George Binette examines last week’s US election results.

For all wings of the Democratic Party Tuesday 4^th November was a good night, meeting or exceeding expectations in so-called off-year elections in cities, towns and states despite the party’s miserable standing in national opinion polls. In elections that partly functioned as a surrogate referendum on the first ten months of Donald Trump’s second White House term, Democratic standard-bearers reaped the rewards.

The elections took place less than three weeks after the second round of “No Kings” demonstrations had mobilised an estimated seven million people onto the streets of huge conurbations and small towns across the 50 states and Washington, DC. Another critical element of the backdrop was the longest ever shutdown of the federal government, already in its sixth week at the time of writing. This has left a substantial proportion of civil servants unpaid and interrupted SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) payments to a majority of SNAP’s 42 million means-tested recipients.

Some notable results

Centrist candidates captured governorships in Virginia – home to tens of thousands of federal employees – and New Jersey. Former CIA counter-terrorism officer Abigail Spanberger won easily in Virginia and ex-Naval officer Mikie Sherrill triumphed in New Jersey, with a margin that considerably outstripped opinion poll projections. Spanberger, who publicly championed LGBT+ rights, appeared to have suffered no detriment for her stance against a Republican opponent whose advertising targeted anti-trans sentiment.

On the Pacific coast, California’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom gambled on a referendum to green-light redistricting for the state’s Congressional seats – effectively a riposte to similar “gerrymandering” moves in Republican-controlled states such as Texas. The initiative paid off handsomely with more than three-fifths of those voting backing the proposal, helping fuel speculation about a Newsom presidential candidacy in 2028.

Meanwhile, in states that backed Trump in 2024, there were some encouraging results for the Democrats. Georgia voters backed two Democrats to sit on the state’s five-person body for regulation of public utilities. Leaving aside US presidential elections and Senate contests, the pair were the first Georgia Democrats to win at statewide level since 2006. In the swing state of Pennsylvania, Democrats retained three seats on the state’s Supreme Court, defying a well-funded campaign by hard-right billionaire Jeff Yass to tilt the court’s ideological balance. Even in Mississippi, Democratic candidates for the state legislature made gains, eroding the Republican ‘super majority’ in the state’s Senate.

New York’s “dawn of a better day”

But the contest that garnered the bulk of both national and global media attention was the battle for the mayoralty of the Big Apple. For the first time New York City has elected both a Muslim and a self-proclaimed democratic socialist in the person of 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani, who again defeated New York state’s former governor, Andrew Cuomo, by nearly nine percentage points. Cuomo, scion of a political dynasty, had left office in disgrace after a string of sexual harassment and bullying allegations. His final tally of 41.6% probably benefited from the collapse in support for Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels vigilante group and the Republican standard bearer for the second consecutive mayoral contest.

Donald Trump’s endorsement of Cuomo, his supposed arch-enemy, failed to play a decisive role in the outcome even as millions in donations from the likes of billionaires Bill Ackman and Michael Bloomberg, and Airbnb’s founder proved a waste of big bucks. (In an ironic twist, Mamdani’s victory speech borrowed from Cuomo’s late father, Mario, who coined the phrase “you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.”)

In securing an absolute majority of the city-wide vote, Mamdani, who had launched his campaign as an obscure no-hoper nearly a year before, won in four of the city’s five boroughs. The lone exception was the smallest Staten Island – New York City’s ‘whitest’ borough and second only to Manhattan in terms of median income. The Bronx, which has the highest official poverty rate, had gone to Cuomo in June’s Democratic primary, but in the final election Mamdani scored 52% of the borough’s vote with majority Black wards that had favoured Cuomo in the primary swinging decisively to Mamdani.

Mamdani’s victory undoubtedly reflected his campaign’s success in sparking a sharp rise in voter turnout with a significant element (nearly 14%) of his support coming from his presence on ballot papers as both the Working Families Party and the Democratic Party candidate. Though city officials have yet to confirm the figure for electors’ participation, it is likely to top 40% – modest, but a dramatic rise from 2021 when fewer than one in four eligible voters cast ballots, and also higher than the turnout in London’s 2024 mayoral contest. This year’s turnout also reversed a secular decline in participation. It was the highest in both absolute and percentage terms since 1969 when a charismatic former Republican, John Lindsey, won re-election after losing his then party’s primary.

Demographic change in the biggest US city undoubtedly played a part in creating the basis for Mamdani’s win, but it took his candidacy to energise potential voters from South Asian, Middle Eastern and other migrant backgrounds. First and foremost, however, Mamdani’s appeal relied on a consistent message, whether in Arabic, English or Spanish, advocating government intervention to tackle New York’s acute affordability crisis: the median monthly rent for a one-bedroom flat is approximately $3,500 (£2,640, arguably even higher than London’s).

This message cut across ethnic divisions and helped defuse relentless, often shameless attempts by Cuomo’s backers to brand Mamdani an ‘anti-Semite’. While Cuomo, who had volunteered his services as a lawyer to Benjamin Netanyahu, chalked up an overwhelming majority among ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, polling data suggests that overall, 40% of the city’s Jewish voters backed Mamdani in spite, or in many cases because, of his pro-Palestinian stance.

Much of the Democratic establishment kept its distance from Mamdani even after his clear-cut primary win. New York state’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, eventually issued a tepid endorsement and joined Mamdani at a campaign rally, while the party’s leader in the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, gave public backing only in the final week of the race. New York senator Chuck Schumer, the 74-year-old leader of US Senate Democrats, ultimately withheld any endorsement even as other senior Jewish politicians such as Representative Jerry Nadler came out in support of Mamdani. The reluctance of the party’s ‘big beasts’ to associate themselves with the Mamdani campaign stemmed not only from their continued support for Israel, but their unwillingness to embrace a comparatively radical social-democratic agenda.

There will be trouble ahead

Having branded Mamdani “a communist lunatic,” Donald Trump has threatened both the deployment of troops to New York City and swingeing cuts worth billions in federal government dollars to New York City in the wake of the result. Trump has also urged major businesses to relocate from his native New York to the likes of Miami with the aim of undermining a Mamdani-led administration.

In his victory speech, Mamdani threw down the rhetorical gauntlet to the 47^th president, telling Trump to “turn the volume up.” In a more substantial passage, Mamdani said: “We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks. We will stand alongside unions and expand labour protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed.”

On the other hand, the initial appointments to his transition team suggest an abundance of caution with women who featured in former mayor Bill DeBlasio’s comparatively progressive administration and Lina Khan, head of the Federal Trade Commission during Biden’s presidency. Whether the introduction of such figures marks a rightward, technocratic turn or simply a pragmatic acknowledgement of his own inexperience in dealing with a massive local state bureaucracy remains to be seen.

Mamdani has etched cast-iron pledges into public consciousness around rent freezes, free bus travel and universal childcare, giving clear yardsticks against which to measure genuine progress. An interview with a New York Times journalist the day after the election suggested that his previously muted proposal for “taxing the rich” is very much back on his agenda.

Two key questions remain. In the context of New York City itself, will Mamdani sustain the campaign infrastructure built over the past year and mobilise at least some of the tens of thousands of volunteers, who propelled him to success when his programme faces inevitable attacks not only from Trump’s administration and key sections of capital, but the Democratic Party establishment across the city, state and US as a whole?

The second question concerns whether Mamdani’s victory will usher in a leftward shift on class-based economic issues by the Democrats generally or, alternatively, portend a schism so deep that a viable new party emerges from the divide.

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 https://www.heute.at/i/so-will-trumps-albtraum-new-york-umkrempeln-120141709/doc-1j979dhkf4 Licence: Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0 Deed