Usually, there isn’t much to learn from a single idiosyncratic primary election.
In the case of the recent New York mayoral contest, most candidates will not be able to replicate Zohran Mamdani’s viral campaign, and not many candidates will have Andrew Cuomo’s heavy baggage.
Such a superficial analysis of the candidates might be enough to tell the tale for many primaries. But not this one. The New York Democratic mayoral primary was about much more than the strengths and weaknesses of the two candidates, and as a consequence there’s a lot more to learn.
Just consider how many political, demographic, economic and technological changes over the last decade helped make Mr. Mamdani’s victory possible. There was the Bernie Sanders campaign and the rise of a new democratic socialist left, along with a growing number of young millennial and Gen Z voters. There was the founding of TikTok and the rise of vertical video, #MeToo, Israel’s war in Gaza, the rising cost of housing and even halalflation.
There’s room to debate the relative contributions of these and other factors to Mr. Mamdani’s victory. What can’t be disputed is that these developments helped him enormously, but even on the day of the election it was not obvious that these changes would be enough to put him over the top.
Of all these changes, the most obvious one is that the Democratic electorate has simply moved farther to the left. Over the last few years, this hasn’t always been obvious. To many, the last presidential election seemed to mark a new rightward turn in the culture, including among the young voters who had powered the ascent of progressives. Looking even further back, progressives mostly seemed to stall after Mr. Sanders’s breakthrough in 2016, including in New York City.
In fact, it was the New York State primary that halted Mr. Sanders’s momentum nine years ago, with the city backing Hillary Clinton by nearly a two-to-one margin. While progressives have had many successes since then, like the elections of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the House and a number of democratic socialists to the state Legislature, progressives have also endured a lot of high-profile defeats. Over and over, whether nationally or in the city, nonwhite and moderate white voters sided overwhelmingly with the establishment-backed candidate. Cynthia Nixon, Zephyr Teachout and Maya Wiley all lost. Mr. Sanders didn’t even make it to the New York primary in 2020.
Nonetheless, there were signs that the Democratic electorate was still moving to the left. Today, liberal Democrats outnumber moderate and conservative ones by 12 percentage points, according to Gallup, 55 percent to 43 percent. In 2016 and 2020, liberals were essentially even with moderate and conservative Democrats.
Similarly, Democrats have moved to the left on Israel. Gallup found that 59 percent of Democrats now sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis (21 percent). This is a huge reversal from 2013, when Democrats sympathized with Israelis over Palestinians, 55-19.
With Mr. Mamdani’s victory, progressives finally have another visible breakthrough. While it might be tempting to attribute this to his personal strengths and Mr. Cuomo’s weakness, much of the change can simply be attributed to today’s much more progressive electorate.
There was no exit poll in the recent primary, but a look at the 2025 turnout among respondents to a New York Times/Siena College poll from October 2024 tells the story well enough. Overall, 62 percent of primary voters were liberal, based on Times/Siena poll respondents matched to post-election turnout records, compared with 36 percent who were moderate or conservative. In comparison, the final Times/Siena poll of the Democratic primary back in 2013 found that moderate and conservative Democrats outnumbered liberals by 28 points, 59 percent to 31 percent, among likely voters.
This change is partly a generational one. Only a sliver — less than 10 percent — of the 18-to-29-year-old voters in 2025 voted in the 2016 primary, as they were mostly ineligible or didn’t live in the city. Many of Mrs. Clinton’s oldest voters, on the other hand, have since died. On top of these compositional changes, Mr. Mamdani also benefited from an extraordinarily strong turnout, with youth turnout matching the turnout among older voters.
It’s important to note that just because Democrats are moving to the left doesn’t mean the electorate is overall. This is certainly the case in New York City: That same Times/Siena poll that showed the Democratic primary electorate as far more liberal than a decade ago also showed Donald J. Trump faring better than any Republican in decades, as was ultimately borne out in the result. The poll also raised the possibility that the Democratic electorate is moving to the left in part because more moderate and conservative voters are disengaging from the party: Only 32 percent of the primary voters who didn’t vote were self-described liberals, and 21 percent backed Mr. Trump in 2024.
While Mr. Mamdani may have appeal among some of the Democrats in New York who swung toward President Trump last November, those voters did not drive his victory: Kamala Harris had an 89-6 lead among Times/Siena poll respondents from October 2024 who subsequently voted in the mayoral race, based on their voter records, compared with a 66-24 lead among the registered Democrats who sat out the primary.
Although the sample of Trump ’24-Democratic primary ’25 voters is so small that I shouldn’t look at it, I must note that a majority of them were Orthodox Jews. Whether they’re actually a majority or not, the actual results make it obvious Mr. Cuomo did indeed win many Trump voters in Orthodox enclaves like Borough Park and South Williamsburg, where he sometimes won nearly 10 times as many votes as Ms. Harris did last November.
Of course, progressives elsewhere in the country will not run in communities with such large Orthodox enclaves. Most of them don’t even need to worry about the general election yet. They’re still trying to win Democratic primaries. And while Mr. Mamdani’s campaign will be hard to replicate, progressives can attempt to copy much of the way he campaigned. They can try to catch fire with viral videos on social media. They can criticize Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank with confidence that Democratic primary voters are sympathetic to their views. In doing so, they would put many mainstream Democratic politicians in a difficult spot, as the general electorate still sympathizes more with Israel.
Most of all, they can focus on affordability. This might seem obvious. Voters almost always say the economy is the most important issue. But apparently it’s not so obvious for political activists and perhaps especially progressive activists (whether liberal or democratic socialist). More often, progressives focus on issues like climate change, democracy, immigration, racism and universal health care. While many voters may say they support progressive aims when asked by a pollster, many of these issues simply aren’t what working- class voters care about most.
Mr. Mamdani’s campaign was different. He focused on the cost of living. By talking about the prices of chicken and rice, groceries, rent and buses, he spoke much more directly to the concerns of ordinary people than he would have if he had campaigned on a Green New York Deal or Medicare for all of N.Y.C. Yes, he sometimes pushed a few buzzy ideas, like free buses and government-owned grocery stores, but even these were pretty prosaic by the vibey standards of Abolish ICE or Free College. He may support those things, but it wasn’t what he was known for. This is probably a reason he fared better in many of the working-class neighborhoods than previous progressive candidates.
Mainstream Democrats might struggle to make such a clear affordability pitch. Usually, Democrats try to address affordability problems through subsidies, but subsidies put upward pressure on prices and could contribute to inflation. The federal budget deficit and high interest rates also make it more challenging for Democrats to propose ambitious spending initiatives.
The budding “abundance” movement among Democrats mostly sidesteps these issues, but it tends to support reducing costs through supply-side remedies that might make many Democrats wary, like deregulation. Nonetheless, Mr. Mamdani managed to co-opt at least some of the movement with his “halalflation” video, which focused on obstacles facing small business owners, and by nodding at the abundance agenda in speeches and interviews.
On the other hand, mainstream Democrats seem unlikely to co-opt much of the left’s agenda. Many Democratic opinion leaders are skeptical of price controls, government-owned enterprises and other measures, even though they might poll well. Ms. Harris supported cracking down on price gouging, for instance, but she didn’t campaign in a full-throated way on these issues, perhaps in part because so many party elites were skeptical of these initiatives.
Taken together, the Mamdani victory suggests there’s an opportunity for progressives. Their ranks have continued to grow in recent years, at least within the Democratic electorate, even though it hasn’t always seemed like it. Affordability and Israel give them new opportunities and put mainstream Democrats in a challenging spot. It still won’t be easy for progressives to win, especially in an area without a thriving left-wing community. But it’s not 2015 or 2019 anymore, either. There are new voters, new technologies, new issues and new opportunities.
Nate Cohn is The Times’s chief political analyst. He covers elections, public opinion, demographics and polling.
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