Zohran Mamdani's Win Is the Beginning of the End of the Old Democratic Party
Mamdani’s NYC primary victory shows that the old tricks of the political establishment are dying out—and something new is being born.
Hamilton Nolan
Mostly, in politics, good things don’t happen. Let’s be honest. Most of the time, the candidates are dishonest, and the issues are distractions, and the person with the most money wins. Sometimes, though, there is a reason for inspiration. And — even more rarely — there is a reason to believe that things are changing. You can feel the gears of history moving. You can feel the tectonic plates of normalcy begin to quaver and slip. The previous, unsustainable arrangement of the world is beginning to slip. The future holds something different.
Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old Muslim democratic socialist, just won the New York City Democratic primary for mayor. When the results came in last night, I was inside a Democratic Socialists of America watch party in the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, a sprawling space with the look of a crumbling high school auditorium, and the sweat-drenched young crowd of Zohran volunteers was approaching ecstasy. These people, used to living on the margins of the political mainstream, have been catapulted into its center. This, I think, is not going to be a fluke. The stuck wheel of the Democratic Party is beginning to turn.
First, though, will come the panicked thrashing of a dying beast. Eric Adams, the disgraced current Democratic mayor of New York, is running for reelection as an independent. So, too, may Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former Democratic governor of New York, who was just humbled by Mamdani in the primary despite $25 million in super PAC spending on his behalf. The Establishment — not just the city’s Democratic establishment, and not just the national Democratic establishment, but also Donald Trump, and the national Republican Party, and Wall Street, and New York City’s rich people, of whom there are many — will throw money at whichever of those wounded old wildebeests seems most plausible. Zohran, like AOC before him, will be elevated to the status of Socialist Boogeyman, smeared as a vile communist, subjected to veiled and unveiled racism, and opposed by organized capital. All of those forces will make his final hurdle, the general election in November, as high as it can possibly be.
I don’t think it will matter, though. One dynamic apparent throughout Zohran’s primary campaign is that the more people learn who he is, the more they like him. That very basic quality accounts for the direction of his polling, which kept going up and up as Election Day approached. The more realistic his candidacy seemed, the more press and attention he got; the more attention he got, the more New Yorkers got to see him; and the more they saw him, the more popular he got. This is charisma, raw likeability, something that Mamdani — kind, smiling, serious, and inspiring in turn — has, that Andrew Cuomo does not. As his general election opponents prepare to spend even more to elevate his profile, they may find that they are doing him a favor.
But there is more to it than charisma. This is the beginning of the end of the Clinton-to-Obama network’s iron grip on the Democratic Party. For my entire adult life, the same basic circle of neoliberal institutionalists have run our only opposition party. From young James Carville to old James Carville. They calcified as the years went on, sacrificing the ability of Americans to have hope for our democracy in exchange for rooting themselves in power. That is the world that produced Andrew Cuomo. He was of it, and could never lose its favor. He was endorsed by old Bill Clinton, and old James Clyburn, and all the old party power brokers who are constitutionally unable to regard DSA as anything but a joke. Sneering economic dinosaur Lawrence Summers called Mamdani “dangerous.” Sneering heir to the centrist punditry throne Matt Yglesias hand-waved away Zohran’s popularity so frantically that he could moonlight as a box fan. The set of people who have taken it for granted for decades that the Democratic Party belongs to them are, like an over-the-hill band, finding out that their old hits don’t excite the crowd like they used to.
Conventional wisdom does not break easily. But when it does, it breaks irreparably. The simplistic, kindergarten version of red-baiting that has functioned effectively in American politics since the McCarthy era is beginning to die out along with those who swore their political allegiance to it. What, exactly, is the scary socialism of Zohran Mamdani that all of the billionaires are screaming about from their high towers? Free buses. Lower rents. Public childcare. Higher minimum wage. Social workers for homeless people instead of cops. Better grocery stores. Ahh! No! Not… not… all of these common sense ideas that the vast majority of NYC residents would be happy for! Anything but that!
There is a limit to the political effectiveness of rich men who have servants telling regular people that their lives cannot be better. We may have reached that limit. The threat of the rich is that they will flee the city. The flaw in their leverage is that almost nobody likes them anyhow.
Zohran’s campaign was distinguished by its determination to treat voters as adults. When accused of “defunding the police,” Mamdani took the time to explain that he wants to create a department of mental health experts and social workers to take work off the NYPD’s plate. When accused of antisemitism, he took the time to forthrightly distinguish that smear from valid criticism of the massacre in Gaza. He was, often, more adult than the political press covering him, which is trained to treat dishonest attack lines as sporting challenges rather than as things to be dismissed. The youngest candidate in this race acted with the most maturity. The oldest, Andrew Cuomo, ran with the traditional playbook of treating voters like ignorant children — and failed.
Old people with old ideas do not stay in power forever. Old lies and old tricks do not work forever. Time moves slowly — excruciatingly slowly, if you are always paying attention — but it does sweep away the old husks and bring new things, eventually. Socialists want more people to have decent lives. Zohran Mamdani is proof that that message cannot be mischaracterized forever and ever. We will look back on this primary win as the start of something new. If America is going to have one lone opposition party to fascism, that party does not have to suck. The establishment is too deeply rooted to move. So we will run them over.
Hamilton Nolan is a labor writer for In These Times. He has spent the past decade writing about labor and politics for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian, and elsewhere. More of his work is on Substack.
