Twenty-Seven Thoughts on Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Primary Win
Some lessons learned by the upstart assemblyman's takedown of Andrew Cuomo
(And apologies if three or four of these are actually kind of the same idea. What do you want, editing?)
Candidate quality is really, really, really important. Say what you will about Zohran Mamdani’s message or his ads or his army of door-knockers, but none of it would’ve mattered if he hadn’t had genuine charisma, an engaging intelligence, a light in his eyes, and an interest in walking the length of Manhattan.
Pretty high turnout in a New York City Democratic mayoral primary is still low turnout overall. Let’s say the final tally shows that just over a million people cast ballots. That’s still just a third of registered Democrats citywide, well below the 50% who voted in 1989’s Democratic primary, and the fact that the primary is closed means that a million unaffiliated voters are totally shut out at this stage in the process. That’s not a good way to run a democracy.
New York is not broken — at least, the Democratic primary voters motivated to turn out don’t think it is. People may be concerned about crime, but, with public safety trends improving, they aren’t petrified. My colleague Greg Berman put this quite well in a recent Vital City piece, outlining all the ways in which Gotham remains quite healthy, thank you. So did Harry Siegel when he wrote in Vital City about how Andrew Cuomo’s success rested on voters buying his frame that the city is in crisis and in need of a rescue. Mamdani’s campaign communicated the opposite every day — in his videos, his tone, his optimism. There was buoyancy and bounce in his step as he walked through the city, no fear.
Zohran’s core message, on affordability, broke through. It’s rare to see a candidate display such message discipline without winding up sounding robotic. He said it over and over and over and over again: freeze rents, free buses, free childcare. Lots of people like these things. We all know what a big issue high prices were in the 2024 election. They remain a problem today, especially in an already overpriced city like ours. Crucially, this wasn’t an identitarian appeal — it was broad-based, or as some might put it, “post-woke.”
Mamdani neither embraced identity politics nor shied away from it, and this could point the way for other candidates. His message had broad appeal across groups — he didn’t microtarget in a condescending way to women, or Blacks, or Hispanics, or so on. But as a proud Muslim, he talked about his faith a lot. It came off as honest, not alienating or identitarian. There were understandable swells of pride in his run in communities with overlapping religious or ethnic identities.
Zohran is open and unafraid, and that’s really appealing to people at a time when too many of us are culturally and ideologically siloed. He didn’t only go places where he’d get cheered and patted on the back. He sat with interviewers and stood with crowds that were skeptical of him — and lived to tell the tale. (And this isn’t performative “debate me!” machismo, it’s conversation.) That kind of agility and aplomb says something special, as it does about Pete Buttigieg.
Only two candidates had clear messages in this campaign. Mamdani’s was that affordability is a huge problem. Cuomo’s was that the city is in crisis, far too scary and disorderly, and needs two big, strong hands to save it. The first message resonated better, at least with the million Democrats who came out to vote.
Candidates who entered the race thinking it could be about crime and Eric Adams’ indictment didn’t fare well. The ground shifted beneath their feet as crime numbers improved and the clouds over Adams partly cleared. Mamdani, who got in on his own terms, did.
In a Democratic primary, it’s easy to promise to tax the rich and corporations to fund costly new programs. People don’t ask how high the tax rates are already, the collateral consequences, etc. In the general election and especially in office, things may be different.
Newspaper endorsements may be irrelevant at this point. The New York Times this year basically broke a rule it set last year against making local endorsements; the only coherent thing one could discern from its “advice” editorial was “whatever you do, don’t vote Zohran.” (Read some great dissections of the paper’s decision on Vital City here.) It had negligible influence, as did the word of the Post and the Daily News. Yes, the Times’ 2021 endorsement of Kathryn Garcia boosted her; maybe an affirmative statement has a different dynamic than a dire warning. Still, after 2016 (when basically every paper in the country endorsed Hilary Clinton, to no effect) and this, it’s hard to claim that this particular (and particularly strange) type of persuasion moves many votes. As Bugs Bunny said, “Laughing boy, no more bullets.”
Relatedly, big money cuts both ways. Companies and billionaires poured millions into the campaign in support of Cuomo. That helped fund ads and other outreach, but it also told voters that the richest and most powerful players were lining up with the establishment candidate. When landlords tell the city they’ll spend $2.5 million to get one guy elected, what does that say to tenants?
Also relatedly, the support of “the establishment” can be as much a curse as a blessing. Every usual suspect lined up behind Cuomo. Most people who voted didn’t seem to care. Speaking of which, Mamdani won without much union support; that almost all went for Cuomo. The result is he has more freedom going forward to carve out positions free of typical transactional constraints. It’s to be determined whether he’ll use it.
In this climate, experience is as much a liability as an asset. Mamdani didn’t have much of a record to defend. Yes, there were statements and tweets, but not many pieces of legislation or major actions that created enemies. Cuomo mocked him for only having sponsored three bills that passed, but not enough people cared. They saw Zohran up close and judged him to be the real article. As Ross Barkan says, “Democratic voters are very sick of having legacy pols thrust upon them. It's been happening for a decade and they are at their wits’ end.”
Ranked-choice voting has strange effects that candidates, pundits and voters are still trying to figure out. I thought the relatively late Brad Lander-Mamdani cross-endorsement was a mistake, at least for Lander — as it meant he lost the ability to sell himself as a Kathryn Garcia-style pragmatist. That might have partially been true, but overall, the move seems to have succeeded at its main goal of squeezing out Cuomo. Who knew? They knew.
YIMBYism and “abundance” probably are appealing among the Twitterati, but they aren’t moving many votes yet. Zohran did gesture agreement with certain abundance themes, like the idea that red tape and unnecessary costs and delays need to be attacked if big public-sector programs are ever to work and confidence in government to be at least partly restored. But mostly what connected with voters were the broad-brush promises about free stuff. And Cuomo, the second-top vote-getter, was the least YIMBY of the major candidates.
Old anti-police tweets supporting “defund” and even calling the NYPD “wicked” aren’t a huge liability, at least among left-leaning voters. Mamdani didn’t renounce his old positions, but he did speak in a much more responsible and balanced way about police in the course of this campaign. There are a few possible conclusions here: people heard and believed what Zohran’s saying today, tuning out the old stuff; people have seen this game played too many times and suspect things are being taken out of context; or they are less offended by the underlying message than opponents assume.
New York Democrats are increasingly wary of antisemitism accusations being used as a weapon. This is in part because the claim is hurled too often — even when someone is merely attacking Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for its military and political decisions — and in part because younger New Yorkers, Jewish and otherwise, have less connection to Israel and their faith. Mamdani doesn’t believe in preserving Israel as a Jewish state; he wants it to be a democratic state with equal rights to people of all faiths. That’s a deeply troubling idea to many New York Jews, especially in Brooklyn. But a passionate critique of the war on Gaza resonates with thousands of gentiles and Jews alike, especially young people.
Ditto claims of “Communism.” Being a democratic socialist apparently now doesn’t hurt a candidate all that much, at least in a low-turnout Democratic primary, and most people understand that the notion of opening a few government-owned grocery stores is no closer to Das Kapital than Donald Trump throwing billions at U.S. farmers or effectively nationalizing U.S. steel. Cities already have hundreds of free public libraries, after all.
About this: Zohran’s three big freebies — freezing the rent, free buses and free child care — aren’t nearly as radical as histrionic critics suggest. (I say this as a pretty serious skeptic of much of his policy agenda, and especially of a housing production plan that I think is very poorly thought out.) We had free buses during the pandemic. They’re costly and maybe not worth $600 million a year but ought not be unthinkable. Free child care feels like a natural extension of free pre-K and 3-K. And a rent freeze? Bill de Blasio’s Rent Guidelines board froze the rent three times. None of these ideas should be treated as punchlines to jokes. Even the idea of opening a few government-run grocery stores isn’t totally crazy in a world with 219 public library branches that also has 450,000 people living in public housing, a great network of public parks and playgrounds and pools, public hospitals and the like. These things are differences in degree, not in kind.
Relatedly, it’s tough to caricature a candidate as menacing if he doesn’t really come across as threatening to people. Voters apply a smell test.
While voting blocs lean certain ways, they are not monoliths in the way people often suggest. Yes, Black-majority districts went strongly for Cuomo and whites and Asians went for Mamdani, but there’s all kinds of interesting nuance when you dig deeper into the results. He did quite well among Latinos. He won Harlem.
To this point, as much as Republicans want it to be so, Zohran is not just the candidate of the upper-class and well-educated progressives who are pantomiming help for the less fortunate. There are plenty of low-income people and many, many middle-class people who voted for him. Look at the map. Dive into the data. As one researcher explained on X, “Mamdani won the broad middle 60%.”
Direct mail and conventional commercials have diminishing returns. Everything matters, but New Yorkers’ mailboxes and TV screens were overflowing with political messages this season. It is hard to imagine that these advertisements moved the needle much.
Bodegas, man. If there was an equivalent in the selection of the Long Island lawn signs of 2016, it was the Zoran posters up in seemingly every bodega in New York in 2025. People like their neighborhood bodegas — they’re anti-establishment establishment — and those amazingly well-designed posters in their windows probably meant as much if not more than all the direct mail.
Contra what Zohran may believe, his campaign proved that the private sector is indeed better at some things! To cut his campaign commercials and web videos, he used Madison Avenue ad people — and the results were much better than anything else out there.
Pollsters in New York, just like around the country, don’t really know how to measure the electorate anymore. Only one pollster, Public Policy Polling, seems to have measured the electorate accurately down the stretch. Public opinion researchers claim to have adapted to a world in which landlines are almost gone and nobody picks up their phone anymore. Have they?
Andrew Cuomo’s unlikability and character problems aren’t just the obsession of people in the press and those who’ve worked with him. A broader base of people is genuinely bothered by the way he leads and by the type of person he is. It’s hard to say whether this is a majority of New York City Democrats or voters — remember, turnout in primaries is still low — but it’s more people than those banking on a Cuomo comeback would want. Trump has rewritten some rules in American politics, but lots of them still apply to other politicians.
Apropos the point about turnout and the fact that crime is declining and other measures of quality of life seem to be improving, the general election isn’t won yet. Eric Adams, unpopular as he is, has a record to run on. And the attacks on Mamdani aren’t impotent; they just haven’t sufficiently connected with the wider electorate yet.
Photo by Andrzej Szymczak on Unsplash
Brilliant analysis!
Adams is about Adams. He’s incapable of differentiating between his self interest and the public interest. A corrupt buffoon who jumped at the chance to be Trump’s footstool. I have mixed feelings about Mamdani, but I’ll enjoy seeing him absolutely shred the incumbent if Adams isn’t too much of a coward to debate.