Zohran Mamdani

Part One: Who Is Zohran Mamdani?

Lucky for you all, I have been compelled to take the day off work, so while I rest and regain my strength, enjoy, for the first time in a long time, two Frozen Peaches articles within a single week. 

The victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race - specifically, in the primary election to determine who will be the Democratic candidate - has been unusually interesting, given that it is a) a local election b) fourteen thousand kilometers away. New York City is, of course, one of the world’s most important cities, but nobody cared about Eric Adams; compare that to AOC, also a politician from the New York area but with one hundred times the profile. This is different. 

As always, I don’t just want to repeat the themes of the race - I will pay a thousand dollar subscription if it means I don’t have to write about Israel on a weekly basis, it’s so damn uninteresting to me and very much a dominated space already online. However, if you don’t know much about this election, I’ll lend you a brief summary before I proceed to analyse this result.

In a race that presumably had a lot of qualified and viable candidates who nobody knew or cared about, the frontrunner became clear, to the despair of many yet again banging their head at the American political system producing the worst of all worlds: Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo is a 67 year old political dynast like the Clintons or Bushes, and a predatory, bullying boss who resigned as Governor over his many misdeeds, like sending COVID-positive cases into nursing homes and then attempting to cover up the resulting swathes of deaths. 

There was no coherent logic as to why he had to go as Governor of the entire state but should return as Mayor: it was pure cynical politics, a resignation to appease the media cycle and a return to fulfill his own ambition and the belief of his boosters that you need a tough guy like him to get stuff done. Never mind the example we saw well demonstrated by Boris Johnson where it turns out that, if you’re constantly consumed with scandal, your cut-through-the-noise bluster doesn’t matter - in practice, you are the noise. He is exactly the kind of person who should be kept from power by a ten foot pole, and whatever you think of Mamdani, his defeat is a moment to celebrate.

The surprise challenger in the race was Zohran Mamdani, who in every way ticked the boxes for “Americans do not elect candidates like these.” Thirty-three years old; an Indian-American Muslim born in Uganda; an open democratic socialist promising not just standard European social democrat politics like universal healthcare or higher income tax rates on the rich, but rent freezes and publicly owned supermarkets. He built momentum on the back of a strong campaign that paired snappy, viral videos displaying clear, simple communication with extensive on-the-ground effort from him and his fifty thousand volunteers (that’s the entire population of Nelson doorknocking just for a primary!) And then he won the first round, 43% to 36%, with Cuomo already conceding before the rest of the ranked choices are announced.

There’s still a general election to go. Zohran Mamdani will face incumbent Mayor Eric Adams - who, rejected by the Democratic Party for his blatant corruption, is now running as an independent - and Republican Curtis Silwa, so technically Mamdani isn’t the mayor yet. Cuomo threatened to run an independent campaign of his own, though his weak showing makes that less viable than a 51-49% result might have. I think we should never underestimate the Bloomberg factor after a candidate as flawed as him opened his checkbook in the 2020 presidential primary and won millions of votes on that basis alone. 

Nonetheless, as the Democrat in New York, Mamdani is the heavy favourite. So what does it mean that New York City is probably going to elect a thirty three year old Muslim socialist ex-rapper to lead?

Part Two: Zohran Mamdani Should Not Be The Mayor

The reactions from Mamdani’s critics have ranged from the hyperbolic to downright hysterical. No, he isn’t a threat to Jews or a terrorist sympathiser. No, he’s not going to shove Wall Streeters out onto the ice (I wonder how Signore Mangione feels about Mamdani?) This is clearly just a guy who met a lot of down-and-out New Yorkers in his twenties while he was working in renters’ rights, said “Damn, I should do something about this,” and got into office to make a difference.

In 2020. 

A guy who has been a member of a local body for as long as most of us spent in high school is clearly unqualified to lead any city of eight million people, let alone one that exists both within its particular financial web and also the complexities of the American federal system. There have been plenty of cases in history of people with little experience succeeding and a lot of experience failing, and I strongly agree with those who say we need to clean out with a broom those who have been there too long, but I think we can safely say there’s a minimum floor you should be above for the best odds of success and he is not there. Especially in an executive office as opposed to a legislative one, where it’s far more important that you know how to actually, you know, execute, rather than collaborate with others to design the rules that bind and compel the executives. 

What has he ever managed before? Been in charge of, called the shots on? What legislation has he gotten done? All of these were steps he, or any leftie who wanted to supplant him, could have taken before running for Mayor, and did not. This is my regular complaint about candidates coming from the left* with a thin resume: what was stopping you starting yesterday on making sure that, if you win, you’re actually capable of helping people? What’s the downside in getting practice reps in instead of learning on the job while hungry and homeless people depend on you knowing what to do and how to get it done? Very obviously, just like in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, the race came down to the two big names each with glaring flaws because the voting public, by and large, ceebs getting to know all the boring, regular, qualifieed options. 

*Hardly a left-exclusive issue, but age polarisation means that left-wing candidates are correlated with youth and inexperience and vice versa.

I’m also not impressed by his big-ticket policies, but I’d feel very differently about the exact same policy pledges if everybody was able to talk about this guy like a new FDR, who had managed the hell out of everything that he had previously laid hands on. As it is, while I obviously do not know and will never know how exactly New York City Council functions, I do not think that he is going to be capable of turning New York City into a socialist institution with all his desired impacts on daily life. Instead, it’s going to come down to what lesser wins he can extract from the councillors and other officeholders around him, who do not share all of his beliefs and will force him to compromise.

Compare this to AOC. AOC came into politics from a working-class background, also targeting “business as usual”, but she represents just 740,000 people directly. Despite that, she has risen through the ranks of Congressional decisionmaking and, critically, when Bernie carks it, she is well-positioned to continue the role he took up in the party. Mamdani understandably criticised “moral victories”, but what’s clear to me is that Bernie Sanders’s losses still compelled Joe Biden, a thoroughly rubbish guy, to come to him and hash out compromises on how much to spend and what priorities to take that would not have happened had the Bernie movement not happened at all. Nobody in small-d democratic politics has ever figured out how to get everything they want because…different voters support different officeholders who believe in and prioritise different things. The challenge for Mamdani will be in how he can convert his skill at campaigning into a skill at politicking, to compensate for his likely inadequacies at executing.

So what skills at campaigning did Mamdani show?

Part Three: Zohran Campaigni

If you go on Twitter*, you will keep saying his supporters say that other left-wingers need to copy the Zohran formula. I think it’s worth noting how simple that formula really was. The videos were all about getting straight to the point on big, flashy promises that were easy to understand. So much of the campaign was carried on purely aesthetic factors, those “this shouldn’t matter but it does so let’s do it right” stuff, not just Zohran’s own charisma (which would be a bit rude to comment on as some kind of “gotcha”) but also the fact that the videos are simply well-filmed, edited and acted so they’re interesting and not boring. And the other part was the part that seems to trip so many campaigns up, where you…actually get people interested in volunteering for you to go out and physically talk with people to shift votes. Well done, top marks, no notes.

*Don’t. 

A unique angle on this race for a local election was views on Israel and Palestine. This is obviously a bit absurd, given that the Mayor of New York City can barely make a mite of difference in the lives of Palestinians and Israelis. I will call back to my Ouroboros rant when it comes to how, for all of Mamdani’s supposed good political instincts, he got caught up in the last days of the campaign defending the phrase “globalise the intifada”. Like Swarbrick’s usage of “from the river to the sea”, I think it’s both entirely defensible and also utterly pointless to put the value of repeating a few words ahead of getting in a position to tangibly do good. 

I would also note that Mamdani never showed the same kind of interest in, for instance, defending his past use of “defund the police”; in fact, he put money into ads openly disavowing that position. I don’t think that means Mamdani prioritises foreign policy over his management of the NYPD - but if it doesn’t, then that means that he lost control of the conversation in the critical final days. My purpose here is less to needle Mamdani - after all, the slew of attacks on this score totally failed to stop him - and more to invite left-wing readers to consider whether praising progressive candidates for sticking to firm stances really makes much sense when, if you look carefully, every candidate who has ever gone anywhere has absolutely made compromises and climbdowns. 

The final note on how this campaign ran is that RCV really proved its worth as a system here. Because Mamdani voters could put Comptroller Brad Lander* down on their ballot too, and vice versa, the candidates were incentivised to endorse and defend each other: better to shore up your second-preference votes and project a sunny, “no more politics as usual” vibe to voters than to continue to indulge in a FPTP-style fixation on “every positive for another candidate is automatically a negative for me”. It’s one of the big arguments for the system, I hope more cities in New Zealand pick it up, and I’m still delusionally hopeful that some day it’ll be integrated side-by-side with MMP for our general elections.

*Again, it’s not the element I most want to discuss here, but there are interesting lessons for consociationalism about the leading Muslim and Jewish candidates specifically challenging the narrative that posed the former as a threat to the latter by working together. All the praise for Lander for not sticking the knife into Mamdani has real “wow, John McCain didn’t agree with that lady, an American hero” energy, but you take what you can get.

So that’s what the voters were presented with. But how did they react?

Part Four: Big Lights Will Inspire You

The funny thing is that the voters reacted in a very predictable way, and most of the reactors to the result have entirely failed to notice that the predictable outcome played out. On the nationalist, xenophobic far-right that now makes up so much of American politics, this is the latest sign that a coalition of illegal and legal immigrants now controls the results of elections to elect America-hating communists who want to destroy the country from the inside and replace whites with everybody else. On the left, this is a vindication of politics that speaks directly to the working class to mobilise everyday people to fix their problems through reclaiming their fair share of the pie from the well-off.

They’re both wrong! It’s obviously incorrect to presume growing immigration and eventual majorities of people of colour outside African-Americans equals a loyally socialist voter bloc - what does the Romanian immigrant obsessed with hating communism have to do with the Hindu nationalist immigrant who posts angrily under Mamdani calling Modi the Butcher of Gujarat? It’s simply lazy racism from Americans who can’t see that they’re behaving just like humans everywhere in the world - easily turned against each other over meaningless sectarian divides. It’s one of the most important political parties in the world behaving as though a rambling weirdo likee Brian Tamaki is a shining port of wisdom.

But it’s a moot point, because there aren’t enough immigrants in New York City to decide who becomes Mayor (and any “the people of colour are the bloc who decide” rhetoric is dancing its way down towards the rhetoric of the American Nazi Party). What we can mathematically measure is that, in fact, Mamdani’s strongest performance - what got him over the finish line - was with well-off white voters! He didn’t get the 1%, but all the upper-class professionals below the 1% and above the working-class were turning out for him. Cuomo performed best with working-class Hispanic and black voters. 

This is the issue again and again that keeps cropping up for the 21st century left, and which the 21st century left seems mystifyingly disinterested in examining: if you keep constantly messaging at the working-class, and it’s the well-off white-collar privileged class who respond most to that messaging, what are you doing wrong? How can you have a movement that holds you accountable to the working class for your successes and failures if they’re not your base? How do you avoid simply signalling to well-off voters to make them feel good about themselves and like they’re making a difference? 

Not to mention all the stretching by privileged people in high cost-of-living cities to paint themselves as in the same basket as the worst off. So much of the issue with political branding for the left is their association with how cities are governed (think about right-wing contempt for Wellington and Tory Whanau, or the endless association between L.A. and needles). It’s a sense that their political leadership are making decisions to placate the woke and well-off who want to rename schools instead of ensure public scrutiny and make the roads run on time. And that’s a sense that gets broadcast out from those cities across the country, and clings to voters everywhere as they go to the polls to vote on Congress and the presidency. This doesn’t mean the solution for the left is to abandon homeless people and drug addicts as part of “people in need”, but it’s clear that there’s a disconnect that isn’t being directly addressed. 

These are the two challenges I am going to continue issuing on this blog again and again to left-wing readers: how does the left make sure it actually gets policies done, and how does the left appeal more to working-class voters who will keep it honest if it fails them? If Mamdani’s call was to supplant moral victories with real victories, the next step is to ensure that more Mamdanis winning is a real victory for working people from rough backgrounds and in great need, not just for politicians, the Twitterati, and people like me.

Still. Mamdani won, and will very likely win. And so that means whatever self-examination I am urging on the left pales in respect to the kind of self-examination the right should go through now, and probably won’t. The right paints the victories of figures like Mamdani as an apocalyptic event that will ruin the lives of millions. And in response to this enormous threat, they put up…Curtis Silwa, the exact kind of wacky weirdo who stands to turn off many of the moderate Democrats who previously opted for Mayors Bloomberg and Giuliani across the aisle. 

The Republican Party is deadset on imagining every kind of conspiracy imaginable for how victory is stolen from them to avoid looking a simple fact in the eye: they are strange, sick people, and they are failing to encourage everywhere from amongst their ranks the kinds of Tim Scotts* and Nikki Haleys who could capitalise on an opportunity as golden as the Democratic Party nominating a thirty three year old Muslim socialist to run the centre of Western capital. 

The Republican Party should, by all rights, be winning this race, glorying in the headlines about raiding deep into Democratic territory, and contrasting sensible businesslike management with the mess of L.A. et al, and any party still halfway connected to reality would be consumed with urgent self-scrutiny right now about how they let Curtis Silwa go nominated unanimously, instead of thinking that posting racism on Twitter makes a difference. Progressives across blue states should be looking at this as a green light to go knock out more moderate candidates and take their place in the general election - how likely is it that the Republican Party will actually be capable of stopping you?

*Scott is actually fairly conservative on policy and not the kind of candidate I’d run in New York - but my point is that the Republican Party would clearly benefit in many races from following the model of centre-right leaders like David Cameron and John Key who focused on attracting candidates across ethnic lines and from disadvantaged backgrounds who could speak to voters the party traditionally struggled to reach. Instead, the party is refortifying in a J.D. Vancey kinda direction that is obsessed with placating the white working-class as society’s only victims.

Part Five: In The Arc Of History

Because of the fixation on Mamdani’s identity and ideology, an important element of his victory has been entirely omitted by every single reaction I have seen. The shockwaves of last year’s presidential election have been reshaping politics across America, and we should not exempt this race from that lens. Looked at in this way, electing a proudly progressive Muslim is obviously a statement from Democrat New Yorkers against Trump.

But that statement needs to be taken a little deeper, because Cuomo also tried to define himself by how he stood up to Trump. This is an expression of the widespread anger that keeps showing up in polls amongst Democrats against their own party: that they are fed up with their choice being figures like the 67 year old Cuomo and the 74 year old Schumer and the acceptably aged but equally listless Jeffries, all from New York, who cling, moribund, to their positions. Democratic voters want them to step aside to reenergise the party. And if they won’t step aside, then they will be made to at the ballot box.

You cannot read too much into an election where the first-preference gap between Cuomo and Mamdani was just sixty thousand votes. But, if we do look at how it fits into a wider trend, it absolutely is the plight of the centre-left. In the UK, in Australia, in Canada, it has recently won elections. And where does it seem like it has direction and purpose? Can you name what any of those governments are going to achieve in the next few years in any of those countries? Oh, there’ll be some things, just like Jacinda got some significant things done. But it’s clear that voters are losing patience with a politics seen to pair progressive values with a steady-as-she-goes demeanour about actually...progressing. 

Basically, voters on the left are looking at right-wing parties turning from being conservative and reactionary towards radical, revolutionary populism, and those voters on the left are not always opting just to batten down the hatches, but sometimes to fight fire with fire. Look at the popularity of Sheinbaum in Mexico and Lula in Brazil and Sanchez in Spain and Lee in Korea*. The left must figure out how to convert that energy in the short term of a campaign into sustaining a demonstration over the long term of “hey, left-wing governance is successful and you don’t need to elect Vance/Farage/Weidel/Le Pen to solve all your problems” if they are to fend off the radical right. Hence my constant emphasis on those two questions: how the left ties itself to the voters it’s meant to serve, and how the left serves those voters.

*Incidentally, like Mamdani, they challenge the traditional blocs in international relations.

I’ve harped on my usual themes enough, so I’ll leave you with one thought specific to this race. I really believe that if you asked New Yorkers on October 11th, 2001, whether a Muslim could win the mayoralty in the next fifty years, almost nobody, including Muslim New Yorkers, would have said yes. In 2007 and 2008, Americans constantly rabbited on the idea that America would never elect a black man with a name like “Barack Hussein Obama” just seven years after 9/11. He went through a media cycle about whether he believed America deserved 9/11. He constantly positioned himself as an all-American Christian patriot. And then he won in a landslide.

Mamdani has faced the same issue as Obama - being portrayed as an un-American Muslim radical - but his response has been entirely different: he actually is a Muslim, and he has directly stood for issues with religious coding like support for Palestinians, even though of course being a Jew or a Muslim doesn’t and shouldn’t directly dictate your beliefs on any political issue. He battled on through immense Islamophobic hatred and an obsession with singling him out as a threat to Jews and Israel by dint of his identity. And, hey, he won! 

Just like with my Rishi Sunak article from a while ago, I think in many ways it’s still remarkable how far and how fast the world has come for overcoming sectarian divides. They’re still alive and spiky, and you just read all my worries about how much the Republican Party is menacing against people of colour. But, at the end of the day, this vote was a reaffirmation of a simple and important truth: that we want the best and brightest to lead us, and our democratic elections are made better when people from all kinds of backgrounds are able to participate, and participate without their participation  being dictated by what their identity is. 

I don’t think Zohran Mamdani was the best choice New Yorkers could have made, but both his victory, and his victory over Cuomo specifically, are worth celebrating. When voters looked at him, they just saw a guy they trusted and liked, and tuned out all the noise. That’s a win for politics leaving behind all the posturing about the things that don’t really matter, and getting on with what does: policy, ideas, and what the mayor will do for you.

if he drops the music video from City Hall I will rescind all critiques, move to New York and personally institute a reign of blood of the executives in Central Park