Mamdani won by a modest margin in a deeply blue city not because of his radical commitments, but despite them.
Zohran Mamdani is an extraordinary political story: a generational political talent, an out-of-nowhere success, and—measured by the number of citizens he will soon govern—the most powerful elected democratic socialist in American history.
But his allies have tried to turn his victory into something different: a model for the national Democratic Party. “All across this country, people are sick and tired of seeing the billionaire class get richer and richer, and the billionaire class controlling to a significant degree both political parties. What Zohran Mamdani is showing is that a grassroots movement can take them on and defeat them,” Senator Bernie Sanders, a fellow democratic socialist, told The Nation just before this week’s election. “The take-aways may echo far beyond New York,” Time’s Philip Elliott concluded on Wednesday.
But the reality is that Mamdani’s victory says absolutely nothing about the wider appeal of his priorities. If anything, the context of his victory reveals the limits of his platform.
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Begin with the basic political geography of the city. New York is overwhelmingly Democratic. Last year, Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump in New York City by 37 points, which was quite low by historic standards—previous Democratic presidential candidates have carried the city by 50 to 60 points. In politics, making it in New York City says almost nothing about whether you can make it anywhere. A win is a win, but Mamdani’s nine-point margin is deeply unimpressive in a city where Democrats usually win.
A recent poll found that his national favorability rating is a dismal 21 percent, lower even than Senator Chuck Schumer’s 25 percent. Mamdani almost certainly would not win a statewide election in New York, and New York is a solidly Democratic state.
The fallacy seized upon by Mamdani’s giddy supporters is that his victory overturns the conventional wisdom that voters punish extreme candidates. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut wrote on X that Mamdani’s election revealed “important lessons,” such as “focus on shifting economic power,” and that “the elites have little idea what’s actually mainstream.” Many have noted Mamdani’s knack for mobilizing enthusiastic swarms of young voters, and the fact that he garnered more votes than any New York mayoral candidate since John Lindsay, in 1969.
The problem that extreme candidates tend to face is that, though they may mobilize supporters, they also mobilize voters against them. And what matters in politics is not how many votes you get, but how many more you get than your opponent. You may recall Trump insisting that he must have won the 2020 election because he pulled in more votes than any candidate in history—except for Joe Biden, who won more.
Mamdani’s victory says less about how the party can beat Republicans than about how a democratic socialist can beat mainstream Democrats in deep-blue areas.
He is not the first democratic socialist to do so. In Chicago two years ago, Brandon Johnson, a county commissioner and union organizer, won by a slim majority against Paul Vallas, a conservative Democrat. Both Johnson and Mamdani had opponents whom most Democrats considered unacceptable. Vallas was a law-and-order candidate who had disparaged favorite son Barack Obama. Mamdani ran against an incumbent dogged by allegations of corruption and ties to Trump (Eric Adams, before he dropped out in September), and a politician sandbagged by allegations of corruption and sexual harassment whom Trump endorsed (Andrew Cuomo). Omar Fateh, a democratic socialist who had been dubbed the “Mamdani of Minneapolis,” lost on Tuesday to Jacob Frey, a standard-issue, mostly scandal-free Democrat.
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Despite running against despised opponents, Mamdani still had to make ideological compromises. He praised the centrist abundance agenda and promised to scrap needless regulations. He renounced the phrase “Globalize the intifada,” apologized to the New York City Police Department for having called it “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety,” and promised to keep Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch.
Many leftists decried these moves as unnecessary or even counterproductive humiliations. “This is a bad idea,” the Current Affairs editor Nathan J. Robinson wrote on X after Mamdani’s NYPD apology in September. “Apologies don’t appease bad faith critics. They just embolden them to ask for more, because now they realize they can bully you into groveling. If you show weakness they attack you harder.”
We don’t know how Mamdani would have fared without these moves toward the center. But his strategy suggests a keen awareness of his own weaknesses. Mamdani may well govern effectively and win over skeptics of his socialist ideals. But he ran like a candidate who understood what some of his fans wish to deny: He managed to win in an overwhelmingly Democratic city not because of his radical commitments, but despite them.
