Zohran Mamdani was wooing Black pastors at the Rev. Al Sharpton’s Harlem headquarters recently when he mentioned he had been there before, at a Christmas Day event to help people in need.
The pastors, surprised, decided to check up on Mr. Mamdani’s claim. “We had to go look at the tape,” Mr. Sharpton said. “There’s Zohran, serving meals. We didn’t know who he was.”
Mr. Mamdani, 33, is hardly unknown now. His upset win in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary has electrified Democratic voters across the country, introducing an exciting new name to national politics with a broad coalition of affluent and middle- and working-class voters, Asian, Muslim, Latino and white voters and younger voters of all backgrounds.
It’s the latest example of a Democratic Party in metamorphosis, as a group of maverick progressives and younger people gain power, animating the base and eclipsing some of the party’s longtime kingmakers.
Progressives have a shot at shaping the direction of a party whose leaders have failed to mount a successful opposition to Donald Trump. Before they can offer Democrats a path forward nationally though, they will have to make significant headway with Americans at the very heart of the Democratic coalition: Black voters. Especially older ones.
In districts that were overwhelmingly Black, Mr. Mamdani lost voters to his main opponent, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, by more than two to one. Progressives seem to particularly struggle with this part of the base. Democrats with big aspirations may want to get very curious about why.
The first step is to look beyond the tired assumption that Black voters are reflexively socially conservative. Some are. But a closer look suggests that the coveted support of many Black voters is often less driven by ideology than by an alchemy of other factors: trusted relationships, sometimes built over many years; the ability to deliver tangible policy items; and politicians who are unapologetic in their embrace of Black people. Perpetually and strangely overlooked is the fact that older Black Americans grew up during Jim Crow and its aftermath, a searing set of life experiences that may lead to a certain cautiousness about politics and politicians.
Democrats with deep roots in this part of the base say these voters are winnable by any politicians, including progressives, who recognize that many of the country’s basic aspirations are now out of reach for all but the wealthiest Americans.
“Their concerns are not unlike the concerns of every other American,” Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia told me in a phone interview. That means good jobs with strong wages, affordable health care, secure retirement and safe communities, he said. “They want to believe that they can pass on an inheritance that’s better for their children than it was for them,” he added.
Mr. Warnock may not be of the new socialist left, but he has among the most progressive records of a senator from a battleground state. When I asked him if progressives faced special challenges with Black voters, the senator seemed to react to the idea with skepticism. “I think these labels are academic, in the pejorative sense of the word,” he told me. “Particularly in a time in which people are feeling the pressure of high costs and trying to make ends meet, they are open to the message of any candidate who understands that.”
The actual political views, traditions and behaviors of Black voters are rich and complex. Polls from the Pew Research Center in recent years show that Black Americans overwhelmingly support abortion rights, with 73 percent saying abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared with 60 percent of white adults. They are more likely than white Americans to say immigrant workers are taking jobs that U.S. citizens would like to have, but more likely to disapprove of recent deportation policies. Nearly 90 percent of Black Americans support raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. They are divided on support for transgender rights, with Black Democrats less likely to back dedicated protections for transgender people than white Democrats, but Black Americans overall less likely than white Americans to support laws restricting the rights of transgender people.
And being perceived as moderate by commentators is no guarantee that Black voters will embrace you. When the Democratic presidential candidates gathered in Selma, Ala., in 2020 to re-enact the 1965 Bloody Sunday March, I looked on as Michael Bloomberg was protested against in a historically Black church. His campaign was dogged by the toxic legacy of stop and frisk, the strategy he embraced as mayor that led to millions of police stops of mostly Black and Hispanic men. I saw his presidential ambitions die on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
The layers of complexity can lead to contradictions, but also coalition-building. In his 2004 presidential run, Mr. Sharpton supported same-sex marriage, something Democrats backed by the party’s establishment at the time, including Senators John Kerry and John Edwards, opposed. Mr. Sharpton said staking out liberal ground in the race had rankled some voters from more conservative Black religious traditions. “Try going to Pentecostal churches and telling them that,” Mr. Sharpton joked, referring to his position on gay marriage.
Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas, among the most prominent left-leaning Black Americans in Congress, told me recently she believed Democratic candidates too often seem hesitant to promote initiatives explicitly meant to improve the lives of Black people. “Yes, let’s be bold about L.G.B.T.Q. policies, let’s be bold about immigration,” she said, ticking off progressive approaches. “But when it comes down to ‘Let’s be bold about Black policies’? It’s crickets.”
How politicians ask for support from older Black voters matters, and this is something progressives probably need to think more deeply about. A candidate without history in Black communities, especially, will have to work harder to build trust. Ms. Crockett said candidates benefit from trusted surrogates to vouch for them in the community, just as Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina did for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential primary. “You really shouldn’t be rolling in by yourself,” Ms. Crockett told me. “You need somebody that can credentialize you.”
It isn’t only the most progressive Democrats who have struggled in this. Early in his career, Barack Obama, too, failed to gain Black support. In 2000, he suffered a brutal defeat at the hands of Representative Bobby Rush, a veteran congressman who helped found the Illinois Black Panther Party. “Taking on Bobby Rush among Black voters is like running into a buzz saw,” Mr. Obama’s former pollster told The Times in 2007.
Mr. Warnock recalled celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend at his Atlanta church in 2008 alongside Mr. Obama, while his mentor, the Rev. Calvin Butts, backed Hillary Clinton. Mr. Warnock, who was 38 at the time, described the divide as a “generational” matter. “For all of his gifts, Black people lined up and were ready to vote for Barack Obama once he won in Iowa, and they could see that he actually had a path,” Mr. Warnock said. “When you’re living on the margins and you know how brutal that marginalization can be because you lived through Jim Crow segregation, that brings a certain kind of perspective.”
Mr. Mamdani has been campaigning hard among Black New Yorkers since his primary win. If he can pick up more Black support, his political star will rise further, along with the kind of economic policies the left is beginning to champion. So far, though, the most promising growing Democratic coalition in America may still be in the South. Black voters, a longtime liberal minority of white voters, and newer residents of many backgrounds are voting together to transform once solidly Republican terrain into more competitive territory. For many Americans, once-improbable Democratic wins in Georgia seemed to be produced overnight. But the competitiveness in states like Georgia and North Carolina is fueled by demographic change — as well as relationships that transcend racial lines and policy disagreements, and reach back decades.
When a multiracial electorate powered by Black voters in Georgia sent the liberals Mr. Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the Senate in 2021, Black voters in Georgia had known both candidates for years.
Mr. Warnock is the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, once led by Martin Luther King Jr. and his father. Mr. Ossoff had close relationships with Black Atlantans long before he was a candidate for office. In high school, he interned with Representative John Lewis. Photographs show the future senator campaigning with his parents for Atlanta’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, when he was just 2 years old. The Ossoff family also belonged to an Atlanta synagogue bombed in 1958 over its opposition to Jim Crow. And as a child, Mr. Ossoff attended a racially integrated private school. “That’s not the only way to grow up in the South, but that’s how I grew up,” he told me in a phone interview.
Mr. Ossoff and Mr. Warnock won the fiercely competitive runoff elections with exceptional Black turnout.
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Mara Gay is a staff writer at New York Times Opinion who writes about politics. @MaraGay
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