What Democrats can (and can't) learn from Zohran Mamdani's triumph
On Tuesday night, Zohran Mamdani — a 33-year-old socialist and state lawmaker — trounced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York City's Democratic mayoral primary. This was remarkable on a few different levels. For Mamdani, merely becoming Cuomo's main competitor would have been an improbable achievement, since doing so required the newcomer to leapfrog a thick field of (heretofore) more prominent progressives.
Once Mamdani established himself as the left's standard-bearer, his victory became plausible. But most observers envisioned the socialist winning in a very specific way: Although Mamdani would surely lose the first round of balloting to Cuomo, the conventional wisdom went, he might ultimately eke out the nomination thanks to New York City's ranked-choice voting (RCV) system. Under RCV, voters can stipulate their second, third, fourth, and fifth choices, and then their votes are reallocated as low-polling candidates are gradually eliminated. As of Monday morning, the betting site Polymarket had given Mamdani just a 6.7 percent chance of winning the first round outright.
In reality, Mamdani defeated Cuomo in that round by more than 7 points, leading the governor to concede even before the electorate's backup votes were considered. Mamdani will still need to win November's general election to become mayor, where he will face an independent run from incumbent Eric Adams, among other potential rivals. But the socialist assemblyman is now the overwhelming favorite to become the next mayor of New York City, which is overwhelmingly Democratic.
All this makes Tuesday's outcome a great news story — and useful fodder for anyone who wishes to declare that the traditional rules of politics are obsolete.
Some on the left have suggested that Mamdani's victory proves Democrats do not need to moderate their party's image to compete for national power. This argument does not make much sense. To secure a Senate majority in 2026, Democrats will need to win multiple states that backed Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by double digits. And even if Democrats give up on winning Senate control next year and shoot for doing so in 2028, they will still need to win in states that voted for Trump all three times he was on the ballot.
According to some political scientists, pollsters, and pundits, doing this will require Democrats to moderate their national reputation, since modern voters tend to judge candidates less by their own idiosyncratic positions than by their party's general image. In this analysis, acquiring the power necessary for advancing even incremental progressive change federally requires the Democratic leadership to observe strict ideological discipline. So long as the party's brand is toxic to the median voter in Ohio — who backed Trump every single time he's been on the ballot — Democrats will have no prayer of passing ambitious federal legislation or confirming liberal Supreme Court justices.
This theory could very well be wrong. But a socialist winning 43.5 percent of the vote in a Democratic primary in New York City does not tell us much about its validity one way or another.
As a general rule, one should not try to extract timeless laws of political physics from the results of an off-year municipal elections in overwhelmingly Democratic cities. And this seems all the more true of a mayoral race as idiosyncratic as this year's, in which moderate Democrats chose to line up behind a scandal-plagued former governor who'd resigned in disgrace.
That said, Mamdani's resounding victory remains an extraordinary event that few anticipated. It's therefore worth considering what it could tell us about where Democratic politics is going and what effective campaigning in 2025 looks like.
Any attempt to extrapolate national political trends from a single municipal election should be tentative. But if there are portable lessons from Mamdani's triumph, these strike me as the most plausible:
This one might go without saying. But in both 2020 and 2024, the Democratic Party nominated presidential candidates who struggled to coherently and comfortably explain their policy views in unstructured conversations. Relatedly, both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris also maintained highly limited media availability.
By contrast, Mamdani appeared to accept virtually every media opportunity available to him. In addition to incessantly shooting and releasing his own shortform videos to social media, Mamdani appeared on such varied programs as the morning radio show The Breakfast Club and wonky finance podcast Odd Lots. By making himself ubiquitous over every channel available to him, Mamdani was able to overwhelm Cuomo's large advantage in paid media. The former governor's $25 million super PAC proved no match for the socialist assemblyman's viral videos and affable interviews.
Of course, this 'flood the zone' strategy only worked because Mamdani is a gifted politician with a quick mind and endearing affect. Unfortunately, these traits are not as common among the Democratic political class as they should be.
The importance of being able to eloquently communicate and perform authenticity — across a wide array of media formats — in today's environment was already apparent before Tuesday night. But Mamdani's win underscores the power of such fundamental political skills.
Mamdani emerged out of a New York City left that has championed some unpopular social causes. At one time, Mamdani endorsed defunding the police and abolishing the standardized test that determines admission to the city's elite public high schools.
But during his 2025 campaign, Mamdani moderated on both those fronts, while putting rhetorical emphasis on his plans for increasing affordability. His pledge to contain costs for ordinary New Yorkers — while combating the well-heeled interests that inflated them — enjoyed pride of place on his campaign's website and in its advertisements.
Mamdani's platform was radical in many respects. His calls for fare-free buses, public grocery stores, and a $30 minimum wage put him sharply to the left of mainstream Democrats.
And yet, there was a remarkable amount of overlap between Mamdani's messaging and Kamala Harris's most effective appeals in 2024. According to the Democratic data firm Blue Rose Research, this was Harris's best-testing ad in last year's campaign:
Here is the top of Mamdani's campaign platform:
The commonalities between these two messages are plain: In both cases, the candidate argues that things are too expensive, your rent is too high, and they will bring your costs down by building housing and cracking down on abusive landlords. Further, in their own very different ways, both Harris and Mamdani spoke to the public's concern over high grocery prices.
To reiterate, we should be very cautious about assuming a tight overlap between the kind of politics that succeeds in a New York mayoral primary and that which sells in a general presidential election. But sophisticated ad-testing already indicated that simple, populist messaging about increasing affordability plays well with swing voters. The fact that such messaging also helped Mamdani catch fire in New York City should increase our confidence in the potency of such rhetoric.
Mamdani's opponents focused much of their attacks on his left-wing views about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Mamdani is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which seeks to coerce the Israeli government into honoring its obligations under international law — including the government's withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territories and recognition of the right of Palestinian families displaced in 1948 to return to their ancestral homes within Israel. These demands could entail an end to Israel's existence as a Jewish-majority state. Mamdani refused to express any commitment to the preservation of such a state, suggesting that he was supportive of any resolution to the conflict that ensured 'equal rights for all,' whether that involved the formation of a single democratic binational state throughout Israel and Palestine, or a two-state solution.
Mamdani was also harshly critical of Israel's war crimes in Gaza and vowed that as mayor, he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, were the Israeli prime minister ever to step foot in New York City.
These stances put Mamdani at the far-left pole of the Democratic Party's debate over Israel-Palestine. Cuomo and his supporters saw this as a great vulnerability and made it the centerpiece of much of their negative messaging.
And yet, in the most Jewish city in the United States, such attacks didn't pack the punch that Cuomo had hoped.
This may be indicative of a broader shift in the politics of Israel within the Democratic Party. The Netanyahu government's utter contempt for Palestinian life in Gaza — its years-long bombardment of its civilian infrastructure, obstruction of humanitarian aid, and avowed interest in ethnically cleansing the territory — have taken a toll on the state's standing within an increasingly diverse Democratic coalition. In 2022, 40 percent of Democrats sympathized more with the Israelis than the Palestinians in Gallup's polling, while 38 percent said the opposite. Three years later, Democrats now sympathize with the Palestinians over the Israelis by an unprecedented 59 percent to 21 percent margin.
Finally, it is easier to picture Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez winning the Democratic Party's 2028 presidential nomination today than it was yesterday.
Mamdani just demonstrated the power of youth, charisma, good looks, and the avid support of a mass-membership political organization in a Democratic primary. Those personal qualities — combined with the organizational and social media heft of the Democratic Socialists of America — enabled Mamdani to prevent any other progressive rival from gaining oxygen. Among young, college-educated New Yorkers eager for progressive change, there was no serious competition.
Were Ocasio-Cortez to run in 2028, she would take all these same advantages into the primary. To be sure, Mamdani's showing also illustrated the potential challenges that any progressive will face in seeking to become Democratic standard-bearer. Even while stomping to victory, Mamdani lost majority-Black areas by 18 percentage points, according to the New York Times. Further, Democratic voters are liable to worry more about the electability of a staunch progressive in a presidential primary than a New York City mayoral one. Nonetheless, over the past 24 hours, Ocasio-Cortez gained 2 points in the betting market for the 2028 Democratic nomination.
Ultimately, Ocasio-Cortez's future political prospects — along with those of socialists and progressives more broadly — may depend in no small part on Mamdani's governing performance, should he win in November. A socialist mayor in America's media capital will be heavily scrutinized. And making good on his promises to increase affordability and improve public services will likely require Mamdani to demonstrate ideological flexibility: Some of the biggest drivers of unaffordability in NYC involve regulations that benefit politically connected interest groups at the broader public's expense.
In any case, the future trajectory of Democratic politics remains uncertain, and the party's best bet for reclaiming national power remains contested. Tuesday's returns cannot settle any argument about where Democrats must go from here. But Mamdani's extraordinary success should inform that debate.
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