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Coffee Break: Zohran Mamdani Wins New York City in a Youthquake

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Zohran Mamdani overturned the New York power structure because of a youthquake at the ballot box, but his battles with entrenched power are only beginning.

Mamdani is the Mayor-Elect of New York City, having won a majority of the vote in a three way race against Republican Curtis Sliwa and former governor Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent after losing to Mamdani in the Democratic primary.

The Results.

The NY Times characterized the results as “the nation’s largest city (embracing) generational and ideological change.”

Previous Coverage of 2025 NYC Mayoral Race

Readers may want to review my previous coverage of this race as well as my piece on the two gubernatorial races decided yesterday.

Record Setting Turnout, Youthquake Powered Mamdani

The race inspired turnout not seen in generations, per the NY Times:

In an era of low turnout nationwide, participation in Tuesday’s mayoral election in New York City was nothing short of electric, approaching numbers not seen in half a century.

More than two million New Yorkers cast their ballots. That figure was almost double the 1,100,000 people who voted for mayor four years ago. In some areas of Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, participation approached presidential election levels.

Unlike many American jurisdictions, New York historically has not allowed early voting in mayoral races. That changed in 2025.

Early vote data is public and gives analysts their first look at who voted in the election, although individual voter choices are confidential. Because demographic blocks tend to vote alike, these numbers also provide the best prediction of the outcome available.

Early vote numbers were enormous.

The NY Times discussed Mamdani’s new coalition:

For decades, Democrats in New York City have prevailed with a fairly static coalition: white liberals in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Black and Latino voters, ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities and a smattering of other immigrants.

Early results suggest that Mr. Mamdani reworked the contours of that coalition, stitching together new alliances that could shift the city’s political outlook for years to come.

He ran up 40- and 50-point margins in Brooklyn’s affluent Brownstone belt, swept northern Manhattan and secured slightly more narrow margins in historically Black and Latino areas of Brooklyn and the Bronx.

Mr. Cuomo pulled away in Orthodox Jewish precincts, where he approached 80 percent of the vote, and clearly won large numbers of more liberal Jewish voters in Manhattan and Riverdale in the Bronx that typically back the Democratic nominee.

But Mr. Mamdani, who will be the city’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor, more than made up for those losses with two groups most Democrats have overlooked: the young residents of gentrifying neighborhoods like Bushwick and Williamsburg, and the taxi drivers, bodega owners and other working-class South Asian immigrants in Queens and the Bronx.

Mamdani also solved one of the problems that has dogged progressive campaigns in recent decades: an inability to connect with working class and minority voters:

During the primary, Mr. Mamdani struggled to win some working-class Black and Latino areas. He overcame those challenges in a major way on Tuesday night.

With almost 90 percent of the votes counted, Mr. Mamdani was winning the Bronx by 11 points, a striking turnaround from the primary when he lost the county to Mr. Cuomo by 18 points.

In working-class neighborhoods like Kingsbridge in the Bronx, Mr. Cuomo beat Mr. Mamdani by almost two points in the primary. On Tuesday night, Mr. Mamdani was winning the neighborhood by 14 points.

Young voters showed up in a way they never did for Bernie Sanders in his 2016 and 2020 presidential races. Say it with me, youthquake:

Another NYT piece focused specifically on Gen Z voters (age 18 to 28):

Young people turned up and voted. The city’s roughly two-week stretch of early voting, which ended on Sunday, saw more than 735,000 residents cast ballots. The median age of these voters was 50, brought down by nearly 100,000 voters under the age of 35 showing up between Friday and Sunday.

The Times credits the Mamdani campaign’s ability to make organizing fun and providing a sense of connection for otherwise lonely and isolated young people.

Mr. Mamdani’s campaign did not want volunteering for him to feel like work, but like a chance to meet new people and discover new corners of New York. His vision of the city, the campaign said, is of a joyful place — one where New Yorkers can spend less time slogging and more time hanging.
…
That vision and the strategy began about a year ago, when Mr. Mamdani slid onto the social media feeds of Gen Z New Yorkers. He jubilantly crisscrossed boroughs, hitting beaches, road races and food stalls in a way that made people want to join in. He talked nonstop about the cost of living in a city where $18 cocktail menus and no-longer-one-dollar pizza slices are unsustainable on an entry-level job salary. He shared his pro-Palestinian views with supporters, who were confronted with videos of the deaths and destruction in Gaza.

And Mr. Mamdani did something else that they weren’t expecting. He invited them to come out — to a scavenger hunt (with a prize of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips, a sly reference to a Mayor Eric Adams campaign controversy), to a soccer tournament, to do-it-yourself merch nights, to a social for shredding personal documents, to bars where people could drink $5 Miller High Lifes and debrief after door knocking.

This is probably the most hope inspiring sign from Mamdani’s campaign as real, in-person, face-to-face, organizing is the most powerful political tool of all.

Whether this model can be implemented outside the densely populated Big Apple will have massive implications on American politics going forward.

Mamdani’s Victory Speech

The NY Times has the full transcript, but I want to highlight a couple things.

He opened with a quote from Eugene Debs, America’s greatest socialist politician, then immediately characterized his victory as a victory for working people.

Then he turned to his vanquished opponent.

Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands. My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty.

I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life. But let tonight be the final time I utter his name, as we turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few.

He went on to thank “the next generation of New Yorkers”, “Yemeni bodega owners, Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers, Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties,” and his 100,000 campaign volunteers.

Then he reiterated some key campaign promises:

We will hire thousands more teachers. We will cut waste from a bloated bureaucracy. We will work tirelessly to make lights shine again in the hallways of NYCHA developments where they have long flickered.

Safety and justice will go hand in hand as we work with police officers to reduce crime and create a Department of Community Safety that tackles the mental health crisis and homelessness crises head on.

He also addressed the spurious charges of anti-Semitism that have been relentlessly hurled at him by zionists throughout the race and his status as a Muslim New Yorker:

We will build a City Hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism. Where the more than one million Muslims know that they belong — not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power.

No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.

He then reinforced his identity as a new kind of unapologetic progressive politician:

I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.

And he closed with a reiteration of his key promises in a call and response with his supporters:

Together, New York, we’re going to freeze the… [rent!] Together, New York, we’re going to make buses fast and… [free!] Together, New York, we’re going to deliver universal… [child care!]

Mamdani Defeats the Oligarchs

Mamdani also commented on the massive oligarch-funded campaign against him and issued a challenge in his victory speech:

Many have heard our message only through the prism of misinformation. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent to redefine reality and to convince our neighbors that this new age is something that should frighten them. As has so often occurred, the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour.

They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long-broken system. We refuse to let them dictate the rules of the game anymore. They can play by the same rules as the rest of us.

This chart from Drop Site News shows just how hard the oligarchs tried to beat Mamdani:

The Guardian named anti-Mamdani oligarch names:

Bill Ackman, the hedge fund manager and prominent Trump supporter, gave a pro-Cuomo group a total of $1.75m; Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire and three-term former New York mayor, donated a staggering $8.3m to the same Pac. The makeup moguls of the Lauder family backed pro-Cuomo and anti-Mamdani organizations to the tune of $2.6m, while the Tisch family gave $1.2m to stop the young socialist. For a long time, an effort – the billionaire class acting in concert to secure a specific electoral outcome – would have seemed insurmountable for a progressive candidate. It does not seem insurmountable anymore.

National Political Implications: Democratic Civil War

Despite running as an independent, Cuomo represented the Democratic party establishment, AIPAC, the oligarchy, and POTUS Donald Trump, who endorsed Cuomo in the final days of the race.

When I first covered the race I wrote, “if Cuomo wins, the sclerotic Democratic establishment will write off the insurgent, younger branch of the part off as sure losers in the 2028 contest and Cuomo will be an instant front-runner in the presidential primary.”

Mamdani’s historic victory (more on that below) means Cuomo’s political career should be finished, although he didn’t explicitly say we wouldn’t have Andrew Cuomo to kick around anymore at his concession speech, hopefully the man’s political career is finally over.

Mamdani’s victory was also a triumph over the Abundance bros that articulate the “vision” of the Democratic establishment:

(Democratic) consultants – long the devil on the Democratic party’s shoulder – have fallen under the spell of “popularism”, a mode of politics advanced by pollsters like David Schor and bloggers like Matt Yglesias, which posits that Democratic candidates must refine their platforms by the median of public opinion; a prescription that has almost always, in practice, meant shifting right, abandoning vulnerable constituencies, and treating the public as implacable belligerents to be coddled, rather than as intelligent adults to be persuaded.

…the rapidly proliferating number of centrist and center-right thinktanks and consultancies looking to shape Democratic party strategy exist, in part, to channel the preferences of their own ultra-wealthy funders, and to signal what the billionaire class will accept. The result is a Democratic party that appears listless and unprincipled, unwilling to fight because they do not believe in anything.

Mamdani’s electrifying campaign rejected this strategy completely.

Alex Shepherd in The New Republic sums up the strategy of the Democratic establishment:

A year ago, the Democratic Party decided to tell its voters “no.” Its leaders, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, adopted a playbook written by a fossil, James Carville, who argued that the Democrats should do nothing: Sit back, don’t make a fuss, and let Trump wreak havoc—then swoop in and win back power. At the same time, Democrats began formulating a message that attempted to scale back what they now believed were the excesses of the previous eight years. The party would be more conservative on gender and immigration, in particular, but also economics.

Mamdani won by doing something completely different. He built a campaign around a message that understood people’s anxieties about rising prices and offered concrete, legible promises that addressed them. He spoke to people not from the remove of Sunday shows and press conferences but where they were: He talked to social-media influencers and went on podcasts and showed up at Knicks games and rap concerts. He resonated with voters because he offered a vision of a better future, not a series of warmed over compromises.

The single issue that Mamdani’s opponents and critics fixated on—his longstanding support for Palestinian self-determination—only served to distinguish him from a Democratic establishment many distrusted. He held true to his beliefs, but perhaps he also saw which way the wind was blowing: Democratic voters’ views on Israel have shifted dramatically over the last two years, but their leaders’ haven’t. That some prominent Democrats lodged baseless accusations of antisemitism against him—or even dabbled in Islamophobia over his Muslim beliefs—only served to remind voters that he represented a clean break from the party’s leaders.

The weakness of the Democratic establishment was most visible in their struggles over whether or not to endorse Mamdani. Governor Kathy Hochul endorsed Mamdani in September.

U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, whose district is inside the city, dithered about whether or not to endorse Mamdani until mid-October when he finally made a lukewarm one.

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, one of New York’s two Senators, never did endorse Mamdani and wouldn’t state who he had voted for.

National Political Implications: Mamdani vs. Trump

Mamdani explicitly called out President Trump in his victory speech:

if we embrace this brave new course, rather than fleeing from it, we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.

After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.

This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one. So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up.

We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks. We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed.

New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant.

So hear me, President Trump, when I say this: To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us. When we enter City Hall in 58 days, expectations will be high. We will meet them.

For his part, Trump chose to make excuses for the GOP losses around the country rather than confronting Mamdani:

Mamdani Took “New” Trump Voters

Perhaps Trump was reluctant to attack Mamdani because he saw that the Mayor-elect cut right into the demographics that put Trump over the top in 2024 majorities: young men and ethnic minorities:

Note the difference between Mamdani and the two CIA centrists who won governships in Virginia and New Jersey.

He beat them among young women as well:

Mark Wauck broke down Mamdani’s success with those groups and speculated as to why they have abandoned Trump:

GOPers were losing with “new Trump” voters. Major parts of the traditional Dem base turned out for Mamdani—of course. On the other hand, the “new Trumpers”—Hispanics and Muslims and various Asians—who had defected from the Dems to Trump over domestic issues (crime, borders, economy) appear to have returned to the Dems. Why? The economy and Trump’s denialism has to be considered a major factor. But Trump’s strong foreign policy identification with the Anglo-Zionist targeting—ranging from tariffs and the accompanying rhetoric, to killing for sport on the high seas, to genocide—of, let’s see, Asians, Hispanics, and Muslims has to have been a factor, as well. I don’t see Trump – Mamdani voters voting GOP in the midterms at this point.

Now Mamdani Will Have to Deliver

Those readers who are having painful flashbacks to the “Hope and Change” of 2008 and burn at the memory of Obama’s failure to deliver anything resembling positive change are right to worry.

Ominously, the big BO himself is promising to be in Mamdani’s ear as a “sounding board” following one of two phone calls he placed to Mamdani during the campaign.

New York progressive netroots veteran Zephyr Teachout has a warning for Mamdani about Obama and his approach to politics:

Remember when David Plouffe and Rahm Emanuel did everything they could to destroy the grassroots that Obama 2007 built, actively stopping them from organizing for health care?

Making OFA a data operation with distributed tasks and radically centralized power?

I mean we are living with the horrific human costs of that now but one way in which Zohran is absolutely not Obama is that I am sure that he has no intention of throttling grassroots power.

Finally we will see what grassroots power built in a political campaign can do. I know a lot of people who don’t believe electoral campaigns can ever be the foundation of grassroots power but here’s a real chance to show them wrong.

Mamdani will face enormous challenges as mayor and I’ll be back next week to put names on those challenges.

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8 comments

      1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

        Thanks for sharing that. I didn’t realize that Mamdani’s wife was a big anti-Assad person in the Syrian Civil War.

        Reply ↓
  2. Alice X

    At 50.4% no one can say it wasn’t legit (except maybe you know who).

    Now the real fight begins; to counter oligarchic power, his supporters must understand and remember that the fight is theirs to win or lose. There must be a constant and continued demand for the oligarchy to recede, the many have the power if they have coherence, he is only a conduit.

    Reply ↓
    1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      It will be critical that he keeps his campaign organization active and powerful. Obama immediately crushed his campaign organization and the Democratic grassroots never recovered.

      Reply ↓
  3. ciroc

    Unfortunately, the man who once promised to confront the NYPD head-on now caters to the police. This alone calls into question the sincerity of his commitment to reform.

    Reply ↓
  4. mrsyk

    (Raises glass) This is a good feeling win against the establishment. I do hope it lasts.

    young women are the story of tonight,
    Those are eye-popping numbers. Is this a rejection of team red or the status quo? Either way, that 19th Amendment is gonna have to go, lol.

    Reply ↓

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