Six Notes on the Zohran Mamdani Miracle

How he expanded the electorate, defeated Cuomo's money machine, and made the election about affordability rather than identity politics.

One: This just doesn’t happen most of the time in politics.

Look closely and you’ll notice two things. In the 2025 New York City Democratic mayoral primary, roughly 400,000 voters under the age of 40 turned out, compared to about 230,000 in 2021. At the same time, turnout among people over the age of 60 sagged, from 390,000 to about 360,000. A very old rule of thumb, that seniors vote at far higher rates than young people, was broken by NY state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s electrifying campaign for mayor. Not only that, in the two weeks prior to the registration deadline, 37,000 people signed up to vote, twelve times as many as did so four years ago. (Gift link to the New York Times article detailing these shifts.)

The last time I can remember the youth vote exploding on behalf of a candidate in a high-profile race was in 1998, when Jesse “The Body” Ventura, a former Navy SEAL, populist talk-radio host and suburban mayor who made his name in pro-wrestling, “shocked the world” by beating an establishment Democrat and an establishment Republican in a three-way race to be Minnesota governor. That state has same-day voter registration, and Ventura’s working-class appeal and barnstorming across sports bars that ring the Twin Cities the weekend before the election energized many young people – in some precincts he got 60% of the vote. Ten percent of those surveyed by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune said they would not have bothered to vote were "The Body" not on the ballot. Ventura won nearly half of the vote among those under 30.

Other insurgent candidates have toppled establishment stalwarts in recent years – Dave Brat over Eric Cantor, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over Joe Crowley, Jamaal Bowman over Eliot Engel. But in none of those races did the challenger win by substantially changing the make-up of the electorate; instead each of these were instances where the incumbent was caught sleeping. We’re all quite rightly talking A LOT about Mamdani’s defeat of former New York governor Andrew Cuomo in last week’s NYC primary because this big a shift in the active electorate simply just doesn’t happen. And one big question we should all be pondering in the weeks and months ahead: is this replicable?

Mamdani did many things right, starting with how much he conveyed youthful energy. Watch his videos: he’s always in motion. Even still images of him often show him mid-stride. Unlike Cuomo, who hid from the public, Mamdani campaigned everywhere, which means a lot of people saw him. I ran into him at a small immigration rights protest April 19 uptown in Washington Heights; my daughter saw him Tuesday of the election when he stopped to watch her softball team play in Greenpoint’s McCarren Park. Neither of us did these things because Mamdani planned to be there—he just was everywhere.

The same was true online. As Kyle Tharp, Parker Butler and Lauren Kapp write, “There’s an outdated school of thought in Democratic communications that goes something like this: You start by crafting your poll-tested, focus-grouped message that’s so polished and flawless that it’s utterly boring and unremarkable. Then, you try to shoehorn this perfect message wherever you can — maybe a quote in a paywalled local news article or a wordy tweet that virtually no one reads. Mamdani’s campaign flipped that script. In all of his campaign messaging, he adhered to a key rule: Attention is currency. On his social media feeds, his team relentlessly deployed a wide range of engaging content, from cinematic direct-to-camera videos, to micro-targeted “fancams,” to collaborations with major pages where voters get their news. His charismatic willingness to go everywhere and talk to everyone shined through, including even to Andrew Cuomo door knockers.”

Multiple organizations provided backbone and field organizing muscle, starting with the NYC Democratic Socialists of America and including the Working Families Party, NY Communities for Change, DC 37, Unite HERE, and the Sunrise Movement, among many others. Suffice it to say that the progressive networks in New York City are many. But without enthusiasm generated by the candidate and his clear and evocative message, those networks couldn’t have turned out 50,000 volunteers on sheer willpower alone. (And that’s an astounding number, considering that about 750,000 people voted!)

Zohran Mamdani at the Resist Fascism Rally in Bryant Park on Oct 27th 2024 (photo by Bingjiefu He)

So it won’t be easy to replicate the Mamdani miracle. A charismatic candidate alone running in a suburban civic wasteland without public funding or a dense media ecosystem will have a much harder time engaging unlikely voters. Indeed, in many districts the potential youth vote isn’t nearly as big as the one in a dense city like New York. But that leaves out a wild card element, which is that we’re not living in “normal” times. As Trump’s onslaught on the Constitution deepens, millions of us are protesting and looking for more energetic leadership. Opportunities abound.

Two: Why didn’t pollsters see the wave coming?

In the days before the primary, political insiders, including people who wanted Mamdani to beat Cuomo, were saying that if the Tuesday night results tallying all the votes cast during early balloting showed the ex-governor ahead by 10 points or more, he would win; if he was up by only 6 to 9 points, the final result would be a toss-up; and anything less than that, he’d be done. The general expectation was the first-round result would be a toss-up. Instead, Mamdani shellacked Cuomo by 43.5% to 36.4%. City comptroller Brad Lander got another 11.3%. The unofficial final result, with votes from all the losing candidates transferred voters remaining choices, shows Mamdani beating Cuomo 56% to 44%.

Only one pollster, Public Policy Polling, predicted a Mamdani win, by 35%-30% in the first round. Every other poll had Cuomo ahead, typically by double-digits. Why did PPP get the trend right? The company says, “It was clear in this election though that Mamdani was building a movement that was going to bring a lot of people into the process that had never voted in a city election before. So we made a conscious decision not to require people we polled to have voted in 2021. If they said they were going to vote on our screening question that was good enough.” [Emphasis added.]

PPP notes that it’s especially hard to get younger people to answer a poll, but that this time around their own unweighted sample found 37% of likely voters were under 45 years old. The pollster notes that “we should have projected an even younger electorate.” Whoa.

Three: Why didn’t Cuomo’s money advantage save him?

About $25 million from an array of fatcat donors flowed into Fix the City, a Cuomo-allied SuperPAC that flooded the airwaves with paid media on his behalf. SuperPACs allied with Mamdani had a paltry $1.2 million. On paper, this race looked like last year’s Jamaal Bowman-George Latimer congressional primary, where AIPAC and its allies spent more than $20 million to hammer the incumbent as anti-Israel on behalf of an older white county executive.

Well, lots of things were different here. No amount of advertising can sell a bad product, and former governor Cuomo’s name-recognition advantage was also a curse. And the anti-Cuomo coalition in the city came together early with a clear message to voters, to make sure to not rank him anywhere among the five candidates they were allowed to choose among their ranked choices.

Mamdani also had enough money to be competitive, because of New York City’s generous public campaign finance system, which matches small donations by 8-1 and where he collected the maximum in public funding, a tad more than $7 million. (Lander got $6.4 million; Cuomo $4.2 million.) Mamdani had more than 27,000 individual contributors helping him qualify for public funds, which I believe is a record, while Cuomo had just over 6,000. When people put money in the game, they are more invested in the outcome.

And Mamdani came from and built up the one force that can beat organized money, which is organized people. Thousands of local progressive activists from a variety of political homes, from DSA to Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, threw themselves into knocking more than a million doors on his behalf. And he campaigned among the city’s Muslim and Asian communities, going to places that machine Dems like Cuomo ignore. Yes, NYC boasts the largest population of Jews (upwards of one million) outside of Tel Aviv. But it is also the home of 800,000 Muslims, many of whom Mamdani was able to address in Urdu and Bengali. I also suspect the intensifying attack on immigrants country-wide may have pushed more such voters into Mamdani’s camp, especially among Latinos, though I haven’t seen any hard data on this.

Four: Why didn’t charges of antisemitism stop Mamdani’s rise?

The simplest answer is because Mamdani isn’t antisemitic. To a progressive Jew like me, who grew up in and around New York City, he’s a recognizable member of the polyglot rootless cosmopolitan educated creative do-gooder class that makes the city so special. His parents are consummate New York intelligentsia success stories—his father a top academic at Columbia, his mother an Oscar-nominated filmmaker. And Mamdani is a product of the very meritocratic pipeline that has served generations of city Jews, growing up on the upper West Side, attending the private Bank Street primary school and then the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. In an interview with West Side Rag, he talks about missing Absolute Bagels, a local hangout that he and friends would go to after school got out, where “I would order my poppy seed bagel with scallion cream cheese and a some-pulp Tropicana.” He also campaigned comfortably at synagogues, participated in a UJA-Federation mayoral forum and even dallied with the Orthodox vote in Brooklyn, getting at least one rabbi there to express openness to him and putting up flyers in Yiddish in some neighborhoods.

The more complicated answer would take a book. First, New York City’s Jews are split, with some, like Brad Lander, comfortable with Mamdani’s progressive politics overall and others seeing his rise as “a spiritual Kristallnacht.” Second, there clearly are enough Jews who are also quite critical of Israel in ways that mirror or approach Mamdani’s positions that they aren’t willing to close their minds to the possibility of him as mayor. Third, Israel’s far-right government is not popular with city voters. Forced to choose between someone (Cuomo) who said he’d make Israel one of his first stops as mayor and someone (Mamdani) who said he’d abide by the International Criminal Court and arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited New York, more New Yorkers leaned away from protecting Bibi. Fourth, as I’ve written here before, the Middle East is not the top defining issue for most Americans; kitchen table concerns rank much higher. Even if most of the money and people attacking Mamdani came from what we might call the AIPAC side of the Democratic coalition, the candidate himself never turned his run into a referendum on AIPAC, instead focusing relentless on how he would make the city more affordable. And lastly, the Lander-Mamdani alliance created a permission structure for liberal Jewish New Yorkers, many of them older, who undoubtedly ranked Lander above Mamdani, but whose votes will seal his victory.

Having gone through the experience a year ago of a similar progressive, Jamaal Bowman, losing his congressional seat over charges of antisemitism (among other things), I think the fact that Mamdani grew up with Jews on the Upper West Side and had a top Jewish city leader (Lander) on his side when the sledding got rough both matter a lot. Bowman admits he had no real knowledge of Jews until he decided to challenge Eliot Engel. His exposure to politics before then seems to have been more “street” than “book” with some of that including dabbling in the kind of conspiracist thinking prevalent among Farrakhan supporters, though he never really explained where that came from. In any event, when the demographic make-up of his district, which is just as Jewish as NYC, put Bowman in the position of having to understand why Jews feel an organic connection to Israel regardless of its policies, he struggled and never found his footing—and that is me being charitable. (Worse, he decided to make AIPAC’s attack on him one of the defining elements of his own campaign, taunting the group and its supporters, playing into its hands while also refusing to apologize for questioning whether Israeli women were raped on October 7.)

Whereas I think Mamdani has a much surer grasp of the importance of Israel to Jewish identity, even as he refuses to give an inch on criticizing what the country has become after decades of occupation, settlement expansion and war. So while I agree with many people who think “globalize the intifada” is a childish and stupid slogan best left to over-eager college students and one that is bound to scare many Jews, I don’t think Mamdani is a tool of the hang-glider left. Indeed, he’s being attacked by those very people for saying that Israel has a right to exist (as well as a responsibility to abide by international law).

Finally, Lander’s role in building a Jewish-Muslim progressive alliance that could defeat the Cuomo side of the Democratic party also can’t be underestimated. For once, a politician put the movement that helped lift him to prominence ahead of his own personal ambition. Maybe Mamdani was lucky to have Cuomo as his foil. In some other timeline where after resigning in disgrace the ex-governor sits in his garage restoring vintage muscle cars and never returns to politics, the liberal-left might not have unified so vehemently and a candidate like Mamdani might have had a tougher run.

Five: Still, should Jews be freaking out over Mamdani’s win?

The night of the primary, Elizabeth Rand, the New York-based founder and mother hen of the giant Mothers Against Campus Antisemitism Facebook group, posted a rant about how dismayed she was by the victory of the vicious antisemite Mamdani. I posted a comment pointing out that a lot of Jewish New Yorkers—perhaps 20-40% of them--had voted for Mamdani, either as their first or second choice after Lander, and that maybe it was time she reconsidered her understanding of what was antisemitism and what was not. The next morning I discovered I'd been removed from the group. But I don’t have to be in that 61,000-member group to know that many American Jews are terrified. On Change.org, this petition calling on state leaders to remove him from the ballot for “endorsing violent extremism” has more than 30,000 signatures.

I think the American Jewish establishment has lost the thread, using language policing and guilt by association in ways that have stopped working because people are tired of the game and its one-sided application. One sign of the exhaustion of this strategy: Jewish New Yorkers who are not political fellow-travelers of Mamdani’s, like Tom Allon, the publisher of City & State, and Micah Lasher, a colleague in the state assembly, have both published personal statements in recent days declaring their rejection of “Mamdani-antisemite” claim, instead arguing that he is person of intelligence and integrity and expressing their hope that he will be a boon for the city. Their lived experience of Mamdani as a budding leader speaks louder than the fears of a traumatized community that, unfortunately, has lost the ability to make useful distinctions and has turned reflexive defense of Israel into a rancid and self-limiting kind of identity politics.

Writing in The Forward, Emily Tamkin, the author of Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities, argues that Mamdani’s win proves the “gotcha” approach to combating antisemitism has to go. I couldn’t agree more. She writes:

If Mamdani had said the magic words and said that yes, in fact, he did think Israel should exist as a Jewish state and couldn’t wait to visit — in answer to questions he was repeatedly asked — would that have made a single synagogue, or Jewish cultural center, or Jewish person on the streets of New York safer?

Will fearmongering about Mamdani’s criticism of Israel — despite the fact that, as mayor of New York City, he will have no foreign policy portfolio whatsoever — make Jewish New Yorkers more secure?

Too often during this campaign, it seemed like antisemitism was brought up in an effort to discredit Mamdani for incorrectly answering a pop quiz on different phrases that some consider antisemitic. His decisive win suggests that many voters weren’t persuaded by that effort.

Which means it’s worth asking whether New Yorkers, and Americans following this story, came away from the primary thinking that antisemitism is a serious problem that requires a nuanced and well-rounded approach — or whether, instead, it’s a series of questions to which you’d better have the right answer, or you’ll be called an antisemite.

Her conclusion: “Voters have every right to not vote for candidates they don’t see as supportive enough of Israel. But when we reduce understanding of antisemitism to buzzwords — and say that we expect certain answers to certain questions and, if we don’t hear them, that means the candidate is an antisemite who has no place holding office — we confuse the definition of antisemitism. And we do nothing to actually, tangibly advance Jewish safety.”

Finally, American Jews who think their path to safety is to align with the strongman politics of Trump and his bullying of universities and other institutions for failing to sufficiently fight “antisemitism” should consider this. The $2 billion that USAID spent in 2022 to help respond to the massive drought in east Africa that year is estimated to have prevented 2.1 million to 3.9 million deaths. As William Herkewitz, a former USAID head of communications in Africa, writes in today’s New York Times opinion section (gift link), “That means it cost the average American household roughly $6 a year in taxes to prevent about half as many deaths as occurred in the Holocaust.” As of yesterday, USAID has been shuttered, fed into DOGE’s woodchipper. And there’s been almost no outcry. The Lancet, a leading medical journal, estimates that in two decades, USAID saved 92 million lives and its destruction will now lead to 14 million preventable deaths by 2030. The amount of attention devoted to Mamdani’s inadequate response to a phrase he’s personally never used, “globalize the intifada,” compared to the now foreseeable deaths of millions that Trump is causing should cause us all to pause and ask, are we focusing on the right things?

Six: Finally, good news!

Hope leads to more hope. According to Amanda Litman, since Mamdani’s win last Tuesday night, “more than 1100 young people have reached out to RunforSomething.net to explore a run for local office—one of our biggest spikes of the year yet.” (That was as of last Thursday; now the number is over 6000.)

Will all the traditional Democratic politicians who backed Cuomo and continue to avoid endorsing their party’s own primary winner, many of them from the older generation, sense where the wind is blowing and get out of the way for what they can’t understand? There will be plenty of time to see how that dynamic plays out. For the moment, I’m with the many celebrating Mamdani’s refreshing and inspiring rise.

Also worth reading:

—Waleed Shahid: “The Rise of Zohran Mamdani,” Waleed’s Substack, June 26, 2025.

—Elizabeth Spiers, “Mamdani Did All The Things the Establishment Hates. He Won Anyway,” The New Republic, June 26, 2025.

—Antonia Scatton, “The Electrifying Campaign,” Reframing America, June 25, 2025.

—Zephyr Teachout, “On Zohran Mamdani and Taxi Drivers,” The Antimonopolist, June 29, 2025.

End Times

What happens when you give people something to vote for.