A Zohran Mamdani victory would be truly unprecedented

His uphill climb makes it all the more impressive if he succeeds

I started following this year’s NYC Mayoral election with two basic predictions about Zohran Mamdani:

1. He would successfully galvanize young voters and progressives, winning at least 15% of the vote and some of Brooklyn’s trendiest neighborhoods

2. He would be completely unable to defeat anyone in the final round of RCV, due to his extreme ideology and limited appeal beyond his base

I’m pretty happy about my first prediction, but my second seems to be doing somewhat badly. Why is this so surprising to me? Because someone like Mamdani really shouldn’t be able to win in a city like New York.

Let’s look at the man, and then at the voters. Mamdani’s running on a platform of a $30/hr minimum wage, government-run supermarkets, and freezing rent for millions of people. He also has a history of supporting “defund the police”. Now, I consider myself a leftist but this is a bridge too far for me, and if I were a New Yorker I would be ranking Mamdani at the bottom of my ballot solely to prevent Cuomo from winning.

As for the voters, there is little evidence that there has ever been a majority of New Yorkers who are ready to vote for a candidate like this. To begin with, around 27% of the Democratic primary voters are Black, a group that leftists often lose in a landslide, except in cases where the left candidate is Black and the leading moderate candidate is not. Neither Mamdani nor Cuomo are Black, but Cuomo has a strong history of winning Black voters in NYC, while Mamdani does not. Additionally, something like 15% of registered Democrats in New York voted for Trump last year. Now these Trump-Democrats, disproportionately non-white and located in outer boroughs like Staten Island, are probably going to be a low-turnout group next Tuesday, but they could still easily make up about 10% of the electorate, and it’s hard to see Mamdani winning a meaningful share of them. I’m reminded of the 2023 Chicago Mayoral election, where leftist Brandon Johnson got beaten by about 90 points in Mount Greenwood, Chicago’s version of southern Staten Island.

Asian and Hispanic voters also make up a decent chunk of the electorate, although much lower than their share of the overall population. These voters are a bit more up-in-the-air and I could conceivably see Mamdani doing well with them, perhaps working along the same lines that saw Bernie Sanders win Hispanics in 2020, but we’ve also seen leftists struggle with Asian voters in particular in the last few years.

Next we come to the rich old white people in places like the Upper East Side and Upper West side of Manhattan, many of whom are Jewish. This group has historically been happy to vote for progressive technocrat types like Brad Lander, but much less so socialists such as Mamdani and Bernie. In 2021, the leading progressive candidate Maya Wiley got just 12% of the vote in the 73rd Assembly District, which covers the Upper East Side. And while Wiley was backed by the left, she was not as extreme a leftist as Mamdani is, nor was Israel/Palestine as salient an issue back in 2021. It’s easy to imagine these two factors dragging down Mamdani in much of Manhattan.

That leaves us mainly with younger, and less rich white voters, especially those in the inner part of the city, who can be counted on to back Mamdani in a landslide. These voters are the backbone of the left in New York and make up a sizable portion of the 21% that Maya Wiley got citywide, or the 26% who voted for Bernie or Warren after they’d dropped out in 2020. Yet this group alone can’t get you to 50%, not even close.

With this picture in mind, one might be tempted to write off Mamdani entirely. There just isn’t a strong constituency for his politics in most of the city. The main counter-example we have of a socialist doing well in moderate parts of NYC is AOC winning in the Bronx and Queens in 2018, but it’s hard to replicate that kind of low-turnout upset today. And yet I cannot deny, there is very real enthusiasm for Zohran Mamdani in this moment and he has significantly narrowed his polling deficit against Cuomo. To me then, the important thing is that if he does win, it suggests a willingness of Democratic primary voters to embrace far-left politics in a way that we have never seen before. This goes well beyond Bernie Sanders, who also struggled to build a majority in a Democratic primary, although he probably would’ve beaten Biden in NYC if New York had voted on Super Tuesday 2020. Bernie never said to defund the police, nor was he as extreme in some of his economic policy as Mamdani. If Mamdani does win next Tuesday, despite everything I’ve laid out above, despite the $15M a pro-Cuomo Super PAC is spending to attack him on the airwaves, it’s hard to understate how big this would be for the American progressive movement. The sky really would be the limit.

And yes, it’s easy to object that Mamdani’s victory might be as much a rebuke of sex pest Cuomo as it would be an embrace of his politics. That would certainly be part of the equation. But New York has ranked choice voting, and no one is forcing New Yorkers to put either of these two men on their ballots. It should be completely possible for New Yorkers who are unhappy with Mamdani and Cuomo, as I am, to send someone like Brad Lander or Adrienne Adams to Gracie Mansion. If they don’t, and if Mamdani triumphs over Cuomo, it means Mamdani genuinely grew the left’s share of the vote in a way that was only partially downstream of Cuomo’s issues.

Depending on your politics, this prospect may be terrifying or exciting. But either way, I’ll be watching closely next Tuesday. Bernie’s insurgent 2016 campaign and AOC’s 2018 upset helped catalyze half a decade of progressive victories. If we really do get New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who knows what could come next?