by Judith Levine
Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old Indian-Ugandan democratic socialist and presumptive winner of the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, is the only one I’ve both supported without reservation and believed could win. “A city we can afford.” Zohran’s slogan is unremarkably moderate and unabashedly progressive. In a city whose median income is rising sharply in spite of a 25% poverty rate, only the rich are comfortable, while everyone else, from students to firefighters to families with more than one kid struggle – or leave.
Asked by a local Fox TV interviewer what a democratic socialist is, Mamdani answered: “To me it means that every New Yorker has what they need to live a dignified life – it’s local government’s responsibility to provide that.” His platform includes a rent freeze on the city’s 2.3m regulated apartments; free childcare starting at six months; no-fare buses; and a $30 minimum wage – about the city’s living wage – by 2030. Basically, he believes life in the city can be easier and happier.
Mamdani’s ideas are not pie-in-the-sky. The rent guidelines board, appointed by the mayor, voted 0% increases on some leases in 2015, 2016, and on all leases in 2020, during the pandemic. The Democratic mayor Bill De Blasio got universal pre-kindergarten staffed, funded and full almost immediately upon election in 2014.
How would Mamdani pay for all this? Impose a 2% tax on the top 1% residents earning more than $1m annually; and raise the top corporate tax rate to match neighboring New Jersey’s, to 11.5% from 7.25%.
New York has the resources. Nationally, corporate profits have risen 80% since the pandemic. In New York, 34,000 households, a thin skin on the Big Apple, take home 35% of the earnings.
Since founding his college’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, Mamdani, an east African Muslim, has been a vocal critic of Israel’s occupation. A week after Hamas’s attacks – which he calls a war crime – he joined Jewish Voice for Peace in a protest of Israel’s outsized response. For this position, his closest rival, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, and the rightwing press have hammered Mamdani as an antisemite and a Holocaust denier.
In an Emerson poll, 46% of New York voters said their candidate did not need to be pro-Israel. The journalist Peter Beinart believes that Mamdani’s victory suggests that the movement for Palestinian freedom has entered mainstream politics and can be an asset to Democrats.
Confronted repeatedly by false accusations of antisemitism, Mamdani has been frustrated and hurt. In his victory speech, he said: “I cannot promise that you will always agree with me, but I will never hide from you.” He would “wrestle with” opinions that differed from his own, he added, implying he meant feelings about the Middle East.
Mamdani’s campaign was partially, appropriately, fueled by economic anxiety. But try as his detractors did to shift the focus, it was not fueled by fear of crime. He does not advocate defunding the police. Instead, he’s proposed a department of community safety, to deal with volatile mental health crises in the subways and to attack hate crimes at their source, leaving cops to pursue violent crime. He recognizes that good public services and personal economic stability, not more police, constitute public safety. More striking, Zohran mobilized civic pride, solidarity and joy. These too are winning political emotions.
People can overpower money
Mamdani crushed it in presumed Cuomo strongholds throughout the five boroughs. Of course, he ruled in the youth-dominated “commie corridor” from Astoria, Queens to Bushwick, Brooklyn (80%). But he also carried communities such as Asian Flushing, Sunset Park, Elmhurst, and Chinatown Queens, by no means presumed progressive.
In February, Cuomo polled at 33% of potential votes; Zohran had 1%.
By primary day, the pro-Cuomo Super Pac, bankrolled by billionaires including Trump supporters like Wall Street bigwig Bill Ackman, had spent $25m, largely on smear ads. Mamdani’s Pac spent $1.2m, and a Working Families party-affiliated Pac put in $500,000.
Mamdani had as many as 50,000 volunteers, who knocked over a million doors. Cuomo avoided the public and the press.
Money isn’t everything.
But whether Mamdani wins or loses, pundits on all sides will avow that what happens in liberal New York stays in liberal New York.
This is not today’s Democratic party. But it has everything to gain from watching Zohran Mamdani and the extraordinary coalition of superhumanly enthusiastic volunteers he has inspired. Theirs are the faces of a political party that democracy, and Americans, deserve.
