The Democratic Party Looks to New York for Answers

The Atlantic

6 hours ago

After its demoralizing defeat in November, the Democratic Party has undertaken an agonizing, months-long self-autopsy to determine how it lost some of its core voters and how to move past an entrenched, older generation of leaders. Zohran Mamdani, the presumptive winner of yesterday's New York City mayoral primary, might provide some of the answers—to a point.
Mamdani, a 33-year-old, relatively unknown state assemblyman, ran an invigorated, modern campaign while embracing progressive—and in some cases, socialist—ideas to upset former Governor Andrew Cuomo. He is now on the precipice of leading the nation's largest city. According to some Democrats, Mamdani—charismatic, tireless, optimistic, a master of social media—could be a new leader in a party that is desperate to move on from overly familiar faces.
Republicans hope they're right. The GOP is eager to make Mamdani a national figure and hold up some of his ideas (city-run grocery stores! free buses!) as evidence that the Democrats are far to the left of the average voter.
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There are, of course, risks to drawing national lessons from a local primary election, particularly one in a city where Democrats make up almost two-thirds of the electorate. Moreover, Cuomo had singular, deep flaws and ran a listless campaign. The incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, wasn't on the ballot, relegated to an independent run after facing allegations of corruption and allying himself with President Donald Trump. But for Democrats desperate to make sense of why their party is so unpopular, Mamdani's win could at least provide a burst of energy, and a few ideas about how to move forward.
Democrats have been consumed with questions about what went wrong a year ago. Why didn't more in the party realize that President Joe Biden was too old to win again? How did Trump make inroads with young voters and with the Black and brown voters who have been Democrats' bedrock for generations? How did Trump make gains in some of the nation's biggest and traditionally bluest cities? Did the party move too far to the left, or not far enough? And why was a billionaire ex-president promising tax cuts for the rich seen as the better bet than his opponent to lower prices for working- and middle-class Americans? Since Trump's return to Washington, Democrats have managed to rally around their opposition to Trump's tariffs, DOGE cuts, and hard-line immigration policies. But they have struggled to put forth a coherent positive vision, and to find the right messenger.
Few looked to New York City for hope. The mayor's race at first seemed destined to be defined by Adams's scandals. When Cuomo made his entry into the race, many expected that his name recognition and his support from wealthy backers would give him an easy win over a series of well-meaning but uninspiring challengers. Cuomo positioned himself as someone who would stand up to Trump and urged voters to look past his own scandals—he resigned in 2021 after a series of sexual-harassment allegations, which he denied—and to recall instead his level-headed COVID briefings. Of all the candidates, he argued, only he had the management skills to revive a city that has just seemed off since the pandemic.
But Cuomo ran a desultory campaign, limiting his exposure to reporters and, more important, to voters. His long-held ambivalence toward the city was evident, as were the rumors that he viewed Gracie Mansion merely as a stepping stone to higher office. He couldn't shake his humiliating exit as governor. A late endorsement from former President Bill Clinton only reinforced the notion that Cuomo represented an aging, tarnished generation of Democrats. 'Cuomo relied on older establishment endorsements that no longer hold weight in the city,' Christina Greer, an associate political-science professor at Fordham University, told me. 'Cuomo also underestimated the extent to which New York voters are tired of disgraced politicians using public office as their contingency plan for life.' (Bill de Blasio, the former New York City mayor who has feuded with Cuomo for years, told me that he ran a 'grim, fear-based campaign with no authentic big ideas.')
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To categorize Mamdani at the beginning of the race as an afterthought would have been an insult to afterthoughts. He has served not even five years in the state assembly, and has little of the experience generally thought needed to manage a civic workforce of more than 280,000 people and a budget of $115 billion. (The New York Times' editorial board deemed him unqualified for the job.) But Mamdani did have energy and charm, and no shortage of ideas that were quickly turned into easy-to-digest slogans such as 'Free buses' and 'Freeze the rent.' He relentlessly focused on affordability and economic issues, a welcome message in a city with an extraordinarily high cost of living and stark income stratification.
Mamdani revealed himself to be remarkably adept at communicating his message, mastering social-media memes and delivering powerful speeches that evoked far more of Barack Obama's loft than Biden's whisper. He said yes to seemingly every interview and every podcast, tossing aside the caution traditionally preached by the focus-group-wielding political-consultant class. He tapped into liberal New Yorkers' anger over Gaza. He resonated with young people, including young men, who not only turned out for him but also volunteered for his campaign, creating an enthusiastic army of believers that created a noticeable contrast with Cuomo's support from donors, unions, and establishment figures. In the race's final days, a cheerful Mamdani walked the length of Manhattan, a metaphor for the tirelessness he brought to the race.
'The Democrats nationally need to start doing what Zohran just did. When we metaphorically sit at the kitchen table and empathize and offer passionate solutions, we win,' de Blasio told me. 'We didn't do that in 2024, and that was a big reason we lost.'
Mamdani did what so many Democrats failed to do last fall: He excited new voters, focused on economic issues, and communicated his story well. And most of all, he won, including in racially and economically diverse neighborhoods. As of this writing, it appears that there will be no need to rely on multiple rounds in New York City's new ranked-choice voting system; although Mamdani did not crack the 50 percent threshold last night to win the nomination outright, he surpassed Cuomo by about eight points, and the former governor conceded.
'Mamdani created a movement around his candidacy, and the big lesson for Democrats is that young voters are looking for a larger social-political movement and not just an anti-Trump party,' Basil Smikle, a New York–based political strategist who has worked for Cuomo and Hillary Clinton, told me. 'His victory suggests there's a needed reformation of the Democratic coalition, and repudiation of incrementalism but also a more wholesale shift from establishment politics.'
But the reverberations from Mamdani's candidacy aren't all reassuring ones for Democrats. Republicans have mocked his socialist ideas by evoking the barren supermarkets of the Soviet Union. They've seized on his previous calls to 'Defund the police' (Mamdani called for reducing the NYPD budget in 2020; he was the only candidate in the Democratic field this year to not pledge to hire more cops). A few Republicans have trotted out racist and Islamophobic stereotypes (Mamdani is of Ugandan-Indian descent and is Muslim). Some Democrats, too, are leery of Mamdani's call for new taxes on businesses and the rich, warning that such policies could lead to a wealth exodus from New York. Republicans have pointed to the sinking poll numbers of Chicago's progressive mayor, Brandon Johnson, as evidence that liberals can't govern. Last night, Vice President J. D. Vance posted on social media, 'Congratulations to the new leader of the Democratic Party,' tagging Mamdani. Trump today went one step further, posting that Mamdani was a '100% Communist Lunatic.'
Mamdani's depiction of Israel's actions in Gaza as a genocide threatens to unnerve some members of the city's large and politically active Jewish population. Within hours of Mamdani's acceptance speech, Republican Representative Elise Stefanik of New York sent a fundraising appeal calling him a 'Hamas Terrorist sympathizer.' Mamdani has defended the pro-Palestinian slogan ' Globalize the intifada ' but has denied accusations that he is anti-Semitic. He has said that he supports an Israel that provides equal rights to all of its citizens, but he has repeatedly dodged questions about whether Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state.
Jonathan Chait: Why won't Zohran Mamdani denounce a dangerous slogan?
'Mamdani is a gift to Republicans. They will link every Democrat to his far-left policy proposals,' Susan Del Percio, a Republican strategist who worked in Rudy Giuliani's mayoral administration, told me. 'As mayor of New York City, every single thing he does will be held under a microscope by Democrats and Republicans alike. And some of these things are really out there.'
When the mayoral race began, the conventional wisdom was that the Democratic primary would be the de facto general election. That is no longer quite the case. Before last night, Cuomo had previously signaled that if he lost the primary, he might run in November on another ballot line, believing that the glow around Mamdani might wear off with more time and scrutiny. (Those close to Cuomo think that an independent run, though possible, might now be less likely given the margin of his defeat this week.) And while the Republican nominee, the anti-crime activist and radio-show host Curtis Sliwa, seems to have little chance, Mamdani's win might open the door again for Adams; in a remarkable plot twist, the mayor has told associates that he can now position himself as the steadier choice to keep the job. A person close to Trump told me that the president might enjoy wading into the race in his former hometown and would consider endorsing Adams, though he might opt against it out of concern that it would hurt Adams more than help him.
Still, the Democratic nominee will be considered the favorite. If Mamdani wins, there will be only so much that his fellow Democrats can learn from the specifics of the race, given New York's liberal tilt. But maybe there will be some lessons that are less about ideology and more about tactics—having energy, communicating clearly and frequently, and focusing on personal economic issues. 'I've already heard from some Democrats who worry that this guy is going to get us all labeled as socialists,' the Reverend Al Sharpton, the civil-rights leader and Democratic stalwart, told me. 'But he hit on something; he connected with something. Mamdani kept showing up. Democrats need to keep showing up.'