The most significant thing about Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York City Democratic primary last night might be that it’s living proof good things can happen — that the villains don’t always win, that the world is not just destined to get worse and worse, and that things can genuinely change for the better; most important, that it can all happen because the power of ordinary people coming together can make it so.

It has not felt that way for a while. Donald Trump’s shock win in 2016, coupled with Bernie Sanders’s crushing defeat in the 2020 primary, conditioned many on the broad left, even if they might not admit it, to believe the world was simply stuck on an inevitable slide toward darkness. The past eight months didn’t change this prognosis, as Trump not only won back the White House but proceeded to carry out a far more extreme, chaotic, and deliberately cruel agenda than anything we had seen in his first term and than we’d arguably seen in decades of US history. As Election Day in New York City neared, Trump appeared set to plunge the country into another disastrous war in the Middle East, this time with Iran — you can’t get much darker than that.

Mamdani’s landslide victory over former New York governor Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday — so emphatic that Cuomo didn’t even wait for the ranked votes to be counted before he conceded — is a repudiation of those past eight months by the biggest city in the country.

Mamdani is everything that Trump has demonized, insulted, and targeted for state repression, contained in one single person: he’s an immigrant, dark-skinned, Muslim, and a socialist. Democratic politicians like to talk about “resistance,” but how many of them have done what Mamdani did this past March, physically confronting border czar Tom Homan at a protest against the administration’s repression of pro-Palestinian immigrants, shouting, “How many more New Yorkers will you detain? . . . Do you believe in the First Amendment?”

Mamdani may be the anti-Trump, but his victory is a distinctly Trump-like one. Just like the Republican president in 2016, Mamdani overcame a more experienced opponent, his own party establishment, a uniformly hostile media, polls that consistently showed him losing, and a gargantuan amount of money spent against him. Cuomo’s super PAC alone, the biggest in mayoral campaign history, raised $25 million to spend against Mamdani, and that tower of cash paid for negative ads that ran nonstop in the run-up to Election Day, as well as a flood of defamatory mailers.

Unlike Trump, Mamdani also weathered what was probably the most scurrilous and bigoted smear campaign against a candidate with national attention since Barack Obama. In 2008, Obama struggled to shake the “accusation” that he was a Muslim and a socialist. Mamdani actually is both, and Cuomo’s machine wasted no time or money fearmongering about it: darkening and lengthening his beard in a mailer, ceaselessly intimating or outright charging he was an antisemite, and Cuomo himself continually mispronouncing his name in a gesture of deliberate disrespect. (He’s not the first establishment candidate to try that move against a socialist who delivered a mayoral race upset).

New York’s decision to elect Mamdani is a repudiation of not just this repellent campaign, but of an institutional Islamophobia and anti-Arab bigotry that has skyrocketed over the past twenty months and that has arguably had a hold over the country this whole century. This has seen not just regular, casual calls for mass violence from political figures and celebrities that go barely remarked upon but actual hate crimes against Muslims and Arabs or those who are perceived to be. That includes Mamdani himself, who received death threats in the home stretch of the campaign as the Cuomo side’s demonization campaign reached fever pitch.

As we speak, the US government has in place a Muslim ban in all but name that’s far broader than Trump’s original one; it is in the middle of a campaign of targeting specifically Middle Eastern and Muslim people for deportation; and not only just launched yet another regime change operation against the Muslim-majority country of Iran but is also facilitating an ongoing genocide against a mostly Muslim Arab population in Gaza. Mamdani’s opponent, incidentally, had been serving on the legal team of the vicious war criminal responsible for that Washington-backed campaign of mass murder, a scandal that didn’t register even as a mild controversy in the election.

If Mamdani goes on to win the general, he won’t just become the first Muslim mayor in New York City’s history in the midst of this explosion of bigotry. He’ll be a Muslim mayor elected only fifteen years after Muslims faced an onslaught of widespread suspicion and fear: the start of the 2010s saw the revelation of the New York Police Department’s shocking spying on the city’s Muslims and mosques, as well as the absurd and racist “Ground Zero Mosque” fiasco, and the years before and since saw federal informants frequently target Muslim men for entrapment in trumped-up terrorism cases.

And as a candidate who fully embraced his socialism, Mamdani points the way forward for not just left politics more generally but the Democratic Party whose candidacy he ran for.

Mamdani ran the kind of race Kamala Harris should have run in 2024: yes, he talked about the dangers of Trump and his opponent’s scandals, but he also relentlessly brought conversations back to his core issue of unaffordability, which also happens to be the core issue of most voters. It also helped that, unlike either Democratic candidate in 2024, the charismatic Mamdani was capable of regularly appearing in public and doing interviews, and wasn’t afraid of going into unscripted interactions or wading into hostile territory.

But it wasn’t just that he talked about affordability. He had bold ideas for how to actually tackle it, ideas that went well beyond the small-bore zoning changes and deregulatory agenda that the Democrats’ neoliberal wing has spent the past six months insisting is the way forward.

If you followed the race at all, you can probably recite these off by heart: a rent freeze, universal childcare, free buses, affordable housing, city-owned grocery stores that won’t price gouge their customers — all ideas that were jumped on to attack him as unrealistic, inexperienced, anti-business, or a pie-in-the-sky dreamer, attacks that fell flat on their face last night.

These are not necessarily socialist policies. In fact, half a century or more ago, they would have just been called mainstream, New Deal Democrat ideas. But in this era of degraded, corporate liberalism, it’s not a coincidence that only the socialist candidate made a full-throated case for what used to be liberalism’s bread and butter, and that hundreds of thousands of Democratic-voting New Yorkers who may not necessarily consider themselves socialists liked the way they sounded.

The Democratic Party has spent the months since Trump’s victory throwing up its hands and asking, “Why us?” Why is the Democratic brand toxic, why does the public find the party unappealing, why are young people and working-class voters of all races uninspired and moving away from the party, why don’t young men want to vote for it? They’ve resorted to laughable boondoggles like spending $20 million to study the “syntax, language, and content” that young men like, or to raise millions more to start podcasts like the ones that gave Trump an electoral boost last year.

Two of those podcasters — radio host Charlemagne tha God and comedian Andrew Schulz, who voted for Trump and has complained about drifting away from the Democratic Party — had a conversation about exactly this just weeks ago, when Charlemagne said, exasperated, “There’s no way we live in a society that claims to be the most wealthy society on the planet and we can’t fix homelessness.”

“Well in that case, we — Democrats’ pivot should be to go more socialist,” someone behind the camera replied.

“Yeah,” said Schulz. “Yes, they should. That’s what everybody’s saying.”

“And that’s Bernie [Sanders],” said the man behind the camera.

Mamdani’s campaign did exactly this: it was a Bernie Sanders campaign at the municipal level, ruthlessly disciplined but uncompromising, socially progressive, yet relentlessly focused on bread-and-butter issues with bold, inspiring ideas no other politician would dare run on, largely because of their reliance on corporate money.

The result was a Democratic campaign that inspired and won nearly all the demographic groups the party has been struggling with: not just young people, tens of thousands of whom pounded the pavement in droves to bring people out to vote for him, but young men too. And precinct data shows Mamdani won in heavily Latino, Asian, and Middle Eastern areas, and did better in majority-black districts than polling had indicated he would. He attracted the organic support of young, popular podcasters and other celebrities — and unlike the Harris campaign, didn’t have to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Naturally, seeing an example of exactly the kind of campaign and candidate they’ve been desperate to find, the Democratic establishment did everything they could to crush it. The party may well find in the coming years that it was to its own benefit that it failed.