New York City politics can seem intensely local. Yet occasionally something happens here that transfixes the world. In 1886, the insurgent mayoral campaign of Henry George seemed to shake the foundations of power in the city, defeating the Republicans and coming close to beating the powerful Democratic machine. That George did so at the head of the recently created United Labor Party inspired Friedrich Engels to salute the creativity of the American masses – who on this ‘epoch-making day’ had contested the election as an independent political force. It seemed clear that the great commercial and industrial capitalists of the city had only prevailed through bribes, ballot stuffing and other forms of brazen cheating. Notwithstanding his reservations about George’s ‘confused’ and ‘deficient’ programme built around a ‘single-tax’, Engels was thus quite hopeful: ‘Where the bourgeoisie wages the struggle by such methods, the struggle comes to a decision rapidly, and if we in Europe do not hurry up the Americans will soon outdistance us.’
Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor represents the most concerted outsider challenge to the ruling order of the city since that time – an indication both of how venerable the quest for a socialist alternative to the party duopoly here has been ever since the relocation of the First International to New York in 1872, and of how rare the moments when it has achieved any kind of mainstream breakthrough. Unlike George, Mamdani made use of the existing party apparatus. Like many DSA cadres, he relied on the Working Families Party, founded in 1998 by disillusioned Democratic operatives and labour and nonprofit organizers, to launch a run in the Democratic primary. But the potential threat he represents is reminiscent of his Gilded Age predecessor, as is his tactical focus on the cost of living. With the field polarized around the issue of affordability, candidates running as credentialled progressives never gained traction, and the contest became a straight match-up between the left of the party and its right – taking the WFP itself by surprise, since its initial ambitions were merely for Mamdani to nudge their more seasoned and typical choice in comptroller Brad Lander to the left.
George entered the mayoral race as the star author of Progress and Poverty (1879), a radical tract which argued that the first went hand in hand with the second due to the monopolization of land, whose owners reaped most of the rewards of progress in the form of rising land values. Bearing a similar message about inequality in a city of even more obscene wealth disparities, Mamdani is perhaps just as far from the typical mayoral candidate. Born in Uganda in 1991 to Indian parents, he moved with them to the Upper West Side at age seven, when his father was hired to teach postcolonial studies in Anthropology at Columbia. His mother is the filmmaker Mira Nair. Cut from this haut-diasporic intellectual cloth, he founded a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Bowdoin in Maine before returning to the city to work as a housing councillor. Joining the DSA in 2017, he worked on several election campaigns, running for State Assembly himself in Astoria in 2020. He used his time in office to strengthen the activism and organizing of the local branches – going on hunger strike in a bid to get debt relief for cabbies in 2021 – while pushing legislation on renewables, ‘good-cause’ eviction and public transport.
Five years ago, the primary process worked more or less as intended. Low turnout and a fragmented centre left empowered the local bosses and fixers, who were able to deliver support to one of their own on the right: Brooklyn borough president, police officer and monstre sacré Eric Adams. This time, deploying a volunteer army of around 50,000, Mamdani marshalled a fund-raising, door-knocking and get-out-the-vote operation more akin to the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders than a municipal primary, which he in effect overwhelmed. Carried throughout by a slick social media campaign, the candidate was shown hurling himself with good-natured grace across the five boroughs – walking, taking public transit, or in a yellow cab. Before election day, Mamdani traversed Manhattan on foot – an echo of the George campaign’s ‘monster parade’, in which 30,000 workers marched a few days before the polls opened.
Andrew Cuomo, meanwhile, entered the race enshrouded in a cloak of grim inevitability. Dubbed a ‘comeback’ by the press, there was more than a whiff of ‘fallback’ about his seeking an office he had persistently sought to diminish in his eleven years as governor. His spats with the then-mayor Bill de Blasio, presented as a personal feud, in fact turned on control of city resources, which Cuomo tried to rein in via deals in the State Senate. This had real consequences for city services, in cuts to Medicaid, public schools, funding for the MTA and the rollout of universal pre-K. His disdain for the sordid realities of the metropolis he had presided over from a safe distance in Albany came through in his appearances: tight-lipped at temples, churches, union and VFW halls, with no questions from the press.
Cuomo not only embodies a kind of holy trinity of the Democratic elite: scion of a political dynasty as the son of the former governor Mario, he married tumultuously into another via his first wife Kerry Kennedy before being made protégé of a third as the youngest member of the cabinet of Bill Clinton. He also symbolizes the cynicism and rot of the party managers and funders. By one count, almost half of the officials endorsing him had called for his head four years ago over sexual harassment allegations and a cover-up of nursing home deaths during COVID (the supposed deft handling of which earned him a $5 million advance for a book his staffers wrote). This gargoyle with feet of clay was the clear choice of Wall Street: Bloomberg, Ackman, Griffin, Loeb and a dozen other billionaires, according to Forbes, channelled $25 million into his PACs alone.
It took political will to escape the inevitable, and a real campaign to expose the strangely ersatz one helmed by the former governor. Here, for all of his reassuring politeness, Mamdani showed mettle by pointedly attacking his rival’s record; a parallel effort, to which other candidates signed on, simply instructed New Yorkers not to rank Cuomo. Mamdani also registered a more significant if provisional achievement. So far, he has shown the ability to weather the charge of anti-Semitism that has become the main weapon used across the West to disqualify the left as unfit for office wherever it has dared to call for justice for the Palestinians. In this centre of Jewish life that has seen the fiercest clampdown on pro-Palestine speech of any state in the Union, using this playbook against a practising Muslim was viewed as a safe bet. It has guided the calculations of the entire Democratic establishment – from the governor’s legal ‘probe’ into anti-Semitism at CUNY to the shameful conduct of Mayor Adams, who pushed for the NYPD to storm the encampment at Columbia and ordered city agencies to cooperate with the ICE agents who later kidnapped one of its leaders, Mahmoud Khalil.
Here Mamdani’s style of earnest engagement mixed with intransigence on essential points seems to have worked to blunt the assault. On the one hand, he offered constant reassurance – in the Forward and Yiddish-language Der Blatt, at synagogues like B’nai Jeshurun – that he would ‘protect’ and ‘listen’ to Jews and take steps to combat anti-Semitism. On the other, he developed – with some prevarications – straightforward responses to the relentless questions posed as to whether Israel had a ‘right to exist’: it did, he said, as a ‘state with equal rights’, which obeyed ‘international law’; he reiterated his support for BDS, without saying if he would apply it; and stood by his description of Israeli apartheid and genocide. At their most effective, these answers exposed the hypocrisy of the questioners and the brain-dead conformity of his opponents. Asked at a live debate where they would go as mayor on their first trip abroad, most candidates rushed to assure viewers they would be on the next El Al flight out of JFK; Mamdani said he would stay put to work on the problems facing New York.
But Mamdani’s astute handling of this issue was probably of secondary importance. For it is hard to shake the impression that the main reason the attacks against him did not work is that Democratic voters (70 percent of whom now have an ‘unfavourable view of Israel’) were actually consulted. Given the chance, they chose the clear and consistent supporter of Palestinian rights; and this included Jews, who showed they are good for more than being pandered to. Cuomo won 30 percent of their votes in round one, coming out ahead with the ultra-conservative Zionist Hasids and Orthodox as well as bastions on the Upper East Side, but Mamdani took second place with 20 percent.
The effects of this unusual campaign – at once more ideological and supremely well-organized on a volunteer basis – were visible well before election day. Turnout for early voting doubled from 2021 to 400,000. By then, several polls showing Mamdani gaining on Cuomo were capped by a final one that saw him winning in the seventh round of ranked choice voting, 52 to 48 percent. In the end, Mamdani’s lead of nearly eight points was so large after just one round that he could declare victory at around midnight, as the first choice of almost 44 percent of voters. What the polling had plainly missed was the motivation of young people. The three largest voter blocs were 25-29, 30-34 and 35-39 year olds (the participation of 18-24 year olds was not so far behind) – a distribution that defies obvious precedent. In the parts of the city where many still – just – manage to live, they delivered Mamdani whopping margins: in Williamsburg (+27), Bedford-Stuyvesant (+43), Astoria (+52), and Bushwick (+66), as against generally much smaller ones for Cuomo in his strongholds.
Beyond this clear generational dynamic, a debate has ensued over the class, racial and ethnic character of the Mamdani coalition. Establishment commentators have emphasized their affluence, with an implied wag of the finger at bookish leftists, out of touch with the lived reality of poorer blacks and ethnic whites. It is true that Mamdani failed to win over older black voters in neighbourhoods like Canarsie, while winning precincts with a majority of college graduates and middle and higher household earners in leafy Fort Greene or Clinton Hill. But this misses the point: in contrast to past ‘progressives’, his appeal was not limited to these layers. Mamdani won the youth vote across racial and ethnic lines with an even stronger showing among minorities than whites. He rallied South Asians in Jamaica and Kensington, won in the Chinatowns of Flushing and lower Manhattan, in Hispanic Washington Heights and where these populations rub shoulders in Jackson Heights and Sunset Park. These and other areas Mamdani won are working-class New York: home to chefs and busboys, delivery drivers, construction, hotel and airport workers; immigrants and their children who keep its service-dominated economy running. Reliance on public transport and renting seems to have been more predictive of voting preferences than education; Mamdani carried by 14 points precincts with a majority of renters, in a city where a third of these send half their pay to landlords, and fully half are defined as ‘rent-burdened’.
Mamdani’s emphasis on affordability and public services stitched together whiter and gentrifying zones with ethnic enclaves. According to one regression analysis, there was ‘no significant class gradient in Mamdani’s vote share’, and a negative correlation between it and income above $100,000 – meaning that in a city where median household income is $76,000, he won large shares of the lower and ‘middling classes’. The extent of his transversal appeal only grew when the full rankings were revealed, showing that Mamdani earned the lower choice votes of other candidates, including his ally Brad Lander, and pulled ahead of Cuomo by 12 points.
What prospects for this democratic socialist to take power in November, and to implement his programme if he does? In terms of the smears – which ranged from vicious to ridiculous: pro-Cuomo mailers lengthening Mamdani’s beard were a bit of both – the primary was clearly a dress rehearsal. The ruling class nationally is now laser-focused on Mamdani. New York is a citadel of their financial and media power, with which they will try to damage him: expect redoubled efforts to weave the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the war on terror years with HUAC-style witch hunts, dirty tricks and accusations of anti-Semitism. Kirsten Gillibrand, a cipher of the tobacco lobby from Albany, first elevated to her position as a New York senator, previewed one line of attack from Democratic leadership – refusing to back Mamdani on account of his ‘references to global jihad’ on WNYC. Rudy Giuliani, the impecunious ex-mayor-in-MAGA-land, offered another at a meeting of Trump’s new Homeland Security Advisory Council – with threats to arrest this ‘combination of an Islamic extremist and a communist’ should he block the city to ICE.
The real limit for Mamdani’s opponents is the structure of the general election itself: all deadlines to file have passed, and a write-in candidate faces bigger hurdles here than in Buffalo, where in 2021 the DSA’s India Walton won the primary only to lose in the general against the former mayor. Cuomo filed – and could run – as an independent, but his defeat in June was so decisive that he has so far ruled it out. In a display of his instinct for survival – shameless to the end – Eric Adams had plans to run on an ‘End Anti-Semitism’ line. But his mayoralty is so mired in corruption and scandal – his federal indictment on charges of bribery, conspiracy, wire fraud and soliciting, were only halted by a quid-pro-quo with Trump – that backing him would be a risky move for the Democratic mainstream.
Mamdani emphasized the headline-grabbing elements of his platform during the election: free and fast buses; a rent freeze for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments; a pilot programme of five city-owned grocery stores, to combat price-gouging and union-busting by the big chains; universal childcare; and a 2 percent tax on the incomes of the rich to pay for most of it, starting at $1 million. The perceived ambition of all this depends in part on how you periodize it: much can be seen as an extension of de Blasio’s policy platform, whose push for universal pre-K has been praised by Mamdani as a precedent for his free childcare plan – an affinity the Times noted with distaste in its anti-endorsement. Mamdani’s housing plan commits to constructing 200,000 affordable units over ten years. But although it pledges to put ‘the public sector in the driving seat’, it mainly consists of tweaks to existing tools related to zoning, planning review, subsidies, incentives and rules for building on city-owned land. As compared to the mayoralties of La Guardia, Wagner or even Lindsay, Mamdani’s vision is quite modest. If his feat is in many ways more impressive than that of George, coming at a low ebb for organized labour rather than in the midst of the Great Upheaval that buoyed the latter, the democratic socialism it envisions also reflects that altered context. The decision to run as – rather than against – the Democrats was a pragmatic one; inevitably, it entails a compromise with the outer limits of that party in its present form. In this new Gilded Age, business acts with a still greater sense of entitlement over the city it largely owns, and is unused to challenges at this scale to its perquisites.
There are likely two reasons for Mamdani’s relative moderation. The first may be strategic: to delay open confrontation with the best organized and most powerful of all capitalist interests in the city – the real estate sector, via the Association for a Better New York, the Real Estate Board, the Apartment Association. The second is that so much of this agenda depends on Albany. The power of the mayor of New York is more tightly constrained than that of perhaps any other big city in the country by the state government that overhangs it. At $115 billion, the city budget is larger than that of all but a few states, and Mamdani will be able to fund some of his plans by playing with the allocations inside it. But the mayor and council control precious few of the taxes that generate revenues. The property tax generates about a third of what the city takes in – but even this can only be raised based on a formula derived from state law. Governor Kathy Hochul has already voiced her opposition to the entire basis of the Mamdani program – a modest millionaire tax and rise in corporate tax – on the grounds that New York cannot afford to lose any more of its monied citizens to Palm Beach. In other words, the scenes of de Blasio begging at the Statehouse on ‘tin cup days’ were not an anomaly of the Cuomo years. Under Mamdani, they are bound to be replayed. For this is in fact the central mechanism for containing the social demands of the residents of America’s ‘capital of capital’ – whose unruliness (that is, its potential ability to hold those in power accountable at local level) has long been a serious concern for the glassed-in titans of Wall Street.
Until the mid-twentieth century, finance had to share the tip of Manhattan with the busiest docks in the world, which represented the largest concentration of industrial workers in the US, a quarter of whom were unionized. In her gripping book Fear City, Kim Phillips-Fein describes the decline of this force as a background condition to the bankruptcy crisis of 1975, when Albany stepped in to broker deals with the banks to restart the market for municipal bonds, effecting a power grab that has left the city in a kind of eternal receivership. The narrative used to justify this setup is of a profligate and poorly managed metropolis whose thirst for welfare and public services is so insatiable that it is constantly on the verge of disaster. The aim behind it is to prevent any resurgence of the ‘homegrown version of social democracy that made life in New York unlike any place else in the US’ in the mid-century. Luckily, Albany is there, 150 miles away, to guard against backsliding. Should he be elected in November, Mamdani will face its full force. In fact, given the difficulty of finding a suitable alternative to stop him, the Democrats and their donors might be wiser to wait: let Mamdani cross the finish line, then work to block his agenda in office, via the governor and legislature – disillusioning his supporters and discrediting his programme in a blow to the entire conceit of municipal socialism.
These are the stakes, whatever else Mamdani’s victory may mean for national politics. Yet this is not a counsel of despair. Mamdani and the DSA can respond by politicizing the upstate-downstate relationship in a way that has not been seen for half a century. It is not just a matter of building coalitions in Albany, as Mamdani has pledged to do. A new city charter and a state constitutional convention would be a natural complement to the comprehensive urban plan which Mamdani hopes to realize, and which New York has always lacked. That too is a remnant from the days of Tammany Hall and the mayoral runs of Henry George, when the cry of exasperated local politicians, inspired by the Irish, rang out as Home Rule for New York.
Read on: Mike Davis, ‘The Barren Marriage of American Labour and the Democratic Party’, NLR I/24.