From Protest Candidate to Mayor of the Largest City in the US

In a recent interview, Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara said that he was definitely a supporter of Mamdani’s run for mayor “from the beginning.” (Little wonder, considering Mamdani’s long history as a Jacobin contributor!) But Sunkara admitted that he hadn’t really thought that Mamdani, who started the primary polling at 1 percent, would win. He thought of the race “more as a pressure campaign — to bring cost-of-living concerns to the forefront of the race.”

Now, Mamdani is New York City’s mayor-elect. What happened?

Two things. First, Mamdani slowly but surely won over more and more of the existing electorate. Second, he expanded the electorate in remarkable ways. In the primary, turnout was higher than it had been for more than a decade. When former governor Andrew Cuomo, who had the backing of the entire national Democratic establishment, refused to bow to the will of Democratic voters and challenged Mamdani as an independent, turnout for the general election was higher than it had been since 1969.

Mamdani pulled it off by laser-focusing on affordability and centering the ways a democratic socialist agenda could help just about everyone except billionaire developers and their allies. New Yorkers who might not otherwise turn out to vote were excited by his vision of a city that was more livable for the working class.

What the F—, Chuck?

In the end, Mamdani handily beat the combined vote totals of the former governor and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa. Almost two weeks later, pollsters are still poring over all the information they can get their hands on about how different subcategories of voters in different boroughs and neighborhoods cast their ballots.

There’s one New York City voter, though, who’s steadfastly refused to come clean about his vote: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Even as many other centrist Democrats fell into line, holding their noses and endorsing the socialist upstart, Schumer flatly refused to back his party’s nominee. When it was all over, he would only say, “Look, I voted and I look forward to working with the next mayor to help New York City.”

Listeners were left to guess who he’d voted for. Suffice to say that the edict to “vote blue no matter who” was out the window.

A week later, the shutdown fight Schumer had been leading crumbled. Polls consistently showed that the public was blaming the Republicans for the disruptions. Nevertheless, a critical mass of Democrats folded.

The original impasse was about continuing health insurance subsidies at their current level. Democrats refused to back a Continuing Resolution that would have kept the subsidies in place, rightly pointing out that the effect of taking them away would be that premiums would double or even triple for many Americans. Republicans refused to budge or negotiate, and we got the longest government shutdown in American history. Predictably, the Trump administration used it as an excuse to try to inflict the maximum possible level of social cruelty, going after SNAP benefits that help almost forty-two million low-income Americans buy food.

Senate Democrats held firm, though. As Bernie Sanders pointed out at the beginning of the shutdown, the combination of letting the cost of buying health insurance on state exchanges skyrocket by pulling away the subsidies and the Medicaid cuts already made by Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” would lead to fifty thousand more preventable deaths every year. For a while, even most of his centrist colleagues seemed to agree that this was a fight worth waging. . . until they didn’t.

Two Senate Democrats, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, had never been on board with the party’s shutdown strategy. This week, six more Democratic yes votes joined Masto and Fetterman, and Trump had his victory. Remarkably, one of those six was Schumer’s closest lieutenant, Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin. Many observers, like Congressman Ro Khanna (D-CA), have been convinced that the defectors wouldn’t have acted without Schumer’s approval. Notably, none of the six are facing reelection next year, so they were all well positioned to take the political hit.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, though, even if we assume for the sake of argument that Schumer’s private and public positions were in alignment, that just speaks to his worthlessness as a leader of the opposition at one of the most fraught moments in American history. According to Durbin (who loyally denies coordination), Schumer didn’t even try to talk him out of voting yes. Instead, Durbin said, Schumer “was a gentleman about it.”

Even on the most generous interpretation of Schumer’s actions, then, he feels unbound by normal rules of party loyalty when a leftist is nominated for mayor in his hometown, but he’s a “gentleman” when health insurance is about to become financially unattainable for many of his constituents.

Which Way, Democrats?

When Trump first came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for the presidency in 2015, he positioned himself as a “populist” attuned to the concerns and frustrations of ordinary Americans neglected by elites. His first term made a mockery of that idea, but after four years of Joe Biden’s deeply uninspiring presidency, many voters were prepared to give him another chance.

In the 2024 campaign, Trump once again identified very real social problems and offered demagogic pseudo-solutions. Did you lose your job? Blame immigrants. Does it feel like our society’s communal bonds are coming apart at the seams? Blame “radical leftists” for steering us away from traditional values. Did someone you love die in a fentanyl overdose? Ignore the poverty, inequality, and social misery fueling the epidemic of drug abuse. Just attack Mexico and bomb the cartels.

The decade that’s passed since Trump first came down that escalator has been one long demonstration of the inadequacy of Schumer-style centrism as a counterweight to Trump’s pseudo-populist authoritarianism. Sometimes the Democratic establishment wins a temporary victory or two, but in the long run, they keep losing ground. They don’t inspire anyone because they have no real vision of how anything can be better.

What Zohran Mamdani pulled off in New York points the way toward an entirely different possibility. He clearly identified the power of the billionaire class as the obstacle that needed to be overcome, and he didn’t spare any hard truths about that class’s political servants, like Cuomo or incumbent mayor Eric Adams. But he didn’t echo Trump’s penchant for interpersonal cruelty or endlessly revel in point-scoring. Instead, he was relentlessly joyful. What he conveyed, at every opportunity, was that he cared about the millions of working-class people who make the city their home, and he wanted to make it easier for them to live there.

There’s no reason a new wave of Democratic politicians couldn’t replicate that formula on a national level, putting forward a vision of a society that voters would actually want to live in and then fighting like hell to make it happen. There’s just one problem: they’ll have to get around the Schumers of the party to do it.