When Zohran Won

A surreal and smashing victory

My new novel, Glass Century, is out now, and available in all formats. George Monaghan, a writer for the New Statesman, the leading magazine in the United Kingdom, declared that my novel is “big and ambitious and successful” and a “brings its full artistry even to throwaway descriptions of inessential moments.” Get it now and, if you like, rate on Goodreads.

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What else can be said? Zohran Mamdani obliterated Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, and this may have been one of the greatest victories for leftist candidates in the history of the United States of America.

This reads like hyperbole until you understand that more than one million people will have shown up for this Democratic primary. That’s five boroughs, myriad languages, every conceivable ethnic group, divergent ideologies, and all rungs on the class ladder. New York is not America, but it’s got, quite literally, every part of America. I am still, to an extent, attempting to comprehend what happened. Though I was bullish on Mamdani and highly critical of Cuomo—I’ve known Mamdani since 2018, and I wrote a book excoriating Cuomo’s record as governor—I did not foresee Mamdani dominating Cuomo so thoroughly. This is not only a historic upset but a historic thrashing. A Democratic dynasty was shattered. Bill Clinton and Jim Clyburn could not save Cuomo. Michael Bloomberg’s millions could not save Cuomo. An endless barrage of furious advertising on the television and radio for weeks on end could not save Cuomo. The New York Times editorial board could not save Cuomo. One city died last night and another was born.

Mamdani’s victory was stunning in its breadth. He won my home neighborhood of Bay Ridge, where he has, between two local campaigns, personally knocked on thousands of doors. He swept the heavily Latino precincts of Jackson Heights and Corona. He broke Cuomo in South Asian Richmond Hill. Despite the rightward drift of Chinese Democrats, he, as a proud socialist, won large chunks of Bensonhurst and Flushing. The gentrifier belts were his too, of course, but there can be no pablum dispensed about how a leftist won a low turnout election with the assistance of a small, highly-educated slice of the electorate. Mamdani won Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan, and even managed to lose conservative Staten Island to Cuomo by only nine points. He won the youth-dominated early vote and crushed Cuomo with the Election Day vote. They voted for Mamdani when it was foggy and unseasonably cool, and they voted for him when it was 104 degrees. This was a realignment election, the death of one coalition and the clear birth of another—a great victory for the counterculture.

Mamdani is now a leader of the American left, along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. Even with the scandal-scarred Eric Adams competing in the general election as an independent—and Cuomo, perhaps, still humoring his own independent run—Mamdani is the heavy favorite to become, at age thirty-four, the youngest mayor of New York in a century. Large labor unions will line up behind him, and he will consolidate Democratic voters against Adams. There is no precedent for a socialist leading New York, and progressives, for all the talk of the city’s overt liberalism, rarely do. Bill de Blasio was the exception, not the rule. Mamdani can hearken back to the populism of LaGuardia and the youthful reform spirit of Lindsay, but he is sui generis: a young Muslim, a political organizer, a former rapper. For the Democratic Socialists of America, this is a triumph beyond their wildest dreams. AOC won in a single House district. Sanders never won a presidential race. And Mamdani, unlike both of them, is cadre DSA, a proud member who has done a tremendous amount of organizing within the socialist ranks and counted himself as a leader of the socialists in Albany. This victory belongs to them above anyone else.

What will socialist governance, in practice, look like in New York? An ideal would be the “sewer socialism” that was wildly successful in Milwaukee in the first half of the twentieth century. Socialists there dominated City Hall, held a House seat, and won many local legislative races because they delivered durable public goods and managed a clean, effective municipality. Milwaukee socialists built out a world-class parks system and installed hundreds of drinking fountains. In contract to Chicago, dominated by Democratic machines, the Milwaukee socialists were remarkably free of scandal. They were notably non-corrupt in an era when cronyism and graft ran rampant. Coming off four years of Eric Adams, who oversaw the most openly corrupt mayoral administration in the modern history of New York, Mamdani will have a chance to win over critics by hiring intelligent, earnest agency bosses and deputy mayors who can make the municipal machinery work again. This is something both de Blasio and Bloomberg, for all their flaws, did very well. Between them, they appointed the best parks and transportation commissioners in America, and de Blasio empowered well-regarded bureaucrats like Tony Shorris and Kathryn Garcia to oversee large swaths of the government. Mamdani will not struggle to attract talent because there are a great number of ambitious, policy-oriented liberals and leftists who would want to work for an administration that seems so wide open. This is what the Cuomo backers never understood: the ex-governor is a notorious micromanager and publicity hound and will crush anyone who seems like a threat to him. He chased Andy Byford out of the MTA. Mamdani, conversely, may be able to find a Byford-like technocrat to oversee his DOT.

This will be the test for the American left. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have it easy; they are legislators, in charge of relatively small staffs. In a sprawling federal government, they have few tangible responsibilities. They don’t have to visit the families of slain cops or rush to the sites of deadly gas explosions. They don’t have to manage the demands of progressives in Greenpoint and Orthodox Jews in Midwood. Mamdani may, come January, have eight million constituents. The mayor of New York is both a glorious and brutal perch, blamed for forces beyond its remit and often tasked with the impossible. Outside of the White House, the mayor faces down America’s largest press corps. Many of these media outlets will be skeptical or outright hostile to a young socialist mayor. The New York Post will treat Mamdani as its greatest foil; they longed for Obama to be a Muslim socialist, but now they’ve found the genuine article. Any minor crime spike will be treated, by the tabloids and broadcast television, as a world-historical crisis. Any governing slip will be regarded as evidence of his profound inexperience. The power elite despises him, and will find any excuse, in the media or elsewhere, to cut down his mayoralty. This will be a war. Even in the general election, a super PAC might form to try to resuscitate Adams. Adams is calling up the wealthiest men in the world right now and telling them he is all that stands between Mamdani and City Hall.

At some point, the hyperbole will die down. Mamdani is pro-Palestine, but will strain to avoid foreign policy discussions as mayor. He did not run a mayoral campaign on BDS or anti-Zionism. He did not run a campaign on defunding the police, either. New York Jews will be safe under Mamdani because he is a savvy politician who understands he now must deliver for them in some fashion. He will take their meetings. The ultrawealthy who whine about hiked corporate tax rates must understand that taxes are up to the governor, not the mayor, and Kathy Hochul has already shot down the idea. The good news for Mamdani is that New York’s municipal budget is $115 billion and a nimble, aggressive mayor can drum up funding there for a few city-run grocery stores and, with help from the state, a childcare expansion. Free buses may cost a billion at best, which is small change for the MTA. Mamdani’s government could always kick cash into that initiative. Savings can be found by cutting out patronage within the city government and reforming the contracting process. Mamdani will have major decisions to make on education and policing—will Jessica Tisch remain as NYPD commissioner or would she choose to stay?—and he will encounter, as all executives do, significant tradeoffs as he weighs what policies to pursue. Since he cannot, as a mayor, abolish capitalism, the rich will be fine. Landlords who own rent-stabilized buildings may have to content themselves with slightly smaller profit margins. If they hate landlording so much, give tenants the opportunity to collectively purchase the buildings and become homeowners. The government can certainly help them do this.

On the national stage, there is much chatter about what this all means. Does it point the way forward for progressives? Is the Democratic Party shifting left? Will Republicans now have a new bogeyman to bash Democrats with, a brown man with a strange name? I am not, for now, as interested in those questions. But for anyone who wants to win an election—conservative, centrist, leftist, whatever—there are very simple lessons that Mamdani offers. We are, first and foremost, in an anti-institutional, neo-romantic age, and voters are deeply dissatisfied with the options before them. There is a staleness to much of what percolates at the top, in establishment and mainstream organisms. Donald Trump found success in subverting the old order, and the left never hunted up an effective counter. Authenticity is the watchword, and Mamdani has much of it. He is a happy warrior. It is not that he used social media; it’s that, in that social media, a viewer found both a man they wanted to spend time with and a man they believed in fully, worth thinking about in their waking hours—and a man, even, who was above them, who was deeply articulate and wore a suit and tie. A voter wants to look up, not down. In terms of brute politics, he made all the right moves, stressing economics and dodging the culture war. He met voters where they were, and his canvassers, forty thousand in number, met them on the doors. He had a message and stuck to it. The more than four hundred thousand Democrats who voted for Mamdani voted, in fact, for Mamdani, and not merely against Cuomo. It was an affirmative choice, a thrilling leap into the unknown. Cuomo, meanwhile, staggered forward like the dazed, entitled goliath he was, and he toppled over mighty quick. His obituary is written, and it won’t be revised. As Mamdani earned his fate, Cuomo earned his. Sometimes, justice does get served.