This essay is part of a series in which writers reflect on Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration as the mayor of New York City.
Illustration by Stuart Davis
The night Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York, I was at a dinner gathering of fair housing and tenants’ rights advocates in New Jersey. The occasion was celebratory—we were marking fifty years since the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled against exclusionary zoning in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, setting in motion a series of further actions to mandate the provision of affordable housing—but the mood was reflective and somber, shadowed by five grueling months of Trumpism and years of difficult electoral setbacks for the left. Asked for my view on the state of things, I haltingly teased out the ways that Democrats had estranged and failed working-class voters, from bungling the Build Back Better effort to enabling a genocide in Palestine.
Walking outside in darkness, I took out my phone to find it glowing with an unending stream of text messages, my friends and comrades inarticulate with joy and disbelief. I have known Mamdani since 2020, when we were thrown together in national Zoom calls as two South Asian socialists running for state office, and on the drive back to Philadelphia I called him, leaving a breathless and no doubt incomprehensible voicemail, before I pulled over to the side of the road and cried.
In victory, Mamdani shook to rubble a lugubrious, ugly rock pile of left-wing self-doubt, bringing a wide, bracing horizon of possibilities into view. His campaign had already swelled the ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapter in Philadelphia, where I’m a state senator, and now his win supercharged the organization’s growth. The group—which was also reenergized by Trump’s election—has absorbed 786 new members since last January, an expansion of 76 percent. Compared to this crop of bright new dues-payers, I am a grizzled, geriatric millennial socialist, having joined DSA in 2014 before becoming one of three socialists in the state legislature in 2021. Attending organizing events and parties in recent months, I’ve been struck by all the new people gingerly but excitedly making their way toward a world of stronger tenants’ unions, militant worker organizing, and an end to the “Palestine exception” to free speech and assembly.
More than anything else, it was organizing around working-class demands—housing, transit, childcare—that drove Mamdani’s victory. This makes it replicable. The Pennsylvania left is currently fighting on multiple, analogous fronts. Its elected representatives—including, at the local level, two city council members in Philadelphia who ran as part of the Working Families Party, and, at the heights, progressive stalwart Summer Lee representing Pittsburgh in Congress—have led efforts to win worker protections with teeth; rental assistance paired with eviction diversion; and, statewide, a “solar for schools” grant program and a first-of-its-kind holistic home repair initiative that is being replicated throughout the country and in Congress.
Nonetheless, a revanchist, majority-Republican state Senate has curbed attempts to render life in Pennsylvania actually livable. Truly challenging the state power structure will require not just ejecting these Republicans from office (though that would help!), but pushing Democrats to propagate a politics that responds to popular needs and demands. Now we have been handed an opportunity: to convert Mamdani’s energy into a movement strong and disciplined enough to tackle the crises we face.
That this inspiration from New York is taking different forms in cities across the country suggests the power of the original source. Mamdani’s extraordinary campaign exploded conventions to such a degree that its innovations and achievements are already being normalized. So successful was he at disaggregating elemental working-class demands into slogans of surpassing bluntness and simplicity—“freeze the rent,” “make buses fast and free”—that Democrats everywhere are suddenly taking up the call for “affordability.”
In recent months many leading Democratic voices have suggested that Mamdani’s approach to the issue places him on a spectrum with the likes of Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill, varying just in shades of blue. But as Waleed Shahid pointed out in a December newsletter, a survey of recent campaigns shows it was only after Mamdani’s win that “affordability” took hold as a slogan. Thus, “a single primary in New York reset what Democrats from safe blue districts to front-liners think it’s safe—and necessary—to say.” At a moment when the Democratic coalition has grown notably wealthy and suburban, leftists like Mamdani offer the party a way back to the working-class politics it often claims to espouse and the constituencies it once represented. Socialists may not yet be able to attain electoral victory everywhere, and they still endure disdain from Democratic politicians—if not Democratic voters. But it is their ideas, organizing, and programmatic thinking that may yet secure Democrats’ political future.