Mamdani’s Massive Victory Should Show Democrats Where the Party’s Future Lies

Zohran Mamdani’s win in Tuesday night’s Democratic primary for mayor of New York City has delivered a shock to the political establishment nationwide, forcing media pundits and Democratic Party leaders alike to countenance the possibility that unapologetic advocacy of working class political priorities like free universal child care, free buses, and rent freezes can appeal to a broad swath of the electorate and win elections in our age of hyperpolarization.

As the race between Mamdani and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo tightened in the weeks leading up to the election, prognosticators warned that it might take a week or more before results were definitive.

That caution, it turned out, was unwarranted. By 10:20 pm on Tuesday night, it was clear that Mamdani had built an insurmountable lead, and Cuomo announced that he had conceded the race and called Mamdani to congratulate him.

Mamdani — who has served in the New York State Assembly since 2021, representing a district in Queens — had been polling around 1 percent as late as February 2025. Within a few months, he surged from being a little-known state assemblyman to seizing the Democratic nomination against one of the best-known figures in New York state politics.

Now, Mamdani will head into a November general election as the presumptive favorite to claim the mayoralty. In that election, he’ll face Eric Adams, the current mayor of New York, whose tenure has been marked by numerous scandals and who decided to run as an Independent in order to avoid defeat in the Democratic Party primary. He may also face Cuomo again who, as of Tuesday night, reportedly had not made up his mind about whether to avail himself of the third-party line he had previously secured for the November ballot.

Despite these obstacles, Mamdani is still the overwhelming favorite to emerge as New York City’s next mayor. On the face of it, Mamdani is exactly the kind of candidate whom the Democratic Party urgently needs at this juncture. Since Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump last year, Democrats have been adrift. Riven by internal divisions over their party’s longstanding support of Israel, and without a clear leader, Democrats have stumbled in their attempts to present a coherent opposition to Trump’s autocratic and neofascist impulses. Their inconstant opposition to Trump’s agenda has taken a toll; recent polls have shown that the Democratic Party’s favorability ratings are at their lowest recorded levels since at least the early 1990s.

With his win on Tuesday, Mamdani may have given the party a new road map for electoral success. While Election Day results are still coming in, previous polling and early results give a strong indication of the coalition that Mamdani built to secure his upset victory. Mamdani secured large majorities in the comparatively young and ethnically diverse boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, running up 50-point or greater margins in neighborhoods like Astoria in Queens and Bushwick in Brooklyn — neighborhoods that contain substantial immigrant communities and also significant pockets of younger, more recent transplants to the city.

Mamdani’s campaign made enormous inroads with young voters across the demographic spectrum, including young men — a group whose flagging support has been a point of great consternation for the party. Mamdani also mobilized an army of volunteers that numbered in the tens of thousands who knocked over a million doors on his behalf, replicating the kind of grassroots groundswell that has buoyed the campaigns of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders.

And, critically, Mamdani succeeded in connecting progressive policy to kitchen-table issues. In keeping a laser focus on New York’s affordability crisis, Mamdani managed to avoid being sucked into an endless series of rhetorical traps, including smears over his stance toward Israel. Mamdani spoke to voters’ everyday concerns and convincingly made the case that bold, progressive policy is the salve for what ails them.

Mamdani’s win will surely force a reexamination of the claims that Cuomo and other establishment Democrats have been making about what political way forward is necessary to resuscitate the floundering Democratic Party.

Cuomo ran on a platform that centered support for Israel and rejected socially progressive policy. He argued, often belligerently, that Democrats needed to move away from calls for police reform and support for LGBT rights and instead embrace centrism. His candidacy also relied on the presumption that name recognition and deep connections within the party are all that is required to run a successful campaign. Never mind documentation of his serial sexual harassment of New York State employees, or the evidence that his administration misled the public about nursing home deaths during the COVID crisis — Cuomo believed voters would still respond positively to a familiar face. Mamdani’s overperformance against Cuomo should be read as a repudiation of the idea that Democrats can rely on the best-known names in the party to win, cycle after cycle.

What happens next will hinge on the Democratic establishment’s reaction to Mamdani’s shock win. To execute much of his policy, Mamdani will need support from other Democrats across New York state, in both the legislature and at the governorate.

Kathy Hochul, New York’s current governor, is not an easy fit with Mamdani. Her brand of cautious, center-leaning politics are sure to clash with Mamdani’s vision for the state’s largest city and political-economic engine. As late as last week, she had criticized Mamdani’s platform for its potential to, in her view, drive “more [New Yorkers] to Palm Beach.” On Tuesday night, though, Hochul struck a more conciliatory tone, acknowledging that Mamdani’s win makes it clear that voters are “demanding a more affordable, more livable New York City.”

Hochul and Mamdani’s visions of what constitutes livability are already in tension — Mamdani has emphasized the costs of housing and consumer goods as pain points for the working class, while Hochul has discouraged higher taxes amid an affordability crisis. Whether she decides to accommodate or challenge Mamdani may be an early indication of the degree to which the national party is ready to embrace this new upstart.

The Democratic Party’s national leadership will also be uniquely affected by the changes Mamdani and his team effect at the city level. The party’s de facto leaders, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of Park Slope, Brooklyn, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, both figure to be Mamdani’s constituents. And Trump, of course, is also a lifelong New Yorker. His long history with the city is almost certain to put Mamdani front and center in Trump’s contentious attempt to pit red states against blue states in a culture war.

The party, then, stands at a stark crossroads. Will Democratic Party leaders embrace Mamdani and his progressive platform, championing his candidacy in November’s general election? If he proceeds to the mayoralty, will they support him as he inevitably clashes with Trump from one of the highest-profile public offices in the country? Or, will the party blunt its backing of the young, charismatic rising star and leave him, and New York City, largely to fend for itself?

Democrats have been yearning for an injection of hope and momentum, and now New York City voters have given them just that. How the party responds to Mamdani’s unabashed embrace of working class politics, though, still remains to be seen.