than centrist Democrats typically do, and Democrats already have a disadvantage on that front. Republicans often coast on the idea that the GOP is better on economic issues than Democrats and were able to use inflation under Biden to their advantage in 2024. On top of that, when Democrats talk about economic issues, they often do it at such a level of wonkiness that voters assume their heads are in the clouds. Mamdani’s economic policies were concrete and easy to digest, especially for people who are really struggling. Tax credits are great, but if you’re out of work and need help right now, they’re not going to solve your problem. They don’t provide immediate relief. But free buses? Now, that might help.
He’s also willing to try daring things and institute programs that go beyond incremental negotiation for better deployment of existing services. Municipal grocery stores for low-income people might sound like a pie in the sky idea, but voters crave new solutions to a status quo that isn’t working. At the very least, they want Democrats to push the boundaries of what can be done. Fatalism around the grim state of the world is often presented as wisdom by Democratic veterans, but it’s just as often an unwillingness to try if it means potentially failing. Which to be clear, is cowardice.
And speaking of: If Democrats are in the minority and damaged by the actions and policies of Republicans they’ve insisted are existential threats to our democracy, voters want action that goes beyond the occasional sternly worded letter and on-camera statements about how recent events are “disappointing” or “troubling”—two words current Democratic leadership use way too often when they should be using “enraging” and “unacceptable,” and following it up with concrete action.
Here, Mamdani was not the only mayoral candidate who ran on an active leadership campaign. Brad Lander, who came in third behind Cuomo, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as he demanded that they produce a warrant to detain an immigrant he was escorting from a court appointment. He also teamed up with Mamdani, knowing full well it probably meant that he’d lose the election, because he felt strongly that Cuomo would be bad for New York City and that his own values were heavily aligned with Mamdani’s. Lander did something rare for politicians of all stripes—he put the public interest before his own—and refused to be passive.
The Mamdani-Lander bromance has been a rebuke to one of the Democratic Party’s biggest problems as of late: petty infighting and a knee-jerk refusal to transfer power to younger elected officials. Perhaps the best recent example of this was the campaign to prevent Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from heading the House Oversight Committee. Ocasio-Cortez had experience on the committee and would have been perfectly capable of leading it, but Democratic leadership, backed by Nancy Pelosi, fought against her nomination and backed 75-year-old Representative Gerry Connolly, who was dying of esophageal cancer.
Here, I’ll be direct: This was not troubling; it was enraging. Congress should not be a spoils system where seniority trumps every other consideration, but this is the mentality that many establishment Democrats have. They would rather see the country burn than relinquish one ounce of parliamentary authority to younger Democratic leaders, especially if they might disagree with them and make different choices without asking permission. It’s what led many of them to suggest Mamdani was too young and inexperienced to run for mayor, despite the fact that he has more public service under his belt than Michael Bloomberg did when he ran. For that matter, the great reformist Fiorello LaGuardia became the head of the Board of Aldermen in New York City at the age of 37.
Fortunately for New Yorkers, Lander and Mamdani both understood that hoarding power does not benefit their potential constituencies, or Democrats at large. Their cross-endorsement was unconventional, but it united constituencies that had overlapping interests against Cuomo, who was heavily backed by Republican money, including Trump supporters like Bill Ackman. But Cuomo’s $25 million in super PAC money (Mamdani had $1.2 million from allied super PACs) was not enough to beat a campaign that spoke directly to the electorate and got voters excited about the possibility of a young energetic mayor who was committed to a positive vision for the city, as opposed to portraying the city as a crime-ridden hellhole in need of more police officers—which was the dominant message from the Cuomo campaign.
Lastly, Mamdani understood how to use language better than his opponents. Democrats have long been stuck in a kind of rhetorical rut that leads them to be vague about what they want to do, lest they alienate a single swing voter or accidentally offend a suburban mom. They use dated language that would have sounded high-minded a few decades ago but now just sounds out of touch. Who even is “Main Street” anymore?
Instead of talking about policy issues the way you’d explain them over a drink at a bar, they opt for anodyne formal messaging using outdated political staples. (“Kitchen table issues,” for example. What isn’t a kitchen table issue for one voter might be for another.) And worse, they tightly control that messaging, punishing people who deviate from the official party hymnal. When a candidate accidentally says something authentic that isn’t highbrow—think Tim Walz calling Republicans doing extreme things “weird”—establishment Democrats twist themselves in knots to try to stop it, and only embrace it after it’s clear that it’s undeniably popular.
Here, Mamdani excelled, partly because he did not try to control every message from the top. He gave his team and volunteers latitude to deliver his message in the ways they deemed best for the people they were talking to, and that resulted in the flourishing of organic messaging that worked. People were creative and made their own campaign collateral, used TikTok as a medium, and thought of new ways to talk to their neighbors that went beyond traditional canvassing. It naturally produced innovation, and the spectacle of something different motivated people. It made them feel like they were true participants in the campaign and not just people whose jobs were dictated to them by the candidates and the party. They were not instructed to mouth platitudes they would never naturally utter in the real world.
All of these lessons are things that apply not just to democratic socialists running in New York City, which by the way will be the inevitable pushback against an argument to learn and change. Sorry to say to those who deal in clichés, but New York City is not some alien ecosystem. It’s simply a giant place with voters who are both demographically and ideologically diverse—for better and for worse. (The only time I’ve seen a Confederate flag outside my home state of Alabama was in the window of an apartment across the street in south Brooklyn.)
You can’t run a Zohran Mamdani in every district in America, but you can run a Zohran Mamdani–style campaign almost everywhere. These are the lessons centrist Democrats in purple areas could stand to learn. Both the electorate and the media environment are changing quickly, and Democrats need to adapt to a new way of doing business.
They also need to challenge some old assumptions. The only major polling firm that predicted that Mamdani would win was Public Policy Polling, which discarded the usual assumption that polling firms make that the people who will vote in the upcoming election are the same people who voted in the last one. Some firms only poll voters who’ve voted in the last three elections—“triple prime voters” in New York polling parlance—which leaves out newcomers, people newly energized, and younger voters. PPP took a different path, polling voters who indicated that they were planning to vote in this election, regardless of vote history.
There’s a lesson to be learned there, as well. The electorate isn’t static. There are always new votes to be had, but getting them requires a different approach. Zohran Mamdani gave them one. It’s going to be up to every Democratic candidate to think deeply on this matter and figure out where their new people are going to come from, and what it will take to get their support.
The post Mamdani Did All the Things the Establishment Hates. He Won Anyway. appeared first on New Republic.
