My gut reaction to Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory over Andrew Cuomo was that it’s a useful reality check for anti-Trump conservatives. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a seductive fallacy, as one can’t help but sympathize a bit with allies in a common struggle. Joseph Stalin briefly became “Uncle Joe” in Western media during the 1940s because he was on the right side of a momentous conflict. I’ve never felt moved to call Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “Auntie Alex” due to our mutual contempt for Trump, but I do understand the impulse to give the benefit of the doubt to strange bedfellows.
Tuesday should remind us that a seductive fallacy is still a fallacy. Progressives are no friend to classical liberals. At best, they prefer to be governed by a form of moronic illiberalism that’s momentarily less menacing than Trump’s. As with Uncle Joe, so too with Auntie Alex: The enemy of my enemy remains my enemy and will prove it in the fullness of time.
Mamdani’s upset came as a shock partly because of his youth, partly because of his faith, and partly because of the apparent formidability of his opponent. But at first blush, the most shocking aspect to me is the fact that he’s prone to precisely the kind of “woke” clownery that Americans rejected last November. “Our prison system relies on dehumanization and brutality, so the goal must be to abolish this exploitative system entirely,” he declared in 2021. A year earlier, he was all-in on “defund the police,” describing it as both a “feminist issue” and a matter of “queer liberation.”
Granted, he was young and foolish when he said those things, not the mature, uh, 33-year-old he is now. And yes, he pivoted during the campaign from being a caricature of cultural progressivism to being a caricature of economic progressivism, offering all manner of silly nonsense. He even got in on the “Abundance” craze among neoliberal wonks to show some moderation, as if socialism and abundance aren’t a contradiction in terms.
How did voters who reside in the beating heart of American capitalism come to nominate someone like this?
There are several possible explanations, ranging from “not so bad” to “uh oh” to “Jews should consider aliyah.”
Don’t overthink it: Retail politics, not ideology, won the race.
There’s an easy story to tell about the mayoral primary in which socialism is only a minor factor.
Not a nonfactor, to be clear. Mamdani had 50,000 people volunteering for him, some of them from pinko outfits hundreds of miles away from NYC, and he put them to use. His progressivism attracted the money and manpower he needed to win.
But his 7-point margin over Cuomo (thus far) may owe less to his policies than to the basic blocking and tackling of electioneering. Simply put, he was an excellent retail candidate running against one of the most repulsive figures in politics.
Mamdani campaigned indefatigably, raising his name recognition at light speed by appearing on every media outlet that would have him. He stumped for votes in the streets of the city and held his first event on primary day at dawn to show New Yorkers what youthful energy in a politician looks like. He’s charismatic too, good-looking and self-possessed at the mic, and he shrewdly focused his message on relatable concerns about the cost of living. If you’re the sort of low-information voter who responds to vibes more than policies, and America has lots of those, Zohran was your guy.
His opponent was an arrogant, corrupt, incompetent, lascivious scumbag.
Andrew Cuomo may be the most unlikable politician in the United States. Some candidates for office carry personal baggage, and some have policy failures to account for, but Cuomo is a rare example of someone with both in spades. If he were possessed of Clintonian or Trumpian charisma, he might have overcome that. He is not, as you’ll know if you’ve ever watched him speak. On the contrary, Cuomo has forever seemed vaguely annoyed at having to explain himself, an interesting trait in a public servant.
He stopped trying altogether once he ran for mayor. Observers of the race marveled at how cloistered he was in contrast to Mamdani, doing hardly any media and barely showing his face in public even during the home stretch of the campaign. He relied on $25 million in spending by an outside group to press the case against his opponent, either believing that he had the nomination locked up or calculating that he could only do himself harm in situations where uncomfortable questions about his past might be asked.
Either way, if you were a New Yorker with only a faint grasp of policy, which would sound better to you? The cool young bro promising free stuff or a disgraced vampiric nepotist who seemed to think that competing for the job of managing the city was beneath him?
Maybe it wasn’t (mostly) about socialism, then. If it were—if Zohran-ism were truly ascendant in the Democratic Party—how could you explain the recent victory by moderate Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey’s gubernatorial primary? And how to explain the real chance that NYC’s current mayor, Democrat-turned-independent Eric Adams, stands of consolidating the considerable anti-Mamdani vote this fall and winning a second term?
For some disengaged leftists still coping with the trauma they suffered last November, the mayoral primary may have been little more than a chance to savor the delayed pleasure of sending a genuinely awful human being down to defeat. Who knows? In an alternate timeline where Zohran Mamdani is a Sherrill-style centrist rather than Bernie Sanders 2.0, he might have won by 15 points instead of 7.
The Democratic Tea Party has arrived.
Here’s a quote that should curl your hair. “It is extremely alarming that the only candidates who genuinely excite our voters are the ones making absolutely insane promises on politically toxic positions,” a Democratic strategist told Politico of Mamdani’s victory. “Leaving us in the spot of trying to execute on bad policy and losing terribly, or failing to keep our promises and reinforcing the idea that all politics is bullsh-t.”
I’ve seen that movie before, said pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson. Yeah, so have I. In fact, as the results came in last night, I flashed back to the 2009 special election in New York’s 23rd congressional district.
That race became a sensation among grassroots right-wingers who were demoralized by the drubbing they’d taken at the polls the previous November and had begun to rally around back-to-basics Tea Party populism as the way forward. The GOP had nominated state lawmaker Dede Scozzafava for the seat, but Scozzafava was a moderate—like, really moderate. She supported gay marriage, federal abortion funding, and Obama’s massive economic stimulus package, among other things. Tea Partiers revolted and began agitating on behalf of the Conservative Party nominee, Doug Hoffman, instead.
They did a good enough job of it that Scozzafava, the “electable” centrist, collapsed in the polls. She withdrew from the race three days before the election and endorsed the Democrat, Bill Owens, who went on to defeat Hoffman narrowly to win the seat. Tea Partiers, however, saw the race as a momentous moral victory: It was proof of concept that populists had the muscle to purge the Republican Party of milquetoast “uniparty” establishmentarians. The right could and would impose purity tests on its old guard going forward to ensure that the post-Obama rebuilding effort was led by “fighters.”
Those tests were ideological at first, measuring Republican officials’ fighting spirit by their fidelity to conservative dogma, but under Trump, they morphed into tests of cultural illiberalism and eventually into the vacuous demands for personal fealty to Trump himself that we know today. “Trying to execute on bad policy and losing terribly or failing to keep our promises and reinforcing the idea that all politics is bullsh-t” is, not coincidentally, an exact description of the choice currently facing congressional Republicans on the president’s big, beautiful bill.
Mamdani’s victory suggests that the Tea Party pattern is now repeating itself among the grassroots leftists. They suffered a hugely demoralizing defeat last November and feel disgusted with the aged, wishy-washy establishmentarians who led them to it. To rebuild and compete nationally again, they’re now being told by party leaders, Democrats must become even more wishy-washy. Given the example of 2009, is it any surprise that they rejected that logic last night in New York City and doubled down instead on populism and ideological purity at the first electoral opportunity?
Carrying Zohran Mamdani to victory over a former governor was far more impressive as a political muscle-flex than knocking Scozzafava out of a House special election. Progressives now seemingly have proof of concept that they can win big primaries in blue strongholds thanks to the radicalizing effect a Trump restoration has had on their party. No establishment liberal is safe, including the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate.
The left wants “fighters” and the hallmark of fighting, to quote Politico’s source, is making “absolutely insane promises on politically toxic positions.” That’s something radicals are temperamentally and ideologically better suited to do than 20-term members of Congress. Mamdani will fight for many stupid things as mayor of New York, but he will fight, and his popularity on the left will encourage other Democrats to follow his example.
In short, an organized national effort to radicalize the Democratic Party via progressive primary challenges is more likely today than it’s ever been. If it succeeds, American government will become more incompetent, illiberal, dysfunctional, and embarrassing than it already is, which is hard to fathom.
Young Democrats are being Corbyn-ized.
What I haven’t mentioned yet about Mamdani is that he’s not just a standard-issue leftist kook on economics. He’s sufficiently intoxicated by progressive cultural priorities to have said a few months ago, “As mayor, New York City would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu.” More recently, he was asked his thoughts on the phrase “globalize the intifada” and whitewashed it so thoroughly that even some Democrats came away thinking he doesn’t take incitement against Jews seriously.
New York has the biggest Jewish population of any city on Earth save for Tel Aviv. Cuomo tried to take advantage of that, but he belongs to a party in which antisemitic attitudes have risen among the young (as they also have on the right) and in which support for Israel has collapsed. Less than a decade ago, Democrats told Gallup that they sympathized with Israelis more than with Palestinians by a margin of 53-23. After nearly two years of war in Gaza, left-wing opinion has flipped completely: 59 percent say they sympathize more with the Palestinians versus 21 percent who sympathize with Israelis.
As it became clear last night that Mamdani would win, some on social media began calling it the Democrats’ “Corbyn moment,” referring to the far-left former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose hostility to Israel was so outlandish that it bred an institutional culture of antisemitism within the party. Choosing him as leader signaled that Labour no longer regarded antipathy toward Jews as disqualifying or antithetical to its mission. The darkest interpretation of Zohran’s victory is that Democrats, or at least a meaningful faction of them, now feel the same.
“One of the reasons why [the New York] results will have global implications,” one Twitter user speculated, is “because it appears that we have finally arrived at the moment where the average Democratic voter’s disdain for Israel has real electoral consequences.” It’s not that Mamdani made his views on Israel a centerpiece of his campaign, Commentary’s John Podhoretz allowed, so much as that he made no effort to renounce them. “He did not moderate his views or his positions as he ran for office here because they were good for him financially and electorally,” Podhoretz explained.
Indeed. The left wants “fighters,” and antagonism toward Israel and “Zionists” is one of the things they expect those fighters to fight for—even in offices whose core duties include making sure that streets are promptly plowed after a snowstorm.
The cheeriest spin one can put on Mamdani’s victory with respect to Israel and antisemitism is that Podhoretz is wrong, that New York Democrats preferred him despite his views on those subjects rather than because of them. He won because he promised to reduce the cost of living, not because he wants to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu. But I’ve seen that movie before, too: It’s the same logic that got Donald Trump reelected last fall. In eight months, we’ve discovered that voters in both parties are willing to tolerate all manner of egregious illiberalism from their leaders so long as it comes packaged with dopey happy talk about making eggs cheaper.
The inescapable lesson is that “globalize the intifada” is no longer an impediment to victory in left-wing strongholds, even ones where the percentage of the population that’s Jewish reaches double digits. That will influence the positions Democrats as a party take with respect to Israel—see again the point above about “global implications”—and it will make progressives who represent indigo-blue jurisdictions feel more confident about presenting their criticisms of the Jewish state in, shall we say, Corbyn-esque ways.
We here at Boiling Frogs worry a lot by definition about Americans acclimating to dangerous temperatures. The water is hotter today than it was yesterday.
Be careful what you wish for.
The conventional wisdom this evening is that Mamdani’s upset is a gift to Republicans generally and to Trumpism specifically. A Muslim socialist who was born in Africa leading America’s greatest city? Nationalists couldn’t dream of a better foil.
The president is already going in on him. So is his most powerful henchman, Stephen Miller, who took a “Great Replacement” tack by blaming the result on “unchecked migration [having] fundamentally remade the NYC electorate.” I don’t know about that—Mamdani’s base appears to be voters who make more than $100,000—but the idea will be catnip for lowbrow populist demagogues.
Assuming he becomes mayor, which I think is likely, any problems that New York experiences under his leadership will be showpieces for GOP ads in 2026 and 2028 about left-wing urban ruin. A colleague even proposed to me that it might be good for Democrats to have Mamdani make a mess of the city, paradoxically, because it would force the party to run away from socialism at full speed before the next presidential election.
Sure, maybe. But be careful what you wish for.
Every argument that Mamdani-style progressivism is electoral poison at the national level imputes a degree of common sense and decency to American voters that I’m no longer willing to assume. There’s evidence today that Zohran bested Cuomo by exciting voters who don’t typically vote in elections, a trick Donald Trump also famously pulled in his three runs for president. Maybe illiberal left-populism is as capable of galvanizing the “forgotten man” as illiberal right-populism has been.
Or, if it isn’t as capable in the abstract, perhaps it is with the right pitchman. Trumpism might not have the same magic when J.D. Vance is the face of it; socialism might have more magic when Zohran Mamdani, not Bernie Sanders, is selling it. “It’s not policy, it’s personality” isn’t entirely true, but it sure ain’t false.
In this era of all eras, I don’t know why anyone would draw firm conclusions about what Americans will and won’t tolerate from their political leadership. “It’s been very funny to see people argue that Mamdani doing well in New York is bad for Democrats,” Crooked Media’s Jane Coaston noted last night, “because I am going to guess that those same people thought Eric Adams would be good for Democrats.”
I remind you all again here that we just reelected a twice-impeached, convicted felon.
The shining lesson of the Trump era is that American voters are ignorant, unserious, and unfit to lead the free world. They’re willing to try all manner of dumb things in the name of “change.” And if New York lucks out and Mamdani’s first year or two as mayor isn’t a catastrophe, his manner of change will seem less frightening: The state of the city will “prove” to swing voters that socialism isn’t as dangerous as the right pretends.
Don’t underestimate Zohran or Zohran-ism. We the People are capable of anything.
