13.11.2025

The party and the hangover

Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York’s mayoral election is well-deserved and rightly celebrated. But the American left must insist on accountability, writes Paul Demarty

It was a hell of a party, and rightly so. Last Tuesday, voters trooped to the polls to elect the mayor of New York City, and a majority of them pulled the lever for Zohran Mamdani, a charismatic young state senator and avowed democratic socialist. That after a year-long campaign, which he began at 1% in polls for the Democratic Party primary. His victory speech was decorated with flowery quotes from India’s first premier Jawaharlal Nehru and Eugene Debs, the renowned Socialist Party of America presidential candidate in the early 20th century.

Mamdani’s voters had been told all along that it was hopeless, that his politics were onto a loser, that he was only attractive to downwardly-mobile professionals and had nothing to offer anyone else. By capturing more than 50% of the vote on a historic turnout, he silenced his critics (or would have done, if these critics had been less in love with the sound of their own voices). He topped the polls among almost all demographic categories, barring the rich and the remaining ‘white ethnic’ enclaves in the outer boroughs and Staten Island.

How did he do it? There are positive and negative factors. Firstly, the positive: Mamdani had an army at his disposal. The New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America is the organisation’s largest, and is largely partisan to the sort of social democratic strategy he espoused. His opponents could not match that. Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, an eccentric cat-loving vigilante, had no such organisation, and in reality was always a no-hoper. It is not that long ago that New York returned Republican mayors, but it feels like centuries, and a holy fool like Sliwa is not the man to change it, as oddly endearing as he is as a character. Former Democratic governor and independent mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo, meanwhile, betrayed bafflingly little interest in the ‘ground game’ at all.

Mamdani also had a programme, which consisted of a handful of concrete measures, aimed at increasing the affordability of life in New York. These included free buses, a rent freeze for a large number of apartments, and the opening of state-run grocery stores - one in each of the five boroughs. He hammered away at these issues constantly - the rent is too damn high, groceries are too damn expensive. He succeeded in exposing his opponents’ attempts to set up a culture war as mere diversions.

He did so for the last of the positive reasons: Mamdani is a natural. He is a good speaker from a platform, and equally comfortable talking to regular Joes and Josephines on the street. He can be funny, but not flippant; he can be serious, but not pompous. He speaks with the freedom of one who has not spent his life grovelling his way up the Democratic greasy pole, in the hope than one day he might achieve the lofty heights of morally desiccated apparatchikdom à la Cuomo. He is, let’s be frank, a good looking young guy with a winning smile.

Opponents

Which brings us, by way of contrast, to the negative reasons for his victory. He was very fortunate in his opponents. We will mostly leave Sliwa aside here - he never had a prayer. Apart from him, Mamdani faced Cuomo and the incumbent mayor, independent Eric Adams - another slightly cracked individual, whose tenure has been dogged by corruption scandals, particularly involving the Turkish state. Adams was likewise a no-hoper: charges against him were dismissed by Donald Trump’s Department of Justice ‘without prejudice’ (ie, they could always be brought back), in order to ensure compliance with Washington’s diktat, and New York voters knew it.

Avowed socialist

The division of the anti-Mamdani vote was thus a serious problem for the political elite, for whom a municipal breakthrough for an avowed socialist and one who refused to bend the knee to Israel was a calamitous prospect. Adams was successfully manoeuvred into pulling out, but Sliwa remained. He notably refused to join in the catastrophising.

Establishment hopes were pinned on Cuomo then, and in him they had exactly the candidate they deserved. He seemed to regard the earlier primary as his birthright, and seems not to have really understood how resented he was in NYC for his repeated shafting of the city as state governor.

It is not clear how heavily his old scandals - allegations of sexual harassment, and his decision to send elderly Covid patients back into nursing homes early, which resulted in hundreds of additional deaths - weighed on the public mind. (Sliwa at least remembered - “slappin’ fannies and killin’ grannies”, he quipped of Cuomo’s reign early in the campaign.) In any case, he failed to up his game, and relied largely on scaremongering about the malign intentions of his Muslim socialist opponent. He was everything his opponent was not: bitter, entitled, politically rudderless, shrivelled like a prune.

The contrast with the earlier presidential primary challenges of Bernie Sanders was obvious. In 2016, his opponent, Hillary Clinton, successfully used control of the party machinery to ensure victory; in 2020, Democratic grandees like Barack Obama prevailed upon a united ‘moderate’ ticket for Joe Biden. In New York, the Democrat party elites were caught flat-footed and, having lost the primary, proved incapable of a unified response.

As a result, New Yorkers are to have mayor Mamdani in Gracie Mansion. He is likely to face serious challenges and, since he is identified with the socialist left, those challenges are ours too.

At the end of the day, despite his convincing victory, Mamdani is not considered a legitimate political leader. Ham-fisted attempts to defeat him will now be transformed into a campaign of sabotage. Having won fair and square, he must now be seen to fail, and fail badly. In order to ensure this outcome, the enemies of socialism in America have many mechanisms.

The central problem is that the NYC mayoralty is not actually that powerful a position. Much authority resides with the governor - it was precisely this power that Cuomo exploited in order to undermine the liberal mayor, Bill de Blasio, some years ago. Yet Mamdani has bigger problems even than that, as the federal government in Trump’s second term is openly weaponised against cities who vote the ‘wrong’ way. Militarised deployments of ICE agents, and perhaps the National Guard, are likely to follow. On current evidence, it is not clear what, if anything, mayors can do to protect their citizens from the predations of these loathsome thugs.

The city government has little power to raise revenue through direct taxation, which means that fundraising for Mamdani’s flagship social programmes depends on the selling of municipal bonds. It is quite certain that access to the bond market can be interfered with; indeed, manoeuvres of this sort radically curtailed the autonomy of New York City back in the 1970s.

Mamdani will, furthermore, face the constant and open hostility of both the rightwing and notionally ‘liberal’ media - the New York Post and New York Times alike. The gutter racism of the campaign is set to continue. Despite his conciliation of the New York City Police Department - he is to retain Adams’s NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch - we know that it is a fearsome institution, which has passively resisted earlier mayoral attempts at reform with some success.

Temptations

That is the stick, but there is also the carrot - of absorption into Democratic machine politics. His victory was hailed by Obama (though notably snubbed by many other Democratic power brokers). The Democrats needed people like Mamdani, he said, as well as people like Abigail Spanberger, the long-time CIA agent who won the Virginia governor’s race the same day.

Mamdani intends to keep his campaigning apparatus going, presumably as some sort of non-profit. It may or may not bring him some benefit, or just become yet another make-work outfit for aspiring political operatives, but the point is that by doing so he insulates himself from political pressure from the DSA, which under relatively more leftwing leadership in recent years has made some hesitant efforts to demand more from its ‘electeds’. Of course, the structure of American politics - and its Bonapartist tilt towards the executive - makes mayors the petty princes of their cities, hard enough to challenge at the best of times.

With judicious application of carrot and stick, the next four years may look like this: sabotage forces Mamdani to moderate; organised leftwing opinion deserts him; but there, waiting in the wings, are various Democrat bigwigs. ‘We need people like you,’ they will say. ‘This is an anti-systemic moment; it is not the hour of Chuck Schumer. Just keep a lid on the Israel-Palestine stuff - what concern is it of yours anyway? - and keep your nose clean with the NYPD.’

Democratic fold

There are real doubts as to whether the Democratic Party has the requisite agility to pull it off. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a previous insurgent DSA winner in New York, would be far better ensconced in the mainstream-Democratic fold by now, if party elites did not keep stiffing her for no discernible reason, when it comes to committee appointments and such. Yet the danger is there. We cannot assume that the Democrats’ present pathetic state of senility will continue. They have been so badly beaten in recent history that a changing of the guard is all but inevitable.

There is much to celebrate in Mamdani’s victory: though it is a local election, New York is no ordinary locality. It is the most populous city in the US, and this is the most telling electoral victory for anyone who styles himself a socialist in America for many decades, if not ever. He burst through firewalls directed at keeping socialists and anti-Zionists from office by mobilising an electorate impressive in its demographic diversity. It can be done again.

That makes the possibility of his being defeated, coopted or both all the more perilous. It would be less so if there existed a strong enough organisation of socialists to truly hold representatives to account - to give them the choice of loyalty or certain political oblivion. That would be a party, which the DSA certainly is not yet.