Zohran Mamdani, Black Voters and the Left

While it’s true that many insurgent candidates on the American Left have struggled to win over large bases in Black communities (arguably Bernie Sanders’ biggest failure and missed opportunity), it is a mistake to assume our communities are inherently moderate. Quite the opposite. A considerable majority of Black voters (67%) have a favorable view of socialism. That’s higher than any other demographic group. We tend to support progressive issues like social programs, investment in good union jobs, affordable housing measures and universal healthcare.

A surface-level analysis of Mamdani’s victory has led some to affirm the misguided assumption that Black communities are resistant to a left agenda. Mamdani’s path to primary victory was through blowout young voter turnout, plus both an increase and a swing left among Asian voters. Cuomo, however, won most majority-Black precincts, where turnout was low.

Name recognition — a first step toward true public trust and familiarity — is often on the side of establishment types, and it can be determinative, particularly in primaries. Trusted political media to help voters form grounded opinions is increasingly hard to come by. 

Many Black voters went into the election undecided and unfamiliar with Mamdani. Two weeks before early voting began, a Data for Progress poll showed that a full 45% of Black voters indicated they simply ​“hadn’t heard enough” about Mamdani to have an opinion — while just 4% of Black voters hadn’t heard enough to have an opinion of Cuomo.

The same poll showed that, among Black voters who did know about Mamdani, his favorability was quite strong — 79%, compared with Cuomo’s 69%. In a city where rent and the cost of living are high, it makes sense that Black New Yorkers (who disproportionately bear those burdens) responded to a candidate with clear proposals to make the city more affordable.

Younger Black voters tend to get little investment from traditional campaign operatives, who tend to write us off as unlikely to turn out (thus increasing our disengagement), but we were actually one of Mamdani’s best demographics — presumably reached by the campaign’s widely resonant digital media content. An exit poll by Vera Action showed that Black voters under 50 went more than 70% for Mamdani, compared with 36% of Black voters over 50.

With effective organizing, more of an economic message that speaks to the particularities of Black working-class communities, and deep partnership with Black leaders (grassroots as well as institutional) over time, a campaign like Mamdani’s can energize even skeptical Black voters. Mamdani has done some of this kind of authentic connection quite well, keeping things focused on the issues of food, housing, and the cost of living while taking time to communicate genuine understanding and stake in Black Americans’ particular experience and legacy under racial capitalism.

For nearly 15 years, I’ve spent time organizing, mobilizing, and campaigning in Black communities in Chicago and New York City, and coaching Black left organizers from Mississippi to Michigan. I’ve knocked doors and sat on porches, canvassed at barbecues and attended house meetings and, while the particularities are invaluable and illuminating, the broad contours of what I’ve seen have affirmed what the data says about Black community attitudes. When investment is made to organize us, when the message is focused not only on issues but also on the need for transformation, when a message about the need for economic overhaul and investing in the public good is infused with specifics about structural racism, when substance is emphasized over partisanship or political terminology, and when intention is taken to secure trust and validation (which can be done in many ways!), we are genuinely predisposed to get behind transformative — what I call left — politics. 

We also know this potential is there because Mamdani is not the first young left insurgent of color to secure a blowout win against the Cuomo-connected political establishment. Black leaders and communities have played important roles in those victories and the broader progressive political movement he’s part of. 

City Councilmember Sandy Nurse, for example, is an Afro-Latina organizer and carpenter with deep roots in the city’s social movements for economic, racial and environmental justice. (We met in 2015 organizing around police violence out of Mayday Space, the Brooklyn community center she co-founded after her time as a leader in the Occupy Wall St Movement.) In 2021, Nurse was elected by a landslide to represent Brooklyn’s majority Black and Latino District 37. She beat her more moderate primary opponent 65% to 35% after being removed from a special election ballot (made possible by a technical maneuver by Cuomo, as governor) less than a year prior. Nurse has since delivered on school and library improvements and new maternity suites at Wyckoff hospital. She ran unopposed in the 2025 primary.

Speaking of how Nurse and some of her colleagues have worked not only to win over, but also sustain support from and govern alongside Black communities, Nurse says of her constituents, ​“We have open conversations. … They talk about ethnic cleansing of New York City and the loss of Black population. They’re very against real estate. They’re anti-corporation. So we’re aligned on a lot of points.” 

Nurse also lifts up fellow Councilmember Chi Ossé, another young Black leftist (elected in 2021), who endorsed Mamdani early. In Bed-Stuy, where there are a lot of older Black progressives, she says, Ossé is ​“really liked by an intergenerational set of Black folks, and even managed to win over a lot of [people] who I like to call ​‘stalactite motherfuckers,’ crusted onto the buildings like they are just never gonna leave,” Nurse says. ​“He was able to really just be open about policies, his intentions, and people have supported that.” Ossé’s signature legislative accomplishment so far has been a law prohibiting landlords from pushing broker fees onto tenants.

Nurse, who co-campaigned with Mamdani this year, made an observation that echoes what I’ve seen in my years of organizing Black and working-class voters in Chicago and around the country: Many feel abandoned by so many candidates who have sold them out, and so there are trust issues. 

The work to build that trust can start with people like Darializa Avila Chevalier, a lead Zohran for NYC canvasser who knocked doors in Black neighborhoods all over the city. Avila Chevalier told me about an early interaction in Marcus Garvey Park while collecting signatures to get Mamdani on the ballot. A 60-something gentleman initially told her, ​“No, no, I’m voting for Cuomo. I don’t know who that [Mamdani] guy is.” He had (understandably) lost faith in the political system, but still planned to vote, and found it safer to go with ​“the devil he knows.” By the end of an honest conversation about issues with someone he could connect with, he took a stack of flyers and committed to think more. 

By the time early voting started, Avila Chevalier was having ​“the exact opposite type of conversation,” she says. People who knew about Mamdani were excited. People whose doors she’d knocked weeks and months prior were making their way to the polls to vote for him. Family members of younger Black voters she’d spoken with had organized their older relatives to come out for Mamdani.

And, now, pulling far ahead of both Cuomo and current Mayor Eric Adams in polls heading into the general election,Mamdani is polling better than any candidate among Black voters. In addition to the bigger audience that comes with winning a primary, Mamdani’s campaign seems to have invested time in Black media, in bringing on advisers with deep experience organizing Black communities, and in courting partnerships with long-standing Black civic, faith and cultural leaders, as well as consolidating support from labor unions that represent huge numbers of Black workers.

I wrote parts of this essay sitting in New York City’s public outdoor plazas with free Wi-Fi (an example of the kind of public good I wish my home city of Chicago had!) in Brooklyn and coffee shops in Queens. Almost everywhere I sat down, I quite literally overheard conversations between pairs of Black New Yorkers — of all ages — about Mamdani.

But this attention needs to be well-cultivated to turn into sustained support. 

It’s clear that leaders like Nurse and Ossé and others from the grassroots — politically developed, grounded and good communicators — are uniquely positioned as important bridge-builders between Black communities, Black civic leaders, and the broader progressive movement. From Nurse’s clear-eyed coalition building and delivery on concrete policies that make life materially better to Ossé’s time spent canvassing neighborhoods personally and putting out the kind of digital media that a Gen-Z digital native does well, both young Black leaders can serve as an example for the broader Left on how to relate to Black communities in all of our diversity.

The task for both Black and left movements is to build trust within Black communities, invest in durable organization, and then mobilize where there is so much untapped potential for wielding political power for the many. 

If we fail at delivering compelling alternatives to the center that effectively reach Black communities, the Left risks losing a core constituency to the Right’s false promises of ​“something different.” 

At the same time that Black Americans are open to bold left solutions, nationally Trump’s approval rating is increasing more swiftly among Black voters than any other demographic, having jumped 8 points from June to July. Given that the far right just passed a bill cutting food assistance, healthcare and funding for just about any public or social good for millions of Americans — and, disproportionately for Black Americans — this is alarming. 

But it’s not inevitable.