In the doldrums of last November, depressed and paralyzed by Donald Trump’s victory, I stumbled upon a video in my social media feed of an affable young man in a suit and tie, microphone in hand, interviewing voters in immigrant-heavy areas in Queens and the Bronx.
“Did you get a chance to vote on Tuesday?” he asks. And then, “Who did you vote for?”
Some didn’t vote at all. But many voted for Trump.
What struck me about the video was the young man’s open-ended curiosity. Through it all, he simply listened to the responses to his questions, his friendly face inquisitive.
Toward the end of the video he finally makes his pitch to a voter: “You know, we have a mayor’s race coming up next year, and if there was a candidate talking about freezing the rent, making buses free, making universal child care a reality — are those things that you’d support?”
“Absolutely,” the man replies.
New York Democrats did indeed embrace that message, vaulting that young man, Zohran Mamdani, who was as unknown to most New Yorkers as he was to me, to the top of the heap last month in the very crowded Democratic mayoral primary field. Like many people, I was resigned to an Andrew Cuomo romp, despite his odious past and his lazy campaign. Instead, we got an electrifying rout by a young, charismatic democratic socialist. When the final tally under ranked-choice voting was announced on Tuesday, Mamdani had won 56 percent of the vote, a 12 point margin on Cuomo, the heavy favorite.
In the dizzying days since that stunning upset, there has been a great deal of hand-wringing about its meaning. Unsurprisingly, Republicans have had a racist freakout, portraying Mamdani, a Muslim who was born in Uganda to Indian-origin parents, as a dangerous jihadist who will impose Shariah law and invite the slaughter of Jewish New Yorkers. Without a trace of irony, they have also pilloried him as a godless Communist who will destroy the financial capital of the United States by seizing the means of production. Trump mused about arresting him.
Many leading Democrats, meanwhile, have rushed to distance themselves from this phenom. Some have asserted a sanitized version of the Republican diatribe, claiming without evidence that Mamdani is a dangerous antisemite with radical plans that will damage New York City. Others, while acknowledging his well-run campaign, have congratulated him while stopping short of endorsing him in the general election, where he will face at least three opponents. Party elites seem united in the belief that the choices of Democratic primary voters in a deep-blue city have little to tell us about their electoral fortunes in the 2026 midterms elections and beyond.
This is a mistake. Mamdani’s win was a rebuke of the strategy, such as it is, that many leading Democrats have advocated in the face of Trump’s shock-and-awe attempt to remake the presidency and the country in his dark image. Haplessly veering between not “getting distracted” by Trump’s lawless actions and signaling their moderation in the face of Trumpian antics as their base marches in the streets, Democrats are missing the core political reality of our time.
The policies and personalities will be different, of course. But Mamdani’s approach in both that video and his campaign — not shaming anyone for supporting Trump but actually listening to what these voters were seeking, then championing those things — is a blueprint for Democrats everywhere, of all kinds of ideological and cultural stripes, if only they will set aside their assumptions and heed its lessons.
New York is, to be sure, so reliably blue that many people who vote Republican in national elections register as Democrats because the primary is where the real competition is for the local offices that most affect their lives.
But that fact belies a deeper truth about the city, past, present and future. When I first moved to New York 26 years ago, the Republican Rudy Giuliani was in his second term as mayor, and for all but eight of the succeeding years the mayor was either a Republican or a former Republican. The center-right held a pretty firm grip on the city’s top office for most of the past three decades, Bill de Blasio’s interregnum notwithstanding. In the 2024 presidential election, voters in New York City swung significantly to the right, a trend driven not by its white ethnic strongholds — many of them long supported Trump — but by areas dominated by newer immigrants from Latin America and East and South Asia.
“We have significant representations of every constituency that is present across the country,” John Mollenkopf, a professor at CUNY who focuses on urban politics and has studied New York City voting patterns for decades, told me. “We also represent what the U.S. will be like once native-born non-Hispanic whites are no longer a majority of the population or even the potentially eligible electorate.”
In Manhattan’s Chinatown, where I live, lots of my neighbors rolled the dice on a second Trump term. I was not surprised. Like many Americans descended from recent immigrants — my mother is Ethiopian — I knew that the simplistic assumptions that longer-tenured immigrants would be offended by harsh curbs on newer ones were dangerously mistaken. No one competes more directly with relatively new immigrants for housing, jobs and opportunity than those who arrived just before them. More broadly, immigrant voters expect — reasonably so! — that politicians will compete for their ballots.
But what is true of immigrants is true of all people. No one wants to be taken for granted, or have their politics or values assumed because of their inherited identities. It is political folly to assume that vast categories of modern Americans — young people, women, immigrants and their descendants, Black people — experience their lives as anything but complex and individual rather than conforming to a group program. This sounds obvious, but the past few decades of American politics demonstrates the ease with which both parties have made these assumptions.
That is what makes Mamdani’s campaign and victory so radical and exciting, whatever one thinks of his political program. Much has been made of his charisma and effectiveness as a speaker, his fluidity with the forms of modern communication — vertical short-form video above all. But I would argue that these formidable advantages are downstream from an even more important one: a rare talent for listening.
“There’s something catalytic about listening,” Patrick Gaspard, a Democratic adviser to mayors and presidents who cut his teeth as a political organizer in New York, told me. “That kind of humility and self-effacement in listening and receiving people’s concerns and their aspirations is what gave him the vocabulary that he needed to go and build a new narrative.”
Some analysts have tried to portray Mamdani’s victory as largely driven by educated white voters, a demographic that has shifted left in the past few presidential elections and helped power Kamala Harris’s near miss in 2024. But Mamdani actually won the city’s majority Hispanic areas by a greater share than he won majority white areas. In the neighborhoods surrounding the spots in Queens and the Bronx where Mamdani filmed the video that first captured my attention last November, Trump doubled his share of the electorate between 2020 and 2024. Mamdani won both areas in the first round of voting.
Cuomo, as expected, won wide support from Black voters, especially older ones, but Mamdani did better than anticipated, Mollenkopf told me. Some of the poorest and richest New Yorkers went for Cuomo, but the middle — blue- and white-collar workers — thronged to Mamdani. Young voters, a group that Democrats have long taken for granted but migrated toward Trump in 2024, were the bedrock of Mamdani’s victory.
It is hard to imagine any future Democratic national majority that does not capture the imagination of precisely the Americans who are slipping out of the party’s orbit. So why are Democratic leaders so reluctant to embrace the politician who has captured their votes, and against such long odds?
Back in 2021, when Eric Adams, New York’s scandal-tarred mayoral incumbent, eked out a very narrow victory in the Democratic primary in the eighth round of voting, he was hailed by national Democrats as a potential savior. A Black former police officer and former Republican, he was celebrated as a quirky but charismatic law-and-order figure, invited by Nancy Pelosi to drop pearls of wisdom at an exclusive gathering of party bigwigs.
Mamdani has received no such public invitations. During the campaign, groups aligned with Cuomo’s campaign relentlessly battered Mamdani with advertisements portraying him as a dangerous antisemite. His victory has been greeted by party leaders and fellow elected Democrats with wariness at best, and in some cases outright hostility over his ardent support for Palestine, conflating it with antisemitism.
“I don’t associate myself with what he has said about the Jewish people,” Eric Swalwell, a Democratic congressman from California, told CNN, without specifying what exactly Mamdani said. Kirsten Gillibrand, New York’s junior senator, went on a bizarre rant about Mamdani’s “past positions” on “global jihad” on a local radio program. She apologized to Mamdani on Monday after a vociferous backlash.
The fact that many Jewish New Yorkers supported him — ahead of the vote polling indicated he was in second place among Jewish voters — and has the support of some Jewish leaders, including his key progressive rival-turned-ally, Brad Lander, did not stop the onslaught.
“He doesn’t get to pick and choose which Jewish people he talks to,” Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said on MSNBC. “He needs to come to us.”
It is striking how absent so-called culture war issues and identity politics were in Mamdani’s campaign. To the extent they existed at all, it was by imposition, not choice. There seemed to be no presumption that candidates from other backgrounds had a special responsibility to keep Jewish New Yorkers safe, something Mamdani was asked about constantly, and pledged frequently and fulsomely to do. In turn, he has faced shocking anti-Muslim racism and death threats.
Democrats are divided on Israel and its conduct in Gaza, but polling over the past year suggests that the deepest divide may be between Democratic voters and their elected leaders: In poll after poll, a growing majority of the party’s voters express greater sympathy for Palestinians than Israelis and almost two-thirds say the government is too supportive of Israel.
Despite this shift, most Democratic leaders remain staunch supporters of Israel, and even those who criticize Israel tread carefully (and are criticized relentlessly by pro-Palestine activists for it). Mamdani took a different tack. When asked repeatedly by journalists to disavow the phrase “globalize the intifada,” Mamdani explained that while he himself did not use that language, he understood why others did, calling it in one interview an expression of “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.”
This answer drew wide condemnation across the political spectrum, and it seemed, for a time, that it might derail his campaign’s momentum. But Mamdani stood his ground, and surged to victory. This outcome clearly appalled many politicians and journalists. But to others, it was evidence of principled conviction on a great moral question of our time. Yes, Mamdani is listening. But he also has core beliefs on which he was unwilling to compromise.
“Most people, unfortunately, don’t go to the polls thinking about international affairs,” Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian American Democratic Georgia state legislator who volunteered on Mamdani’s campaign, told me. “But what they do get is that if you’re going to throw this group under the bus, you’re going to throw me under the bus too. It’s this gut feeling: Can I trust you to look out for me?”
If Mamdani is elected mayor in the general election in November, something that seems highly likely, he will need to deliver on at least some of his promises to transform New York into a city ordinary workers can afford. But winning comes before governing. And to win in this strange and fractious new era of American politics, there are two key questions that leaders everywhere will face from voters: Are you listening? Can I trust you to look out for me?
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Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion columnist.
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