Democracy Strikes Back 🪶 Lessons From Zohran Mandami’s Victory In New York Mayoral Contest

Barry Gilheany ✍ Last week a 34 year-old Muslim of African-Asian origin and self-proclaimed socialist Zohran Mandami secured victory in the election for Mayor of New York City.

With over 50 per cent of votes cast, it has widely been seen as a transformative moment in progressive politics in terms of the defeat not just of the Republican candidate but also that of a stale incumbent Democrat establishment by a radical, energised grassroots movement which spoke to, campaigned for and triumphed on the concerns of working class New Yorkers: a cost-of-living platform which included a rent freeze for rent-stabilised apartments, free bus service, universal childcare, and city-run grocery stores, all funded by increased taxes on corporations and the wealthy.[1]

Truly a victory for the audacity of hope on the anniversary of That victory for despair. Mamdani’s victory came on a night of impressive Democrat results with gubernatorial victories by healthy, double-digit margins for “moderates” Mikie Sherill and Abigail Spanberger in New Jersey and Virginia respectively also on campaign themes around the reduction of the cost of living. Completing the innings defeat for Donald Trump was the approval by Californian voters of a measure to redraw congressional boundaries, an attempt to stop Republicans from retaining full control of the federal government in next year’s midterm election and counter a gerrymander in Texas to carve out new safe Republican districts.[2]

So, have the tectonic plates of progressive politics in the USA at any rate shifted? Does Mamdani’s victory lay out a path to victory or the Democrats in next year’s crucial mid-term elections and, further ahead, to the White House in November 2028? Are the lessons learned from and the model of campaigning in Mamdani’s victory transferable to, for example, Britain? There the crisis of legitimacy enveloping the traditional two big parties of government, Labour and the Conservatives - due to cost of living pressures and a chronic breakdown of trust in politics - has led to the rise of and possible ascension to power of the populist right wing Reform UK party and has opened up space to the left of Labour for a radicalised Green Party led by its new self-proclaimed eco populist leader Zack Polanksi and Jeremy Corbyn’s and Zara Sultana joint but so typically fractious far left venture Your Party.

Does it provide a model for the rejuvenation of the Labour Party along the lines of “radical social democracy” proposed by the writer and activist Paul Mason? Does his victory transcend the divisiveness of “identity politics” or does it represent a progressive essence of identity politics as argued by the writer Nesrine Malik? But what perils await the nascent project represented by last week’s New York Mayoral victor from a vengeful Donald Trump in whose lexicon the words “defeated candidate” will never figure?

The Triumph of Charisma Not Charlatanry

An undoubted factor in Mamdani’s victory was his charisma or, less definitionally problematic, relatability. He is the first Muslim mayor of New York as well as its first African Asian postholder, the son of a Ugandan academic, Mahmood Mamdani, a specialist in colonial and post-colonial history and Mira Mair, an acclaimed film maker.[3] While vocally opposed to antisemitism, he vocally both condemned the genocidal Hamas attacks of 7 October and the genocidal Israeli response in its two year war in Gaza. A proud Muslim who suffered an outrageously racist campaign against him drawing on unfounded jihadi slurs and exploitative memories of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers, he resisted the pressure to play down his identity in order to fit in, he proclaimed “No longer will I live in the shadows”. He married his own Islamic identity by quoting the Arabic phrase ana munkum wa alaikum – “I am of you and for you – in his victory speech and named those “forgotten by the politics of our city,” the “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.”[4]

That sense of the triumph of the audacity of hope is really conveyed by the New York based author and journalist Megan Nolan in her telling of her experiences of the Mamdani campaign trail. For Nolan, the triumph of such an unabashed radical seemed too good to be true in a city where the obscene wealth gap is virtually accepted as a natural phenomenon. It seemed too good to be true where the anointment of Andrew Cuomo, his opponent, scion of the Cuomo Democrat dynasty and the jaded, sneering former governor accused of sexually harassing more than a dozen women, as mayor of the Big Apple seemed inevitable.[5]

But it proved perfectly good to be true to the horror of Trumpians who encouraged Republican electoral support for Cuomo and to the barely disguised disdain of the Democrat old guard. Mamdani’s victory in the primary was built on a forcefield of phenomenal grassroots energy: the average donation to his campaign was $98, compared with Cuomo’s $593, and an unprecedented army of 50,000 volunteers which, by his account, had grown to 90,000 before the vote. Compare this economy of scale of resources to that of the corporate billionaires who had donated such immense amounts of money to anti-Mamdani and pro-Cuomo PACs (Political Action Committees). Michael Bloomberg donated $13m, Bill Ackman $2m, Joe Gebbia, the founder of Airbnb, another $2m. But on this occasion, democracy proved not to be the best version that money could buy as the combined power of capital and the numbing effect of a Democratic party wedded to the now worn strategy of peddling the same tired default ‘don’t scare the Wall Street/corporate horses’ ran convincingly out of road.[6]

It is the consensus of commentators and analysts of Mamdani’s victory was down to the centrality of the theme of affordability in his campaign. It is also widely agreed that his success was down to reaching out beyond his base of educated young leftists to disenfranchised working-class people alienated from a complacent Democratic party. But behind these explanatory factors are the backstories which so illustrate his human listening capacity and relatability.

Take the case of the tired mother and her daughter, a 17-year-old woman who used a wheelchair to whom Megan Nolan’s best friend Daniel had spoken to in the lead up to the primary. When he started describing Mamdani’s aims about affordability and prioritising New Yorkers’ ability to remain in their home city, mother, and daughter “lit up.” This, they said, was” the kind of thing they needed to hear and never did.” They “were excited to vote.”[7]

At SEIU 32BJ in Manhattan, the headquarters of a union that represents mostly building workers, union leaders whooped as Mamdani praised labour movements and expressed his admiration for those in the room, some of the workers having joined in the 1970s, others two weeks ago. He listened as doctors described broken-down lifts in their hospitals, teacher’s aides receiving salaries of $30,000 a year, and one security woman telling him that her daughter, born and raised in New York, had been priced out so severely despite working full-time that she had to move across the country: “Mr Mamdani, I want my daughter back”, she told him. To which he replied, “We want your daughter to come home.” “We will make this city a place your daughter a place your daughter can afford to live”[8]

For virtually the last twelve months in the wake of the election of Trump 2.0 Mamdani had been performing a one-man band operation to find out why working-class New Yorkers had voted for Trump. He set up premises in working-class streets such as Fordham Road in the Bronx and Hillside Avenue in Queen’s, where Trump, despite the districts’ large immigrant populations, had enjoyed a double-digit lead over the Democratic Party. The lesson that Mamdani picked up was that lifelong Democrats had voted Trump or abstained because “they remembered having more money in their pocket four years ago” and that they wanted the Democratic Party to offer “a relentless focus on an economic agenda.”[9] Hence at the top of his Mayoral campaign were the everyday living issues such as o the rent freeze, free and fast buses, cheap city-run grocers and free childcare.

A not insignificant aspect of the strategy to recover Trump defectors was the emphasis on showing respect for everyone on the doorstep. In the words of a campaign organiser “We’ve emphasised that it’s important not to chastise, not to speak down to people who turned to Trump or who just don’t vote.” This strategy obviously bore fruit with Mamdani’s victory in the Bronx, a borough that is majority Hispanic and which had swung notably towards Trump, by a margin of 11 points. This is on top of his overwhelming popularity with young voters, with a stunning 78% of 18-to-29-year-olds backing him.[10]

But as well as the promise of radical change, the Mamdani campaign offered joy. Mamdani closely connected his social media to the affordability message spread by his regiments of canvassers across the city. The purpose of the surreal and rapidly iconic video of a suited Mamdani taking the Polar Bear plunge in Coney Island was to drive home his promise to freeze stabilised rents. His spoof of his two Democratic primary rivals, Cuomo and Eric Adams, as two old dudes bickering in a New York diner was slapstick fun but delivered a biting satire of them as archetypes of a moribund party establishment.[11]

This tactic of targeting through entertainment was evident in two more eye-catching events. In August, the campaign held a scavenger hunt that drew 5,000 New Yorkers from all corners of the city. Last month, about 1,500 attended a soccer tournament in Coney Island where mixed-gender teams played friendly matches borough against borough. Both events underlined Mamdani’s commitment to, and love of, New York City, and attracted people to his cause who had hitherto never engaged in the political process.[12]

A major canvassing push to engage previously under-represented Muslim and South Asian populations across the city, spurred by Mamdani’s condemnation of Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide also paid dividends. The Muslim civic engagement group Engage, which backed Mamdani estimates that turnout among the 380,000 Muslim New Yorkers registered to vote was likely to have doubled in the election; up from the 22% who participated in the 2021 Mayoral election. His stance on Gaza does not appear to have damaged his standing among New York’s roughly one million Jewish population with a CNN exit poll suggesting that Mamdani winning as many as one in three Jewish votes to the presumed chagrin of Amichai Chikli the Israeli minister of diaspora affairs who wrote apocalyptically after Mamdani’s victory that “New York will never be the same again” as “the city is walking eyes open, into the abyss into which London has already plunged.[13]

In the era of politics as personal presentation in which charisma and celebrity have been the currency of success, Mamdani stands out not as a great disruptor but as someone who has used the brushstrokes required to paint a different canvass; to modify the rules of the game to achieve radical and transformative results. His charisma is one of genuine connectedness with people and to reach those parts of the electorate through the arts of non-judgmental listening, engagement with those who haven’t engaged with and been engaged with political systems and to use fun and happiness to effect change. Unlike the charlatan, he doesn’t promise the undeliverable; unlike the sectarian ideologue he is not in the business of trying to create utopia from dogma and ending with grotesque chaos and dystopia. He offers hope and realisable change which will probably not be achieved in its entirety. But he will keep hope alive.

Lessons for the Left

Mamdani’s victory is a progressive exemplar of the old adage that politics is the art of the possible. For it inverts the commonsense that victory is only possible within the prevailing consensus which has prevailed throughout either side of the millennium; that there is no ideological and/or structural alternative to the hegemonic corporate, light touch regulatory model of financial capitalism. The change that did occur was refracted through the centrist Third Way model of Tony Blalir’s New Labour and Bill Clinton’s New Democrats which accepted the fundamentals of the market economy; the conditionality of social welfare benefits and built social and economic infrastructural projects through mixed public and private financing. For many, the success of Mamdani has shown that alternative social arrangements are possible; another world is possible if you like and that to campaign for this alternative is a winner and that the right can be fought.

That certainly is the lesson from Mamdani that the Guardian columnist Aditya Chakraborty draws. For, in his opinion, he is the first left winger to show that politicians can not only face down Trumpism, but they can also beat him. The defeat of Trump and Trump’s Triple P mutations across the world is the defining and preeminent task of our time as New York’s new mayor knows.[14]

For instead of taking on the extreme right, the centre-left is, as Fintan O’Toole writes in the latest New York Review of Books, it is playing at being not-Trump. Or not-Farage, not-Le Pen, In the UK, Starmer’s pitch is basically to adopt the language and flags but to deploy them with greater civility[15] although the singling out of Reform UK as Labour’s principal electoral and ideological rival and greatest threat to democracy by the British PM at Labour’s annual conference was encouraging.

For in the changing political and economic order that the economist Branko Milanovic describes in his new book The Great Global Transformation in which China and the Global South now account for more of the world economy than the US, Japan, Europe and many others out together and in which capitalism is being refined into narrower, meaner and harsher societies which are ditching the DEI culture of commitments to multiculturalism and equality for women,[16] the Third Way triangulations with electoral bases are no longer viable due to the hollowing out of these demographics and the consequent anti-politics mood that has swept the Western democratic world.

Despite the best efforts of anti-Muslim racists to elevate culture warriordom over the prospect of a Muslim mayor officiating in the city that suffered the cataclysm of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers, Mamdani rose above the jihadi slurs, dog whistles and fog horns to fight a relentless cross-identity campaign fought on a purely economic agenda. But his campaign did owe itself to a form of “identity politics.”

It is necessary to enclose those two last words in quotation marks because of the bad rap that identity politics discourse and practice has received. Many on the left have written with despair on the toxicity of identity based struggles be they on race, sexuality, gender and other ‘markers’; of the competitive victimhood; the ‘cancellations’ and total divorce from the material realities of people’s every day lives as opposed to the primacy of particular “lived experiences” This type of ‘woketarian’ identity dynamics have drained so much oxygen from progressive politics.

Yet as Nesrine Malik reminds us, identity politics as an organising political force has its origins in universal goals. She revisits its definition by the Black feminist socialist organisation the Combahee River Collective in 1977; it connoted identity politics as a path to a liberation that could only emerge through understanding that systems oppress many different people along the lines of their identity, and could only be dismantled if all groups worked together. The collective emphasised that “we also find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are often experienced simultaneously.”[17]

Mamdani rooted his campaign solidly in the experience of being a New Yorker, and how the city needed to be more affordable, then expanded that to include all the ways in which different groups live that experience.[18] This is that “simultaneous experience” in actuality as opposed to the tortuous nomenclature and practices around “intersectionality”

His was a politics that is forged and defined by being on the margins, but not as single individual who wants to escape alone perhaps to a place of self-empowerment or hyper-individualism. The margins from which he came were spaces in which a majority can be mobilised, where people don’t want to hear about victimhood but justice, is to create coalitions and escape together. Its project is not the exposition of particular racism and prejudices, but an entire system that excludes all those who don’t have capital in all its forms. Above all, it is the story of the virtue of the American “melting point,” a nation of immigrants at the sharp end of capitalism who are collectively recognising all the ways in which the USA fails to live up to its ideals.[19]

So, it was neither just the economy nor just identity, stupid!

References

[1] Anna Betts, Joseph Gedeon and Robert Tait, Democrat Mamdani in historic win in New York. The Guardian. 6 November 2025 p.10.

[2] Ibid

[3] Ibid

[4] Nesrine Malik, ‘Identity Politics’ really can win elections – just ask Mamdani. Guardian Opinion 10 November 2025 p.3

[5] Megan Nolan, How Zohran Mamdani Captured the Heart of New York. The Observer New Review 9 November 2025 pp.8-10

[6] Ibid

[7] Ibid, p.8

[8] Ibid, p.10

[9] Guardian, 8th November 2025, p.33

[10] Ibid

[11] Ibid

[12] Ibid

[13] Ibid

[14] Aditya Chakrabortty, Mamdani’s lesson for progressives: fight the right. The Guardian. Journal 6 November 2025 pp.1-2

[15] Ibid, p.2

[16] Ibid

[17] Malik, op cit

[18] Ibid

[19] Ibid

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.