George Binette reports on the shock win of Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic mayoral primary in New York.

Amidst baking mid-summer heat thousands of New Yorkers queued to cast votes in the 24th June Democratic Party primary for its candidate to contest the general election for mayor of the USA’s biggest city. With early voting already underway the previous weekend, credible opinion polling had suggested a major upset just might be on the cards.

Zohran Mamdani, a Ugandan-born Muslim and self-proclaimed democratic socialist who came to the US via South Africa aged seven, had launched his mayoral campaign last autumn with little name recognition citywide and polling figures in low single digits. By the early hours of 25th June, it was clear that Mamdani had won a substantial plurality of first preference votes and the heavily favoured establishment candidate, former New York state governor Andrew Cuomo had conceded defeat.

With 93% of just over a million votes counted, Mamdani had 43.5% of the total, a commanding lead of nearly seven percentage points over the second-placed Cuomo. A member of the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) had scored winning margins in three of New York’s five boroughs – Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens (where Mamdani’s New York State Assembly seat is located) – with Cuomo the biggest vote winner in the Bronx and on Staten Island.

Unusually for the US, New York’s mayoral primary allows for ranked voting, and it seems all but certain that second preferences will put Mamdani above the required 50% threshold when counting concludes early next week. The third-placed candidate with 11.3% of the poll, City Comptroller Brad Lander, had expressed sympathy with much of Mamdani’s agenda and urged his supporters to give their second preferences to Mamdani.

Lander, a liberal with principles, who is himself Jewish in a city with a Jewish population estimated at 960,000, has aided Mamdani in refuting charges of anti-Semitism. These have inevitably dogged Mamdani’s campaign as a Muslim with pro-Palestinian sympathies, who has not only denounced the war criminals of the Netanyahu government, but criticised the state of Israel itself, publicly supporting the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. In contrast to the increasingly cautious Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who did endorse his campaign, Mamdani was also to the fore in demanding the release of Columbia University Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil.

Since the primary result, veteran Congressional representative Jerry Nadler endorsed and US Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer congratulated Mamdani ahead of the general election in November. Both are Jewish and in their own words “committed Zionists.” Whether Schumer, in particular, sees which way the wind is blowing and hopes to increase his leverage with a future Mamdani administration would be a question on the minds of many of the campaign’s core activists.

Campaign Blends Old and New

The 33-year-old Mamdani brought experience as a rap music producer as well as a tenants’ advocate to his campaign. Though outspent by Cuomo’s camp by a ten-to-one factor, Mamdani’s savvy use of TikTok videos combined effectively with an old school effort that pounded the city’s pavements and knocked on tens of thousands of doors.

Soon after Donald Trump’s November 2024 victory, which saw his vote share rise above 30% in the Big Apple, Mamdani shot videos with potential voters who had either abstained or in many cases had switched from Joe Biden in 2020 to Trump last year. In contrast to New Labour’s tightly controlled focus groups, this method of directly engaging with the public went viral on social media. This may help explain why Mamdani performed strongly in neighbourhoods such as Sunset Park (Brooklyn) and Woodhaven (Queens), which had swung towards Trump last November.

Obituaries for the flagging DSA, which had surged during the 2016 Sanders’ presidential campaign, suddenly seemed premature with thousands and thousands signing up to volunteer for Mamdani’s campaign. Canvassing figures suggest Mamdani’s enthused troops contacted some 45,000 households in a single May week. The blend of contemporary digital and traditional methods managed to sell a comparatively radical programme (especially by recent US standards), which the Democratic establishment had sought to brand as unaffordable and even utopian.

European Social Democracy Comes to NYC

So, what features in the programme that according to the Financial Times has left Wall Street reeling? There are certainly some echoes of the 2017 and 2019 Labour Party manifestoes as well as the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone’s leadership. Against the backdrop of an undeniable affordability crisis, Mamdani proposed an across the board rent freeze as opposed to the city’s current complex rent regulations, which have failed to stem the relentless rise in housing costs. Alongside rent control, Mamdani promised a large-scale housebuilding drive that would entail the construction of 20,000 units of “affordable housing” a year for a decade, with a doubling of the maintenance budget for what remains of the city’s public housing stock.

His platform also featured a call for free bus travel, complemented by the extension of dedicated bus lanes to reduce congestion and travel times. He has also backed a significant increase in funding of the city’s subway system, which Andrew Cuomo has pointedly refused to use.

Mamdani pledged free child-care for all from six weeks to five years of age along with “baby baskets” for infants that would include educational resources and such practical items as diapers, baby wipes and swaddles. He is keen on creating school streets, particularly near elementary (primary) schools. In terms of the higher education sector, a Mamdani administration would aim to make the City University of New York tuition-free.

His policies include the creation of several city-owned grocery stores with the aim of supplying more affordable, good-quality food. This apparently surprising proposal is actually similar to municipally-run retail operations in such mid-western states as Kansas and Wisconsin.

Of course, there are costs attached to implementing such a programme and the Mamdani platform provided answers to questions about funding such significant reforms. In addition to increasing the city’s corporation tax to 11.5% in line with the neighbouring state of New Jersey, Mamdani has pledged to introduce a 2% surtax on top of the basic 3.9% rate for those with annual earnings exceeding $1,000,000, which is actually more modest than the “fair share” tax approved by Massachusetts voters in a state-wide referendum four years ago.

The Opposition: Alleged Abuse and Corruption

Aside from the remarkably effective campaign Mamdani waged, his success also owed something to the staggering weaknesses of his principal opponents. Incumbent mayor Eric Adams, who is African-American and a former senior police officer, easily defeated Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels vigilante group and the Republican candidate in 2021. Sliwa will again be the Republican standard-bearer in November. Adams, meanwhile, dropped out of the Democratic primary and announced his intention to run as an independent in the November election.

Already notorious for its hard-line crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University, Adams’ administration has faced multiple corruption allegations with accusations of the mayor himself accepting bribes from figures linked to the Turkish state, leading to a federal indictment last autumn. Adams has since cosied up to Donald Trump and the Department of Justice dropped the charges against him in early spring.

Uncertainty currently remains about the future intentions of Mamdani’s chief opponent, 67-year-old Andrew Cuomo. The heir to something of a political dynasty and a ‘big beast’ in the Democratic establishment, Cuomo had been governor of New York state with a population of nearly 20 million until he suffered a dramatic fall from grace. Serious allegations of sexual harassment emerged late in 2020 from more than a dozen women. Cuomo’s “#MeToo” moment eventually led to his resignation in April 2021 after nearly a decade atop the Empire State’s politics.

The scandal did not, however, put an end to his political career and Cuomo’s coffers swelled with donations from the likes of ardent supporters of Israel such as hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman – now a Trump donor – and Palantir CEO Alex Karp as well as New York’s ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg. The estimated $25 million in contributions to Cuomo’s campaign along with some notable union endorsements (nine union locals backed Mamdani and two more have endorsed him since the primary win) proved far from sufficient to secure his widely expected victory. He failed to secure the still coveted backing of the New York Times editorial board, which failed to endorse any candidate even as it reserved most of its fire for Mamdani.

Cuomo, incidentally, didn’t hesitate to play the anti-Semitism card against Mamdani during the campaign. Last year he volunteered his services to the legal team defending Binyamin Netanyahu against the indictment issued by the International Criminal Court.

Between Now and November

Andrew Cuomo has just announced he will run independently in November. In any case, the path ahead for Mamdani is hardly smooth. Opponents in the Democratic Party itself and across much of mainstream media will continue to hurl allegations of anti-Semitism. A common narrative, pushed by the likes of hard right Boston Globe columnist Carine Hajjar, derides Mamdani as a “Nepo baby” (his mother is the noted film director Mira Nair and his father a university academic) who can happily hold ‘luxury beliefs’.

According to a piece in Forbes, Bill Ackman and other ultra-rich figures from the finance and tech sectors remain committed to defeating Mamdani in the general election. They are actively seeking a candidate, presumably with less baggage than Adams or Cuomo to mount a challenge and are supposedly prepared to invest “hundreds of millions.” An unattributed quote from one of Ackman’s outriders makes the pitch to potential candidates: “The risk/reward of running for mayor over the next 132 days is extremely compelling as the cost in time and energy is small and the upside is enormous.”

Whether the Mamdani campaign can sustain its current momentum through the November general election in the face of shameless mud-slinging and opponents with far greater financial resources remains to be seen. Should he win in November there are further formidable obstacles to implementing his programme. He is likely to face significant opposition from within the city council despite the vast majority of 51 councillors being Democrats. In addition, New York state’s government has a final say over the city’s tax rates and Mario Cuomo’s successor, Kathy Hochul, is adamantly opposed to the proposed surtax.

In some otherwise cock-a-hoop commentary on the Jacobin website following Mamdani’s shock win, left academic and activist Eric Blanc offered a sobering observation: “The most challenging obstacle on the road ahead is that Zohran’s electoral success has significantly outpaced the scale of working-class and socialist organization in New York City.”

A sustained popular mobilisation on a scale not witnessed in decades will surely be required to enable a Mamdani administration to weather the wrath of Donald Trump, who has already branded him a “Communist lunatic”, and outmanoeuvre much of the Democratic Party’s national leadership, which will seek to frustrate the implementation of much of his current programme.

George Binette, a Massachusetts native, is a retired union activist, vice-chair of Camden Trades Council and former Trade Union Liaison Officer of Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP.

Image: Zohran Mamdani. Author: Bingjiefu He, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.