In a stunning upset to the political elite in NYC and across the US, Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), won in the Democratic Party mayoral primary. Mamdani defeated disgraced Democratic Party veteran and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo with 56% compared to Cuomo’s 46% of the vote.
This is a stunning rebuke, especially by young New Yorkers, of the entitled, scandal-ridden, establishment politics of the Democratic Party and the billionaires who were arrogant enough to back a candidate like Cuomo. He faces no less than 13 credible sexual assault allegations and has covered up the deaths of tens of thousands of seniors from COVID-19. Young people turned out to vote at historic levels in this primary election, up to three times more in Zohran’s strongest districts than in the last primary. Early voting in Brooklyn was up 118%.
The primary victory is already striking fear into the capitalist class of New York and across the country. In response to this electoral victory, right-wingers and billionaires threatened that businesses would abandon NYC. Trump called Zohran a “communist” and Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand claimed that Zohran was calling for “jihad” because he defended the use of the term “global intifada.” She later had to walk it back. Others compared Zohran’s victory to 9/11, and Trump even threatened to deport and denaturalize Zohran, who was born in Uganda.
In February, Zohran was polling at 1% in a field saturated by “progressive” Democrats, current Mayor Eric Adams, and Andrew Cuomo. What made this stunning turnaround possible?
New York City is facing one of the biggest affordability crises in the country. The median income for a household is $79,000/year while the median rent is $55,000/year, highlighting a rent burden of well over half the median income. This has been compounded by inflation still impacting the affordability of basic goods.
It is no wonder that a platform of affordability which focuses on key demands—like rent freezes for rent stabilized apartments, a $30/hr minimum wage by 2030, free buses, no-cost childcare, city-owned grocery stores, taxing the rich, and seizing properties owned by slumlords—became so popular in the span of a few months among many of those most acutely affected by the crisis. Zohran’s victory is a testament to the power and popularity of clear working-class demands that directly address this crisis.
As a New York assemblymember, Zohran was involved in protests against the war in Gaza, participated in a 15-day hunger strike alongside debt-ridden taxi drivers, and fought for public ownership over energy in the state. In key moments of the campaign, Zohran successfully polarized around class issues, clearly naming Trump, billionaires, and corrupt figures like Cuomo as central enemies of progressive change.
Finally, but crucially, a key piece of Zohran’s victory was amassing an army of nearly 50,000 volunteers who door-knocked over 1.5 million homes across the five boroughs. This victory represents the outlines of a potentially powerful working-class political movement and a resurgence of the left in the face of a rising right.
A “New Era” For The Democratic Party?
Many people are asking: is this a new era for the Democratic Party? Can it become a party that will embrace progressive and even democratic socialist ideas? Bernie Sanders has an answer: “Will the current Democratic party leadership learn the lessons of the Mamdani campaign? Probably not. Too many of them would rather be the captains on a sinking Titanic, rather than change course.”
As we wrote in the lead-up to the primary election, we strongly disagree with Zohran’s choice to run within the Democratic Party. Time and again, when workers’ candidates were elected within the Democratic Party, the entire party turned against them and used the full weight of its institutions to successfully defang them.
When AOC was first elected, she led a protest sit-in in Nancy Pelosi’s office fighting for a Green New Deal, a welcome change from business as usual politics. Fast-forward 7 years and AOC has dropped demands like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. She refused to force a vote on Medicare for All when she and the Squad had serious leverage to do so. She abstained on funding Israel’s Iron Dome instead of voting no and infamously voted in favor of breaking the railway strike in 2022. The logic of the Democratic Party ensnares even those with the best intentions, setting up disastrous consequences for the working class. Zohran’s popularity makes it harder for the Democratic establishment to crush his campaign outright with xenophobia, Islamophobia, and red-baiting, so if that fails, they will inevitably attempt to co-opt him and turn him into another AOC.
Winning the demands Zohran is running on will require an approach that is completely at odds with the increasingly right-wing Democratic Party. What room is there for class-struggle politics in a party controlled by billionaires that bankrolled the genocide in Gaza, where the main concern about Trump bombing Iran was that he didn’t let Democrats in Congress vote to authorize it first? This is a party that totally failed to defend abortion rights and never even tried to win a decent minimum wage.
In various interviews since his election victory, Zohran has said he is looking forward to working with those in the Democratic Party who disagree with him to build a broad coalition around his platform of affordability, failing to understand the Democrats’ inherent opposition to his platform. He has also framed his victory as a “referendum on the Democratic Party” and that he’s “bringing people back into the Democratic Party.”
Socialists should expose the role the Democratic Party plays in undermining and strangling our movements, not work to rehabilitate their rotten image. The Democratic Party machine was set up precisely to neuter and hollow out socialist, communist, and left-wing activists. Zohran should use his platform to expose the maneuvers of the Democratic Party by doubling down on an approach based on independent working-class struggle.
Good Cop, Bad Cop—Democrats Pull Out All The Stops
The establishment media and the Democratic Party are spinning in circles over how a self-described democratic socialist could win an election in the financial center of Western capitalism.
Zohran’s campaign should not underestimate the Democratic Party’s willingness to pull no punches to stop him. The Democratic Party’s purge of the DSA leadership in Nevada in 2023 is a clear example. After the DSA leadership won, Democratic leaders gutted the Nevada State Democratic Party infrastructure and transferred thousands of dollars out of the party coffers, among other things. As we wrote at the time, the Democrats “have repeatedly shown that they are willing to burn the house down before they let socialists or the left gain any kind of foothold in their party.”
Shortly after Zohran’s victory, Eric Adams, the city’s corrupt former cop mayor and darling of billionaires like Mike Bloomberg, officially announced his independent run for mayor, something Adams had set up months earlier by leaving the Democratic primary process. He began by attacking the ideas of socialism, saying “[in NYC] a dishwasher can own a chain of restaurants” and that “this is not the city of handouts, this is the city of hand-ups.” This is completely out of touch. Eric Adams is also ramping up dangerous anti-immigrant, Islamophobic rhetoric and smearing Zohran as “pro-Hamas.”
As a section of the establishment unleashes a fight to prevent Zohran from winning in November, a wing of the Democratic Party is also seeking to co-opt him. As votes were coming in, Cuomo conceded to Zohran saying he ran a good campaign, dropping his frequent accusations that Zohran is anti-Semitic. Since his primary victory, the campaign has received a wave of endorsements from more liberal Democratic state officials and Democratic organizations.
According to the New York Times, “Mr. Mamdani was scheduled to meet Monday night with Democratic district leaders in Manhattan and had meetings scheduled next week with a group of chief executives from some of the city’s largest companies and other tech industry leaders.” This is a trap for Mamdani where he will be urged to show that he is not a threat to finance capital and the real estate industry, the real masters of the city.
Unfortunately, during his election speech, Zohran said he was looking to be mayor of “all New Yorkers,” which waters down the working-class message that won his campaign in the first place. Zohran should be clear that he doesn’t represent a single one of the over 100 billionaires that call NYC home.
Build An Organized Mass Movement
Socialist Alternative enthusiastically calls for an independent movement of working-class people to fight for Zohran’s demands. In this context, we are calling for New Yorkers to vote for Zohran in the November general election. A resounding vote for a genuine working-class program in the biggest city in the country would be an enormously positive development, but running in the Democratic Party should absolutely not be seen as a blueprint for socialists and working-class fighters who are rightfully invigorated and inspired by this campaign.
After Zohran’s victory, DSA put out emails and social media blasts calling this a “victory for socialism,” but we should be careful about such sweeping declarations, because the election is far from over. Winning the campaign’s program, let alone socialism, will require a far higher level of organization and strategy.
We must be very clear: If Zohran wins in November, his own party and its billionaire backers will become the biggest obstacle to implementing his program. A first step to building the type of movement needed to overcome the resistance of the Democratic Party and wider ruling class would be to transform his tens-of-thousands-strong volunteer machine into permanent neighborhood-based organizations of struggle across the entire city. The first task could be to collect one million petition signatures around Zohran’s central demands of freezing the rent, a $30/hr minimum wage, and free public transit. Huge organizing meetings could be held in every working-class neighborhood to build for mass rallies and workplace actions.
But these new organizations will need to be fully independent of the Democratic Party in order to guard against the twin dangers of sabotage and co-optation. This could become the basis for a new, actually democratic, working-class party in NYC that could hold Zohran firmly accountable and act as a clear counterweight to the pressures which will inevitably come crashing down on him. Steps like this would inspire similar campaigns in cities across the country and could lead to the formation of a new national working-class party like what’s in the process of happening in Britain.
Resisting Cooptation
Unlike a city council member, the mayor is the executive of the capitalist state machine. That means Zohran will oversee the NYPD, manage hundreds of union contract negotiations with teachers, transit workers, and sanitation workers, and will come under pressure to maintain the flow of profit through the city. This is in contrast to a city council member or congressperson who can set themselves up as a principled opposition with the backing of movements in the face of a pro-capitalist majority. Wall Street and the billionaires will do everything they can to ensure Zohran’s demands suffocate under relentless setbacks and attacks. Winning his platform will require ongoing and monumental confrontation with the capitalist class.
DSA’s and Zohran’s definition of democratic socialism does not call for a fundamental break with the capitalist system but instead advocates using the existing capitalist structures to achieve reforms, something akin to the old mass social democratic parties of Europe. However, the halls of power are not neutral when it comes to fighting for a better life for working-class people. Zohran’s campaign will need to expose the entire system of capitalism as the reason for high rent, gentrification, the cost-of-living crisis, war, repression, and oppression.
Naming the fundamental problem is the first step in fighting it. Real change will not be won through progressive elected officials’ ability to negotiate or push for this or that clever amendment. It can only happen on the basis of a ferocious movement of working-class people mobilized around an independent working-class platform and organization that breaks from the establishment and norms of capitalism.
Following AOC’s election victory in 2018, we raised some of the key lessons from our own electoral victories. This was based on the experience of Socialist Alternative member and Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant—who fought for and passed the first $15/hr minimum wage in a major city, a ban on winter evictions, and a tax on corporations like Amazon to fund affordable housing. The NYC mayor currently makes a yearly salary of $250,000. Socialist Alternative calls on every working-class representative to take only the average worker’s salary while donating the rest to build social movements, as Kshama Sawant did. Zohran should pledge to give his salary to movements and only keep the average New York City worker’s salary of $74,000.
Zohran will need to challenge every betrayal by City Council members should they throw immigrants and trans people under the bus and speak truth to working people about how the structures of government are deliberately stacked against the majority. He should be prepared to call out and organize against Speaker of the City Council Adrienne Adams when she blocks any part of his platform. As it stands, Zohran has already backed off demands to decrease the police budget to pay for social services, saying he wants to keep the bloated NYPD budget at the current level. This is not a good sign.
Should he be co-opted by the Democratic Party and fail to win in November, or should he win the election but become indistinguishable from other establishment Democrats once in office, the right wing could be strengthened. Voters have been sorely disappointed by the lack of tangible gains won by left Democrats, and a section of voters, including some working-class people, can be pushed into the arms of the far right if Zohran fails to deliver on his campaign promises, particularly if he does so without a major fight.
The majority of the current rotten NYC labor leadership lent their support to Cuomo in the primaries. Many were forced to switch their endorsements to Zohran. Currently, far too many union leaders are tied at the hip to the Democratic Party establishment. A victory for Zohran, and particularly his platform, will require class-struggle organizing by unions from the bottom up, with union leadership accountable to their members instead of politicians.
An independent working-class movement for Zohran’s platform has the potential to transform the city into an organizing hub and a bullhorn for movements across the country. In the face of far-right authoritarians like Trump and imperialist war, this movement is sorely needed, and Socialist Alternative will be there every step of the way to help build it.
