How Socialist Zohran Mamdani Beat the NYC Democratic Establishment
In a city used to politics of fear and caution, voters chose boldness, says a former adviser to AOC and Justice Democrats.
New York City just got a huge step closer to electing its first Muslim mayor, its first South Asian mayor, and the first democratic socialist to lead a major American city since the Great Depression (the last was Milwaukee). But Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary isn’t just a series of firsts. It’s a break from the city’s entrenched political order. It’s a direct rebuke to the corporate-backed Democratic machine that propped up Andrew Cuomo’s comeback, despite his record of corruption and mismanagement, and a rejection of the kind of politics that prioritizes fear and donor appeasement over vision.
Reflecting on Mamdani’s win, I’m reminded of the powerful scenes following Donald Trump’s Muslim ban in 2017, when thousands of Yemeni bodega owners shuttered their stores and poured into Brooklyn’s streets. Their prayers and American flags carried a profound assertion of dignity, visibility, and belonging. A challenge to Donald Trump and a country too accustomed to their erasure. Those moments illustrate that democracy lives not in abstract ideals, but in tangible acts of courage and solidarity. Too often, Democratic Party leaders have eloquently invoked the vision of multiracial democracy, yet faltered precisely when solidarity demanded clarity – particularly around Palestinian suffering, anti-Arab bigotry, and anti-Muslim discrimination. This has been more than strategic cowardice; it has amounted to a moral failure. Mamdani’s candidacy directly confronted this silence, declaring that true democracy includes the people that power often renders invisible.
One of the biggest mistakes the Democratic Party establishment made was trying to smother their base’s outrage over US support for Israel's assault on Gaza. An outrage that felt like basic moral common sense. Mamdani gave it a voice. Without that, there’s no campaign. As a Bangladeshi Uber driver told me on election night: “Our entire community voted for Zohran. He’s for ordinary people. He’s for peace, not war. We don’t want more wars killing innocent people. We need help here in New York.” This voter, and countless others, heard Mamdani speaking not in the language of focus groups, but in the language of shared humanity and lived struggle. At a moment when the establishment flinched from even acknowledging the mass death in Gaza, Mamdani said plainly: solidarity is not a slogan. It’s a commitment. It means seeing Palestinians, not erasing them. It means listening to voters who are tired of being told their grief is too controversial to name.
Mamdani’s victory redrew the map of what’s possible in New York City politics. He didn’t win on the backs of white gentrifiers alone; he built a multiracial, cross-class coalition that reached from the brownstones of Park Slope in Brooklyn to the apartment towers of Jackson Heights in Queens. He ran up margins in progressive enclaves like Park Slope, East Village, and Cobble Hill, but also won working-class, immigrant-heavy neighborhoods across Queens and Brooklyn – Bangladeshi, Chinese, Latino, Arab, Indo-Caribbean. He was the highest performer in Queens among Latino and South Asian precincts and carried South Asian strongholds like Richmond Hill and Jackson Heights, and East Asian precincts like Sunset Park, Chinatown, and Flushing. Most strikingly, he flipped Oakland Gardens, a swing district in Queens that went from supporting Joe Biden in 2020 to Republican Lee Zeldin in the 2022 New York gubernatorial race to Trump last year, is majority Asian, and long seen as part of Cuomo’s base. Mamdani didn’t just activate the left; he broke into communities that conventional wisdom says don’t vote socialist. And he did it with a disciplined message on public goods and affordability, backed by a massive, relentless volunteer field operation.