🌊 It’s a Blue Wave, Baby!
Peter Rothpletz on Zohran Mamdani’s historic win, the Democrats’ electoral sweep, and Graham Platner’s viral response to the passing of Dick Cheney.
🚨Breaking: The US government shutdown is now the longest in American history. Guess who was president when the previous record was set.
Good morning! Peter here, reporting from the Big Apple, where my fellow Gothamites just overwhelmingly elected Zohran Mamdani to be our next mayor. History was made, my friends!
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ The Resistance finally finds its footing, Zohran Mamdani pulls it off, and the Supreme Court takes up Donald Trump’s tariffs. Plus, we have a full Election Day roundup from across the US.
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‘In This Moment of Political Darkness, New York Will Be the Light’
Remember where you were last night. Remember what you were thinking as the winner of the New York mayoral election took to the stage in Brooklyn. Remember how you felt.
It was the beginning of something historic, something unprecedented, something new.
“New York City, breathe this moment in,” NYC Mayor-elect Zohram Mamdani told a cheering, ecstatic crowd of supporters. “We are breathing in the air of a city that has been reborn.”
Zohran Kwame Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist and proud immigrant, made history yesterday evening when he was elected the 111th mayor of America’s biggest city.
The youngest New York mayor in more than a century. The city’s first Muslim mayor, first South Asian mayor, first mayor born in Africa.
He wasn’t supposed to have won this race. He was a political unknown, a left-wing dreamer, a New York assembly member polling at less than 1% not even a year ago. And yet, as he put it in his victory speech, he and his movement “toppled a political dynasty.”
“I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life,” a smiling Mamdani announced, “but let tonight be the final time I utter his name as we turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few.”
It was a speech filled with hope and ambition, references to early 20th-century US socialist Eugene Debs and legendary Indian independence leader and former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and a warning to Donald Trump: “To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.”
Mamdani’s triumph is the clearest sign to date that Donald Trump’s fascist project is a sputtering failure. But what’s nigh-equally important to recognize is that the liberal establishment must wake up to what the American people are begging for: true and proper change. Just lazily deploying “socialist” as if it is a slur doesn’t work anymore.
With more than 50% of the vote – and more than a million votes total – Mamdani handily defeated both Republican challenger Curtis Sliwa and Trump-endorsed, alleged #MeToo prowler Andrew Cuomo in a race that shattered every conventional political assumption about what’s possible in America.
Listening to that speech last night, and you can watch it above in full, it was obvious to me that Zohran Kwame Mamdani is the most charismatic and eloquent Democratic Party star since Barack Hussein Obama. (And, as Mehdi often points out, unlike Obama, Mamdani actually is a socialist Muslim from Africa!)
Here, though, is the big question: when will the Dem establishment get behind him?
For months, party leaders have treated Mamdani’s campaign like abject kryptonite. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer flat out – and shamefully – refused to say who he voted for. In his own city!
As I explained in yesterday’s ‘First Draft,’ Mamdani’s win doesn’t mean every Democrat must suddenly sound like a socialist. It merely means the party can no longer pretend that his ideology has no constituency, that his policies have no supporters. Because the truth is, there is no one kind of Democrat anymore. But there is a playbook from Mamdani, a politician who has energized disaffected young men that Democrats were so desperate to reach in the wake of their 2024 defeat.
The playbook has four key lessons:
Prioritize anti-system, anti-status quo messaging.
Never stop talking about affordability, inflation, and the cost of living until the cows come home.
Pick a candidate who is able to do the 30-second TikTok, 30-minute podcast, and three-hour Hasan Piker stream.
Pick a young, smiling, charismatic candidate who doesn’t back down under attack.
Or as Mamdani put it in his soaring speech last night: “I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”
🗞️ What You Need to Know
Travel travails: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that the US might have to close parts of its airspace due to staffing shortages caused by the ongoing government shutdown.
SNAP showdown: White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration will be “fully complying” with the court order to fund some SNAP benefits after Trump threatened to withhold funding until Democrats vote to reopen the government.
Trump’s tariffs get day in court: The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments today about whether Trump’s sweeping tariffs broke federal law. A ruling against him could eliminate his favorite foreign policy crutch, but the current 6-3 conservative majority has largely bent over backwards this year for his MAGA masterplan.
Trump health scare?: Trump off-handedly mentioned he underwent an MRI scan, which he says was “perfect,” and a cognitive test. When press secretary Leavitt was asked yesterday why he was tested, she responded: “I’ll check back on that.”
Platner watch: Following the passing of former Vice President Dick Cheney, Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner came out saying that folks should not mourn his death. Surely his legacy wasn’t that bad. Oh, wait.
Conservative catfight: House Speaker Mike Johnson told a National Review reporter that conservatives should not give a platform to antisemitism when asked if Tucker Carlson has a place in the conservative movement after having Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes on his show.
🗳️ Everywhere But New York
Swin and Andrew on the Zeteo politics team filed this election roundup from the rest of the country last night:
Democrats of all stripes won everywhere on Tuesday, not just in New York City, in a historic night that was also a repudiation of Donald Trump’s Republican Party and far-right second administration.
Democrats cruised in Virginia and New Jersey. Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill, both centrists, won their campaigns for governor handily. Spanberger said of her win: “Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship.” Virginia also elected Ghazala Hashmi as lieutenant governor, making her the first Muslim woman elected to statewide office anywhere in the US. The state also elected Jay Jones, the Democratic attorney general candidate, who was widely criticized for writing violent text messages.
The results indicate there’s growing backlash throughout the US to Trump’s increasingly authoritarian and unpopular administration. NBC News’s exit polls in New Jersey, Virginia, New York City, and California found majorities of voters disapprove of Trump. More than 60% of those polled in Virginia and New Jersey said they are angry or dissatisfied with how things are going in the country today. In Virginia, California, and New York City, voters listed the economy at the top of their concerns.
The exit polls found dissatisfaction with Trump’s immigration policies in New Jersey and Virginia.
In Pennsylvania, voters retained three Democratic justices on the state Supreme Court. Philadelphia’s progressive district attorney, Larry Krasner, won big.
In Maine, voters thoroughly rejected a conservative ballot measure to make it harder to vote, in advance of the competitive Senate race for Republican Susan Collins’s seat next year. The measure, as Zeteo previously reported, was bankrolled by Supreme Court’s dark money master Leonard Leo, who may be Maine’s least popular part-time resident. Mainers also voted to enact a red-flag gun law, following the deadliest mass shooting in the state’s history in 2023.
In California, voters approved Proposition 50, which allows for new congressional district boundaries in the Golden State. It’s a big win for Governor Gavin Newsom’s “fight fire with fire” strategy in the ongoing state-by-state redistricting battle, prompted by Republicans in Texas, that could determine which party wins control of the US House in the 2026 midterms. Dems in California could now win as many as five extra seats next year.
Across the GOP on Tuesday night, party leaders and operatives did their best to spin this apparent, harsh repudiation of authoritarian Trumpism as anything but a repudiation of Trump and the Republican elite.
The president himself weighed in on his social media site, declaring that “REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT” because “TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT” and because of the ongoing government shutdown.
Numerous Republican Party sources, including current and former Trump administration officials, attempted to downplay to Zeteo the significance of the night, and several tried to make it sound like a bad thing for Democrats that Mamdani had won.
“Off-year blue state election results are not determinative for the midterms,” said Sam Nunberg, a former political adviser to Trump. “Republicans have a lot to be happy about now that Mamdani is the new face of the Democrat party.”
But every once in a while, you get a less buoyant assessment from someone working within the Trumpian cult of personality.
“It’s not tonight’s results that are making me nervous about 2026 or 2028,” one current Trump adviser told Zeteo. “It’s the president’s approval rating dipping into the 30s.”
🧠 Pop Quiz!
Which women’s suffrage leader was arrested and fined $100 for illegally voting in the 1872 presidential election?
Keep your eyes out for the answer below!
🌏 Anywhere But America
🇵🇸 Don’t forget Gaza: Israel has rejected nearly two dozen requests from nine aid agencies to bring in almost 4,000 pallets of shelter supplies, including tents, blankets, and sealing materials, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. Meanwhile, Israel continued violating the ceasefire with intense air raids and shelling in parts of the Strip.
🇸🇩 Sudan genocide: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on the international community to “stop the fighting” in Sudan, noting reports of widespread executions since the Rapid Support Forces seized El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state.
🇨🇲 Protesters killed in Cameroon: Security forces in Cameroon killed 48 civilians at protests against the re-election of 92-year-old President Paul Biya, the world’s oldest leader, who has been in power since 1982.
🇳🇬 Nigeria responds to Trump: Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar rejected Trump’s claims that Nigeria is allowing the “killing of Christians.” The statements come shortly after Trump designated Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” and threatened possible military actions against the African nation.
🚨 Don’t Miss It!
Zohran Mamdani’s history-making victory doesn’t just give a tactical blueprint for Democrats moving forward; it provides a strategic mandate for 2026 and beyond, writes Geoff Simpson, the PAC director for Justice Democrats and co-director of New Yorkers for Lower Costs, in an upcoming essay for Zeteo.
It’ll hit your inbox later today!
🦊 Fox Watch
Border czar Tom Homan says the quiet part out loud: ICE kidnappings aren’t just reserved for criminals. What happened to targeting the “worst of the worst”?
🧠 Trivia answer: Susan B. Anthony, who described her trial as “the greatest judicial outrage history has ever recorded.”
🤦 WTF
So, just to get this straight, ICE agents can use tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets, but once you throw a sandwich at them, you’ve crossed a line?
They must be making those footlongs with metal, the way it shook up Officer Sandwich Guy.
ICYMI From Zeteo
Zeteo’s Melanie Riehl, Akshay Gokul, and Minnah Arshad contributed to this newsletter.
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My hope is these will be the Democrats who will actually do something. And not just fall in the long line of do-nothing-Democrat tradition.
I watched some Fox News last night, and it was delicious!