What Mamdani's Win Means Beyond New York - CNN Political Briefing - Podcast on CNN Podcasts

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4 hours ago

Zohran Mamdani (clip)
00:00:01
I will fight for a city that works for you, that is affordable for you, that is safe for you. I will work to be a mayor you will be proud to call your own.
David Chalian
00:00:17
'33-year-old Zohran Mamdani pulled off a major political upset with his success in this week's New York mayoral primary. The state assemblyman's top challenger, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, conceded Tuesday night.
Andrew Cuomo (clip)
00:00:30
I want to applaud the assemblyman for a really smart and good and impactful campaign. Tonight is his night.
David Chalian
00:00:43
It was a stunning moment, especially considering Mamdani started the race as a virtual unknown. But a mix of viral videos and promises that appealed to young progressives vaulted him to the top of the pack. Now some Democratic leaders and operatives around the country are looking to Mamdani's success as a potential playbook. So was that success more about specific policy proposals or his appeal to young and new voters? And what lessons from New York can actually be applied nationwide? Senior reporter Isaac Dovere has been writing about this race and the results for us here at CNN. He joins me today to discuss Mamdani's victory, how he pulled it off and what it means for the Democratic Party. I'm CNN's Washington Bureau Chief and Political Director, David Chalian, and this is the CNN Political Briefing. Isaac, thanks so much for doing this. Really appreciate it.
'Edward-Isaac Dovere
00:01:40
I'm glad to be here. It's cooler in the recording studio than it was at Mamdani's party.
David Chalian
00:01:45
Excellent. I'm going to start with a tweet that you sent out on your feed on primary day, just shortly before polls closed. You said, quote, "Prepare for an avalanche of deep thoughts about New York politics from people whose main experience in the outer boroughs is flying in and out of JFK or LaGuardia." I just want to give our audience context. That does not apply to either you or me as we engage in this conversation, two people that have covered New York City politics in our past professional experiences.
'Edward-Isaac Dovere
00:02:14
That is true, and you know, you're never supposed to read tweets back to someone, but I stand by that one.
David Chalian
00:02:21
Oh, no, I thought it was an excellent tweet. I just didn't want our listeners to think that they were getting that kind of cheap analysis.
'Edward-Isaac Dovere
00:02:27
No, and I should say, in context of that tweet also, I grew up in Manhattan. So I am myself a Manhattanite, but I have spent a lot of my life living in New York City and started out my professional career covering New York city politics, which often took me out and about around the other four boroughs, which are quite important in city politics these days.
David Chalian
00:02:47
'Yes, my mother tells me often that I drive like a New York City taxi driver, and I always tell her that's because when I got my first job in journalism at New York 1 News, a 24-hour cable channel covering just the five boroughs, and I had to drive the little white car around all five boroughs with my camera gear to chase mayoral candidates. So that was my start in journalism.
'Edward-Isaac Dovere
00:03:06
Yeah, well, I'm enough of a New Yorker that I had my bachelor's degree before I had my driver's license.
David Chalian
00:03:12
'So with that being said, this certainly was a political earthquake that occurred in the results of this Democratic mayoral primary this week. You were up there covering it. I guess I just wanna start with one broad question. Since you had been up there a few weeks before, this seemed to move very quickly from a one-man race in a crowd of 11 to a very competitive two-person race that ended up perhaps in the final result not being quite as competitive at all.
'Edward-Isaac Dovere
00:03:41
'Yeah, I think that it's hard to see it as anything other than a race that changed really within the last 14 or 16 days of it. But I will tell you, when I went up at the end of May to cover this, the premise of what I had started out working on was sort of like, here's what Andrew Cuomo is doing, and there's Cuomo and all these other candidates. Even in the course of the reporting, it became clear to me that there was Cuomo and these other candidates, and this Mamdani guy is actually starting to gel. And in the story as it ran, there is a whole section of it about Mamdani, and I talked to him for it and said to him, Cuomo wanted you to be the perfect foil and thinks you are. What do you think of that? And he said to me, I think Cuomo is the perfect foil for my race. And even then, it didn't seem like that was going to be quite what this was. And a combination of quite a few things happened here. The deep hatred for Andrew Cuomo came back into people's minds, especially as he continued the way that he had over the whole campaign of not actually doing anything, either through being out and about, campaigning or interviews or showing up at events or talking to all the kinds of political people that you need to, to mitigate or change those feelings of animosity towards him. And Mamdani just ran a vigorous campaign, both online and in person and was able to make this race feel not just about the affordability pitch and like people who actually live in New York. One of his lines about Cuomo is, we need to send him back to the suburbs. And, sure, Cuomo grew up in Queens, but he hadn't lived in New York City until a couple months ago moving in to run, and to make himself as a visible embodied change from what Cuomo was, which is a 67-year-old guy who's been around politics forever, whose father was in politics, obviously, and who had resigned in disgrace, the kind of thing that the Democratic Party keeps saying that they want to move past. And Mamdani could just say, look at Andrew Cuomo. That's who he is, and this is who I am, and I'm different. And people really responded to that.
David Chalian
00:05:53
Now it also seems, and I know we don't have a ton of hard data on this, but just from your experience and reporting, the success of the campaign was not only, as you said, clearly on the right message about affordability, but he brought a slew of new people, specifically young people, into the process. He inspired sort of a new generation of voters in this New York City mayoral race, and that as we've seen time and again with successful campaigns, both Republican and Democratic, over the course of the last two decades, I would say, like that is sort of the point of the realm. If you can expand an electorate and bring new people into it because they're so committed to you and your mission and your message, that is the stuff of victory.
'Edward-Isaac Dovere
00:06:37
Yeah, and sometimes it's not, to be clear. But look, it is, what is the, maybe one thing that unites Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump? It's reaching voters who don't vote for other people and who hadn't been voting and may not vote for other people in the future but did show up to vote for them. By the way, that also unites, like, Donald Trump and Barack Obama, too. And one of the things that you see on the national stage is that there are all these Democrats who turned out for Obama in '08 and in '12, weren't there in the midterms for him, haven't really been there since, despite what Joe Biden, you know, the historic vote total that he got. The people who voted for Donald Trump in his elections but weren't there in the 2018 midterms or in 2022, but obviously showed up for him. And Mamdani, in different kinds of voters, although some overlaps, was just able to reach these people who, similarly in those coalitions, were feeling like politics isn't really for me. It doesn't do anything. I don't care about these people. Oh, but that guy, that guy seems to be speaking to me.
David Chalian
00:07:39
Yeah, I think that was really well said, and I think you chose the right examples. We talk a lot about the Obama coalition of voters or the Trump coalition of voters. These coalitions are very specific to the person that they're voting for in many ways, and they don't necessarily translate into elections when those people are not on the ballot.
'Edward-Isaac Dovere
00:07:57
I mean, I think about it sometimes, like really, as like, there are people who have tattoos of Barack Obama on their bodies. There are people who have tattoos of Donald Trump on their bodies. I don't think there's anybody who has a tattoo of Mitt Romney on their body or of Joe Biden or of Kamala Harris. I'm not sure what the Mamdani tattoo situation will be, maybe over time...
David Chalian
00:08:18
Sounds like an excellent reporting target for you.
'Edward-Isaac Dovere
00:08:22
That's my next assignment.
David Chalian
00:08:25
How much of Mumdani's success was the specifics of his proposal, you know, a rent freeze, free busses, taxes on the wealthy? How much of that is in the specific policy proposals versus, as you said, just effectively communicating and consistently communicating at all times about an affordability crisis broadly?
'Edward-Isaac Dovere
00:08:50
'I think it's a mix. Look, this is a running theme of New York. When I was growing up in New York, the rent was too expensive. Now, years, too many years, maybe, after that than I like to think about, the rent is also too expensive in New York. And when it comes to everything else, groceries, childcare, schools, all of it. And people who make more money than a lot of their counterparts around the country often feel like they are struggling or behind, and they just can't catch up. And that is even more acute, obviously, for those people who aren't making a lot of money, who are more working class than the people who are in the white-collar jobs who are feeling like they can't get ahead. So with Mamdani, there was this response to, hey, at least someone's talking about this. And then some of it also was like, yeah, maybe we should freeze the rents, or maybe it's too expensive to go on the busses, so, like, free busses seems like a good idea. But I think importantly, when I talk to people both in New York and around the country for some of the reporting that I've done since Mamdani won, I talked to a guy named John Liu, who used to be the city comptroller and is now a state senator from Queens. And he said to me, look, I'm not a socialist. If he can get two of the things that he's talking about done, that would be huge, and at least we're talking about big ideas. I talked to a woman named Paige Cognetti, who is the mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Joe Biden's hometown, who said to me that she does not agree with most of the things that Mamdani has proposed, but she does agree with the idea of taking bold action and proposing big ideas and really trying to tackle these things with fresh ideas.
David Chalian
00:10:23
You talked about the dislike for Andrew Cuomo, you know, who resigned in disgrace just four years ago being a key factor for his fall here, but what about the message that he was offering New York City voters, specifically the negative frame around Mamdani, that he simply just did not have the experience for the job of being New York city mayor. So obviously that didn't hold sway broadly or enough, but is it the messenger, or was that message itself about Mamdani's experience just simply rejected by voters, or could a different candidate not named Andrew Cuomo have had, do you think, a little more success with raising questions about Mamdani's abilities and experience to tackle this job?
'Edward-Isaac Dovere
00:11:10
Well, in their second debate a couple weeks ago, Cuomo made that attack, and Mamdani's response was, yeah, I don't have the experience of having to resign, I don't have the experience of all that. You know, I don't have your experience, and that's a good thing. And people did respond to that, certainly among Mamdani supporters. But I wonder if there had been a more mainstream Democratic candidate who was not a former governor, let alone a former governor who had resigned in disgrace, whether Mamdani would have had the room to catch up here. I do think that if you go back and look at 2016 and not necessarily to take anything away from Donald Trump, but would Donald Trump have had the same kind of success either in the primaries or in the general election against a candidate who was not a part of a legacy dynasty who was running a very cautious campaign herself? I really don't think so. And I think that there are parallels to that here. You know, for all of the Democrats, whether you want to call them the establishment or more mainstream or more central, I don't know, whatever word you want use for it. For all of those efforts to stop Mamdani, really, this is, go back six months ago and find someone other than Andrew Cuomo to be your candidate, if that was your goal, because I talked to a very prominent New York political figure the day after that person endorsed Cuomo a couple months ago. And I said, why'd you endorse him? And the person said to me, well, you know, nobody else can win; he's obviously the right person. And it's very circular reasoning. To voters these days, that doesn't really hold water.
David Chalian
00:12:49
'That's a perfect place to pause. We're gonna have a lot more with Isaac Dovere on the fallout from the mayor's race and what it means for the Democratic Party nationally. Stay with us. You were just starting to talk about some parallels, perhaps, to 2016 and 2015, and is there something going on right now with the Democratic Party that may sound like establishment Republicans sounded in 2015 of just being totally dismissive of the Trump phenomenon as it was actually happening inside the Republican Party and not understanding it or grasping it in a way? And are, like, do you think Democrats are at risk of sort of dismissing the Mamdani thing as just anti-Andrew Cuomo or some other thing and not actually being open to assessing, like, what it is that perhaps their base of voters are shifting on or looking for in candidates?
'Edward-Isaac Dovere
00:13:59
I think where we are in the world, in this country, in culture, with all the changes that are going on, with all of the shifts that are happening in all these different ways, people want to know what you are going to do for them. If you're not doing anything for them and saying you're going to doing anything for them, then they don't want to have anything to do with you. I really think, and I wrote a book about the 2020 campaign, and I talked to a bunch of Obama people about what Trump's appeal was and how they saw it. And they said to me then that they knew that Obama hadn't done enough to deal with the wage disparities that had started to really erupt while he was president. And they saw that Trump's power was that he was saying to them and to voters that at least he's angry about it too. And at least he's going to do something about it or try to do some thing about it. And so now you bring it forward to this race, and Cuomo was saying, look, the city's in bad shape, and it's sort of spinning out of control. And there is a lot of that. People feel not as safe on the subways. There are unlicensed weed shops all over the place. And there's a little bit of, like, what's going on in the city? Is anyone in control? And Eric Adams, the current mayor's dysfunction has accentuated that, but they hear all that, but then they say, okay, so, like, what's your big idea? Or is it just like you're gonna like manage things better? Well, people would like that. They'd like things to be run well. But that is not the kind of message that is ever going to inspire people. And when they see a guy in Mamdani who was speaking to that anger and that frustration and saying, again, I got these big ideas. Let's just try to do some stuff, right? Now, it's very possible that if he wins the general election now, and he is the mayor, he will flop on a lot of these things that he is trying to do. But at the moment, they just want someone to try to actually speak to what these big problems they see are and address them with the level of fervor and imagination that they think should be there.
David Chalian
00:16:04
There is the general election, and Eric Adams is announcing or reannouncing and repackaging his campaign in the aftermath of the primary that he was sure to lose and therefore didn't participate in and is trying to extend his life here by running as an independent in the general. But now has perhaps, like you were talking about, Cuomo and Mamdani both thought each other were the exact opponent they wanted for what they were doing. Like Eric Adams, is his perception that, well, running as independent now in this election, let's say, Andrew Cuomo chooses not to run on his independent line, and it is Adams and Mamdani and Sliwa in the major slots there. You know, it's an overwhelmingly Democratic city, but are there enough questions about Mamdani that he doesn't sort of enter the general election as an overwhelming favorite or no?
'Edward-Isaac Dovere
00:16:53
'I think he enters it as a favorite, overwhelming, we'll have to see. Look, when I was at Mamdani's party on Tuesday night, the first thank you that his campaign manager who started the speeches of the evening made was to the Democratic Socialists of America. And the whole place started chanting, D-S-A, D-S-A. I think that that will be a harder sell to a wide electorate if that is the kind of campaign that they carry forward here. Because, fairly or not, people respond to the idea of democratic socialism, those who are not democratic socialists themselves, often with things like, it feels a little bit too much for me. Adams will be looking to connect with his base of middle of the road, outer borough, often older African American and Latino voters and try to link that up to the business community who may decide to freak out about Mamdani. So far, they are trying to figure out how freaked out they are. And if they get there behind Adams, obviously, that would probably mean a lot of money for his campaign, but it could also lead to some level of support. Again, Eric Adams, he's an imperfect messenger of his own when it comes to this. He can say, as Cuomo was trying to say, listen, I'm the one who can run the city. I'm not so far out to the left, all that stuff. But he has been running the city for the last four years, and most people think he has been struggling to run the city or hasn't even been trying to run the city, and that was the case before all the stuff with the Trump indictments.
David Chalian
00:18:35
But unlike in some previous races where the Democratic nomination sort of after the primary the race is done, this is one that we're going to have to watch develop.
'Edward-Isaac Dovere
00:18:43
Listen, and it's not just them. There's a guy named Curtis Sliwa who is known to every New Yorker as a perennial gadfly, as a guardian angel, shows up in a red beret everywhere he goes. For anybody who is a fan of the The Morton Downey Jr. Show in the late 80s, is the kind of guy who was a regular on that. He is running as the Republican nominee. He ran as the Republican nominee four years ago against Adams, and he got 33% of the vote. Okay, can he expand that? He put out a statement just before we started recording blasting Eric Adams as a failed mayor, and he's not a real Democrat. He can't appeal to Republicans, and that it's up to him, Curtis Sliwa, to clean up the mess that Eric Adams has made. But if you imagine a situation where Mamdani is running even strong as a Democrat, and he will have the support also the Working Families Party, he already has the support but he'll have their ballot line. Does that get him to 40%, 45%? Depends how strong Adams ends up running. Mamdani is always going to seem like the favorite of that, but not necessarily the strong favorite.
David Chalian
00:19:53
The range of democratic response to Mamdani's victory, I mean, you reference John Liu's comments, you reference the Scranton mayor in your reporting, but you have the Democrats out on Long Island, like Tom Suozzi, Laura Gillen, who have expressed total dissatisfaction with Mamdani as a leader of the party. There are House seats that Republicans sit in in the New York suburbs that Democrats would like to flip, and perhaps those two incumbent Democrats sort of reflect some view around how those Democratic candidates may feel the need to run around Mamdani's spotlight at the moment. You have some doing an embrace, like Jerry Nadler, the Manhattan congressman, and you have some that are just still trying to figure it out, like the leaders of the party in Washington, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer who have offered praise for Mamdani's successful campaign, but I don't think have come through with a full throated endorsement just yet.
'Edward-Isaac Dovere
00:20:50
'They have not. I remember working on a story in the aftermath of the election in November that was about what Democrats were going to try to learn as they attempted to pick up the pieces. No one suggested to me then that the answer was democratic socialism and a 33-year-old assemblyman talking very proudly about all of these ideas for going further to the left. However, it is definitely true that he won not only the race but won a lot of hearts. It is also definitely true that the electorate of New York City, new voters and old voters in the Democratic primary, is really pretty different from the kind of voters that are up for grabs in the House districts, in the states where there are competitive Senate races and governor's races that Democrats are gonna need to win over. And so that's where you see the caution and the threading going on. Obviously, Republicans have very quickly gotten into tagging Mamdani to anyone that they can, and it's only been, you know, 48 hours or so. That's going to continue. But, like, I'll juxtapose two quotes that I had in an article that I wrote on Wednesday. One is from George Latimer, who's a congressman who beat a guy named Jamaal Bowman, congressman in the primary last year. Bowman, a big Mamdani supporter. I saw him at Mamdani's party on Tuesday night. He's from the suburbs just north of New York City. And Latimer said, it's going be tough for frontliners, House Democrats in tough districts, because they're in districts that have a lot of Republicans in it that would look at a Democrat and want to hear the narrative, oh, this guy's radical. But, on the other hand, I talked to Chris Murphy from Connecticut, not really a big lefty guy himself but has been really identifying with a more populist kind of politics since the election and has gotten a lot of attention for it. And he said to me, look, I know this feels like a shock to a lot of folks, but it doesn't seem like rocket science. He's focused on reordering economic power. He's dynamic, and he's a new voice. And he's said, check, check check, right? That kind of thing, more than the policies, the freshness of ideas, the boldness of ideas maybe is the thing that Democrats need to be about. Because Republicans, and you see this in a lot of the commentary about things that Trump is doing, not just Republicans, but swing voters, respond to things that Trump has been doing and saying, like, that's not what I voted for, because they didn't really dig in and, like, go through the policy positions or what it would mean.
David Chalian
00:23:25
But Isaac, to your Chris Murphy quote point, you know, the third way centrist Democratic crowd would say, yeah, check, check, check. That was exactly Bill Clinton, 1992. And the Bernie Sanders AOC crowd would say check, check, check. This is why AOC should run for president. So, there are different wings of the party that see that set of credentials that Murphy put to you through their own lane and through their own eyes as the path to success, right?
'Edward-Isaac Dovere
00:23:50
Totally. And I could see somebody sitting in JB Pritzker's office and looking at these results and saying like, yep, I see how this is our path in. Or Gavin Newsom's or Pete Buttigieg's or AOC's or whoever the other candidates may turn out to be running for president in 2028 on the Democratic side, but if they don't feel like they fit that mold, and I won't call out specific names of people who are prominent Democrats right now who definitely don't fit that mold, then they would be crazy to try to run. Again, if they can't figure out some way that those sorts of things apply to them.
David Chalian
00:24:31
Isaac, I really appreciate your insights, your reporting. Great work this week up in New York and in advance of this election. And thanks for chatting with us about it. Appreciate it.
'Edward-Isaac Dovere
00:24:41
Thank you.
David Chalian
00:24:41
That's it for this week's edition of the CNN Political Briefing. Remember, you can reach out to us with your questions about Trump's new administration. Our contact information is in the show notes. CNN Political Briefing is a production of CNN Podcasts. This episode was produced by Emily Williams. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Podcasts. Our senior producers are Faiz Jamil and Felicia Patinkin. Support from Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. We'll be back with a new episode next Friday. Thanks so much for listening.