The Meaning of Zohran Mamdani's NYC Win

Zohran Mamdani soared to victory in New York City last night.

Propelled by a wave of populist fervor, the AOC-ally put to use the same playbook that she and Jasmine Crockett have been perfecting - drawing a strong, economic populist contrast with their conservative opponents.

Mamdami stomped Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic Primary. Because Brad Lander, who came in third, campaigned closely with Mamdami in the ranked-choice contest, Landers’ second round voters are unlikely to help the more conservative Cuomo. Cuomo has conceded the primary to Mamdami.

The left’s answer to the Trump era isn’t corporate centrism. It is progressive populism.

This was obvious all along. Centrist policy is extremely unpopular, and has been for a long time. The collapse of the Romney wing of the Republican Party should have made it obvious to everyone that a Democratic party politics built on preserving billionaire supremacy was a path to nowhere.

Why do people get confused about this? Often, I think, it is because voters will say they like it when people are “moderate” and they might mutter something about “both sides” being “extreme.”

But political data gurus will tell you it turns out that these self-styled moderates don’t really hold centrist values. They, like most of us, hold a mix of beliefs, some that might be described as left, some conservative, some centrist, and so on. The notion that —in an age of populism—centrist policy will capture this wildly varying group is just a little bit nuts.

I’ll admit, when people prognosticate too hard about the meaning of an election loss, I’m often skeptical (irony noted, as I’m doing that here!) and you should be too. The conclusion of the author is almost always that their party would be more successful if they just grabbed onto ideas that are—SURPRISE—more like the author’s ideas. I strongly suspected after the Trump win in 2024, that the path to success wasn’t to tack to the center, it was AOC style populism. But I didn’t trumpet that too hard, because I recognized this confirmation-biased pattern in myself. Instead, I kept my prognosticating where I had a deeper grasp of the numbers (locally).

But even before the NYC race, the fight was framed as a competition between cop-besotted coddlers of the tax cutting class, and populists fighting to contain a cost of living crisis that has spiraled out of control.

Last, night, even centrist talking heads saw the writing on the wall. Sandeep Kaushik, of Seattle Nice fame, put it well:

“Cuomo is a deeply flawed candidate who ran a crap campaign, but it’s also true that his defeat, despite the millions poured in to back him, is glaring sign that the old neoliberal corporatist establishment in the party is done.”

(Be still my beating heart!)

Granted, Kaushik went on to imply that Mamdami is promising fairies and rainbows and that disillusionment from his inevitable failure means we end up with JD Vance as President in 2028. (These are the kinds of indefensibly over-determined predictions I’m talking about!)

I’m particularly curious to see the pattern among young, working class nonwhite voters in November who bolted to Trump last year. Trump’s numbers with these folks have softened notably. Still, while Mamdani’s coalition seems multi-class and multi-racial, it is interesting, for instance, that more middle class Black areas of NYC did vote Cuomo. Will left-wing populism win back the more right-leaning young Black and Latino men when a Republican is on the ballot? What if Cuomo makes good on his spiteful promise to run as an independent? These remain to be seen.

Incumbency and Establishment Association Still Suck

Like Bruce Harrell hanging out in Bellevue for a few years, Cuomo tried to paint himself as an outsider. But this is not 2021 and NYC voters saw through the BS this time that Seattle missed three and a half years ago. The establishment - from Bill Clinton, to corporations, to some of New York’s bigger labor leaders (undoubtedly not because of excitement among members, but a blinkered view among political directors), to politicians representing everything wrong with yesterday’s politics —Cuomo brought out all the usual suspects.

And the people weren’t having it. Anti-incumbency is one of the most powerful forces bringing rich-world governments down around the world. (Granted, Trump is so bad he created a rebound effect, saving left-leaning governments in Canada and Australia already!) People nevertheless have strong “throw the bums out” feels.

“Defund is Dead” is A Dumb, Dead Message

The defund movement has been dead for quite some time. It has no prospect of going anywhere. But politicians like Seattle’s Rob Saka gleefully beat that dead horse because they think the populace is—like them—still living in 2021. So they are totally out of touch with the explosive cost of living crisis and the threat from the Trump administration. With the national crime wave having ebbed, politicians peddling Fox-news style fear and promises of insanely impractical increases in police presence are not capturing the public’s imagination this time around.

Democrats Don’t Want Leaders Who Disrespect Women

Cuomo created what the DOJ has called a “sexually hostile” workplace, that protected the powerful over the interests of those who were harmed. (Sound familiar, Seattle voters?) This, and his cover-up of covid-era nursing home deaths forced him to resign from office. When handsy older men like Bill Clinton stepped in to support him, it didn’t help.

Corporate and Billionaire Backing Backfired

This is familiar. In Seattle, we’ve seen the same pattern. In February, when Amazon put up money to stop funding for social housing in Seattle, a race that was polling neck and neck flipped to a highly progressive result. Even in 2023 when big money outspent left leaning support by insane margins, candidates who emphasized this disparity got mileage out of the yucky cashs. It was an 11-point backlash-against-progressives year, and while I didn’t win my own race, I have long believed that one of the reasons I outperformed the average swing by 13 points was because I emphasized the wealthy, corporate, and Republican money flowing to my opponent. That almost certainly helped me then, and it seems to have helped Mamdani here.

Just like Donald Trump’s biggest Washington backer maxed out to Maritza Rivera and for Bruce Harrell, and made big contributions to their PACs - so too did the notorious Bill Ackman cough up for Cuomo. People don’t like it when rightwing rich people and corporations try to buy elections and put Dems in their pocket. Highlighting that helps progressive candidates.

“Abundance” is popular.

Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein have started a conversation among elites about the need for Democrats to push an “Abundance” agenda. While I disagree with some of their framing in terms of the philosophical essence of abundance and the rhetorical strategy for putting it to political use—the abundance agenda is basically the stuff I ran my own campaign on and continue to fight for (think, lots more housing and trains, getting rid of dumb roadblocks). Mamdami went on mainstream podcasts and more or less indicated that he is “abundance-pilled.” While his actually policy positions aren’t a perfect abundance wonk’s dream, there is some substantial overlap, and this does confirm something I’ve been pushing with national abundance folks for a while - that the abundance agenda is comfortable with (dare I say, the best fit for) leftwing populists.

Unique Alliances

One of the most fun and interesting parts of this campaign has been to watch the bromance between Mamdani and the more moderate Lander. While much of this is due to the incentives of ranked-choice-voting, there is something delightful about the progressive and the mainstreamer linking up to box out the icky centrist. I’d love to see more of this.

One wonders in Seattle - will Katie Wilson and Joe Mallahan do something similar to try to push out Harrell? Perhaps Nathan Rouse, Rory O’Sullivan and Erika Evans against Ann Davison It isn’t a panacea - Maren Costa’s competitors, including the moderates, all endorsed her in the primary against Rob Saka in 2023 and he still won because of the larger structural forces at play that year.

But you gotta admit, this kind of cooperation is sure good look.

Seattle Implications: Bruce Harrell Is in Trouble

Speaking of Seattle - our establishment grossly misread the moment.

I have argued since early December that we are in a new political era, and that Harrell is vulnerable. The signs have all been there - incumbent backlash, Alexis Rinck’s primary numbers, Trump’s election, the social housing initiative’s blowout results after Harrell going hard against it while backed by a big spend from the Chamber, bad poll numbers for Harrell and worse poll numbers when he is put against his competitor.

The blasé approach to Bruce-as-inevitable was not only a blinkered misreading of the moment, but it squandered a chance to have a highly competitive primary to maximize our chance of replacing him. (Sound familiar?). Right now too many people are also blowing their chance to help Bruce’ biggest competitor - Katie Wilson. (By the way, I sent her my democracy vouchers. It takes like three minutes and you don’t need to know where they are. You should too!)

Still, New York shows there is time to fix this, and that even if the establishment never comes around, Wilson has a shot. It’s time to roll up our sleeves!

(The same stupid thing happened with South King County Congressman Adam Smith. He is beatable, and a Teresa Mosqueda or Girmay Zahilay could crush him. Instead Kshama Sawant will try, fail, and give centrist agitators a strawperson to scare people with. Let’s hope someone else steps up).

The parallels between Cuomo are Harrell are many 

Just in case you didn’t notice, I thought I’d help by pointing that Harrell has much in common with Cuomo:

-Both are backed by billionaire and corporate interests
-Both are preening and insecure, making over-the-top-performances to prove their masculinity
-Both have long careers, though Cuomo had big accomplishments; Bruce does not
-Both have created hostile workplaces for women
-Both favored cutting social spending to fork out tons of money to try to put way more cops on the street than are actually hire-able
-Both have scandals the media covers, but blithely skims over when talking about the candidate outside that story itself 

What about Sara Nelson?

Seattle City Councilmember Sara Nelson is, of course, too right wing for even Harrell. She is extremely unpopular and has not gathered the kind of establishment Dem support that Harrell has. Granted, her opponent is not running a populist campaign, so it’s hard to draw clear parallels between the NYC contest and this one. But the fact that Seattle is a Democratic city and Nelson’s big backers are similar to Cuomo’s doesn’t bode well for her. (Fun fact, DoorDash’s lobbyist wrote Nelson’s signature legislation to cut minimum wage for delivery drivers and it went down in flames - DoorDash also made a splash about endorsing Cuomo).

I’ll close with my favorite take of the night. It comes from Derek Young, the former Pierce County Councilmember:

Appendix: A note on how NYC compares to other big cities.

Although New York City is much bluer than the nation as a whole, it is huge, and its recent vote patterns aren’t unusually blue for big and biggish cities.

Only 70% of New Yorkers voted for Harris over Trump. Seattle was closer to 87%, but Seattle is a tiny rich enclave whereas NYC is more like an amalgamation of cities that would include the rest of King County. King County is thus probably a closer comparison, and it voted for Harris at a (still a bit bluer) 74%. Cook County (which is Chicago plus suburbs) was similar. Austin and its suburb sit in Travis County, and Atlanta and it burbs are in Fulton County. Harris won 68% and 71% in each. Los Angeles County? 65%. Denver County, which is really just the city and no suburbs? 77%. You get the idea.

New York City can hardly be written off as an outlier when it comes to urban areas.