“Mamdani was in the 21st century and Cuomo was in the 19th century,” NYU urban policy professor Mitchell Moss told The Washington Post in one of the many New York mayoral election post-mortems. “That’s all there is to it.”
Well, yes and no. And it’s the “no” that requires some explanation, both of Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory and Andrew Cuomo’s correspondingly stunning defeat.
Cuomo first. Moss is clearly right that Cuomo didn’t understand how to communicate with today’s voters, young voters particularly, even if the substance of his messages, not to mention the substance of Andrew Cuomo himself, are equally if not more to blame for his loss. That said, Cuomo’s campaign would have done a lot better if it had been a good 19th century campaign. New York’s Democratic machine from the 1870s through the 1940s—Tammany Hall, and its outer borough allies—carried Election Day after Election Day on the strength of a massive ground game, powered by ward heelers who, like Mamdani’s precinct walkers, knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors (and also provided jobs and favors to more than a hundred thousand voters). Tammany’s strength was also rooted in “contributions” that city employees were compelled to make to its coffers, and various payoffs of all descriptions that the Hall itself made to smooth its way.
Cuomo’s operation had no real ground game to speak of. Even his paid canvassers were Mamdani voters. So by the metric of the 19th century, Cuomo fell flat.
Mamdani, by contrast, had a ground game that quantitatively evoked Tammany’s at the height of its powers, but better. While Tammany had to put its ward heelers on the payroll to get them to prompt voters to the polls, Mamdani had a volunteer army that was inspired enough to work for their candidate.
But there’s another way in which Mamdani’s victory is in the grand tradition of New York politics; for that matter, in the grand tradition of American big city politics generally. As a rule, those politics have long been politics of ethnic succession. Beginning in the mid-19th century, they pitted Irish immigrants against native-born Yankees, and any political history of Boston, New York, or any Northeastern city from the 1840s through the 1930s must focus on that conflict. The subsequent arrivals of Ashkenazi Jews, Italians, Southern Blacks, Caribbeans, and Mexicans and Central Americans to our major cities are central to their more recent political histories, too.
In that regard, the Mamdani coalition bears a striking resemblance to the coalition that brought New York’s greatest mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, to power in 1933. La Guardia was a Republican with distinctly progressive politics. (In the years preceding his three terms as mayor, he was a longtime congressman from East Harlem, and in the one year that the Republicans refused to run him on their party line, he was re-elected running on the line of the Socialist Party.)
His 1933 campaign, like Mamdani’s, unified the city’s progressives, but that wouldn’t have sufficed to defeat Tammany’s Democratic candidate. He also drew substantial support from the city’s Jews and Italians, both of whom had come to resent Tammany’s favoritism in providing city jobs to the Irish, and from the city’s WASP elites, who had been fighting Tammany’s for the preceding 60 years.
As Arthur Mann makes clear in his wonderful book on the 1933 election, La Guardia Comes to Power, New York’s Italian community hadn’t been much of a factor in previous elections, but Italians went to the polls in droves when they heard La Guardia’s promise to create a civil service that would hire based on qualifications, not ethnicity, from a candidate who spoke to them in Italian. La Guardia was fluent in Yiddish as well, which surely didn’t hurt when talking to many of the city’s Jews (who also wanted a neutral civil service, as many had been seeking jobs as teachers in the city’s schools). And it certainly didn’t hurt La Guardia that while his parents were Italian, his mother was also Jewish, and that in being raised as a basically secular Episcopalian, his nominal faith was also that of the city’s Brahmin elite.
La Guardia’s election also came at a time when Franklin D. Roosevelt, who’d then been president for eight months, had enacted some crucial legislation, giving workers collective bargaining rights and establishing massive public works programs to reduce the stratospheric levels of unemployment. This array of legislation prompted key Jewish institutions—chiefly, the clothing and garment workers’ unions—to switch from supporting Socialist Party candidates to supporting candidates who supported social democratic policies on more viable electoral lines. Both Roosevelt and La Guardia swept the Jewish vote in their re-elections of 1936 and 1937, respectively, with the unions creating their own party called the American Labor Party that enabled them to campaign heavily for those two standard bearers while still eschewing Tammany.
Just as Roosevelt and La Guardia convinced New York’s Jews to forsake the sectarianism of only supporting Socialist Party candidates in favor of electing major-party candidates who favored social democratic policies, Mamdani’s success as a socialist running as a Democrat, like that of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, might persuade some of the more sectarian DSA members that working to promote socialist candidates within the Democratic Party is no heresy. In fact, it’s the only effective way to advance socialist policies and causes.
How else does Mamdani’s coalition resemble La Guardia’s? Like that of New York’s greatest mayor, his is rooted in a solidly progressive constituency, New York’s young people, who followed him on social media and were so strongly motivated that they provided a ground game the likes of which the city hadn’t seen in at least 80 years. But it also had distinct ethnic roots. New York, it’s well known, is home to roughly 2 million Jews. But it’s also home, as is not widely known, to roughly 800,000 Muslims, the plurality of whom are, like Mamdani, of South Asian ancestry. And just as La Guardia was able to talk to voters in Italian and Yiddish, so Mamdani has been able to talk to voters in Urdu, Bengali, and Spanish.
As Waleed Shahid noted last week, this community of Muslims of different nationalities (New York is reportedly home to a more diverse set of Muslims than any other city on the planet) had seen a good deal of community, worker, and small business organizing in recent years, but had only begun to factor in New York politics until Mamdani’s race brought them to the polls in record numbers, as La Guardia’s had the Italians. Moreover, as Shahid also pointed out, Mamdani ran strongest in racially mixed precincts, while Cuomo ran strongest in virtually all Black and virtually all white (including bloc-voting Hasidic) precincts.
In short, Mamdani’s coalition, like La Guardia’s, is a coalition of the city’s “outs,” whether by reasons of ideology, age, ethnicity, or immigrant or children of immigrant status. All have been outside the circles of political power, and by reason of economics, outside the circle that could easily afford to live in New York.
And like La Guardia, Mamdani is a talented politician, with a gift for communicating with all manner of voters, who is himself a child of immigrants. More specifically, he’s a child of immigrants who’ve long had minority status. The achievements of his parents are so dazzling—his father an internationally known academic with an endowed chair at Columbia, his mother an internationally celebrated and Oscar-nominated filmmaker—that it’s easy to overlook their life histories as secular Indian emigres who’ve always had minority status. His father was born Muslim in an India that is majority Hindu and increasingly Hindu nationalist, was then an academic in Uganda who had to flee when Idi Amin banished Indian immigrants, and was for a time legally stateless. His mother came to the U.S. when she was 19; her first marriage was to Mitch Epstein, an American Jewish photographer whose work highlighted progressive themes. After her divorce, she met Mamdani’s father while researching a film in Uganda, where she married and gave birth to her son. The family moved to New York six years after 9/11. Mamdani’s wife, artist Rama Duwaji, is a Syrian American born in Houston. Mamdani’s commitment to universal rights is not only a deeply held belief; it also follows logically from his family history.
Should Mamdani be elected mayor in November, then, he will match his polyglot city of immigrants as no mayor has since La Guardia. Both of them, and both of their coalitions, can be loosely described as social democrats, but both of them can just as aptly be described as Ellis Island democrats, or more elementally still, as simply New York.