Who are the principal leaders of the opposition to Donald Trump’s authoritarianism? It certainly doesn’t feel like the Democratic Party establishment these days. Watching Zohran Mamdani run for New York City mayor, it increasingly feels like the opposition’s leaders are the Left.

Mamdani held a rally with 13,000 supporters at Forest Hills Stadium, joined by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Sen. Bernie Sanders. In their speeches to the crowd, Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Mamdani argued that a vigorous defense of civil liberties and an aggressive economic populism are the antidote to Trump’s authoritarianism.

Nearly two weeks earlier, Mamdani held another mass rally in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. There he was introduced by New York attorney general Letitia James — her first public appearance since a federal indictment ordered by Trump, in clear retaliation for her past investigations into the president.

These are major national political figures who are at the forefront of opposition to the president, or in James’s case are at the heart of major test cases of how much Trump can get away with weaponizing the levers of government power. And they aren’t seeking party establishment figures to rally with as part of that opposition — they want to be on the campaign trail with Mamdani.

Last night, explaining how Trump had won the presidency again and even achieved a rightward swing in many New York City districts, Mamdani spoke about the voters his campaign heard from after the presidential election:

They told us they supported Donald Trump because they felt disconnected from a Democratic Party that had grown comfortable with mediocrity and gave its time only to those who gave millions. They told us that they felt abandoned by a party beholden to corporations which asked them for their votes after telling them only what it was against rather than presenting a vision of what it was for.

They told us they didn’t believe in a system anymore that did not even pretend to offer solutions to the defining challenge of their lives, the cost-of-living crisis. Rent was too expensive. So were groceries. So was childcare. So was taking the bus. And working two or three jobs still wasn’t enough.

Trump, for all his many flaws, had promised them an agenda that would put more money in their pockets and lower the cost of living. Donald Trump lied. It was up to us to deliver for the working people he left behind.

Over the eight months of the primary, we told New Yorkers how we intended to address that very same affordability crisis.

Mamdani, unlike the Democratic establishment, is offering a clear analysis of the party’s problems and providing a model of how to win working-class voters back from the Right.

The Trump administration and the GOP are now quite unpopular with the public. It’s little wonder why. They’ve unleashed National Guard troops on several cities and directed masked Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents to terrorize Americans and violate their rights with impunity; they have set up an irrational, ever-shifting tariff regime that is worsening an already bad cost-of-living crisis; and they are spending billions on tax cuts for the country’s richest while hacking away at the safety net.

Yet on the whole, the Democratic Party seems utterly incapable of behaving like a real opposition party. They mostly seem to be following James Carville’s advice to “roll over and play dead”; their government-shutdown gambit, after pressure from the Democratic base, is a welcome change of pace on that front, though they are not doing a great job at explaining why they are letting the government shut down.

The explanation for Democratic leaders’ passivity in the face of Trump’s authoritarianism is anyone’s guess, though perhaps this has to do with the difficulty of putting forward a message and a program that appeals to America’s working-class majority while the party is dominated by wealthy big-money donors and business interests.

By contrast, the United States’ prominent democratic socialist politicians are articulating a robust oppositional message as well as a positive vision of taking on the billionaires and tackling the cost-of-living crisis that has wide appeal.

Mamdani’s affordability-focused campaign for New York City mayor has caught fire among working-class New Yorkers. Meanwhile, Sanders and AOC have been barnstorming the country framing the fight against Trump as part of a larger fight against the oligarchic threat to democracy — tying ordinary Americans’ pressing pocketbook concerns to the authoritarianism and corruption of Trump and his ultrarich backers.

While Mamdani is still relatively unknown with the general public, AOC and especially Sanders are among the most popular politicians nationally. And research consistently finds strong support for the sort of economic populist messaging and policies that Sanders, AOC, and Mamdani are championing.

The national Democratic Party brand overall, however, is in the toilet. Gallup polling had the party’s favorability rating at a near-historic low last month, at 37 percent, even lower than the GOP’s dismal 40 percent. And in some critical swing states, the problem may be even worse.

Recent surveys of voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan by the Center for Working-Class Politics found that a candidate’s identifying as a Democrat suffered “a measurable vote loss tied to the party label itself. In states like Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, that penalty ranges from ten to sixteen points.”

The impotence and unpopularity of the Democrats, and the explosion of support and enthusiasm around Mamdani, might explain why some establishment leaders are getting on board with the mayoral candidate, however tepidly or reluctantly. New York governor Kathy Hochul is a case in point: she endorsed Mamdani in September and earlier this month endorsed his call for universal childcare, though she has continually opposed the increase in taxes on the rich and corporations that Mamdani wants to use to fund it.

Hochul’s endorsement of Mamdani led to a surreal moment at last night’s rally, when — not long after several of Mamdani’s democratic socialist comrades from the New York City Council and State Assembly took the stage, many of them decked out in matching red “Democratic Socialists of America” sweatshirts — the governor came out to address the crowd, along with Democratic state legislative leaders Carl Heastie and Andrea Stewart-Cousins. The audience did not give Hochul a warm reception: almost immediately, the crowd started breaking out into chants of “Tax the Rich.” (She eventually responded, “I can hear you.”) At one point, after mispronouncing the mayoral candidate’s name, the audience erupted into chants of “Mamdani.”

.@KathyHochul almost got booed off stage to chants of “TAX THE RICH”—& forced @ZohranKMamdani on stage early to calm the crowd.

During her speech, largely critical of DC, intermittent heckling culminated.

Then Mamdani came out, grabbed her hand, raised it & walked her out. pic.twitter.com/A8NzxTgO8S

— Bernadette Hogan (@bern_hogan) October 26, 2025

Eventually the heckling got so bad that Mamdani himself emerged to take Hochul’s hand and raise it with his, generating some applause before escorting her off the stage. The interaction seemed to have an impact: earlier today, Hochul expressed tentative openness to tax increases.

Hochul is no born-again progressive, as the hecklers rightly surmised. Yet her half-hearted embrace of Mamdani’s candidacy likely reflects a sense that, at least in New York, Mamdani’s coalition represents the future of the party, and that by hitching her wagon to his train — both by endorsing Mamdani and at least presenting herself as a potential partner in passing a wildly popular and life-changing policy like universal childcare — her own political fortunes could benefit from his ascendancy. Hochul senses which way the wind is blowing, and it’s not toward the party’s establishment.

Other prominent Democrats are taking a different tack. New York senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, for instance, have not endorsed Mamdani, even as chief rival Andrew Cuomo’s campaign has garnered the blessing of Trump and leans into vile Islamophobic attacks. Not long after Mamdani won the Democratic primary, in fact, Gillibrand took to the radio to falsely accuse Mamdani of “supporting global jihad.”

Their opposition to Mamdani is rooted in part in their staunch support for Israel: while Mamdani has condemned the genocide in Gaza and denied Israel’s right to exist as a state that enshrines racial or religious hierarchy, Gillibrand and Schumer have continued voting to send more US arms to Israel.

And it’s rooted in opposition to the core message of Mamdani’s campaign: that government ought to act aggressively to make life affordable for working-class New Yorkers, by expanding the public sector and taking on the oligarchy — a program big donors and corporate interests oppose.

The fecklessness of leaders like Schumer has created a void in Democratic Party leadership, into which figures like Mamdani, AOC, and Sanders have stepped to become de facto leaders of the anti-Trump opposition on the national stage. And as they garner more support from Democratic voters and independents, establishment figures will be increasingly faced with hard choices over how to relate to the party’s socialist or socialist-friendly wing.

None of this is to say that a complete left-wing takeover of the party is likely or imminent. Socialists and genuine progressives still represent only a tiny minority of Democratic caucuses in Congress and state legislatures, and the continued dominance of large-money donors and corporations in the party coalition pose a giant obstacle to any fundamental transformation of the party. Moreover, even fair-weather “allies” like Hochul will actually support a Mamdani-style agenda only if confronted by serious popular pressure and the threat of electoral consequences.

And New York City socialists like AOC and Mamdani will likely need to stitch together a coalition with a wide array of populist forces like Dan Osborn, the strike leader and independent Nebraska Senate candidate, who reject the Democratic label entirely and strike a different note on certain cultural issues. Such a coalition would transcend the bounds of the Democratic Party, as Sanders himself has suggested. These are considerable challenges for the Left.

But for now, it’s clear that the party establishment isn’t rising to the challenge of opposing Trump. The Left is.