Zohran Mamdani is a stylish, millennial, African-born Muslim with a Hollywood pedigree who just won the Democratic primary in the New York City mayor’s race.
If he sounds like Donald Trump’s worst nightmare, he just might be. But he’s also a lot like him.
They’re both charismatic leaders who have bucked their parties, tapped into the current political ethos that eschews traditional loyalties and by doing so, made themselves popular enough with fed-up voters to win elections when — to many in the political elite — they seem exactly like the kind of candidate who shouldn’t be able to get their grandmother’s vote.
“Working-class people want somebody who really takes on the status quo, who pushes an economic populist agenda and convinces them that something’s going to change,” Lorena Gonzalez told me.
She’s the head of the California Labor Federation, which represents unions, and even she’s fed up with Democrats.
“There are days that I’m like, why am I still in this party?” she said. “When I see them cozy up to tech, when I see this abundance issue that streamlines worker protections, when I see this fascination with billionaires and this acquiescing to not taxing billionaires and not doing anything about rent control, you know, there’s a point where I’m like, come on, grow some balls, go decide who you’re for.”
Or, as Trump put it in a social media post after Mamdani’s win, “Yes, this is a big moment in the History of our Country!”
Trump is right, words that I don’t often say — Mamdani’s victory may signal something deeper than a lone mayor’s race on the East Coast. People — both on the left and the right — crave authenticity, and want someone to believe in, be it an orange-hued boomer or a brown-skinned hipster.
The Democrats, as political strategist Mike Madrid put it, are having their own Tea Party moment, when populist anger eats the old guard, as it did beginning in 2007 when the far-right of the Republican party began its now-successful takeover. Trump was never the impetus of the party’s swing to the fringe, he just capitalized on it.
“This is just a populist revolt of the Democratic Party against the establishment base,” Madrid said.
There’s been ad nauseam amounts of pontificating about the current state of the Democratic party. Should it go more centrist? Should it embrace the progressive end? But the truth is the voters have already decided. They do indeed want lower grocery prices, as Trump promised but failed to deliver. But they also want democracy to not crumble. And they want to buy a house, and maybe not have their neighbors deported. But really, in that order.
And they don’t trust many, if not most, of the current Democrats in office to deliver. Like Republicans before them, they want outsiders (Mamdani, 33, is serving in the state Assembly), or at least someone who can sound like one.
Gonzalez spends a lot of time talking to voters and she said left and right, Democrat and Republican, they see few differences remaining between the two parties, and are tired of voting for career politicians who haven’t delivered on economic issues.
Mamdani, whose mother is the film director Mira Nair (and who once rapped under the name Young Cardamom), campaigned on “a New York you can afford.” That included freezing payments on rent-controlled apartments, building new affordable housing with union labor, making both transit and child care free and — you guessed it — cheaper groceries. Whether he delivers or not, those were messages that a broad swath of New Yorkers, struggling like all of us with the cost of living, wanted to hear.
And he delivered them not just with credibility, but with an entertainment value that nods to his mom’s influence: hamming it up Bollywood style for the South Asian aunties, walking the length of Manhattan to talk with people, jumping in the Atlantic ocean in a suit with a skinny tie.
Charisma and chutzpah.
Which, of course, is how Trump made his own rise, promising, with showman verve, to be the voice of the toiling voiceless who increasingly are in danger of becoming the working poor. Yes, he is a con man who is clearly for the rich. But still, he knows how to deliver a line to his base: “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the dogs.”
That may be the biggest lesson for California, where we will soon be voting for a new governor from a crowded field — of establishment candidates. Even Kamala Harris, maybe especially Harris, fits that insider image, and certainly Gavin Newsom, despite zigzagging from centrist to pugilist, can’t forward his presidential ambitions as anything but old-guard.
“What makes someone like Zohran so compelling, is even if you don’t agree with him on everything, which few voters do, you understand that he believes it and that you know where he’s coming from,” said Amanda Litman, the co-founder and executive director of Run for Something, a PAC that recruits young progressives to run for office.
“I think that’s the distinction between him and say someone like Gavin Newsom, which is, like, does Gavin believe what he says? Does he buy his own bull—? It’s sort of unclear,” Litman added.
The anger of voters is strikingly clear, though, especially for ones who have for so long been loyal to Democrats. A new Pew analysis out this week found that about 20% of the Republican base is now nonwhite, nearly doubling what it was in 2016. Republicans have made gains with Black voters, Asian voters and Trump drew nearly half of Latino voters. Ouch.
“One of the real challenges for the Democrats is two central pieces of the orthodoxy has been that they are the party of the working class and that they are the party of nonwhite voters,” Madrid said. “Both of those are increasingly proving untrue, and the question then becomes, well, how do you get them back? The way you get them back is by having some sort of economic populist policy framework.”
Litman said that the way to capture voters is by running new candidates, the kind who don’t come with history — and baggage. In the 36 hours after Mamdani was elected, her organization had 1,100 people sign up to learn more about how to run for office themselves, she said. It’s the biggest spike since the inauguration, and it shows that voters aren’t disinterested in democracy, but alienated from the existing options.
“The establishment is not unbeatable. They’re only unchallenged,” Litman said. “And I think the more that the Democratic Party establishment, as much as it exists, can understand that the people and the playbooks that got us here will not be the people and playbooks that get us out of it, the better off we’ll be.”
So maybe there are more Mamdani’s out there, waiting to lead the way. If Democrats are looking for advice, Trump may have offered the best I’ve seen in a while — highlighting the insider/outsider Democrats who have, like Mamdani, made their name by rattling the establishment.
“I have an idea for the Democrats to bring them back into ‘play,’” he wrote on social media. “After years of being left out in the cold, including suffering one of the Greatest Losses in History, the 2024 Presidential Election, the Democrats should nominate Low IQ Candidate, Jasmine Crockett, for President, and AOC+3 should be, respectively, Vice President, and three High Level Members of the Cabinet — Added together with our future Communist Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani and our Country is really SCREWED!”
Or not.
Wouldn’t that be a slate?
In emotional speech, Zohran Mamdani defends Muslim identity against ‘racist and baseless’ attacks
NEW YORK — Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, pledged Friday to further embrace his Muslim identity in response to growing attacks by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his surrogates that he characterized as “racist and baseless.”
Encircled by faith leaders outside a Bronx mosque, Mamdani spoke in emotional terms about the “indignities” long faced by the city’s Muslim population, choking back tears as he described his aunt’s decision not to ride the subway after the Sept. 11 attacks because she didn’t feel safe being seen in a religious head covering.
He recounted how, when he first entered politics, an uncle gently suggested he keep his faith to himself.
“These are lessons that so many Muslim New Yorkers have been taught,” Mamdani said. “And over these last few days, these lessons have become the closing messages of Andrew Cuomo, Curtis Sliwa and Eric Adams.”
At a news conference later Friday, Cuomo accused Mamdani of “playing the victim” for political purposes and denied that Islamophobia existed on a wide scale in New York.
Throughout the race, Mamdani, a democratic socialist, has been criticized by Cuomo and others over his criticism of Israel’s government, which he had accused of committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
But the tone of those attacks have amped up in recent days, drawing allegations from some Democrats that Cuomo’s campaign is leaning into Islamophobia in the final stretch of the campaign.
Appearing on a conservative radio station Thursday, Cuomo appeared to laugh along at host Sid Rosenberg’s suggestion that Mamdani would “be cheering” another 9/11 attack. “That’s another problem,” Cuomo replied.
A Cuomo social media account posted, then removed, a video depicting Mamdani eating rice with his hands and describing his supporters as criminals. A campaign spokesperson said the video was posted in error.
At an event endorsing the former governor, Mayor Eric Adams invoked the possibility of terrorist attacks in New York City, seeming to suggest — without explanation — they would be more likely under a Mamdani administration.
“New York can’t be Europe. I don’t know what is wrong with people,” Adams said, standing alongside Cuomo. “You see what’s playing out in other countries because of Islamic extremism.”
At a debate earlier this week, Sliwa, the Republican nominee, falsely smeared Mamdani as a supporter of “global jihad.”
Asked about Rosenberg’s comments, Cuomo said he “didn’t take the remarks seriously at the time.”
“Of course I think it’s an offensive comment. But it did not come out of my mouth,” he added.
Messages left with Adams’ and Sliwa’s campaign were not immediately returned.
In his speech Friday, Mamdani said he was aiming his remarks not at political opponents but at his fellow Muslim New Yorkers.
“The dream of every Muslim is simply to be treated the same as any other New Yorker,” he said. “And yet for too long we have been told to ask for less than that, and to be satisfied with whatever little we receive.”
“No more,” he said.
To that end, Mamdani said he would further embrace his Muslim identity, a decision he said he consciously avoided at the start of his campaign.
“I thought that if I behaved well enough, or bit my tongue enough in the face of racist, baseless attacks, all while returning back to my central message, it would allow me to be more than just my faith,” Mamdani said. “I was wrong. No amount of redirection is ever enough.”
He continued: “I will not change who I am, how I eat, for the faith that I’m proud to call my own. But there is one thing that I will change. I will no longer look for myself in the shadows. I will find myself in the light.”
Mamdani, who won the primary in stunning fashion, has faced skepticism from some in the Democratic establishment, particularly over his criticism of Israel. On Friday, Mamdani earned the endorsement of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.).
Cuomo told reporters that Mamdani’s criticism of Israel had made Jewish people afraid to leave their homes.
He also rejected Mamdani’s claim that Muslim New Yorkers have been made to feel uncomfortable in their own city.
“Don’t tell me New Yorkers are Islamophobic. They’re not,” Cuomo said.
“What he is doing is the oldest, dirtiest political trick in the book: divide people,” Cuomo said.
Offenhartz writes for the Associated Press.
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Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump have a lot in common. California should pay attention
Zohran Mamdani is a stylish, millennial, African-born Muslim with a Hollywood pedigree who just won the Democratic primary in the New York City mayor’s race.
If he sounds like Donald Trump’s worst nightmare, he just might be. But he’s also a lot like him.
They’re both charismatic leaders who have bucked their parties, tapped into the current political ethos that eschews traditional loyalties and by doing so, made themselves popular enough with fed-up voters to win elections when — to many in the political elite — they seem exactly like the kind of candidate who shouldn’t be able to get their grandmother’s vote.
“Working-class people want somebody who really takes on the status quo, who pushes an economic populist agenda and convinces them that something’s going to change,” Lorena Gonzalez told me.
She’s the head of the California Labor Federation, which represents unions, and even she’s fed up with Democrats.
“There are days that I’m like, why am I still in this party?” she said. “When I see them cozy up to tech, when I see this abundance issue that streamlines worker protections, when I see this fascination with billionaires and this acquiescing to not taxing billionaires and not doing anything about rent control, you know, there’s a point where I’m like, come on, grow some balls, go decide who you’re for.”
Or, as Trump put it in a social media post after Mamdani’s win, “Yes, this is a big moment in the History of our Country!”
Trump is right, words that I don’t often say — Mamdani’s victory may signal something deeper than a lone mayor’s race on the East Coast. People — both on the left and the right — crave authenticity, and want someone to believe in, be it an orange-hued boomer or a brown-skinned hipster.
The Democrats, as political strategist Mike Madrid put it, are having their own Tea Party moment, when populist anger eats the old guard, as it did beginning in 2007 when the far-right of the Republican party began its now-successful takeover. Trump was never the impetus of the party’s swing to the fringe, he just capitalized on it.
“This is just a populist revolt of the Democratic Party against the establishment base,” Madrid said.
There’s been ad nauseam amounts of pontificating about the current state of the Democratic party. Should it go more centrist? Should it embrace the progressive end? But the truth is the voters have already decided. They do indeed want lower grocery prices, as Trump promised but failed to deliver. But they also want democracy to not crumble. And they want to buy a house, and maybe not have their neighbors deported. But really, in that order.
And they don’t trust many, if not most, of the current Democrats in office to deliver. Like Republicans before them, they want outsiders (Mamdani, 33, is serving in the state Assembly), or at least someone who can sound like one.
Gonzalez spends a lot of time talking to voters and she said left and right, Democrat and Republican, they see few differences remaining between the two parties, and are tired of voting for career politicians who haven’t delivered on economic issues.
Mamdani, whose mother is the film director Mira Nair (and who once rapped under the name Young Cardamom), campaigned on “a New York you can afford.” That included freezing payments on rent-controlled apartments, building new affordable housing with union labor, making both transit and child care free and — you guessed it — cheaper groceries. Whether he delivers or not, those were messages that a broad swath of New Yorkers, struggling like all of us with the cost of living, wanted to hear.
And he delivered them not just with credibility, but with an entertainment value that nods to his mom’s influence: hamming it up Bollywood style for the South Asian aunties, walking the length of Manhattan to talk with people, jumping in the Atlantic ocean in a suit with a skinny tie.
Charisma and chutzpah.
Which, of course, is how Trump made his own rise, promising, with showman verve, to be the voice of the toiling voiceless who increasingly are in danger of becoming the working poor. Yes, he is a con man who is clearly for the rich. But still, he knows how to deliver a line to his base: “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the dogs.”
That may be the biggest lesson for California, where we will soon be voting for a new governor from a crowded field — of establishment candidates. Even Kamala Harris, maybe especially Harris, fits that insider image, and certainly Gavin Newsom, despite zigzagging from centrist to pugilist, can’t forward his presidential ambitions as anything but old-guard.
“What makes someone like Zohran so compelling, is even if you don’t agree with him on everything, which few voters do, you understand that he believes it and that you know where he’s coming from,” said Amanda Litman, the co-founder and executive director of Run for Something, a PAC that recruits young progressives to run for office.
“I think that’s the distinction between him and say someone like Gavin Newsom, which is, like, does Gavin believe what he says? Does he buy his own bull—? It’s sort of unclear,” Litman added.
The anger of voters is strikingly clear, though, especially for ones who have for so long been loyal to Democrats. A new Pew analysis out this week found that about 20% of the Republican base is now nonwhite, nearly doubling what it was in 2016. Republicans have made gains with Black voters, Asian voters and Trump drew nearly half of Latino voters. Ouch.
“One of the real challenges for the Democrats is two central pieces of the orthodoxy has been that they are the party of the working class and that they are the party of nonwhite voters,” Madrid said. “Both of those are increasingly proving untrue, and the question then becomes, well, how do you get them back? The way you get them back is by having some sort of economic populist policy framework.”
Litman said that the way to capture voters is by running new candidates, the kind who don’t come with history — and baggage. In the 36 hours after Mamdani was elected, her organization had 1,100 people sign up to learn more about how to run for office themselves, she said. It’s the biggest spike since the inauguration, and it shows that voters aren’t disinterested in democracy, but alienated from the existing options.
“The establishment is not unbeatable. They’re only unchallenged,” Litman said. “And I think the more that the Democratic Party establishment, as much as it exists, can understand that the people and the playbooks that got us here will not be the people and playbooks that get us out of it, the better off we’ll be.”
So maybe there are more Mamdani’s out there, waiting to lead the way. If Democrats are looking for advice, Trump may have offered the best I’ve seen in a while — highlighting the insider/outsider Democrats who have, like Mamdani, made their name by rattling the establishment.
“I have an idea for the Democrats to bring them back into ‘play,’” he wrote on social media. “After years of being left out in the cold, including suffering one of the Greatest Losses in History, the 2024 Presidential Election, the Democrats should nominate Low IQ Candidate, Jasmine Crockett, for President, and AOC+3 should be, respectively, Vice President, and three High Level Members of the Cabinet — Added together with our future Communist Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani and our Country is really SCREWED!”
Or not.
Wouldn’t that be a slate?
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