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MAMDANI’S VICTORY IS A REBUKE TO THE FAILED STRATEGIES OF THE
DEMOCRATIC PARTY  
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Moira Donegan
November 5, 2025
The Guardian
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_ The Democratic party appears listless and unprincipled, unwilling
to fight because they do not believe in anything. Zohran Mamdani is
the opposite of this _

Supporters celebrate after New York City Democratic mayoral candidate
Zohran Mamdani was projected the winner during his election night
watch party at the Brooklyn Paramount on November 4, 2025., Michael M.
Santiago, Getty Images

 

Reports of the death of the Democratic party seem to have been greatly
exaggerated. On Tuesday night, Zohran Mamdani
[[link removed]], the 34-year-old
political novice who won New Yorkers over with an affable demeanor
that seemed to take infectious joy in the people of the city and a
relentlessly focused message of affordability, swept to the mayoralty
of the US’s largest city with a commanding lead.

In so doing, Mamdani defeated what has been, since 2010’s
Citizen’s United decision unleashing unlimited money into American
political campaigns, one of the most indefatigable forces in electoral
politics: the preferences of billionaires. And it wasn’t close –
Mamdani trounced his billionaire-backed opponent by nearly nine
points.

Mamdani had faced down a robust funding campaign by the nation’s
ultra-rich in favor of his opponent, Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced
former New York governor who ran as an independent in the mayoral race
after Mamdani defeated him in a landslide upset victory this past
summer. (The Republican ballot line featured Curtis Sliwa, a perennial
mayoral candidate and New York City eccentric who was not a real
contender in the race.) Billionaires, perturbed by Mamdani’s avowed
socialist politics, his proposals for expanded social services like
universal childcare, and his declarations that billionaires should not
exist, had backed Cuomo
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with a fervor that at times bordered on mania.

Bill Ackman, the hedge fund manager and prominent Trump supporter,
gave a pro-Cuomo group a total of $1.75m; Michael Bloomberg, the
billionaire and three-term former New York
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staggering $8.3m to the same Pac. The makeup moguls of the Lauder
family backed pro-Cuomo and anti-Mamdani organizations to the tune of
$2.6m, while the Tisch family gave $1.2m to stop the young socialist.
For a long time, an effort – the billionaire class acting in concert
to secure a specific electoral outcome – would have seemed
insurmountable for a progressive candidate. It does not seem
insurmountable anymore.

Mamdani’s victory, above all, is a rebuke to the conventional
strategies of the Democratic party, which in the year since Donald
Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election had been in a
state of malaise and decline. Democratic congressional leadership
seems to have replaced the work of politics with a sort of learned
helplessness; alumni of the Biden administration are publishing
dueling memoirs blaming everyone but themselves.

Meanwhile, consultants – long the devil on the Democratic party’s
shoulder – have fallen under the spell of “popularism”, a mode
of politics advanced by pollsters like David Schor and bloggers like
Matt Yglesias, which posits that Democratic candidates must refine
their platforms by the median of public opinion; a prescription that
has almost always, in practice, meant shifting right, abandoning
vulnerable constituencies, and treating the public as implacable
belligerents to be coddled, rather than as intelligent adults to be
persuaded.

It is not only pragmatism, but cynicism, and no small degree of fear,
that has led to the widespread adaptation of this approach: the
rapidly proliferating number of centrist and center-right thinktanks
and consultancies looking to shape Democratic party strategy exist, in
part, to channel the preferences of their own ultra-wealthy funders,
and to signal what the billionaire class will accept. The result is a
Democratic party that appears listless and unprincipled, unwilling to
fight because they do not believe in anything.

Mamdani’s electrifying campaign rejected this strategy completely.
Rather than define himself by what he wasn’t, via the conventional
path of left punching, shifting rightward, and abandoning in the
general election stances that he had taken in the primary, Mamdani ran
on a remarkably consistent message of the injustice of economic
inequality and an insistence on the possibility that the city could
become a place where working people could live with dignity.

When Cuomo and his backers launched racist attacks suggesting that
Mamdani, an Ugandan-born South Asian Muslim, would celebrate terrorism
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he responded by cutting an ad in Arabic. When Republicans and other
Cuomo backers tried pushing a red-baiting line promoting fear of
Mamdani’s socialism, he evoked Vito Marcantonio, a socialist who
represented Harlem in Congress for seven terms. “We need to look
only to our past for proof of how socialism can shape our future,”
he said. In a record turnout election, a majority of the people of New
York City agreed with him.

The Democratic party leadership, it should be said, does not. Hakeem
Jeffries, the House Democratic leader whose Bed-Stuy district
overwhelmingly went for Mamdani, did not endorse the young socialist
after he won the Democratic primary, giving only tepid, reluctant
support in the days immediately before the election.

The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, whose Grand Army Plaza home
is also located in a significantly pro-Mamdani section of Brooklyn,
did not endorse the Democratic nominee for the mayor of his home city
at all, and refused to say
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who he voted for in the election – a conspicuous omission that led
some to speculate that he had voted for Cuomo.

With the notable exception of Barack Obama, who reportedly recently
called Mamdani to express admiration for the younger man’s campaign,
the attitude among national Democrats towards Mamdani’s victory
seems to linger somewhere between distaste and alarm. They do not like
his progressive politics, certainly; they are perhaps not comfortable
with a rising star in their party being a Muslim, immigrant man of
color, perhaps. Or maybe they are embittered and resentful that where
their calculated, cynical, focus-grouped campaign strategy of
insincerity and manipulation has failed, Mamdani’s unabashedly
sincere campaign of joy and principle has succeeded.

There is a long way to go for Mamdani. Having won the mayoralty and
vanquished one of New York’s most hated and longstanding political
dynasties, he now faces the true test: having to govern. This, too,
might scare the Democratic establishment: not because Mamdani could
fail, but because he could succeed. Perhaps the only thing they would
hate more than bad socialist government, one suspects, is good
socialist government.

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_Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist_

* Zohran Mamdani
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