Could Mamdani be the generational candidate that transforms the DNC?

A view of the Brooklyn Bridge with the East River at the forefront. Photo credit: Matt Dragon, April 22, 2022

New York City, NY: Zohran Mamdani’s overwhelming support in the New York City mayoral primary has reignited the fight over policy, ideology, and identity within the Democratic Party. 

Before election results started rolling in, some other “Democrats” had already joined right-wing reactionaries to run wall-to-wall ads decrying that Mamdani would abolish the New York City Police Department (NYPD), single-handedly kill every Jew in the city, and levy increased corporate taxes. Interestingly, they also characterized him as inexperienced and incapable of accomplishing anything at all.  

Mamdani refused to play along; if anything, he dug in, recognizing that his values and policy positions were his only way to ensure support, despite an overwhelming media and advertising onslaught. 

They left no stone unturned. He’s a communist. He’ll bankrupt the city. Residents will flee. Corporations will flee. They added in a sizable serving of racist white supremacy tropes:

He’s not white. (In case you hadn’t noticed)

He’s “foreign born.”

He’s Muslim, so he’ll impose Sharia law.

He's Muslim, so he's a terrorist.

He’s Muslim, so he’s anti-Semetic.

He’s Muslim, so he was involved in 9/11. (He was 9-years-old)

He’s Muslim, … (silence so your own worst Islamophobic fears have room to resonate and grow).

So what lessons can we take away from this Primary? How much did Mamdani win, vs. how much did the centrists lose this election? And what are the larger lessons around policy and purity tests we should take into other races, outside of the cultural and racial melting pot of New York City? 

Mamdani built a platform that distilled down to a succinct targeted message: “New York is too expensive.” Under this platform umbrella, he could touch all the political hot stoves because he didn’t approach issues as one-offs. He saw every issue, every identity, every policy within the bigger picture. Living, or even just surviving, in New York City was getting further and further out of reach for a majority of his potential constituents.

His edge: He authentically sees that our problems and their solutions are interrelated and dependent on one another. 

He campaigned on housing affordability, but not using some complex, capitalism-infected scheme where the government helps tenants pay absurd rents driven up by coordinated rent hikes. Instead he wants to freeze rents, invest in publicly owned, forever affordable housing, and go after malicious actors in the landlord and real estate investment spaces. Because giving existing landlords city money doesn’t solve any problems, it just enriches a minority while leaving the majority still struggling. 

He campaigned on free childcare, and fast and free transit, because for the vast majority of New Yorkers these are huge daily struggles. They aren’t struggles for the donor class, they aren’t struggles for Andrew Cuomo, speeding around the city by chauffeured car, and his silver spoon spawn, but they are struggles for actual voting New Yorkers. 

He campaigned explicitly on public safety, not policing, because for a Black and brown city, policing isn’t safety. 

He didn’t campaign on Palestine, because he was running for Mayor of New York City, not US Senate or President. But he’s Muslim and has an actual conscience (a rarity in political candidates); he was asked non-stop about Israel and anti-Semitism (which, yes, are two completely separate and distinct issues, no matter how much the propagandists try to convince you otherwise). 

It was in those answers that his campaign accelerated into top gear. Yet it was precisely because they were not campaign answers that they resonated, they were deeply held, deeply informed personal values, that he refused to discard to benefit a candidacy. 

His calls for equity and equality in representation and under law, yes, even in Israel, should have been Democratic Primary kryptonite. We have John Federman wearing an Israeli flag as a cape for f–ks sake. But in the end it worked.

It worked because it was about humanity, and humanity resonates in an era when we can pick up our phones and see the worst of humanity in an infinitely scrolling feed.

Ultimately, Mamdani was the antidote to the idea that you can be "progressive except for Palestine." Not because your position on Palestine is a purity test, and not because we all must prioritize that issue above all else (especially in an election with no foreign policy component), but because just like Mamdani’s platform intentionally tied together all the major issues, Palestine is not its own issue, it’s part of his integrated platform. 

It’s healthcare, as hospitals are intentionally and systematically destroyed, and ambulances, their crews, and the doctors who meet them at the hospital doors are all intentionally targeted for trying to do their job, saving lives.

It’s education, as bombed schools become refugee shelters, become raging infernos, become piles of rubble and ash, not because of what they taught, but who they taught.

It’s immigration, as the checkpoints and immigration sweeps that have consumed Stephen Miller’s dreams for years, are plainly visible, not just in the “borders” between Gaza, the West Bank, and the rest of Palestine, but in the internal checkpoints within Gaza and the West Bank, where settlers are waved through, and Arabs are delayed for hours just because.

It’s LGBTQIA+ rights, because as much as Israel loves to pinkwash it’s apartheid and genocide, they actively entrap LGBTQIA+ Palestinians to be report on their families and neighbors, threatening to out them if they refuse. 

A pride flag on a f--king tank doing donuts on someone’s tent in an occupied territory isn’t something to be celebrated.

It’s women’s rights, because of the dead mothers, the dead children, so many dead children. Girls murdered who will never grow up to become women. Fathers kidnapped off the street, held for decades without formal charges, never getting to meet their unborn daughter before they grow to become mothers themselves, or are vaporized before they can escape childhood. Mothers who must mourn multiple children all at once, after collecting bits and pieces in a bag to bury. And those are the “lucky” ones, because they didn’t die in childbirth because of a blockade on medical supplies, or see their babies killed before they could even get a birth certificate.

Mamdani gave the Democratic Party the playbook.

Will they continue to ignore it, and with it, their voters?