Zohran Mamdani Defeated a Corrupt, Weak Democratic Party Establishment
Mamdani laid out the strategy. Now the left should follow his example and primary Ritchie Torres, Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, and so many others.
Zohran Mamdani made history Tuesday night in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary by trouncing not just Andrew Cuomo but the entire political and media establishment that had coalesced around the former governor. Mamdani won by beating expectations, beating the polls, beating the big money, beating the endorsements of the legendary political leaders and venerable institutions. This is a victory over an elite that has been viscerally hostile to Mamdani’s youthful energy and economics. Axios rightly calls this “an earthquake victory.” To be sure, Mamdani isn’t mayor yet. The general election is in the fall, and he’ll have to fend off not just a Republican rival but also the scandal-ridden current mayor, Eric Adams, who will run as an independent, and perhaps once again Cuomo, who has not ruled out an independent run. Still, as of Tuesday, he can reasonably be seen as the favorite.
The scale of his victory can be gauged by the enormous hurdles he had to overcome. In the final results, Mamdani beat Cuomo in the first round by 8.1 points, 43.5 percent to 36.4 percent. This will almost surely increase as the ranked-voting system is implemented and Mamdani picks up votes from the other candidates. Yet in all but one of the polls done before the election, Cuomo had led in the first round. According to The New York Times, the recent first-round poll results were YouGov (Cuomo +10), HarrisX (Cuomo +19), Emerson (Cuomo +3), Manhattan Institute (Cuomo +3), Center for Strategic Politics (Cuomo +8), Marist College (Cuomo +12). Even the one poll that had Mamdani winning underestimated him: Public Policy Polling (Mamdani +5).
The polls reflected the consensus that Cuomo was a formidable front-runner and Mamdani the underdog. For much of the election, it was a reasonable assumption.
Cuomo had obvious weaknesses as a candidate: He resigned as governor in 2021 after credible accusations of sexual harassment. His governorship had been wracked by scandal, notably his mismanagement of nursing homes during the Covid pandemic. But these scandals, while real, didn’t seem politically lethal. After all, Donald Trump has been dogged by even more serious and numerous sexual harassment scandals. He also mismanaged Covid, and he managed to win the presidency in 2024. If the public likes a politician, they are willing to forgive almost any misdeed.
Cuomo led in the polls thanks to his enormous name recognition. Aside from his tenure as governor, his family has been active in New York politics for decades, with his late father, Mario Cuomo, serving as governor from 1983 to 1994.
Cuomo called on his extensive political network to supply an impressive list of endorsements, including from former president Bill Clinton, former mayor Michael Bloomberg, and South Carolina Representative Jim Clyburn (a famous kingmaker who was instrumental in Joe Biden’s securing the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination). Labor unions, which tend to want to play it safe by endorsing likely winners, rallied to Cuomo’s side, including two important unions that had once called on him to resign his governorship (Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union and the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council).
Cuomo’s biggest advantage was in money. Billionaires, fearful of Mamdani’s promises to tax the rich, make buses free, and freeze the rent, made it their mission to secure the nomination for Cuomo. According to The New York Times, the pro-Cuomo super PAC Fix the City raised $25 million (including more than $8 million from Michael Bloomberg), making it “a financial juggernaut on track to spend three times as much as Mr. Cuomo’s actual campaign legally can.” Combined with the $8 million that he was legally allowed to spend, the pro-Cuomo campaign spent $33 million. Pro-Mamdani super PACs had less money to work with (roughly $1.7 million in addition to the $8 million in donations to the campaign).
Coupled with the money was the support of the media. It was hard not to notice an anti-Mamdani slant not just in the familiar right-wing press (the New York Post) but also in mainstream publications. The New York Times kept harping on Mamdani’s lack of experience and The Atlantic suggested Mamdani was a threat to the safety of Jews.
But if all of Cuomo’s advantages led to a thorough election thrashing, perhaps they weren’t advantages. Mamdani proved to be a superb campaigner with a message about affordability that resonated with voters. Cuomo, by contrast, was aloof and seemed to try to see as little of voters as he could get away with. Perhaps he felt that as a former governor, the job was beneath him.
Like the 2024 presidential election, the mayoral primaries were a change election. Winning depended on harnessing voter anger. It’s notable that Mamdani seems to have done well with the demographics that had shifted away from the Democratic Party in 2024, including young people (particularly young men), Asians, and Latinos.
In truth, Mamdani benefited from being an anti-system candidate, and Cuomo was weighed down by being the poster boy of the establishment. After the failure of the Biden presidency, which showed how hapless centrist Democrats were in the face of the crisis of the moment, why would the endorsement of the party elders help Cuomo? In 2025, who can take the political advice of Bill Clinton or Jim Clyburn seriously? The party elite had coalesced around the faltering and diminished Biden in 2020, which succeeded in the short term—Biden won the nomination and the election—but the strategy eventually led to disaster.
Mamdani’s victory is a sign that the Democratic Party establishment is in trouble, and the party is ready for a wider revolt. The next move of progressive Democrats is to start running insurgent candidates in primaries to harness the anger of the moment. One can easily imagine noxious figures like Ritchie Torres, Hakeem Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer being targeted for primary challenges. Mamdani has laid out the strategy. The left should now follow his example.
The Democratic Party establishment is old, weak, and corrupt. Seizing power from it is a crucial part of saving American democracy.
CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten summed up the election by saying, “The people who hate this result the most are the Democratic establishment. We have seen poll after poll after poll showing Democratic voters fed up with their leaders in Washington, fed up with their leaders in government.” The goal now should be to give the establishment many more elections to hate.
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