Perception battle: Real meaning of Mamdani’s victory

In the doldrums of last November, depressed and paralysed by Donald Trump’s victory, I stumbled upon a video of an affable young man in a suit and tie, microphone in hand, interviewing voters in immigrant-heavy areas of New York City’s Queens and Bronx boroughs.

“Did you get a chance to vote on Tuesday?” he asks.

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 a candidate was 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 Tuesday, Mamdani had won 56% of the vote, a 12-point margin on Cuomo, the heavy favourite.

In the 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 jihadi 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 US 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 sanitised 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 midterm 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 signalling 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.

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 won the city’s majority-Hispanic areas by a greater share than he won majority-white areas. In the neighbourhoods 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 said. Some of the poorest and richest New Yorkers went for Cuomo, but the middle — blue- and white-collar workers — thronged to Mamdani.

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?

@The New York Times