Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member and current New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani is the expectant Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, after disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo conceded the primary race Tuesday night. This demonstrates a significant leftward shift among New York City voters and is sure to shake the Democratic Party establishment across the country.
New York’s ranked choice voting (RCV) system means that we won’t know the final vote tallies for another week, but the results — a seven-point lead, on a night when most expected Cuomo to end up ahead — demonstrate a strong rejection of mainstream Democratic politics in both the results and the unusually high turnout among young voters, who strongly favor Mamdani.
Several progressive city council candidates who were facing primary challenges also retained their seats. Overall, it was a very good night for DSA and progressive politics, demonstrating interest among Democratic voters — including among populations and in neighborhoods thought to be more moderate — in leftist politics.
Zohran’s success is especially notable in the context of Cuomo’s Super PAC, which far outspent any other campaign, and the Islamophobic and red-baiting opposition propaganda funded by the PAC and by the Whitney Tilson campaign. This win comes after nearly two years of mobilizations against the genocide in Palestine; six months of mobilizations against Trump, like the massive No Kings rallies; growing anger against Biden, Harris, and the Democratic leadership in Congress for failing to mount any meaningful opposition to Trump; and several years of a post-Covid labor resurgence. The Mamdani campaign spoke to these phenomena, promising reforms and setting himself apart from the Democratic Party status quo.
In short, this primary election sends a strong message: People are hungry for a change.
How New York City’s Elections Work
Primary rules vary widely by state, and New York has closed primaries, which means only people who are registered as Democrats are able to vote for mayoral candidates in this election, as the Republican nomination is uncontested this year. Because New York City leans strongly Democratic, the primary is often viewed as the “real” election since the Democratic nominee is highly favored to win.
New York City also uses a system of ranked choice voting, in which voters can select up to five candidates ranked in order of their preference. If one candidate wins over 50 percent of the first-choice votes, they win and the election is over. If no candidate wins over 50 percent of the first-choice votes, then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and their supporters’ votes are reallocated to their second-choice candidate. Zohran’s first-round performance was strong enough that he is expected to easily meet the 50 percent threshold during RCV tabulation.
Andrew Cuomo has already filed paperwork for an independent ballot line, allowing him to still run in November despite losing the primary.
Understanding the Results — for the Mayorship, for the Democrats, and for Socialists
At the beginning of this primary season, Cuomo held the advantage of significant name recognition and was highly favored in the polls even before he officially declared his candidacy. Cuomo is a neoliberal moderate — backed by some Trump donors — representing the Democratic Party establishment.
In contrast, Mamdani was far less well-known and rarely broke 10 percent in the polls for the first several months of his campaign. But with the message “Zohran: For a New York You Can Afford” and a strong social media presence, he began to gain popularity. His message was clear: the rent is too damn high, the buses are too slow, and it’s hard to make a living. Furthermore, he pointed at the Democratic Party establishment as those who are to blame.
In the aftermath of Trump’s 2024 victory, Bernie Sanders wrote a statement claiming that it wasn’t that the working class left the Democrats, but that the Democrats left the working class. In the first months of the Trump government, Democrats in office stood silent as Trump issued attack after attack. Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC) tapped into the anger at Trump, but also at a Democratic Party for their attacks on the working class with a “Fight the Oligarchy” tour, packing stadiums across the country.
Mamdani taps into a similar sentiment. After the 2024 election, he posted a video interviewing Queens and Bronx residents, many of them immigrants and people of color, who voted for Trump. Why? Gaza, wars, inflation. Mamdani told them that he wanted to change the Democratic Party, to make it work for them again — and that is the promise of his campaign.
The Mamdani campaign, with strong support from NYC-DSA as a whole, has amassed at least 50,000 volunteers (consisting of a more diverse political coalition than merely DSA members) organizing an impressive ground game and has secured endorsements from AOC, Bernie Sanders, the Working Families Party, and many city unions.
Slogans like “Don’t rank Cuomo” and “DREAM: Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor” are widespread even among voters and institutions who aren’t campaigning for Mamdani as their top choice. Fellow candidate Brad Lander in particular played a significant role in supporting Mamdani’s candidacy in a “send Cuomo back to the suburbs” cross-endorsement coalition.
Mamdani’s Program Has Strengths and Limits
Mamdani’s headline proposals are to freeze the rent for rent-stabilized apartments (slightly less than half of the city’s housing stock, which the mayor’s office has more influence over), make the buses fast and free, and to provide universal childcare. His platform also includes establishing city-owned grocery stores and a department of community safety to replace the police’s role in responding to distressed people in the subway (while maintaining police funding levels), along with many other proposals, including raising the minimum wage, making New York a sanctuary city for LGBTQ+ people, and “Trump-proofing NYC.”
Mamdani is also known for speaking out against the genocide in Gaza and supporting BDS — and has been maligned by those who equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Although Mamdani himself has been correctly criticized by the movement for Palestine for saying that he supports the state of Israel “as a state with equal rights,” affirming a state whose existence is predicated on ethnic cleansing, he was nonetheless certainly the most pro-Palestine candidate in the race.
Especially in light of the Islamophobic propaganda campaign against him, and the strong reaction to his comments on the word “intifada,” Zohran Mamdani doing so well in the primary also shows that New Yorkers like — or are at least willing to vote for — candidates that take anti-Zionist stances (despite the limits of Mamdani’s framing of supporting Israel “as a state with equal rights”). This is an important shift, showcasing how the pro-Palestine movement and the horror of Israel’s genocide in Gaza have transformed public opinion.
But we need to be clear about the limits of Mamdani’s program. For instance, he is also seriously backtracking from his previous anti-police positions, insisting that he is not interested in defunding the police as mayor and that police “have a critical role to play” in society. He repeats that he wants to keep the nearly $6 billion police budget the same, the budget of the highly militarized police force, which trains with the Israeli Defense Forces and is larger and more well-equipped than many countries’ entire militaries.
It is unclear whether his real views on the police have evolved since his calls to defund the NYPD in 2020 or if this is merely a tactical decision intended to position himself favorably within the election, but framing the proposed department of community safety as something that is good for police undercuts the potential for the proposal to spark a conversation about the repressive — and, in the case of discussions of people with serious mental illness living in the subway, ableist — role of police in society, the massive police budgets and prison-industrial apparatus, and how the cops are used to brutalize Black and brown communities in particular.
This backtracking on the police is tied to how Zohran and his campaign have been distancing him from DSA and its program. Zohran distanced himself from his organization in the second mayoral debate by avoiding saying the group’s name and reassuring viewers that its program, which includes defunding the police and nationalizing major industries, is not the program of his campaign, and one of his campaign representatives repeated this line to a reporter on Election Night.
While most DSA members are undoubtedly celebrating their candidate’s historic win today, this distancing does create programmatic tension between the campaign and the organization it is supposed to represent, despite Zohran’s comments in 2022 that “The whole point of being in office is to do the same work that we’re doing as an organization: to use the platform and the resources of the office to fight for the same mission.” These were his remarks as a state representative, but he has watered down his program and changed his approach while running for an executive position. During the general election and once he is in office (if he does win), there will be even greater pressure for him to compromise further on his program.
The Democrats and Mamdani in a Bind
This Mamdani victory places the Democratic Party in a complicated position.
On the one hand, the Party does not want democratic socialists in office, and certainly not under the Democratic Party’s name. The most well-known example is how the party rallied behind first Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the party’s presidential nomination, but we can also see this in how, when DSA member and Black Lives Matter activist India Walton won the 2021 primary for mayor of Buffalo, the Democratic establishment refused to support her. Instead, the incumbent mayor Bryon Brown — who lost to her in the primary — managed to pull off an unlikely write-in campaign and secured another term.
Moderate Democrat Michael Bloomberg is responsible for roughly a third of all of Andrew Cuomo’s super PAC funding, and the centrist think tank Third Way has also come out strongly against Mamdani. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) also recently ousted former vice chair David Hogg, a Parkland shooting survivor who is now supporting Mamdani, for his support of running primary challengers against incumbent Democrats. The Democratic Party consistently scorns its progressive wing, despite the dynamism that wing brings, and continues to take anti-immigrant, anti-trans, pro-war, and pro-corporate stances. The party is already going through a crisis of party identity and realignment, and this win will only deepen the debates within it.
On the other hand, Mamdani’s success is strengthening the Democratic Party, both ideologically and literally — the same party responsible for building up ICE and funding the genocide in Gaza. By running for office as a Democrat — and defining himself as one — instead of on an independent socialist ballot line, Zohran reinforces the idea that the Democratic Party is a viable place for socialists to do politics, which contradicts the notion that it’s urgently important to organize a party independent from the interests of capital. While many DSA members and caucuses do support breaking from the Democrats in theory, most of the organization supports acting within the Democratic Party in practice.
A campaign with this much enthusiasm and hope around it is, intentionally or not, creating enthusiasm for the Democratic Party. Because of New York’s closed primary system, the Zohran campaign is literally recruiting more voters, including young/first-time voters and voters previously registered with third parties, into the Democratic Party. In his victory speech Tuesday night, he said he hopes to “govern our city as a model for the Democratic Party” — his aim is to build and inspire the Democrats, not to break from them. Building the Democratic Party is not the way forward for a Left that is serious about fighting for — and winning — its program.
What Happens Next?
On July 1, the New York City Board of Elections will calculate the Ranked Choice Voting tabulations, and we’ll see Zohran’s true margin of victory.
Campaigning for the general election will also begin in earnest. Cuomo has already filed the paperwork to run in the general election on an independent ballot line, although he may choose not to do so in light of Mamdani’s stronger-than-expected performance. Incumbent Eric Adams will also run as an independent. In the three-way or four-way race between Mamdani, Adams, potentially Cuomo, and Republican Curtis Sliwa, the Zohran campaign will face continued — and likely escalated — attacks from both moderate Democrats and the right wing.
At the same time as these inevitable attacks on the campaign, New Yorkers will also continue to face political attacks from the Trump administration, including escalated ICE raids, massive budget cuts in the reconciliation bill making its way through Congress, significant attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, repression of the Palestine movement, and more. The organized Left cannot pin its hopes on electoral victories by progressive Democrats as the means with which to stop Trump and the Far Right. The Democratic Party as a whole is engaged in a major operation to defuse the class struggle and channel everything into the ballot box. Even as Zohran’s supporters continue to agitate around the November general election, it is essential to organize discontent against Trump from below, from the workplaces and schools, rejecting co-optation and demobilizing efforts from the Democrats and non-profits.
Despite these limits, Zohran’s election day performance and presumptive win of the nomination shows that voters are open to progressive politics, with opportunities for the Left to continue reaching wider audiences. His campaign shows that there is space to build a radical program for the working class and youth, against genocide and against Trump.
Zohran’s primary win, and the potential for him to win in the general election, mean socialists urgently need to dialogue with other leftists and with newly socialist-curious liberals about key political questions like the role of the police in repressing the working class, the role of the Democratic Party in containing mass mobilizations, and the need for more radical demands beyond Zohran’s very popular proposals of freezing the rent, free bus fare, free childcare, community grocery stores, and more. As mayor, Zohran would also be responsible for appointing a commissioner of labor, who would negotiate with the city’s public sector unions as management, determining working conditions for hundreds of thousands of workers. If new protest waves like the Gaza Solidarity Encampment movement at universities or the anti-ICE uprisings in Los Angeles begin, it will be his police force that represses it.
These are important issues that need robust discussion, and we invite readers to join us, such as through debates published on our pages like the articleswe published this week. The working class needs to go beyond the Democrats to build a party of our own that fights for a socialist future, a future much more expansive than the Mamdani campaign’s demands; how do we build a combative and organized working class ready, willing, and capable of fighting Trump, bringing an end to the genocide, and building an international socialist movement? The election results suggest the potential opportunity we have in this current political moment to have that discussion — we hope you will have it with us.