When I interviewed Zohran Mamdani last November, he spoke to me through a fuzzy webcam dressed like Fidel Castro — pairing an army green jacket with a black turtleneck and a respectable beard. As his campaign slowly built to Tuesday’s crescendo, Mamdani was rarely seen in anything other than a suit and tie. Turtleneck aside, the man’s political talents were evident in how he cheerfully framed democratic socialism without its usual baggage.
He hasn’t tweeted the word “queer” since 2023, nor “defund the police” since 2020. (Except for a 12 June post that read: “Don’t believe the MAGA billionaires funding Andrew Cuomo’s fear-driven campaign: I will not defund the police.”) But back in 2020 Mamdani insisted that “Queer liberation means defund the police.” This would have been toxic to a citywide campaign in pandemic-era NYC, but Mamdani isn’t running on it now. He’s running on one thing and one thing only: affordability. And it has captured the disenfranchised Millennials that Democrats have ignored.
Back in November when we chatted, as Democrats were reeling from Donald Trump’s culture-war comeback, Mamdani’s populist streak actually positioned him well to meet the moment. When I asked what his message was to Trump-supporting New Yorkers, Mamdani said he’d just spent the weekend in Queens and the Bronx chatting with voters about why they backed Trump or stayed home from the polls.
Trump, they told him, spoke to their “desire for a more affordable life and bringing peace back to the world.” So Mamdani said his path to victory was clear: talk about “tangible, deliverable policies” for the working class, not about “values or ideas.”
“There are far more New Yorkers who feel left out by the economic policies of Mayor Eric Adams and the Democratic leadership,” he told me, “Than identify with any one political persuasion.”
This turned out to be the key to Mamdani’s primary win. For most voters, in New York City or anywhere else, elections are always a matter of choosing between two imperfect choices. To read Andrew Cuomo’s loss as the Democratic electorate’s embrace of defund-the-police socialism is to underestimate the toxicity of the party establishment and how much voters have turned against it.
People are viscerally angry at Cuomo. And they are right to be, they project understandable grief onto him for Covid-era nursing home deaths. They see him as a figurehead for the party that led the city ever deeper into an affordability crisis, and the party that went to comical lengths covering-up the president’s mental decline. That’s enough to motivate many voters to actually go to the polls, and enough for them to take a chance on the guy who only ever seems to talk about one thing: the cost of living.
Mamdani was the perfect foil to a terrible candidate. It’s really that simple. If Democrats are mad about voters electing a socialist, they should consider that consolidating behind Cuomo left a whole lot of New Yorkers determined to vote in a way to take the disgraced governor down at all costs. For some, it was more about affirmatively embracing Mamdani’s platform and for others it was more about rejecting Cuomo. You don’t have to be a democratic socialist to vote for one when the alternative is more Andrew Cuomo.
Consider how the conservative writer Rod Dreher likened Mamdani’s win to Trump’s, writing that New York’s Left-wing voters “lashed out against what they regard as a failed liberal establishment, electing a charismatic populist who promised a clear break with the past.” Just as voters did for Trump nine years ago. “We on the Right can shake our heads and laugh at how dumb New York liberals and progressives were to choose a candidate as politically inexperienced and radical as Mamdani,” he argued “but don’t miss that this was also a referendum on the Democratic Party itself.”
The question, then, is why voters are animated and desperate to reject the Democratic Party, so much so that some were willing to vote for the erstwhile host of Celebrity Apprentice or a millennial socialist. I think Peter Thiel might have the best answer.
Cuomo is, of course, repulsive in many ways that have nothing to do with his economic policies. His fall from gubernatorial grace was particularly humiliating and shameful. But Thiel, the techno-libertarian billionaire, articulated socialism’s pull with millennials in a 2020 email to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, among other tech heavyweights. “I would be the last person to advocate for socialism,” he wrote. “But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why.”
“You don’t have to be a democratic socialist to vote for one when the alternative is more Andrew Cuomo.”
“And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact,” he added, “there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.”
In Thiel’s framework, it is no surprise then that Mamdani outperformed Cuomo in boroughs with the highest concentration of young voters, who are facing extreme rising costs and unaffordable housing in New York City. Andrew Cuomo’s own campaign website observed the cost of living has “risen faster than the growth in incomes.” New York’s state comptroller reported that food costs rose by 56.2% over the last ten years, which is 10% more than the national increase. And rents in the city “grew more than seven times faster than wages last year, the largest gap in the country.”
But this is not all Cuomo’s fault. It’s the result of structures that transcend the city’s borders. Places like New York City struggle, in part, because they’re such desirable places to live, with abundant economic and cultural opportunities. It will always be a hardscrabble city for the ambitious and artists. But it needs a healthy middle class and it can have a middle class — at least if politicians hope to neutralize the appeal of populism.
Mamdani’s biggest vulnerabilities in the general election in November are the two issues that fall in the middle of the Venn diagram between culture and economics: immigration and crime. They’ll either be his salvation or his downfall. The #defundthepolice record will be hard to run from in a general election, but Mamdani has backed away from it and the city is recovering from the pandemic-era crime spike, meaning it’s not as sensitive for voters right now as it was several years ago.
Immigration could be even tougher. Like many Democrats, Mamdani is leaning into the culture war angle by aggressively opposing the Trump administration’s crackdown as a fight against “fascism.”
“We are going to protect our immigrant communities and not collaborate with ICE,” he pledged this month. The campaign will have to convince wary New Yorkers, who also connect immigration with jobs and housing, that his opposition to Trump’s crackdown won’t be a package deal with the policies that flooded hotels and shelters earlier in Eric Adams’s term.
The likeliest case is that any time Mamdani is asked to defend his cultural record, he’ll pivot to affordability as fast as Adams jumps on business class flights to Turkey. When Mamdani says people in New York are “struggling to afford even a shred of dignity in their lives,” it resonates, and makes people more willing to take a chance on something new. His bet is that they care more about decreasing the cost of living than whatever he may or may not do in the cultural arena. If he can signal that queer liberation is a lower priority than affordable housing or universal childcare — and his opponent is a scandal-stained centrist — he can keep overperforming expectations, and win.
For Mamdani, the key to achieving that in the primary was a “relentless focus on an economic agenda,” as his communications director Andrew Epstein told me on Election Night. When I asked Epstein what the campaign’s message is now that Mamdani is running in the general election, he replied, “One thing Zohran has said throughout this whole campaign is there is not an ideological majority in New York City but there is a majority of people who feel disillusioned with the political system and alienated from the economic system and feel the strain of the cost of living prices.” The alienated and disillusioned — Thiel’s millennials — showed up full throttle for Zohran.
“I don’t think the message really changes,” said Epstein. “I think it continues to be this relentless economic agenda.”
Democratic voters are clearly not the only New Yorkers ready for change. Mamdani’s opponents, be they Bill Ackman, Curtis Sliwa, or Eric Adams, will need to make Mamdani look like a riskier bet than the painful and precarious status quo if they have any hope of preventing his win in November. Like the broader Democratic Party, Mamdani is now winning voters’ trust by focusing on kitchen table issues without fully disavowing the progressive cultural policies he prioritized before Peak Woke started receding. If he’s successful, then the party might have found its path out of the wilderness.
