The Brooklyn Paramount theatre, just off DeKalb Avenue, was a regular performance haunt for Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington in the New York City of the 1930s, but it took almost a century for its shining political moment to arrive. Not long before half-past 11 on Tuesday night, New York’s 111th mayor took the stage and spoke his first words as the next holder to that office.
“The sun may have set over our city this evening but as Eugene Debs once said: ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity’,” Zohran Mamdani said.
“For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and well connected that power does not belong in their hands. Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor; palms calloused from delivery-bike handlebars; knuckles scarred by kitchen burns. These are not hands that have been allowed to hold power. And yet over the last 12 months you have dared to reach for something greater. Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands. My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty.”
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[ Who is Zohran Mamdani?Opens in new window ]
It was an opening segment that dipped into the working class imagery of On the Waterfront, referenced a US socialist figurehead in Debs, rattled the ghosts of Tammany Hall and deepened Republican suspicions that New York, the heartbeat of capitalism, had elected an out-and-out Marxist.
RM Block
“Did the Commie win?” scoffed Sean Hannity, the Fox News show host, at nine o’clock on Tuesday, even as New York City’s mayoral voting returns pointed towards an unforgettable political moment in the five boroughs. Not long after the polling booths closed, Hannity had his answer. Yes.
It was apparent that the 34-year-old Democratic socialist had completed what Bernie Sanders aptly described as “one of the great political upsets in the modern history of our country”.
In less than a year, Mamdani came from nowhere to obliterate the establishment consensus that political campaigning is predicated on vested-interest big money donors and a preservation of the distorted wealth system. Through a combination of personal charisma and warmth and a manifesto sympathetic to the daily, routine struggles of ordinary New Yorkers coping with a spiralling cost-of-living crisis, more than one million were willing to overlook his stark inexperience to elect him to one of the most challenging mayoral roles in the republic. It was the highest turnout since 1969.
“The reason for that is that I think Zohran understands that we are living in a moment in American history that we have never seen,” Sanders said before the polls closed.
“Billionaires doing better than they have ever done while 60 per cent of people in this country live paycheck to paycheck. They can’t afford housing, they can’t afford decent food at the grocery store, they can’t afford healthcare, they can’t afford to send their kids to college. And what Zohran is doing in New York is putting his race in that context. What he has done has created an incredible grassroots movement. He has 90,000 volunteers – an incredible amount of enthusiasm.”
There’s a Broadway fabulousness to Mamdani’s story: a Ugandan-born Muslim whose campaign, less than a year ago, seemed fanciful to the point of delusion. Mamdani may be a child of privilege but he looks and speaks and sounds like a regular New Yorker: he looks at home sitting in a carriage of the A train.
In a January poll, Mamdani commanded just 1 per cent of the vote in polling, tying “Somebody Else” as an insignificant footnote to a story that was about Andrew Cuomo’s striding return from disgrace. Instead, Mamdani dominated. His campaign was at once playful in delivery and deadly serious in intent, and agile to the last. Smear campaigns linked to remarks he made about the running of the NYPD and Israel’s attacks on Gaza failed to damage him. Repeated Republicans claims that he is a “communist” were equally ineffective.
Even before he won Mamdani had become a bugbear of Donald Trump’s. On the final day of the election, Trump fired off a final missive, warning New Yorkers that “any Jewish person that votes for Zohran Mamdani, a proven and self-professed JEW HATER, is a stupid person”.
Within hours, Mamdani had posted a video reply in which a Jewish voter asked him what he thought of Trump’s comment.
“That I am looking forward to being a mayor for every single Jewish voter, whether they are voting for me, voting for someone else or not voting at all because at the end of the day they are New Yorkers – they deserve not only protection, they deserve to be celebrated and cherished and they deserve someone more than just a president who is trying to define what it means to be a good Jewish person in this city or country.”
Mamdani’s victory was among several chinks of light for the Democratic Party after a year in the wilderness. As expected, California voted to approve the Prop 50 amendment to the state’s congressional district map. The adjustment could help Democrats win an added five House of Representatives seats in next year’s midterm elections.
In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger succeeded Republican Glenn Youngkin as governor. A resolute moderate, she becomes the 75th governor of the state – and the very first woman to hold that office after comfortably seeing off the challenge of Winsome Earle-Sears, who had served as Youngkin’s lieutenant governor.
And in New Jersey, where Spanberger lived until the age of 13, the Garden State elected just its second woman governor when Mikie Sherrill won her gubernatorial election against the Republican candidate Jack Ciattarelli.
“My goal and my intent is to serve all Virginians and that means I will listen to you, I will work for you and with you,” Spanberger said.
“That is the approach that I have taken throughout my entire career. I have worked with anyone and everyone regardless of political party to deliver results for the people that I serve. And that’s because I believe in this idea that there is so much more that unites us as Virginians and Americans than divides us. We can set an example for the rest of the nation.
“Our founders understood this from the very beginning. They didn’t choose to call Virginia a commonwealth by accident. They chose it to signify that our government would be based on the power of the people united for a common good, not for a political party, not for a president, not for a monarch.”
None of the three election results were unexpected. But Democrat politicians, strategists and supporters will choose to see in the returns a blunt repudiation of the first 10 months in office of president Trump. The exit opinion polls flashed up by all the major networks, quizzing voters on their concerns and living standards, told stories more revelatory than the votes themselves. In New York and California, the returns spoke of the prevailing worries about housing and the dismal cost of living. Only a slender percentage felt they were “getting ahead” in life; about 30 per cent could say they were holding steady, but a further 30 per cent felt their living standards were steadily deteriorating.
The evening pointed to a nagging sense that for all of the tempests and distractions and headlines created by the Trump administration, and beneath the angsty opinion columns and dissertations on a slow lapse into a soft autocracy, nothing much has changed in the refrigerators and car loan statements and date nights of the ordinary Americans. Somehow, the land of plenty has become a horrendously expensive place to just get by. Just like Joe Biden before him, Trump is discovering the difference between telling Americans the country is doing great and Americans seeing the fruits of that in their households.
Meanwhile, Congress looks set to this week establish a new and undistinguished record for the longest government shutdown, for which the majority of Americans blame the party in power.
So, on the one-year anniversary of the generational disappointment of Kamala Harris’s failed bid to shatter all sorts of political glass ceilings, the Democrats can, on Wednesday, point to a series of small victories and believe that some of their traditional flock, swayed by Trump’s dark, mesmeric campaign rhetoric, are beginning to return.
“Despite all the premature obituaries that were written about Democrats a year ago from today, and there were lessons to be learned, what we are seeing is the Latino community moving decisively in our direction, working-class Americans moving decisively in our direction,” said House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries on Tuesday night.
“The American dream has been broken for far too long, and Donald Trump is making it worse.”
The broader question concerns which brand of Democratic leadership can truly fix that battered, elusive promise. Mamdani, in a bold and at times abrasive victory speech, was unequivocal about the way forward. And he had a message to a noted late-night television viewer who represents another strand in the tapestry of New York.
“After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it’s the city that gave rise to him,” the next mayor of New York said.
“So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you. Turn the volume up. 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.”
