Can a Socialist Become Mayor?

Considering Zohran Mamdani

This is one of those subjects where I’ll have to do the throat-clearing first and let my audience decide, after I’m done, whether to trust me. Zohran Mamdani, a state assemblyman from Queens, is running for mayor. Mamdani was, when I ran for State Senate in 2018, my campaign manager. I know him well. We spent, at one time, every single day together, knocking on doors and whipping canvassers and strategizing deep into the night. I knew, back then, he’d run for office someday, and I was not surprised he was elected to the State Assembly in 2020. He is a genuine political talent. He has the ability to go very far.

I will be as clear-eyed as I can about his chances. His campaign has obvious strengths. There are, too, significant hurdles he will have to overcome to be competitive. What I can say, without much hesitation, is that New York has never seen a mayoral campaign like Zohran Mamdani’s before.

I’m not even referring to the history-making potential of his bid—if he won, he’d be New York’s first Muslim and first South Asian mayor. He’d be the first mayor who wasn’t white or Black. That certainly matters.

Rather, I am focusing on the fact that he is a proud socialist. There have been very few mayoral campaigns in New York history that were so explicitly leftist. It is even hard to find examples of anti-establishment, factional progressive campaigns over the last half century. Mamdani, at thirty-three and only an elected official for four years, will arrive without the bevy of endorsements and institutional players that typically determine the course of primaries. From an ideological perspective, as far as anyone alive is concerned, he is sui generis.

First, I’ll explain why Zohran Mamdani will probably not be elected the next mayor of New York. Then, I will make a case for Mamdani’s potential—and why the Democratic Socialists in America, in particular, needed to support him.