Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City's Democratic primary for Mayor is a progressive victory worth celebrating
Mamdani's win over establishment favorite Cuomo is a long time coming.
Last Tuesday, Muslim-American and former State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic Ranked-Choice Primary for the New York City mayoral elections. Mamdani is a Shia Muslim and a fan of Premier League team Arsenal (my favorite as well).
One week later, ranked-choice voting tabulations confirmed Mamdani’s win, beating out the corrupt former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. He is likely the favorite to win the general election, since he is on the Democratic and Working Families Party lines. Mamdani will face off against incumbent Mayor Eric Adams (I), right-wing media pundit and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa (R), attorney Jim Walden (I), and Cuomo (Fight and Deliver, but still an official Democrat), and unlike the primary, the general is a first-past-the-post, meaning a that a plurality is sufficient to win.
Mamdani’s win has brought out the full anger of right-wing crybabies, often featuring racist and Islamophobic tropes, false accusations of “antisemitism”, and/or even calls for deportations and arrests.
Mehdi Hasan wrote in Zeteo that Mamdani’s victory is a good day for Muslim Americans (06.27.2025):
The polling is clear: Muslims endure the highest prejudice of any religious and ethnic group in the US, and that prejudice has been increasing in recent years. Three times as many Americans – and five times as many Republicans – oppose a Muslim presidential candidate as they do a Jewish presidential candidate. And, when Wadea Al-Fayoume, a 6-year-old Muslim boy, a Palestinian American, was stabbed to death in a hate crime after Oct. 7, it barely attracted any national attention.
Yet Congress holds multiple hearings on antisemitism while ignoring growing Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hatred – including against their own Muslim members. Day after day, ordinary Muslims across the length and breadth of the United States are expected to suck it up and endure insult after insult, trope after trope, threat after threat.
The Islamophobes’ strategy is clear. They want us to be afraid and insecure; to keep our heads down. They want us cowed and intimidated. As Mamdani told MSNBC on Wednesday: “I’ve spoken to many Muslims across this city who have shared that their fear of having to be essentially branded a terrorist just by living in public life is one that keeps them preferring life in the shadows, life outside of that specter. And this is not the way that we can have our city be. It’s not the way that we can have our country be.”
He’s right. But I, for one, am a Muslim American who founded a new media company to speak truth to power because I have no intention of staying in the shadows.
And Zohran Mamdani is a Muslim American who ran for the highest office in the biggest city in the country, and is on course for victory in the fall, because he has no intention of staying in the shadows.
The same applies to Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, André Carson, Keith Ellison, Ali Velshi, Ayman Mohyeldin, Amna Nawaz, Ramy Youssef, Mo Amer, Hasan Minhaj, and many more.
Because Muslim Americans are not going anywhere. I’m sorry to have to break it to the Islamophobes, but as Zohran Mamdani so powerfully demonstrated on Tuesday, we’re just getting started.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened to arrest New York City’s Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani if he carried through with campaign promises to enact sanctuary city policies.
The president, during a trip to a south Florida immigration detention facility he’s taken to calling “Alligator Alcatraz,” called the 33-year-old U.S. citizen a “communist” and even suggested that he may be in the United States illegally.
“Well then, we’ll have to arrest him,” Trump said in response to a question about Mamdani’s promises to prevent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in New York City. “Look, we don’t need a communist in this country, but if we have one, I’m gonna be watching over him very carefully on behalf of the nation.”
If they are brazen enough to arrest Mamdani, blue states should consider secession in protest of the Trump Regime’s lawless maneuver.
Earlier this year, Mamdani told Erin in the Morning that he would fight for trans New Yorkers. “The company you keep says a lot about you — and Andrew Cuomo’s is anti-choice, anti-trans activists and billionaires,” he said. “At a time when Donald Trump is already stripping constitutional freedoms from our city’s residents, we need leaders with conviction, not cowardice.”
Mamdani is also the only mayoral candidate out of the crowded Democratic pool who appears to have participated in the protests against NYC hospitals complying in advance to Trump’s anti-trans health care legal threats.
“In light of Trump’s illegal executive order, the question is being asked: Who are we willing to give up?” Mamdani said in a February social media video, captured in the crowds of one such demonstration. “If you’re NYU Langone, Mt. Sinai, [New York] Presbyterian [Hospital] or Mayor Adams, the answer seems to be everyone. But for the rest of us, it's no one.”
The aging Democratic establishment should probably be put out to pasture
Still, the headline on this newsletter focuses on theme #4, in part because Silver Bulletin mostly takes a national lens. Cuomo’s campaign produced a laundry list of endorsements, such as Bloomberg, former president Clinton, former majority whip Jim Clyburn, plus lots and lots of unions. Meanwhile, the New York Times, which can be incredibly influential in the city, issued a half-hearted anti-Zohran endorsement after initially swearing off involvement in local races, encouraging voters to rank Cuomo toward the lower end of their ballot but Mamdani not at all.
The Clintons, Clyburn, the New York Times and the unions, plus Black groups, Jewish groups, Italian groups and every other stripe of the rainbow: that was supposed to be a winning formula in New York. But the old formula doesn’t compute anymore.
It’s hard not to be reminded of the past three presidential races, and particularly the Democratic establishment forcing an eat-your-spinach choice down the throats of the primary electorate. It was Hillary Clinton’s turn to win the nomination in 2016 after she lost to Obama in 2008 and she heavily emphasized this in her campaign — although to be fair, she performed much better in New York City against Bernie Sanders than Cuomo did against Zohran.3
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Meanwhile, Clinton, Biden and Harris were all nominated despite all being previous primary losers. (Clinton in 2008 to Obama; Biden in both 1988 and 2008; Harris in 2020.) You can’t say the same about Cuomo, at least, who thrashed former Sex and the City actress Cynthia Nixon in the 2018 gubernatorial primary. But in the mayor’s race, Cuomo trotted out the same boilerplate, tired themes, including a heavy emphasis on Trump, that had also failed Clinton, Biden (in 2024) and Harris rather than the local issues that mayoral races often turn upon.
The extent to which this might be a leading indicator for national politics, and particularly the 2028 presidential nomination race, is an open question. But I think you could go too far in dismissing it, and some fellow center-left types probably will. New York City is a weird place, but it’s also an exceptionally diverse place, home to every imaginable ethnic group, more conservatives in the Democratic primary electorate than you might think, and plenty of voters who were probably closer to Cuomo on the issues but who just didn’t like his vibe, or who liked Mamdani’s.
So Zohran thoroughly earned the win, and Cuomo and the Democratic establishment thoroughly earned the loss. And even if they finally take the hint, generational turnover in the Democratic Party is coming whether they like it or not.
Judith Levine for The Guardian on how Mamdani’s win could make Democrats bolder fighters for the people (07.01.2025):
Asked by a local Fox TV interviewer what a democratic socialist is, Mamdani answered: “To me it means that every New Yorker has what they need to live a dignified life – it’s local government’s responsibility to provide that.” His platform includes a rent freeze on the city’s 2.3m regulated apartments; free childcare starting at six months; no-fare buses; and a $30 minimum wage – about the city’s living wage – by 2030. Basically, he believes life in the city can be easier and happier.
This platform resonates. When you canvass, you ask people what concerns them. A woman with a baby on her hip nodded toward the baby and sighed. I got what she meant. At a shabby industrial building surrounded by new glass towers, a woman descended four flights because the landlord won’t fix the buzzer, or anything else; he’s trying to push out the tenants and sell the lot. She said cheap rent allowed her to start a business, which she feared Mamdani would tax to death. I told her he supported a crackdown on bad landlords and commercial rent control. “Hmm,” she said. By the conversation’s end, I entered “leans yes” in the canvassing app.
Mamdani’s ideas are not pie-in-the-sky. The rent guidelines board, appointed by the mayor, voted 0% increases on some leases in 2015, 2016, and on all leases in 2020, during the pandemic. The Democratic mayor Bill De Blasio got universal pre-kindergarten staffed, funded and full almost immediately upon election in 2014.
Chicago and Atlanta may be moving ahead with municipal groceries. A 2023 pilot program waiving fares on five New York bus routes was largely successful, and its failures can inform the next attempt.
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Moral integrity is good politics
Since founding his college’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, Mamdani, an east African Muslim, has been a vocal critic of Israel’s occupation. A week after Hamas’s attacks – which he calls a war crime – he joined Jewish Voice for Peace in a protest of Israel’s outsized response. For this position, his closest rival, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, and the rightwing press have hammered Mamdani as an antisemite and a Holocaust denier; on one mailer, his photo was doctored to make his beard bushier and longer. Cuomo kept mispronouncing his name, insinuating that Zohran Mamdani is inscrutably, dangerously foreign.
Establishment Democrats – Kamala Harris, Cory Booker – keep running from condemnation of what most of the world calls Israel’s crimes against humanity. This is not just a moral failing. It’s politically unnecessary. A recent Pew poll found that almost seven in 10 Democrats – and half of Republicans under 50 – have negative views of Israel. In a couple of months of canvassing, I met only two people who wouldn’t vote for Mamdani because of his position on Israel-Palestine. One had Hebrew tattooed on his forearm. Among the volunteers, several of whom were drawn to Zohran for his stance on Palestine, were Jewish people.
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Fear doesn’t always rule elections
Mamdani’s campaign was partially, appropriately, fueled by economic anxiety. But try as his detractors did to shift the focus, it was not fueled by fear of crime. He does not advocate defunding the police. Instead, he’s proposed a department of community safety, to deal with volatile mental health crises in the subways and to attack hate crimes at their source, leaving cops to pursue violent crime. He recognizes that good public services and personal economic stability, not more police, constitute public safety.
I am hoping and praying for Mamdani to win the general this November, so that the Democratic Party can move in a better direction and give the middle finger to the right-wing MAGA crybabies, Donald Trump and his fascist regime, Islamophobes, and the pro-Israel lobby.